Trump Orders Declassification of UFO Files

- The directive was announced by Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform, where he stated he would instruct the "Secretary of War" and other agencies to release files on "unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)" and UFOs. - This move follows former President Barack Obama's recent podcast comment that aliens are "real," which Trump asserted was a leak of classified information. Obama later clarified that he was speaking about the statistical likelihood of extraterrestrial life and had seen no evidence of it during his presidency. - The modern U.S. government effort to track these incidents is handled by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which was established in 2022. - A 2024 Pentagon study that analyzed government investigations since 1945 found no evidence of extraterrestrial technology or alien life. Likewise, AARO has stated it has found no evidence of extraterrestrial activity in the cases it has reviewed. - The most recent consolidated report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, covering May 2023 to June 2024, included 757 new reports, bringing the total number of cases being reviewed by AARO to over 1,600. - A June 2021 preliminary report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was largely inconclusive; it could not identify 143 of the 144 UAP incidents reported between 2004 and 2021. - Previous large-scale declassifications of this nature have occurred, including the records from the U.S. Air Force's Project BLUE BOOK, which investigated 12,618 sightings between 1947 and 1969. - The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) also declassified hundreds of documents in 1978 related to its investigations into UFOs, primarily from the late 1940s and 1950s.