On Thursday, US President Donald Trump announced on his social media platform Truth Social that he would direct the Department of Defense and other federal agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any other information related to these extremely complex, but extremely interesting and important matters.”
The directive came after a podcast interview last week in which former President Barack Obama said he believed aliens were “real” but that he had not seen evidence of them during his presidency.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday, Trump criticized Obama’s comments, and alleged that the former president’s comments had revealed “classified information.” (Trump himself has done faced allegations earlier also Trump’s declassification order, the current president said, “could get (Obama) out of trouble.”
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Sean Kirkpatrick, who served as the first director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) from 2022 to 2023, explains scientific American that “Obama said nothing classified and, in fact, said nothing that has not been said in multiple forums – including congressional testimony.”
Trump’s announcement also follows the controversial release of another government document – a massive, heavily redacted database of materials obtained from the federal investigation of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, with whom Trump and many other powerful world figures were linked.
What do President Trump and former President Obama know about aliens?
Obama clarifies his views on aliens after his podcast interview causes uproar an instagram post that he “saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Indeed!” The former president said claims that aliens are real are a matter of statistics: “The universe is so vast that the chances are good that there is life out there,” he wrote. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances of aliens visiting us are small.”
Trump, for his part, explained to reporters on Air Force One that he was also in the dark, saying “I don’t know if they’re real or not.”
Is there evidence that aliens ever visited Earth?
To date, no US government reports or investigations have provided any evidence that Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials, despite several decades of official study in the mid-20th century. Over the past decade, the Pentagon’s AARO, as well as NASA-appointed expert panels, have documented sightings of unexplained objects, now commonly known as Unidentified Unusual Phenomena (UAP), but none have concluded that any of these phenomena are evidence of alien technology or life.
Kirkpatrick says, “There is no evidence that any of these UAP sightings are extraterrestrial in nature.” “However, there is a tendency to sensationalize sightings for which there is little concrete data.”
Many such incidents have ultimately been attributed to misidentified aircraft, atmospheric phenomena or sensor artefacts – although experts acknowledge there is still much to learn.
“As a scientist and a member of NASA’s UAP panel, I have not seen anything that indicates that we have observed phenomena that violate the laws of physics and require an alien society to come to us to explain them,” says Federica Bianco, an astrophysicist at the University of Delaware. “We have shown in our NASA study group that even the most unusual scenes can be explained by known man-made technologies when the right assumptions are made.”
Beyond the federal realm, some space scientists such as astrophysicist Avi Loeb of Harvard University and Beatriz Villarroel, a researcher at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden, have independently presented claims of evidence of possible alien visitation. Much of Loeb’s focus has been on Surprising behavior of interstellar objects Passing through the solar system. Villarroel, meanwhile, has argued that the lights seen on space-age photographic plates in the sky may indicate artificial objects that orbited Earth before the launch of humanity’s first satellites.
These claims have been widely met with skepticism by other scientists, with some arguing that these observations can be explained by natural causes or human activity.
Thomas Zurbuchen, an astrophysicist and former associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate who established the agency’s UAP panel, says scientific investigations of potential alien encounters should not be unfairly stigmatized and the recommendations in final report of the group Still standing.
“It’s a good idea to look at different datasets and look for unusual activity and learn as much as you can from it,” he says.
The scientific search for extraterrestrial life is alive and well. For example, Loeb has launched the Galileo Project, a network of small telescopes and other instruments that can observe and study flying UAPs. And several modest search efforts for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) exist to observe electromagnetic transmissions coming to Earth from hypothetical cosmic civilizations. Like all previous discoveries, no conclusive evidence of aliens has yet been found.
NASA, for its part, has spent decades and billions of dollars searching for life elsewhere in the universe. Recently, the space agency launched Europa Clipper to explore the habitability of Jupiter’s moons and developed the flying drone Dragonfly to study the environment of Titan, Saturn’s largest and perhaps most astronomically interesting moon.
But NASA’s most notable search for aliens is probably its effort to identify possible signs of ancient life on Mars and bring the samples back to Earth. However, the agency’s Mars sample return program has been plagued by budget overruns and schedule delays. Its funding was cut to zero earlier this year, effectively canceling the mission.
Meanwhile observations of potentially habitable exoplanets by the James Webb Space Telescope have also revealed what some scientists have controversially interpreted as potential biosignatures. NASA is now in the midst of developing an even more ambitious telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which is aimed for the 2030s and can more closely study promising exoplanets for possible signs of life.
what happens next?
Trump’s Thursday directive did not specify which government files would be made public or when they might be made public, but rather signaled the beginning of a process in which officials would review relevant documents and other evidence for potential disclosure. The selection, review, declassification and final release of any material can take weeks, months or even years.
Kirkpatrick expects any release to contain “no new revelations.”
While acknowledging that he does not have access to classified information, astrophysicist Bianco says that “the timing convinces me that this is a move to distract people in the United States from the many ongoing political and social crises and the failures of this administration.”
