Trump Orders UFO Files Release
President Trump ordered U.S. agencies to release classified records related to aliens and UFOs, covering both "unidentified aerial phenomena" and alleged government knowledge of extraterrestrial life. The directive follows renewed public interest in government transparency regarding UFO phenomena and comes after former President Obama's remarks affirming belief in alien life. The files are expected to be released soon.
- The U.S. government's formal investigation into UFOs dates back to 1947 and includes programs like Project Sign, Project Grudge, and the longest-running, Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 to 1969, investigated 12,618 UFO sightings, concluding that 701 of them remained "unidentified". - In July 2022, the Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to consolidate and investigate reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). This office replaced the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) that was active from 2017 to 2022. - AARO released a report in March 2024 covering U.S. government involvement with UAPs from 1945 to the present, stating it found "no empirical evidence" of alien technology or that the government has concealed extraterrestrial spacecraft. - According to its fiscal year 2024 report, AARO received 757 new UAP reports between May 2023 and June 2024. A previous report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in January 2022 cataloged 510 UAP reports as of August 2022. - Public congressional hearings on UAPs have become more common, with the first in over 50 years held in May 2022, where officials reported a database of 400 UAP incidents. Subsequent hearings have focused on whistleblower protection and the need for greater government transparency. - One of the most famous UFO incidents occurred in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico, where the Roswell Army Air Field initially announced the recovery of a "flying disc." The military quickly retracted this, stating the debris was from a weather balloon, though later reports in the 1990s linked the wreckage to the top-secret Project Mogul, a high-altitude balloon program for monitoring Soviet nuclear tests. - A significant precursor to the current push for transparency was a 2021 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence which examined 144 UAP incidents reported by government sources between 2004 and 2021; it was unable to identify 143 of them.
