President Donald Trump has said he is directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to identify and release files related to aliens and UFOs because of “tremendous interest.” Image is used for illustration purpose only. | Photo credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
President Donald Trump said Thursday (Feb. 19, 2026) that he is directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to locate and release files related to aliens and UFOs because of “tremendous interest.”
Mr. Trump made the announcement in a social media post hours after Mr. Obama accused former President Barack Obama of revealing “classified information” when he suggested aliens were real in a recent podcast interview.
Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One, “I don’t know if they’re true or not,” and said of Mr. Obama, “I might get out of trouble by declassifying him.”
In a post on his social media platform on Thursday (February 19, 2026) night, Mr. Trump said he is ordering government agencies to release files on “extraterrestrial and extraterrestrial life, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), and Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) and any and all other matters of importance.”
Making his comments on a podcast show over the weekend, Mr. Obama later clarified that he had not seen evidence that extraterrestrials had “made contact with us,” but that “statistically, the universe is so vast, the odds are there’s life there.”
When it came to the prospect of alien visitors, Mr Trump told reporters: “I don’t have an opinion on that. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”
Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law Laura Trump indicated she was open to talking about it this week, however, when she said on a podcast that the president was open to a speech on aliens he would give “at the right time.”
That was news to the White House. Press Secretary Carolyn Leavitt responded with a laugh when asked about it Wednesday and told reporters, “The 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 came to public consciousness after a group of former Pentagon and government officials leaked Navy videos of unidentified objects. The New York Times And politics In 2017. The renewed scrutiny prompted Congress to hold its first hearing on UFOs in 50 years in May 2022, although officials said the objects seen as green triangles floating above the Navy ship were drones.
The Pentagon has since promised more transparency on the issue. In July 2022 it created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, as a central location to collect all military UFO encounter reports, drawn from department task forces.
In 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the AARO at the time, told reporters that he had no evidence that “any program exists to do any kind of reverse engineering of extraterrestrial (unidentified aerial phenomena).”
Declassified information shows that the vast majority of UFO reports made by the military go unsolved, but most of those identified are benign.
Also Read | No hints of extraterrestrial or extraterrestrial activity with recent evictions: White House
According to an 18-page declassified report submitted to Congress in June 2024, service members made 485 reports of unidentified phenomena in the past year, while 118 cases were identified as “various types of experimental objects such as balloons, birds and unmanned aerial systems.”
“It is important to emphasize that, to date, AARO has found no evidence of extraterrestrial life, activity or technology,” the report stressed.
Published – February 20, 2026 08:22 am IST
