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WASHINGTON — <\/span>President Donald Trump said Thursday that he’s directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to identify and release files related to extraterrestrials and UFOs because of \u201ctremendous interest.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump made the announcement in a social media post hours after he accused former President Barack Obama of disclosing \u201cclassified information\u201d when Obama recently suggested in a podcast interview<\/a> that aliens were real.<\/p>\n Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, \u201cI don\u2019t know if they\u2019re real or not,” and said of Obama, \u201cI may get him out of trouble by declassifying.\u201d<\/p>\n In a post on his social media platform Thursday night, Trump said he was directing government agencies to release files related \u201cto 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Obama, who made his comments in a podcast appearance over the weekend, later clarified that he had not seen evidence that aliens \u201chave made contact with us,\u201d but said, \u201cstatistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there\u2019s life out there.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump told reporters Thursday that when it came to the prospect of extraterrestrial visitors: \u201cI don\u2019t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump suggested this week that he was ready to speak about it, however, when she said on a podcast that the president had a speech prepared to deliver on aliens that he would give at the \u201cright time.\u201d<\/p>\n That was news to the White House. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded with a laugh when she was asked about it Wednesday and told reporters, \u201cA speech on aliens would be news to me.\u201d<\/p>\n Public interest in unidentified flying objects and the possibility of the government hiding secrets of extraterrestrial life remerged in the public consciousness after a group of former Pentagon and government officials leaked Navy videos of unknown objects to The New York Times and Politico in 2017. The renewed scrutiny prompted Congress to hold the first hearings on UFOs in 50 years in May 2022, though officials said that the objects, which appeared to be green triangles floating above a Navy ship, were likely drones.<\/p>\n Since then the Pentagon has promised more transparency on the topic. In July 2022 it created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was intended to be a central place to collect reports of all military UFO encounters, taking over from a department task force.<\/p>\n In 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of AARO at the time, told reporters he didn\u2019t have any evidence \u201cof any program having ever existed as a to do any sort of reverse engineering of any sort of extraterrestrial (unidentified aerial phenomena).\u201d<\/p>\n The information that has been made public shows that the vast majority of UFO reports made by the military go unsolved but the ones that are identified are largely benign in nature.<\/p>\n