US President Donald Trump has announced that he will order US agencies, including the Department of Defense, to begin identifying and releasing government documents related to extraterrestrial civilizations, writes the BBC.
Trump made the statement on his social network Truth Social. Before that, he criticized former US President Barack Obama for releasing classified information – Obama said in a podcast last week that “aliens are real.” Trump said that Obama should not have said that, and that the former president made a big mistake. When asked if he thought aliens existed, Trump replied that he did not know if they were real.
Obama told the host of the podcast Brian Tyler Cohen on the 14th of February that he thought aliens existed. He said that aliens are real, but he has not seen them and they are definitely not being held in the infamous Area 51. Obama stressed that there are no underground facilities there, unless there is some huge conspiracy theory and the aliens are not hidden there from the US president. When the statement made headlines, Obama tried to explain that he meant that, given the size of the universe, extraterrestrial civilizations probably exist.
In an Instagram post after the broadcast was made public, Obama wrote that during his presidency he had not come across evidence that aliens had tried to make contact with Earthlings.
There is no evidence that Obama based his answer on classified information.
Trump, for his part, pointed out on the 19th of February that while many people believe in the existence of extraterrestrials, he has never talked about it and has no opinion on it. A few hours later, the US President announced that, given the enormous interest, he would seek to obtain the release of files related to aliens and extraterrestrial civilizations, unexplained celestial phenomena and unidentified flying objects.
In 2024, the Pentagon reported that there was no evidence that the US government’s had encountered alien life, and most UFO sightings were related to human activities.
In 2023, the US House of Representatives held a panel discussion on UFOs. At that time, the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations was not confirmed, and there was no big revelations.
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