United States President, Donald Trump, said Thursday that he has instructed federal agencies to begin declassifying and releasing government records related to extraterrestrial life and other unexplained aerial phenomena.
“Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Earlier in the day, Trump alleged that his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, had disclosed classified information by acknowledging the existence of extraterrestrial life.
“He gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.
“He made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information. No, I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”
Trump added that he “may get him out of trouble by declassifying” the material, though he did not specify what information he believed had been improperly disclosed.
Public interest in extraterrestrial life intensified after Obama, during a conversation with American podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen, said that aliens “are real.”
“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,” Obama said in the podcast episode published Saturday, responding to a question about extraterrestrials.
“They’re not being kept in Area 51; there’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States,” he added.
In a subsequent statement posted on Instagram, Obama said he “was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round.”
“Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he said.
“But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens are low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
Area 51, a highly classified US Air Force installation located at Groom Lake in southern Nevada, has long been associated with conspiracy theories about alien activity, although its officially acknowledged role is aircraft testing.
