Donald Trump wants the truth on extraterritorial life, at least, out there.
The president on Thursday night directed government agencies to release files pertaining to the existence of aliens just hours after complaining that Barack Obama had shared classified information on the matter.
Trump, 79, announced he will assign Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to identify and release files “related to alien and extraterrestrial life” after Obama received global attention by discussing the topic over the weekend.
Obama made his extraterrestrial claim to podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen in an interview published on Saturday. “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in Area 51,” Obama said.
“There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States,” Obama added.
After the comments attracted global attention, Obama clarified on Instagram that “statistically” the universe is so large he believed there was a large chance that other life exists beyond earth.
“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!”
When asked on Air Force One earlier Thursday about Obama’s take and whether he himself had any proof of “non-human visitors to earth”, Trump took aim at the former president.
“Well he gave classified information, he’s not supposed to be doing that,” Trump said, without explaining what was problematic with Obama’s comments.
Fox News reporter Peter Doocy then asked Trump if he also believes aliens exist.
“I don’t know if they’re real or not,” Trump responded. “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.”
When pressed, Trump said he has no opinion on whether aliens are real.
“I never talk about it. A lot of people do.”
When Doocy reminded him he could “declassify anything” he wanted to, Trump said of Obama, “I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.”
In a Thursday evening Truth Social post, Trump claimed that “tremendous interest” in aliens had led him to put Hegseth and “other relevant Departments and Agencies” on alien patrol.
Trump said they will “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.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
Trump’s daughter-in-law told a MAGA-friendly podcast this week that the president has a prepared speech that confirms the existence of extraterrestrial life.
Speaking on the New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast, Lara Trump, who is married to the president’s son Eric, said she had asked the 79-year-old what he knew about aliens, claiming he gave her a “coy” response.
“Eric and I were like, ‘Oh my gosh, he won’t even fully tell us, maybe there’s more to it,’” she claimed.
This month, UFO researcher Mark Christopher Lee made a post on X that claimed a “source inside the Trump administration” had leaked the full text of “President Trump’s prepared historic announcement on UAPs/non-human intelligence.”
The post claimed that as part of the speech, Trump will state, “This is not a threat-this is an opportunity to unite humanity in understanding our place in the universe.”
On the podcast, Lara Trump said, “My father-in-law has actually said it, that there is some speech that he has, that he is going to break out and talk about, and it has to do with maybe some sort of extraterrestrial life, so to speak.”
Trump’s other son, Don Jr., has also stoked conspiracy theories on alien life.
“None of this should surprise all of us, but it should surprise us that we can now say fairly definitively it seems that there’s evidence of non-human intelligence out there engaging with our planet,” Trump Jr. said during an interview with reporter Ross Coulthart, who conducted a years-long investigation into “secret alien aircrafts.”
The secrecy around the highly-classified Area 51 air force facility in the Nevada desert has led to conspiracy theory that the base is the home of UFO research, testing for extraterrestrials and hidden alien life forms.
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