President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he will order government agencies to release files on UFOs.
“Based on the tremendous interest shown,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “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. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
It remains unclear what the records contain or when they will become public. The White House has not yet outlined a timeline for declassification.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt amplified the announcement on X, calling it “OUT OF THIS WORLD NEWS.”
🚨OUT OF THIS WORLD NEWS from President Trump… 👽 pic.twitter.com/NI3wTGRqdh
— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) February 20, 2026
Trump’s declaration followed his criticism of former President Barack Obama over remarks about extraterrestrial life.
The president accused Obama of revealing classified information and suggested he may step in.
“I can tell you he gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that. He made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information,” Trump said in an exchange with Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy.
Pressed on whether aliens are real, Trump signaled uncertainty. “I never talk about it. A lot of people do,” the president said. “Do you believe it, Peter?”
“The president can declassify anything that he wants to,” Doocy responded.
“I may get him out of trouble by declassifying,” Trump later told Doocy.
Obama previously commented that extraterrestrial life is real but denied seeing it during his time in office. He also dismissed long-standing speculation about secret facilities like Area 51.
“There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States,” Obama said.
Obama on Aliens:
“They’re real” “But I haven’t seen them. They’re not being kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility — unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the President of the United States.” pic.twitter.com/LM1G7AWoF8
— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) February 14, 2026
He later backtracked and clarified his remarks in a social media post.
“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” Obama wrote.
“But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!” he added.
Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump has also fueled curiosity about the topic.
Speaking on the “Pod Force One” podcast, she suggested the president may have prepared remarks related to extraterrestrial life.
“We’ve kind of asked my father-in-law about this… we all want to know about the UFOs… and he played a little coy with us,” Lara Trump said.
“I’ve heard kind of around, I think my father-in-law has actually said it, that there is some speech that he has, that I guess at the right time, I don’t know when the right time is, he’s going to break out and talk about and it has to do with maybe some sort of extraterrestrial life,” she added.
Asked about those comments, Leavitt told reporters a speech on aliens would generate enormous interest.
“I’ll have to check in with our speech writing team. Uh, and that would be of great interest to me personally, and I’m sure all of you in this room and apparently former President Obama, too,” she said.
Calls for transparency on unidentified aerial phenomena have grown in recent years.
In 2022, a House Intelligence subcommittee held the first congressional hearing on UFOs in more than five decades.
Lawmakers heard from officials overseeing a Pentagon task force investigating UAP reports.
During a 2023 House hearing, three military veterans warned that sightings pose a national security issue and argued the government has been too secretive.
Former military intelligence officer and whistleblower David Grusch claimed the Pentagon and other agencies are withholding information.
He asserted that the government is concealing a “multi-decade” effort to reverse engineer nonhuman technology allegedly recovered from crash sites. The Pentagon has denied Grusch’s claims.
The Department of Defense launched a website for declassified UAP material in 2023.
The Pentagon expanded efforts to catalog and analyze sightings through its All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.
In a 2024 report, the office stated it found no evidence of alien life. Working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other agencies, it recorded 1,652 UAP reports as of 2024.
Congressional interest intensified last year when a House Republican shared footage during an Oversight hearing.
The video showed a U.S. missile striking an unidentified glowing orb over waters off Yemen.
Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri released the Oct. 30, 2024 footage, which a whistleblower provided.
When slowed down, the video appears to show a Hellfire missile hitting the object and bouncing away.
“We’ve never seen a Hellfire missile hit a target and bounce off,” Lue Elizondo, a former senior intelligence official with the Pentagon, told lawmakers.
“When a hellfire makes a hit, a kinetic strike on something solid, there’s usually not much left of whatever it is it’s hitting,” Elizondo added.
“It’s very, very destructive. But in the video … what seems to happen is that the missile is either redirected, or in some case, perhaps glances off the object and continues on its way.”
