Trump says he doesn't know if aliens are real but directs government to
release files on UFOs, more
[February 21, 2026]
By MICHELLE L. PRICE
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Thursday that he's
directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to identify and
release files related to extraterrestrials and UFOs because of
“tremendous interest.”
Trump made the announcement in a social media post hours after he
accused former President Barack Obama of disclosing “classified
information” when Obama recently suggested in a podcast interview that
aliens were real.
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, “I don’t know if they’re real
or not," and said of Obama, “I may get him out of trouble by
declassifying.”
In a post on his social media platform Thursday night, Trump said he was
directing government agencies to release 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.”
Obama, who made his comments in a podcast appearance over the weekend,
later clarified that he had not seen evidence that aliens “have made
contact with us,” but said, “statistically, the universe is so vast that
the odds are good there’s life out there.”
Trump told reporters Thursday that when it came to the prospect of
extraterrestrial visitors: “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's daughter-in-law Lara Trump suggested this week that he was ready
to speak about it, however, when she said on a podcast that the
president had a speech prepared to deliver on aliens that he would give
at the “right time.”
That was news to the White House. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt
responded with a laugh when she was asked about it Wednesday and told
reporters, “A speech on aliens would be news to me.”
Public interest in unidentified flying objects and the possibility of
the government hiding secrets of extraterrestrial life remerged in the
public consciousness after a group of former Pentagon and government
officials leaked Navy videos of unknown objects to The New York Times
and Politico in 2017. The renewed scrutiny prompted Congress to hold the
first hearings on UFOs in 50 years in May 2022, though officials said
that the objects, which appeared to be green triangles floating above a
Navy ship, were likely drones.
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President Donald Trump waves after stepping off Air Force One,
Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Md., on return from
a trip to Georgia. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Since then the Pentagon has promised more transparency on the topic.
In July 2022 it created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or
AARO, which was intended to be a central place to collect reports of
all military UFO encounters, taking over from a department task
force.
In 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of AARO at the time, told
reporters he didn’t have any evidence “of any program having ever
existed as a to do any sort of reverse engineering of any sort of
extraterrestrial (unidentified aerial phenomena).”
The information that has been made public shows that the vast
majority of UFO reports made by the military go unsolved but the
ones that are identified are largely benign in nature.
An 18-page unclassified report submitted to Congress in June 2024
said service members had made 485 reports of unidentified phenomena
in the past year but 118 cases were found to be “prosaic objects
such as various types of balloons, birds, and unmanned aerial
systems.”
“It is important to underscore that, to date, AARO has discovered no
evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology,” the
report stressed.
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Associated Press writers Konstantin Toropin and Steve Peoples
contributed to this report.
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