Donald Trump has said his administration plans to make government UFO material publicly available, following NASA’s Artemis mission earlier this month.
On Wednesday (April 29), the president met with the mission’s crew in the Oval Office after Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen completed a ten-day trip in space.
The team returned to Earth on April 11, marking what was described as the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Although Trump didn’t claim the astronauts had encountered anything unusual during the mission, he indicated that new information about unidentified objects would soon be shared with the public.
“For some reason, and I guess it’s just a reason, it’s been in the minds of people for a long time,” Trump said during the White House event.
“I think some of it is going to be very interesting to people.”
He also said he’d spoken with individuals who described extraordinary sightings, telling him “they saw things you wouldn’t believe”.
Back in February, Trump instructed the Defense Department to release files connected to reported UFO activity. The material is expected to include records relating 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’.
Trump didn’t provide a specific timeline for when the public should expect the release. However, he suggested at a Turning Point USA event earlier this month that the documents would be published ‘very, very soon’.
“As you remember, I recently directed the Secretary of War … to begin releasing government files relating to UFOs and unexplained aerial phenomenon,” he said at an event in Phoenix.
“This process is well underway, and we found many very interesting documents, I must say, and the first releases will begin very, very soon.”
Comments about extraterrestrial life have also surfaced from other political figures. Earlier this year, Barack Obama said he believed aliens were real, though he later framed it as his personal view rather than evidence of a hidden government program.
Speaking on the Brian Tyler Cohen podcast, the former president said: “They are real – but I haven’t seen them.
“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.”