When President Trump posted on his Truth Social website Thursday evening that he was directing the government to release records tied to aliens and UFOs, understandably, the reaction was immediate excitement, speculation, and a fresh wave of “disclosure” chatter across social media.
However, buried in the adrenaline rush of the government revealing its UFO secrets is a quieter—and far more consequential—detail. President Trump’s statement, as written, does not clearly order the declassification of any such records (if they exist).
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So, is Trump really set to release all existing alien and UFO files? Not so fast.
A Review and Release Effort?
“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 information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important matters. GOD BLESS AMERICA!” President Trump wrote.
The President’s statement reads more like a directive to begin a review-and-release effort—an important distinction in a national security system where “release” is often conditional, redacted, delayed, or quietly denied.
Similarly, Trump’s phrasing—to begin the process”—matters. It implies bureaucracy and coordination. It does not explicitly say, “These records are now declassified.”
President Trump’s post, then, may be less a sudden opening of the vault than a signal that the government is being told to look for material it can safely put out—on a timeline and through a process controlled by the same agencies that have long treated UAP information as sensitive.
The gap between the headline-grabbing word “release” and the legal action behind “declassify” is the pivot point in the story, because without an explicit declassification order, any disclosure is likely to arrive slowly, selectively, and heavily shaped by national security concerns.
And the timing only heightens the confusion, given that Trump’s directive follows a recent surge of presidential alien talk—first from former President Barack Obama, then from Trump himself.
Obama’s viral “aliens are real” moment—and Trump’s Air Force One reaction
Former President Obama recently went viral after telling podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen, “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them.” The remark, delivered in a speed-round tone, ricocheted online—especially among audiences primed by years of congressional UAP hearings, leaked military videos, and renewed public debate about what the government may be sitting on.
Days later, Obama walked back the remark, clarifying on Instagram, “I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us.”
The viral moment was also amplified by fresh intrigue within Trump’s orbit. On the New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump suggested she believes the president has a prepared address he’s saving for later, saying: “There is some speech that he has, that I guess at the right time, I don’t know when the right time is, he’s going to break out and talk about and it has to do with maybe some sort of extraterrestrial life.”
Pressed on Wednesday about Lara Trump’s claim, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said she was unaware of any such plans, calling the idea “very exciting” and of “great interest,” but adding that a speech on aliens was “news to me.”
Yet, rather than brushing off the new wave of alien talk, President Trump appeared to pour fuel on it. During a Q&A with reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday, framing Obama’s original quip as if it were an accidental national security leak.
“He gave classified information, he’s not supposed to be doing that,” Trump told Fox News’s Peter Doocy, before adding that he might “get him out of trouble by declassifying.”
The entire sequence was tailor-made for the modern UFO information ecosystem. A viral soundbite and walk-back by a former President, whispers of a coming “alien speech,” and a sitting President hinting at secrecy.
Then, later Thursday, Trump took things even a step further by posting on Truth Social that he was directing the government to begin identifying and releasing UFO- and extraterrestrial-related files. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth then amplified the message on X, sharing a screenshot of Trump’s post alongside an alien emoji and a saluting emoji.
Yet even amid this seemingly unprecedented presidential order, the language in Trump’s public directive still falls short of the one step that would instantly change the legal status of any hidden alien or UFO archive: an explicit order declassifying the records.
Here’s the paradox: Trump could declassify UFO files almost instantly
In the United States, the modern classification system is built on presidential executive orders, which means a sitting president has ultimate authority to classify or declassify anything they want at any time.
While the Supreme Court has not squarely ruled on how far Congress can constrain the executive branch’s control over secrecy, it has emphasized just how expansive presidential authority can be—describing the president’s power to “classify and control access” to national security information as rooted in the Constitution and existing “quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.”
At times, the executive branch has reinforced that view in candid terms, telling Congress that the President holds “plenary authority”—essentially absolute, exclusive control—over classified information, with one major exception: certain nuclear-related secrets governed by separate law.
The nuclear secrets exception is real and often misunderstood. However, simply put, under the Atomic Energy Act, some nuclear information is treated as “Restricted Data,” which follows its own declassification process and isn’t handled like ordinary national security classification.
More on How the U.S. Maintains Secrecy: It’s Classified! A Deep Dive Into the Dark World of Keeping Secrets
However, for the UAP issue, President Trump is invoking records held by the United States Department of Defense, the intelligence community, or other executive-branch agencies. In this case, the presidential authority is sweeping.
In fact, legal discussions of presidential declassification authority repeatedly return to a blunt conclusion. If a President communicates that information is declassified, that decision is immediate and decisive.
So if President Trump wanted to remove classification as a barrier, he could unilaterally do it in plain language—explicitly. He could say, in effect: “Any government records about alien craft retrievals, reverse engineering, UAP sensor data, and related programs are hereby declassified to the maximum extent permitted by law.”
Such a statement would be an unmistakable trigger—even if it came via social media rather than a formal memo. At that point, any government records related to aliens, UFOs, or UAP would, in principle, become eligible for public release under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), subject to the law’s other exemptions.
However, that’s not what he did.
Instead, Trump framed his move as a directive to “begin the process” of identifying and releasing files—language that implicitly preserves the normal machinery: interagency review, classification appeals, exemptions, and the slow grind of national security redaction.
Release is not disclosure—especially for the “good stuff”
Even in the most generous reading of Trump’s post, there’s another hard reality. The “best” evidence—if it exists—would likely be entangled with the most sensitive systems the U.S. government has.
Modern UAP cases that generate serious interest often involve detection across multiple sensors: radar, infrared, electro-optical systems, electronic surveillance, satellite collection, and classified fusion platforms that integrate inputs into a coherent track. That kind of evidence is not just a blurry video. It can expose how the United States sees the world.
Releasing it would risk revealing sources and methods—the signature obsession of every intelligence service and every serious national security bureaucracy. If a still frame from a video, a radar plot, or a telemetry readout can tell a foreign adversary what a particular platform can detect, at what range, with what precision, and under what conditions, then “UFO disclosure” becomes, very quickly, a debate about whether the U.S. should volunteer a capability briefing to rivals.
That resistance would not come from one corner of the Pentagon. It would come from everywhere. Program offices, intelligence components, operational commands, and partners who share classified systems and will not want their capabilities exposed through a UFO release.
This is the unique problem of the UFO issue. The more compelling the evidence, the more likely it is to be inseparable from the crown jewels of collection.
And if it’s historical evidence, the questions get even harder
What about non-modern material—older reports, legacy files, records that aren’t inherently tied to today’s exquisite sensors?
Those come with a different problem. If the government has maintained a genuinely extraordinary historical record—anything that credibly suggests nonhuman technology, unusual materials, or a long-running legacy program—then release would demand more than just documents.
It would demand an explanation.
Why was it secret? Who authorized the secrecy? Under what classification rationale did it persist across administrations? What oversight existed? How did it stay contained in a system that—at least on paper—requires periodic review and justification?
For any administration, that would be politically nuclear terrain. The story wouldn’t just be “aliens.” It would be about the architecture of secrecy—and what it says about public trust in government.
The modern UFO bureaucracy is built for managed transparency
As The Debrief has reported in past coverage of UAP policy and Pentagon efforts, the post-2017 era created a more formal pipeline for handling UAP reports and public pressure. Including the creation of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Yet official reviews have repeatedly stated they have not found verified evidence of extraterrestrial technology, and many publicly released cases resolve into mundane explanations once data improves.
That context matters because it shows what “release” usually means in practice: incremental disclosures, carefully scrubbed summaries, selective video declassification, and reports designed to reduce speculation without exposing capabilities. President Trump’s language— “begin the process” —fits that pattern more than it breaks it.
And it’s worth noting that even beyond the Pentagon, there are already repositories of UFO-related materials managed for public access, including collections at the National Archives and Records Administration. The existence of a UFO record trail is not itself proof of alien visitation. However, it is proof of decades of public interest and government recordkeeping.
So what would “real” declassification look like?
If Trump truly intended to force the issue, the clearest indicator would be explicit declassification language—ideally paired with a written presidential directive that instructs agencies on how to handle rapid release while protecting narrow categories legally protected (including nuclear Restricted Data) and legitimately sensitive sources and methods.
Absent that, President Trump’s Truth Social post functions more like a promise to try—and, crucially, a promise that can be fulfilled with a modest document dump that changes little. A tranche of previously-released files, heavily redacted documents, or material that satisfies curiosity without exposing anything the national security state considers genuinely costly.
That doesn’t mean nothing will come out. It means the public should not confuse “ordering a release” with “declaring the secrets unclassified.” President Trump has the authority to do the latter in dramatic fashion. However, so far, he hasn’t.
Until he does, the alien-file frenzy is still mostly operating in the gravity of the same old forces: classification, capability protection, institutional risk aversion, and the political peril of explaining why extraordinary information—if it exists—was kept quiet for so long.
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com