Man and boy sit on a paved sidewalk and draw alien faces.
Annie Otzen | Digitalvision | Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he would direct the Department of Defense and other agencies to make public government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life.
Trump said the files that will be identified and released will also concern unidentified aerial phenomena and unidentified flying objects, as well as "any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters."
In a Truth Social post, the U.S. president said his move was based on the "tremendous interest" in the subject, without providing additional details. This comes after he accused former U.S. President Barack Obama of leaking "classified information" on aliens.
"I don't know if they're real or not, but I can tell you he gave classified information," Trump told reporters on Air Force One.
Obama said on Saturday in a podcast that aliens were real, "but I haven'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 added.
Area 51 refers to a classified U.S. Air Force facility in Nevada, and has been the center of conspiracy theories saying the U.S. government has been conducting research and using the facility for storing extraterrestrial materials and technology.
Obama had previously said that the first question he wanted answered when he became president was "Where are the aliens?"
After the podcast on Sunday, the former U.S. president clarified his stance on a post on Instagram, saying that the universe was so vast that the odds are good that there's life out there.
However, he said that he also saw "no evidence" during his presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with Earth."
In late 2024, the Pentagon said it had seen 757 new reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs between May 2023 and June 2024, NBC News reported.
Of these, 21 "merit further analysis" due to "anomalous characteristics and/or behaviors," the report said, adding that there was no evidence, so far, to substantiate life from another planet being involved in these sightings.
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