In 2006, Donald Trump was firing people on The Apprentice and Dr. Phil was daytime television’s reigning tough-love therapist.
Twenty years later, the former is president of the United States, the latter, his informal UFO ambassador—recently trusted with unreleased government files on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) to gauge how the public might handle what’s inside.
“Here’s what comes in stages. First they acknowledge it, then they confirm it’s real, then they tell you where it’s from,” Dr. Phil said in an August 7 Instagram video discussing UAP disclosure. “And somewhere down that road, maybe, is the big one—the government of the United States standing at a podium and saying out loud, we are not alone.”
For most of 2026, a rumor has consumed the world of UFOlogy: President Trump is sitting on a finished speech confirming humanity isn’t alone. Whether the “disclosure speech” actually exists is a topic of rabid discussion on X, the r/UFO subreddit, and dozens of extraterrestrial-curious podcasts, but the reasons so many people believe in it are very real. Humans are arguably experiencing the most consequential era for the UFO scene since the ’40s and ’50s, when a mysterious crash outside Roswell, New Mexico, and unexplained radar blips over Washington, DC, birthed decades of legends of little green men and flying-saucers.
There’s no doubt that the government has been engaging with the topic. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently confirmed that Stephen Miller, one of the most powerful figures in the White House, has been handed the UAP portfolio.
Tim Gallaudet, a retired Navy rear admiral who helped run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during Trump’s first term, testified before Congress about UAP in 2024, and now sits on a UAP Science Advisory Council reporting to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He called the increased government interest “a total change in executive-branch transparency from the last 80 years.”
But he’s unsure if that would ever culminate in a speech from a sitting president, because they would “have to acknowledge that we’re not in control, that we’re not the highest level of intelligence on the planet, and that’s going to be a very hard thing for any government to admit.”
A White House spokesperson tells WIRED via email that “No such speech is planned—rather, the administration continues to release files as they become available, and the public to make up their own minds about the information uncovered.”
For believers, the modern UAP disclosure began in 2017, when a New York Times article revealed a secret Pentagon program quietly investigating UAPs. The Pentagon went on to confirm in 2020 that leaked videos of Navy pilots tracking seemingly impossible objects were real. A 2021 intelligence report conceded the phenomena existed and remained unexplained, and in 2022 the government established an official investigation office. Then, from 2022 to 2025, Congress held yearly public hearings where pilots, military officers, and intelligence veterans (including Gallaudet) testified under oath.
What’s also novel is that UAP disclosure has bipartisan support. Both the House task force on declassifying federal secrets and the House UAP Caucus are made up of legislators from across the aisle.
This year, the drumbeat of government interest turned into a drumroll about a potential Trump speech. In January, filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee claimed a disclosure speech was imminent, pegged to the 79th anniversary of the alleged Roswell crash on July 8. Few took him seriously.
But in February, the president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, gave the idea new legs, saying on the Pod Force One podcast she’d heard Trump had a speech ready touching on “some sort of extraterrestrial life.” Around the same time, Barack Obama mused in a podcast interview with Brian Tyler Cohen that aliens are “real” before conceding “I haven’t seen them.” Trump then accused his predecessor of disclosing classified information, and announced that he was directing agencies to release their files on “alien and extraterrestrial life.”
What followed was bizarre even by this administration’s standards. In May, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself escorting a handcuffed gray alien, and a mysterious loading page appeared on the domain aliens.gov, leading to rampant speculation within the UFO community that the big reveal was coming. But when the White House finally launched aliens.gov late in the month, it ended up being a Star Wars–style website that functioned as an ICE tip line—with aliens being a reference to undocumented people.
The machinery of disclosure kept grinding forward. Since May, the government has released five batches of declassified videos and documents onto the Department of War’s website. Detractors say the files lack context and the videos prove little.
Even after the Roswell date passed, rumors about a disclosure speech intensified. In late July, Liberation Times—an independent news website with a record of breaking UAP stories—reported that a speech confirming some UFOs are of non-human origin had been prepared for Trump.
The site’s founder, Christopher Sharp, tells WIRED the story began with a call from a source he deeply trusts.
“They basically said, ‘Look, I’m quite shaken, because it looks like Trump may make some kind of announcement on UAP disclosure’.” Another source described the speech itself, he says, alleging it basically reads, “we’re not alone, we have captured some of these or retrieved some of these things, they’re of non-human origin, and that there is a reverse engineering effort.”
Sharp was also told Trump wouldn’t deliver it unless unspecified conditions were met.
“If you’re the president, you have to be sure that there’s firm evidence,” he says. “The worst thing you can do is come out with this speech and then whatever you put out could be debunked straight away … You’ll go down in history as a laughingstock.”
In August, the rumor hit a fever pitch. Robert Bigelow, the billionaire aerospace mogul who has bankrolled UFO research for decades and once owned Utah’s infamous Skinwalker Ranch (a 500-acre plot of land renowned for alleged alien and paranormal activity and later the namesake of a popular History Channel series), told veteran Las Vegas journalist George Knapp that he’d met Trump in the Oval Office months earlier and personally handed him a speech containing a single sentence: “A non-human, intelligent presence has been on Earth for a very long time, using spacecraft and with performances completely beyond our capabilities and our human physics.”
Bigelow said he advised the president to deliver the line casually, on his way to boarding Air Force One—no evidence, no press conference, just confirmation. Trump hasn’t said it. Yet.
If the cycle of presidents and UFO disclosure feels familiar, that’s because it is. For nearly 80 years, someone has always supposedly been on the verge of revealing the truth, but no president has ever delivered.
“Politicians overpromise,” says Greg Eghigian, a professor of history and bioethics at Penn State and author of After the Flying Saucers Came. “The reality is that even presidents are not privy to a lot of classified information that lies within the bowels of the military and intelligence community bureaucracy.”
Still, for the believers, the stakes justify the hope.
“Often in the mainstream, when this topic gets brought up, there’s a giggle factor. I can tell you who is not giggling about this: senior members of the administration, senior intelligence officials, senior members of the military, senior members of Congress,” says Jordan Flowers, executive director of the Disclosure Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for UAP transparency. “When the door closes, no one ever says, ‘Oh, this is all made up, isn’t it?’ No. The door closes and they say, ‘We know there’s something happening here, we know this is serious, what do we do about it?’”
But that discourse still hasn’t been confirmed, at least in a meaningful way to the general public.
“A speech from the President of the United States confirming the existence of things in our airspace that we do not understand would unequivocally contribute to the public taking this issue seriously,” says Flowers.
Eghigian, however, isn’t so sure a Trump pronouncement would settle anything, particularly from “this president, who has a long history of not telling the truth.”
If the past is any indicator, this could be another nothingburger.
“Unless something radically different happens, which I know a lot of people are counting on, what we could probably expect is that this will eventually die down,” he says, citing an 80-year history of “intense moments where societies are really focused on the subject, and then all of a sudden interest wanes, and then all of a sudden it appears again.”
Right now, interest is arguably at anall-timee high. Few politicians enjoy a public spectacle as much as Trump, and what spectacle could be bigger than news that transcends our planet, and potentially our galaxy. Maybe the rumor just becomes another footnote on presidents and UFO lore. Or maybe it becomes the most important proclamation in human history, delivered by a reality TV star, with a talk show shrink by his side.
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