WASHINGTON \u2014 President Donald Trump said on Thursday he would direct federal agencies to begin \u200breleasing government files related to aliens and unidentified flying objects, pointing to what he described as strong public interest in the issue.<\/p>\n
In a social media post, Trump said he would \u200corder Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth and other agencies to release the information, calling the matter “extremely interesting and important.”<\/p>\n
Earlier in the day, Trump, without \u2060providing evidence, accused former President Barack Obama of \u200bimproperly disclosing classified information when discussing aliens publicly, \u2060saying Obama “made a big mistake.”<\/p>\n
“He took it out of classified information … He’s not supposed to be doing \u200cthat,” Trump told reporters \u200cwhile traveling to Georgia.<\/p>\n
During an interview with podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen released on Saturday, \u2060Obama was asked if aliens were real.<\/p>\n
“They’re real, but I \u2060haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in … Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States,” Obama said.<\/p>\n
Area 51 is a classified Air Force facility in Nevada that fringe theorists have speculated holds alien bodies and a crashed spaceship. CIA archives released in 2013 said it was a test \u200csite for top-secret spy planes.<\/p>\n
Pentagon investigations<\/p>\n
There was no indication in Obama’s remarks \u200bthat the former president released classified information. Obama’s office did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
“I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!” Obama said in an Instagram post on Sunday.<\/p>\n
In the post, Obama explained his belief that aliens exist by saying the statistical odds of life beyond Earth were high because the universe is so vast. He added that the chances of extraterrestrial life visiting Earth were low given the distance.<\/p>\n
Following his \u200bcomments on Obama, Trump added that he had not seen evidence that aliens exist, saying, “I don’t know if they’re real \u200cor not.”<\/p>\n
In recent \u200cyears, the Pentagon \u2060has investigated reports of UFOs, and senior military leaders said in 2022 they found no evidence to suggest that aliens had visited Earth or crash-landed here.<\/p>\n
A 2024 Pentagon report said U.S. government investigations since the end of World War II had found no evidence of extraterrestrial technology, and most sightings were misidentified ordinary \u200cobjects and phenomena.<\/p>\n
The website of the \u200bNational Archives and Records Administration says it has records related \u200cto UFOs across numerous collections.<\/p>\n
Contributing: Kanishka Singh<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 President Donald Trump said on Thursday he would direct federal agencies to begin \u200breleasing government files…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481162,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[1302,3811,3812,2091,134,3729,3,111,3813,3814,79,193,99,1505,2987,3324,2986],"class_list":["post-481161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-homes","tag-international","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-science","tag-space","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}