Trump tells Pentagon to release files on UFOs and "alien and extraterrestrial life"

Joe Walsh
Thu, February 19, 2026 



President Trump on Thursday directed his administration to release files on UFOs and any "alien and extraterrestrial life," an issue that has drawn decades of public fascination — and spawned more than a few wild theories.

In a Truth Social post, the president told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other agency heads "to begin the process of identifying and releasing" any relevant files.

Mr. Trump also called for the release of "any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters."

It's not clear what files on UFOs might be released — or what information they might contain. The Pentagon has tracked reports of what it calls unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, for decades. But the military said in a 2024 report there's no evidence that any government investigation into UAPs has confirmed the existence of extraterrestrial life.

Mr. Trump's announcement came just days after one of his predecessors, former President Barack Obama, made waves by telling a podcaster that aliens are real. He later clarified that he never saw evidence of contact between humans and extraterrestrial life during his time in the White House, and he primarily believes that extraterrestrial life is real because "statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there."

Asked Thursday about Obama's comments, Mr. Trump told reporters he isn't sure whether or not aliens exist, but added that the former president "made a big mistake" and "gave classified information."

"I may get him out of trouble by declassifying," Mr. Trump said.

Public interest in UAPs has grown in recent years. Pilots and military service members have reported spotting hundreds of unexplained objects in the sky, leading some lawmakers to press the Pentagon to investigate the phenomena and determine whether they pose a threat to safety or national security.

Last year, one House Republican released a whistleblower video of a U.S. missile striking an unidentified glowing orb in the sky and bouncing off it. And in another case, a former Navy pilot told "60 Minutes" about frequent sightings of strange, fast-moving objects in restricted airspace.

A large number of UAP reports can be explained by birds, balloons, drones, satellites and other everyday phenomena, according to the military's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. But many cases remain unresolved.

"It is important to underscore that, to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology," the office said in a 2024 report. The office also noted that it has "no indication or confirmation that these activities are attributable to foreign adversaries."

Trump Makes UFO Announcement as Seth Meyers Predicted He Would After Epstein Revelations

Michael Luciano

MEDIAITE
Thu, February 19, 2026 


President Trump announced the release of government files on unidentified aerial phenomena and potential alien life, following predictions made by late-night host Seth Meyers.




President Donald Trump announced that he will order his administration to release files about unidentified aerial phenomena and potential alien life. The announcement comes after late-night host Seth Meyers predicted seven months ago that the president would make a declaration about UFOs to distract from revelations about Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump received a wave of bad press in July, as The Wall Street Journal reported that he sent Epstein, the deceased child sex trafficker convicted in 2008, a lewd birthday message in 2003. The message contained a fictional cryptic dialogue written inside a drawing of a woman’s torso. The president denies writing the message and is suing the Journal, which also highlighted a 2002 interview in which Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy.”

Two days later on July 23, 2025, the Journal reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi told the president that his name appears in the Justice Department’s files on Epstein.

“Whatever is in those Epstein files must be really f*cking bad,” Meyers said on the July 24 episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers. “They must be finding so many mentions of Trump, they’re going to have to change the name to the Trump files featuring Jeffrey Epstein. They’re so desperate to distract everyone.”

The comedian added, “I honestly think we’re just one Epstein story away from Trump announcing that UFOs are real.”

Eventually, the Justice Department released some of its files about Epstein, even though Congress passed a law in November compelling the release of all the material, with only victims’ names to be redacted. Even so, the DOJ did redact portions of the files that went beyond names and images of victims.

Trump has repeatedly denied wrongdoing or knowing about Epstein’s illegal activities. On Tuesday, he claimed he had “nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein.”

On Thursday, the president announced he would release documents about UFOs, writing on Truth Social:

Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related 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. GOD BLESS AMERICA!

Earlier in the day, Trump accused former President Barack Obama revealed classified information by claiming that aliens exist. Obama later walked back the comment, stating that he saw no evidence of aliens, but believes they could exist, given the vastness of the universe.

The government releasing material about UFOs and potential alien life is nothing new. Multiple presidential administrations have disclosed all manner of reports, videos, and testimony on the subject. Moreover, Congress has held hearings on the matter, which have yielded little in the way of proving aliens exist.

GOP Rebel Says New Trump Bombshell Is a Desperate Distraction

Ewan Palmer
Fri, February 20, 2026


Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Rep. Thomas Massie has accused President Donald Trump of desperately trying to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein files by directing the government to release information about alien life.

The Kentucky Republican, who spearheaded efforts to force the Department of Justice to release all documents linked to the late pedophile, accused the administration of deploying the “ultimate weapon of mass distraction” with the announcement.

“But the Epstein files aren’t going away… even for aliens,” Massie posted on X.

Thomas Massie has been a nemesis of Donald Trump for several years. / Anadolu / Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images

The 79-year-old president posted on Truth Social late Thursday that he is directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon, and other relevant government agencies to release all files related to “alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).”

Trump said the announcement comes after “tremendous interest shown” in the question of whether extraterrestrial life exists. Last weekend, former President Barack Obama caused a stir after claiming on a podcast that aliens are “real,” but that he personally has not seen them.

“They’re not being kept in, what is it? Area 51. There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States,” he added.

Obama later clarified that he was suggesting that, “statistically,” it is likely that there is some form of life somewhere else in the universe, given how vast it is.

“But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens are low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us,” Obama posted on Instagram. “Really!”

Trump accused Obama of disclosing “classified information” with his comments about the existence of aliens.

“I don’t know if they’re real or not,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday. “I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.”

The Trump administration has been widely condemned for its handling of the Epstein files.

Massie’s and Democratic California Rep. Ro Khanna’s Epstein Files Transparency Act directed the Department of Justice to release all its files connected to Epstein, who died in 2019, by Dec. 19, 2025.

The DOJ has released more than 3 million files related to Epstein, while acknowledging that nearly 3 million more were being withheld for various reasons, including ongoing cases and the sensitive nature of some materials.

Donald Trump is mentioned in the Epstein files hundreds of times, although the president denies being aware about his former close friend's child sex crimes. / Davidoff Studios/Getty Images

“The DOJ said it identified over 6m potentially responsive pages but is releasing only about 3.5m after review and redactions,” Khanna said in a January statement following the latest release. Khanna believes that “hundreds of thousands of emails and files” from Epstein’s computers are still to be made public.

Several Trump officials cheered on his “weapon of mass distraction” after he ordered the release of files on aliens and UFOs.

In a post on X, Hegseth shared Trump’s social media announcement with alien and saluting-face emojis.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt praised the move as “OUT OF THIS WORLD NEWS.”

Newsmax Reporter Asks Karoline Leavitt Point-Blank: ‘Does the Trump Administration Believe Aliens Are Real?’

Zachary Leeman
Wed, February 18, 2026
 Mediaite

Key takeawaysPowered by Yahoo Scout. Yahoo is using AI to generate key points from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about President Trump's beliefs on aliens after Lara Trump hinted at a prepared speech on the subject.See more

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked on Wednesday whether President Donald Trump believes aliens are “real” or not after his daughter-in-law teased a speech on the subject.

Newsmax’s Mike Carter noted at a White House press briefing that former President Barack Obama recently made waves by saying aliens are “real,” and Lara Trump suggested her father-in-law has a speech on aliens prepared.

“President Barack Obama, Karoline, was recently asked if aliens are real. He says they’re real, but he hasn’t seen them. President’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, told Miranda Devine of the New York Post that the president has a prepared speech on this issue that he prepares to deliver at the right time. Is that true, and does the Trump administration believe aliens are real?” Carter asked.

Leavitt said any such speech existing would be news to her.

“Well, a speech on aliens would be news to me. That sounds very exciting though. I’ll have to check in with our speechwriting team. And that would be of great interest to me personally, and I’m sure all of you in this room, and apparently former President Obama too. So we’ll keep you posted on that,” she said.

Lara Trump said this week that she believes her father-in-law will be discussing aliens in depth “at the right time.”

“Then I have just heard just kind of around — I think he’s actually said it, I think my father-in-law actually said it — that there is some speech that I guess at the right time, and I don’t know when the right time is, he’s gonna break out and talk about [it]. And it has to do with maybe some sort of extraterrestrial life, so to speak,” she said.

Obama released his own statement clarifying comments he made in an interview stating that aliens are “real,” but professing to have never seen them.

“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify,” Obama wrote. “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us.”

Lara Trump reveals president has speech pre-written to announce the discovery of alien life after Obama claim

Isabel Keane
Wed, February 18, 2026 

Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, says the president has a speech pre-written and is ready to address the discovery of aliens.

Lara, 43, made the shocking claim in an episode of the New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast, published Wednesday, after she was asked about former President Barack Obama's apparent confirmation that aliens are real during an interview last weekend.

“I believe I’ve heard on your podcast that you’ve discussed with the president these UFOs. Do you think that he’s about to make an announcement about UFOs, because President Obama was just on a podcast talking about how he believes in UFOs and hinting that he saw something when he was president?” host Miranda Devine asked.

“What’s kind of funny is we’ve kind of asked my father-in-law about this cause we’re like, ‘Well, what do you know?...”Lara began.

However, the president reportedly “played a little coy” when she and her husband, his son, Eric Trump, inquired about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

“Eric and I were like, ‘Oh my gosh, he won’t even fully tell us, maybe there’s more to it,’” she said.

“I have just heard kind of around that he’s actually said, my father-in-law has actually said it, that there is some speech that he has, that I guess at the right time...I don’t know what the right time is...that he is going to break out and talk about, and it has to do with maybe some sort of extraterrestrial life, so to speak,” Lara added.

Her comments come as Obama made a stunning admission over the weekend during an appearance on the No Lie With Brian Tyler Cohen podcast.

When asked about extraterrestrials, Obama replied, “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in — what is it? There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

The Internet went wild over his admission that aliens are real, prompting the former commander-in-chief to take to Instagram to clarify his stance.

“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify,” the former president wrote. “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.”

Barack Obama confidently said that aliens are real during an appearance on a podcast this past weekend (Getty)

“But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us,” he continued,

Doubling down on his claim, he added, “Really!”

Its long been speculated by many that aliens and UFOs are hidden at the mysterious Area 51 base in southern Nevada — and a documentary released last year suggested that Trump may soon confirm the existence of other life forms.

In The Age of Disclosure, director Dan Farah suggests that a massive government cover-up operation has concealed the existence of non-human intelligence, but that the cover-up will soon be exposed.

“I think it's only a matter of time before the release of this film is followed by a sitting president stepping to the podium and telling the world, ‘We're not alone in the universe,’” Farah told Entertainment Weekly in late November.

“It's the most significant moment a leader could possibly have.”

Despite Farah’s claims, Trump has not yet shared a definitive answer about the existence of aliens since returning to office.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for UAP

Not in My Jewish Name: From Israel’s (perpetual) Crimes Against Humanity to Slandering Ms. Rachel

Plus an excursion into other current manifestations of state-sanctioned criminality and mendacity

by Phil Rockstroh / December 11th, 2025

A tragic canard of history — i.e., the assertion: “Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people; therefore, we Jews have the right to return and establish a Jewish ethno-supremacist state.”

Only by a literal reading — i.e., cracked-brained — of Old Testament mythos can we Jews claim to be the people G-d choose to [ethnically cleanse] the Levant.

DNA analysis proves the Jews of the Torah are, wait for it, the Palestinian people (and that would include a certain rabble-rousing, empire-agitating rabbi known as Jesus of Nazareth). In contrast, my Jewish DNA reveals, my ancestors origins are from Europe e.g., Germany, France, Spain, Greece, with 4% traced to northern Iran and Iraq.

Thus we can conclude the “Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jews” canard should be regarded as flat out, Flat Earth theory-level risible.

Conceived in lie Zionist perpetual crimes against humanity continue unabated:

A journalist and former detainee, identified as “Yahya” reports, during his year and ten month of incarceration in Sde Teiman prison, he was subjected to torture by electrocution, being beaten, starved, and was the victim of sexual assaults that were filmed by his jailers.

Yahya went on to relate he was sexually assaulted by a dog trained to inflict the act.

Yet Ms. Rachel is accused of all forms of depravity, including “blood libel,” by defenders of Israel — a crime against humanity disguised as a nation.

May be an image of child and text that says ‘PET ES RECYCLE > Meeting Rahaf from Gaza'”

These are the people, when I, as a Jewish person, object to the conflation of Zionism and Judaism, hiss I am a self-loathing Jew and I am committing an act of treason against my tribe.

Truth be told: if I acted as an apologist for Israel, doing so would amount to an act of treason against my soul and I would loathe myself as I made the utterance.

Update from the annals of the “most moral army on earth.”

A CNN investigation has revealed the IDF opened fire on starving Palestinians while they were desperately attempting to secure flour in Gaza. Then the IDF used bulldozers to bury their corpses in mass graves.

Their deaths were not chronicled, nor was the location of their bodies disclosed to their families.

According to the UN, since the US-brokered “ceasefire” in Gaza, the Israelis have slaughtered an estimated 360 Palestinians (and counting).

The above, since the establishment of Israel, has been the Zionist state’s conception of peace. Moreover, any act of retaliation or even resistance by Palestinians are termed as acts of terrorism.

In the late 1930s, the Gestapo entered my family’s home, arrested my grandfather, and imprisoned him in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. If he and his fellow prisoners had escaped and fought their way through the streets of Berlin, the Nazi regime would have termed them terrorists — yet history would have lauded them as heroes.

This is the context of the Palestinian struggle from 1948 to the Oct. 7 Gaza prison breakout. The response of the Zionist state: a rampage of collective punishment.

By the standards of international law, a flagrant war crime; by Israeli standards — the modus operandi of Zionist tyranny.

As brazen as SS (Schutzstaffel) officers who wore death-head skulls on their uniforms and US Jim Crow era Klansmen prone to brandishing lynching nooses, Ben-Gvir, Israeli Minister of National Security, Culture Minister Amichai Eliyahu, and other devotees to the radical right-wing death cult, masquerading as the Israeli government, have taken to affixing golden noose-pins to their lapels expressing their call for Palestinian detainees from Gaza be executed.

All as:

“An elderly woman and her son were among at least seven Palestinians killed in the latest Israeli attacks in Gaza, as the military continues to operate across the “yellow line” ceasefire demarcation.

“Health officials reported the killings on Saturday in Beit Lahiya, Jabalia, and Zeitoun, including a 70-year-old woman and her son, who were hunted down and killed by a drone in Gaza City.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said the woman and her son were chased by a quadcopter drone about one kilometre [half a mile] from the yellow line and “left there to bleed to death” as the aircraft continued hovering overhead, preventing anyone from reaching them.”

Yet Israel’s apologists bristle and insist on their perpetual victimhood because the world views their genocidal rampage through Gaza and observers posit the mindset of all too many Israelis is analogous to that evinced by racist sorehead denizens of the Jim Crow ruled US Deep South and the blood-drenched actions of the Israeli government are Third Reich adjacent.

The conduct of the Zionist state is an affront to the memory of my relatives who perished in the flames of The Shoah. Israel defenders, to their shame, represent a whole new bloc of Holocaust denialists.

Yet, through the horror of it all, the world has witnessed the true nature of the Zionist ethno-supremacist state: i.e., a perpetual crime against humanity disguised as a nation.

All the Zionist hasbara lies, including social media trolling as a national enterprise, will not cause the world to forget what we have witnessed. And the Israeli citizenry senses the fact. A recent poll reports: 40 percent of Israelis are considering or making plans to leave the country.

Personally, I will welcome them if they come in the spirit of repentance.

More from The Department of Not In My Name

Zionists are attempting to bulldoze the reality of their lawless actions, to bury the people of the world’s awareness of the massive crimes against humanity Israel perpetrates, from Gaza to the West Bank, and outward towards their neighbors in the region — rather than face the reality that Zionism, the dream of an ethno-supremacist state, has been manifested as the blood-drenched, waking-life nightmare that it is.

Israel’s apologists, relentlessly, attempt to whitewash away the nation’s perpetual transgressions by means of the proliferation of propaganda and character assassination with the soul-defying agenda of imposing censorship and intimidate critics into silence.

Withal, a comment/threat made by a Zionist troll on a recent post of mine on the subject:

From Vincent ******* “We are noticing you. Never again. #noticing Jew-haters”

I replied, “can you say that with a World Two era, Hollywood movie German accent to achieve its full effect?”

Speaking of acting in a Third Reich-adjacent manner, from the fascist-minded homefront, Donald Trump is demanding stripping US citizenship from individuals who refuse to swear absolute fealty to the tenets of what he terms: “Western Civilization.”

Quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi when asked what he thought of Western Civilization:

“I think it would be a good idea [if they tried it].” [A disputed quotation. — DV ed]

Withal, the US (a nation established in ethnic cleansing, slavery and genocide) has slaughtered over 4 million people of the Islamic faith since the early 1990s alone. Israel, a de facto Western nation, remains committed to ethnic cleansing and genocide, and the funds and weaponry to do so are supplied by the West.

Masked ICE thugs patrol US streets. The economic elite serially exploit all their greedhead minds survey, from the resources of the cupidity tormented earth to the bodies of teenage girls and women from power-devoid economic groups. As, all the while, rents, medical care, utilities, and food prices rise and rise when life’s necessities, in a civilized society, would be a birthright not a privilege of the few.

Yes, I agree with Mahatma Gandhi, we, in the West — where we have been brainwashed to believe our capitalist-imposed shackles are the very wings of liberty — should give civilization a go.

What else is on the minds of the civilized men of Western civilization?

Trump and his Heinrich Himmler toy soldier appointees to the US Department of War (Crimes) are careening towards an attempt at a military smash-and-grab of Venezuelan oil.

I thought I had witnessed the nadir of jingoistic stupid and soul-shriveling political class arrogance in the run up to the Bush-Cheney administration’s war of aggression waged against the people of Iraq. How could I have suffered from such pathology-based-optimism?

By any measure of sentience the history of imperial fuckery would serve to warn us off such a dance with catastrophe — in buying into such a dismal display of war mongering prevarication — such a psychopathic lust for mayhem and mass death.

The guiding god of empire (including the US imperium’s client state, Israel, is: Moloch, a God to whom the innocent are sacrificed. In modern imperium, his blood-crazed devotees, knowing his thirst is insatiable, proffer him libations of blood and oil.

Pete Hegseth insists his god is Jesus Christ but his guiding god is Moloch. This is the reason Hegseth does not, in any manner, regard the declarations of the Christian Messiah, The Prince Of Peace, blesser of the meek and peacemakers, Jesus Christ — who would demand of Tipplin’ Pete the question:

Why did God, the all-knowing Father, place the United States’ god-given oil beneath Venezuela’s commie soil?

Trump et al. are the emblems, in shambling human form, of the personality types i.e., one-dimensional, greed-crazed maniacs — human embodiments of the Second Law Of Thermodynamics — who cause the collapse of over-extended, corrupt-to-the-core empires.

Tragically, the remedy for the pathology of End Stage Empire is: the doubling down of said End Stage Empire by the dim and dismal machinations of belligerently obtuse imbeciles.

In this manner, Trump and his klavern of fools and tools have heard and are heeding the call of history.

Further dispatches from the realm of government-squatting fools:

The news has been “disclosed” by National Security State “whistleblower” insiders that “alien technology,” in the form of downed UAP/UFO craft and the remains of “nonhuman biologics” are in the (greed-rancid) hands of Military Industrial Complex (war) profiteers.

Of course, like a hammer that sees the world as an endless series of nails, these militaristic minded characters, straight out of a combination of Dr. Strangelove and Plan 9 From Outer Space, are warning us to watch the skies, and “be afraid, be very afraid!”

If we were not perpetually afraid, NSS and MIC types would be out of a job, wouldn’t they?

Think it through: If aliens possessed the tech they are purported to have, they could have blasted our species of bipedal, grifting ne’er-do-wells and genocidal knuckleheads to cosmic shitdust long ago and in an instant.

Same type of Big Lie storyline being deployed towards Venezuela — i.e., “narcotrafficking” Venezuelan fisherman, for the sake of US national security, must be bombed then survivors of the initial assault are to be “double-tapped” bombed.

Will we next be subject to official narratives reporting that UFO-manning aliens are the actual party delivering fentanyl to the decaying precincts of the collapsing republic?

If super intelligent aliens regard us at all, I suspect, it would be with the annoyance that we regard raccoons prone to upend garbage containers scattering the contents across the yard, albeit we humans, with our ecocidal, genocidal, and war making proclivities cannot be regarded as, in any manner, cute.

Consider this, the beauty and terror of it, at times, must be regard from what the poet Wallace Stevens termed to “central mind” of poetic imagination:

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

We make a dwelling in the evening air,

In which being there together is enough. Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour, Wallace Stevens

As US empire, the global neoliberal order, and the Zionist state are falling apart — so are we.

We have been in service to a dictatorship of money, to a gangster imperium, and we are held and buffeted by the caprice of a soul-defying despotism that will kill what it cannot dominate.

Through it all, we are all storytellers conjuring tales of what isn’t and what has never existed. We are a fiction of possibilities, most of the latter being improbable.

How real is the tangible world that is invisible to us given its hidden-from-us order? Real enough to prove to us that it is us that must be regarded as unreal.

I am an ad hoc contrivance of myself. Only by surrendering to the implausible can I conjure a serviceable face to meet the day and to possess a modicum of plausibility I must allow myself to be transformed by the inchoate counsel of Impossible Angels.

You might not know it but, I suspect, the same goes for you.

Bear the above in mind as the world (we only believe) we know continues to fall apart.

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Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist, and essayist. His poems, short fiction, poetry and essays have been published in numerous print publications and anthologies; his political essays have been widely posted on the progressive/left side of the internet.  Read other articles by Phil, or visit Phil's website.

Tennessee Republican muses about underwater 'entities' that came to Earth a millennium ago

HE READ THE LOVECRAFT MEMO

Sarah K. BurrisMatt Laslo
September 18, 2025 

RAW STORY

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) on UAPs (Photos: Screen captures)

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) told Raw Story that aliens may have come to the Earth 1,000 years ago or more and could have been living in the deep ocean.

Walking on Capitol Hill Wednesday night, Burchett mused, "What if these are entities that are on this Earth that have been on this Earth — who knows how long, and that we, we, think that they're coming in from way out. Maybe they did a millennium ago, but they're here in these deep-water areas and that's why — I mean, like we say, we know more about space than we do what's going on there."

The oceans have gone largely unexplored and unmapped. Google began a project 12 years ago to map the oceans as part of a partnership with The Catlin Seaview Survey. The images can be seen on Google Maps and Google Earth.

"We have a higher propensity of silence around these five or six, I believe, deep-water areas," Burchett continued. "And so, for me it, just, um, creates a question. And then when we have Naval personnel telling me that we have these sightings and that there's these underwater craft they're chasing that are doing hundreds of miles of hour and the best we've got is something that goes a little under 40 miles an hour. So, I got a lot of questions about that stuff."

Last week, Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) showed a video seen on social media in a House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee hearing that showed a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone attempting to intercept an unidentified object off the coast of Yemen in 2024. It failed to do so, VICE reported.

Four witnesses spoke in the Sept. 9 hearing about their experiences with unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).

USA Today noted that congressional leaders allege that the federal government knows more than is being said and is intentionally keeping Congress in the dark on the matter.

UFO hearing: Newly released video appears to show US missile bouncing off object

LUIS MARTINEZ
Tue, September 9, 2025 


A never-before-seen video released Tuesday by a member of Congress appears to show a U.S. military Hellfire missile bouncing off a bright, shiny object that was being tracked off the coast of Yemen on Oct. 30, 2024.

The video was released at a House Government Oversight subcommittee hearing into Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), which is the military's term for UFOs.

During the hearing Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) played a video that he said "I've been given" and that he claimed was taken by an MQ-9 Reaper drone.



The overhead video showed a fast-moving object moving in a straight line above the waves in the waters off the coast of Yemen and captured what Burlison said was a Hellfire missile fired by another Reaper drone that appeared to strike the object.

"I'm not going to explain it to you, you'll see exactly what it does," said Burlison as the video clip was played.

The video showed what appeared to be an impact, but the object seemed to continue on its same trajectory.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images - PHOTO: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) witnesses testify before the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets at the Capitol, Sept. 9, 2025.More

Pentagon's UFO report finds over 700 new cases, with 21 the agency could not explain

"This is when it's zoomed out, you can still see it traveling," said Burlison who did not provide details of how he had obtained the video.

At the time that the video was purportedly taken, the waters off Yemen were an active combat zone as U.S. Navy ships and aircraft protected commercial shipping lanes from missiles and drones fired at shipping vessels by the Houthi militants in Yemen.

U.S. Navy ships were regularly shooting down Houthi missiles and drones that posed a threat to them or commercial vessels.



'It's coming right for us!': Witness tells Congress of UFO sighting
BBC128

The video raises several questions: Did it capture a potential attack on ships? Did the object pose a threat to U.S. Naval ships operating in the combat zone?

"The public should be seeing this stuff, and why you're not allowed to, I don't know," said George Knapp, an investigative journalist, who was a witness at Tuesday's hearing alongside others identified as whistleblowers of military UFO incidents.

Public's UFO obsession has experts, others sorting what's fact, what's fiction

"That's the Hellfire missile smacking into that UFO and just (bouncing) right off," he said, commenting on the video. "And it kept going."

"It kept going," Burlison agreed, "and it looks like the debris was taken with it."

"Yeah. What the hell is that?" Knapp added.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images - PHOTO: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) journalist George Knapp testifies before the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets at the Capitol, Sept. 9, 2025.More

Burlison said he was not going to speculate on what the object was in the video, but asked "Why are we being blocked from this information consistently?"

A U.S. defense official told ABC News "we do not have anything to provide on this" when asked to authenticate the video and the time and location it was allegedly taken.

Asked to comment on the video, a DOD spokesperson said: "I have nothing for you."

The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) continues to investigate UAP reports filed by military personnel, some of them going back decades.

While it has been able to explain some high-profile reports, there are still many cases that have been unexplained and has not found that any of the incidents are of an extraterrestrial origin.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images - PHOTO: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) witnesses are sworn-in before testifying to the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets at the Capitol, Sept. 9, 2025.More

Newly-released DoD video purportedly shows Navy pilot's encounter with UFO

The new video is similar to a 2015 video that came to be known as the "Go Fast" video that showed a fast moving object appearing to fly at a high rate of speed above the waves in the waters off of California.

AARO analysts later determined that the video had captured an optical illusion involving a weather balloon and that the high rate of speed captured by the sensors aboard a Navy F/A-18 fighter jet was due to parallax and the angle from at which the camera viewed the object.

AARO officials have said previously that some of the older incidents remain unexplained because there was not enough data gathered by high-tech military sensors at the time. Newer incidents provide more data, because of the increased sophistication of sensors, that analysts can use to review them.

At the end of the hearing, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) replayed the video and asked the panelists if they were scared by what they saw in the video. All said yes with the exception of Knapp, who replied that he was happy that the video had been released.

  

Is the Pentagon Spending Taxpayer Money on Alien Tech?

Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Congress must hold the DOD accountability for how it uses its funds.

Ellen Brown
Aug 31, 2025

Common Dreams

The US federal debt has now passed $37 trillion and is growing at the rate of $1 trillion every five months. Interest on the debt exceeds $1 trillion annually, second only to Social Security in the federal budget. The military outlay is also close to $1 trillion, consuming nearly half of the discretionary budget.

As a sovereign nation, the United States could avoid debt altogether by simply paying for the budget deficit with Treasury-issued “Greenbacks,” as Abraham Lincoln’s government did. But I have written on that before (see here and here), so this article will focus on that other elephant in the room, the Department of Defense (DOD).

Under the Constitution, the military budget should not be paid at all, because the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Expenditures of public funds without a public accounting violate Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution, which provides:
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

The Pentagon failed its seventh financial audit in 2024, with 63% of its $4.1 trillion in assets—approximately $2.58 trillion—untracked. From 1998 to 2015, it failed to account for $21 trillion in spending.

As concerning today as the financial burden is the wielding of secret power. US President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

President John F. Kennedy echoed that concern, warning in 1961 that “secret societies” and excessive secrecy are “repugnant in a free and open society,” threatening democracy by withholding truth from the public. He warned that excessive concealment, even for national security, undermines democracy by denying citizens the facts needed to hold power accountable. “No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed,” he said. If untracked billions fund classified programs, citizens are left powerless, governed by a shadow entity answerable to no one.

Those concerns persist today. On August 13, 2025, Joe Rogan interviewed US Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who leads a House Oversight Committee focused on government transparency regarding various topics, including UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly UFOs). Luna said the committee had been formed after she and two other congresspeople were denied access at Eglin Air Force Base to information on UAPs provided by whistleblowers. The problem, she said, was that Congress was supposed to represent the public and be an investigative body for it, “and you have unelected people operating basically in secrecy… I think this goes all the way back even to JFK, with how they basically have operated outside of the purview of Congress and basically… have gone rogue…”

The main gate into the Area 51 United States Air Force Nellis Testing Range is shown in Lincoln County, Nevada.
(Photo by David James Henry/ Wikipedia)

A Behemoth Without Oversight

The Department of Defense’s $885.7 billion budget for 2025, approved by the House of Representatives, dwarfs the military spending of China ($296 billion), Russia ($84 billion), and the next eight nations combined. Managing $4.1 trillion in assets—from aircraft carriers to secret drones—along with $4.3 trillion in liabilities (e.g. personnel costs and pensions), the federal government’s largest agency oversees a military empire spanning over 4,790 sites worldwide. Yet it operates with minimal oversight.

The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 mandated audits for all federal agencies, but the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018 delayed the Pentagon’s first department-wide audit to 2018 due to its unwieldy size, its decentralized systems, and its outdated software. The DOD has failed every audit since that time. In 2024, it could not account for its $824 billion FY 2024 budget, with 2,500 new audit issues identified. Of 24 reporting entities, only nine received clean opinions, while 15 received disclaimers due to insufficient data. In fact the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has flagged DOD financial management as high-risk for waste, fraud, and abuse ever since 1995.

A 2016 report in The Nation highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.

As observed in a January 2019 article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi, openly secret budgets were first legalized in 1949 with the passage of the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which exempted that newly created agency from public financial disclosure. The act stated, “The sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations related to the expenditure of Government funds.”

The aim of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 was to curb billions of dollars said to be lost each year through fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement of public budgets. Despite the mandated audits for all federal agencies, the DOD—the only major agency without a clean audit—has received $3.9 trillion in congressionally approved funding since 2018. “Every year that members of Congress vote to boost Pentagon spending with no strings attached,” observed federal budgeting expert Lindsay Kosgharian, “they choose to spend untold billions on weapons and war with no accountability.”

The Audit the Pentagon Act of 2023, backed by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), proposes docking 0.5–1% of budgets for audit failures, but the measure has not received a vote.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched with promises to strip waste, fraud, and abuse from federal agencies, has conspicuously sidestepped the Pentagon. A June 2025 article titled “Why DOGE Was Always Doomed: The Pentagon Problem,” points out that the DOGE mission was seriously hampered by the Pentagon’s exemption from auditing:
In FY 2024, total discretionary spending was about $1.6 trillion. Of that, the Pentagon alone received $842 billion. In other words, it got more funding than all other departments combined. You read that right: one (very special) department received more than all the rest put together.

Funds that are not accounted for divert resources from critical needs like troop readiness, healthcare, and infrastructure. Overbilling by contractors enriches corporations while taxpayers foot the bill. And the lack of transparency erodes public confidence, as Americans struggle with domestic priorities.

The Missing $21 Trillion: Fraud, Waste, or Something Worse?

The Pentagon’s audit failures mask not just inefficiency and waste but pervasive fraud and corruption. Between 1998 and 2015, Inspector General reports show that the DOD could not account for $21 trillion in spending—65% of federal spending during that period. For perspective, the entire US GDP in 2015 was $18.2 trillion. In 2023, the agency failed to document 63% of its $3.8 trillion in assets, up from 61% the prior year. A 2015 DOD report identifying $125 billion in administrative waste was suppressed to protect budget increases.

There is plenty of verified waste to support the case for mismanagement. Military contractors, who receive over half of the Pentagon’s budget, are a major culprit. The F-35 program, managed by Lockheed Martin, was reported in 2021 to be $165 billion over budget, with $220 billion in spare parts poorly tracked. A 2023 CBS News investigation found that contractors routinely overcharged by 40-50%, with some markups reaching 4,451%. A 2016 report in The Nation highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.

It is no longer even necessary to cover up fraud and corruption by wildly inflated prices. In 2017, former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official Catherine Austin Fitts collaborated with Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University, to document the missing $21 trillion in unsupported journal voucher adjustments at the DOD and HUD. In a June 2025 article published in Fitts’ journal The Solari Report titled “Should We Care about Secrecy in Financial Reporting?,” Dr. Skidmore discussed how the government responded to the publication of his research with Fitts. Its response was to immediately eliminate the paper trail leading to its covert financial operations. In particular: “Pentagon officials turned to the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) for advice. Several months later, FASAB posted a new document (FASAB 56), which recommended that the government be allowed to misstate and move funds to conceal expenditures if it is deemed necessary to protect national security interests.”

Fitts remarked, “The White House and Congress just opened a pipeline into the back of the US Treasury, and announced to every private army, mercenary, and thug in the world that we are open for business.”

Speculation Run Rampant

In a widely-viewed interview by Tucker Carlson on April 28, 2025, Fitts expressed her belief that the missing trillions had been funneled into classified projects involving advanced technologies, including massive underground bunkers to protect elites from a “near-extinction event;” and that they were using advanced energy systems and hidden transit networks possibly linked to extraterrestrial tech. She discussed “interdimensional intelligence” and a secret space program linked to a “breakaway civilization.” The latter term was coined by UFO researcher Richard Dolan and is defined by Google as “a theoretical, hidden society that operates outside of mainstream civilization with advanced technology, often linked to UFO phenomena and secret space programs.”

In a Danny Jones interview in May 2025, Fitts alluded to Deep Underground Military Bases (“DUMBs”), perhaps used for “advanced technology or off-world operations.” Existence of these bases was confirmed two decades earlier by whistleblower Philip Schneider, a US government geologist and engineer involved in their construction. In his last presentation in 1995, Schneider said there were 131 of these cities connected underground by mag-lev rail, built at a cost of $17-26 billion each. According to his biographer, Schneider was assassinated in 1996 by a US intelligence agency for disclosing the government cover-up of UFOs and aliens.

Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Are we dealing with a scenario like that in such Hollywood movies as the 1997 film Men in Black, in which hidden forces—human or alien—control our fate?

As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government.

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contends that no verifiable evidence supports extraterrestrial activity. But other prominent figures support the UFO-UAP narrative. In 2017, the New York Times exposed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), said to be a $22 million DOD initiative run by Luis Elizondo investigating UAPs from 2007-2012.

According to BBC News, Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s space security program, claimed in a 2020 interview with the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that the US government has an “agreement” with a “Galactic Federation” of extraterrestrials. He alleged aliens have been in contact with the US and Israel, with secret underground bases where they collaborate on experiments. Eshed claimed the United States was on the verge of disclosing this under President Donald Trump but withheld it to avoid “mass hysteria.” The claims were unverified but provocative.

In recent years, Congress has increased its focus on UAPs, with high-profile hearings in 2022, 2023, and 2024. In 2023, whistleblower David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified that the US possesses “non-human origin” craft and “dead pilots,” based on classified briefings. On November 13, 2024, the House Oversight Committee’s hearing, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” featured testimony from Luis Elizondo, retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, journalist Michael Shellenberger, and former NASA official Michael Gold, who claimed the US possesses UAP technologies and has harmed personnel in secret retrieval programs. Shellenberger alleged that a covert “Immaculate Constellation” program hides UAP data from Congress.

Some lawmakers, including Rep. Luna and Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), continue to criticize Pentagon secrecy and to push for transparency. In May 2024, Burchett introduced the UAP Transparency Act, requiring the declassification of all UAP-related documents within 270 days. He stated:
This bill isn’t all about finding little green men or flying saucers, it’s about forcing the Pentagon and federal agencies to be transparent with the American people. I’m sick of hearing bureaucrats telling me these things don’t exist while we’ve spent millions of taxpayer dollars on studying them for decades.
Secrecy Undermines Democracy

With $21 trillion unaccounted for historically, $165 billion in F-35 overruns, and $125 billion in buried waste, the DOD’s financial mismanagement needs urgent reform. Congress is primarily responsible for overseeing the DOD budget, exercising its constitutional “power of the purse” under Article 1 of the US Constitution. So why isn’t it enforcing this mandate?

The chief excuse given is the need for secrecy for security reasons, but a congressional committee could be given access to the Pentagon’s financial data in closed session in order to exercise public oversight and enforce accountability. Other factors are obviously at play, including political influence, lobbying, campaign contributions from the defense sector, and a lack of penalties for noncompliance.

To restore accountability, Congress needs to enforce the Audit the Pentagon Act, modernize DOD systems, and investigate contractors profiting from lax oversight. UAP transparency is also critical, whether to debunk myths or uncover truths.

As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government. The Pentagon’s secrecy and lack of accountability could be shielding anything from contractor fraud to UAP programs and alien alliances. If there is information so secret that even our elected representatives don’t have access to it, who does have access? Is there a secret government above the government we know? Without fiscal transparency and accountability, we can no longer call ourselves a democracy, as JFK warned.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Ellen Brown
Ellen Brown is an attorney and founder of the Public Banking Institute. She is the author of twelve books, including the best-selling "Web of Debt," and "The Public Bank Solution," which explores successful public banking models historically and globally.
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