President Donald Trump in February directed the U.S. government to “begin the process of identifying and releasing” files on extraterrestrial life, the BBC reports.
That declaration came shortly after former President Barack Obama told a podcast host that aliens “are real” but noted he hasn’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 said.
Trump was reportedly angered by the disclosure, telling reporters that Obama “made a big mistake” with his claim.
”He’s not supposed to be doing that,” Trump said of Obama’s statement.
The administration began declassifying the UFO files in May. In June, Trump tapped controversial Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb to lead a team studying the national security risks posed by UFOs. According to a new report by Politico, in the months since, little movement has been seen among the group “tasked with reviewing and testing existing government-collected data to determine whether aliens or their technology are on Earth.”
Loeb was hopeful that a July directive by deputy director of national intelligence Aaron Lukas would get “the ball rolling” on intelligence sharing between agencies, military branches and the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Science Advisory Council. “But he had received no new data then or since,” Politico reports.
“It’s just amazing to think that months into this, we’ve gotten nothing,” one team member who attended the July meeting with Lukas told Politico. Still, the member “[believes] that’s about to change.”
According to the report, there’s a persistent doubt underscoring “Loeb’s mission … about whether the government will actually release the data it has been holding on to.”
“It’s been months already with little to show,” Politico reports. “Will Trump force reluctant intelligence agencies to relinquish what nearly everybody across academia involved in the scientific inquiry into extraterrestrial life believes is meaningful raw data? Will that material be made public? How will any revelations be communicated to the public?”
“There is the possibility that they are baffled by the data,” Loeb told Politico, “Or, it could be they are using me.”
Poltiico described UFOs as “the kind of deep state-countering, coastal-elite-upsetting, conspiracy-adjacent rabble-rousing that the second Trump administration has a record of responding to.”
One UAP expert argued Trump “knows more about it than people thinks he does,”
“[The expert] noted that Trump himself seems to believe the government has evidence of non-human technology and wants the truth to come out,” Politico reports.
“It’s enough to leave him disturbed about what to do,” the expert said.
According to the report, some “members of the council worry they may be risking their reputations by participating.” Some also say the CIA is stymieing efforts for public disclosures.
Devesh Nandal, a Harvard post-doc council member who spoke with Politico, called the CIA a “nemesis.”
UAP council member Peter Skafish likewise told Politico “My government sources always point back to CIA.”
“These claims about the CIA are completely false,” a White House spokesperson told Politico. “All relevant agencies have worked cooperatively with [Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters] PURSUE in order to identify records that are responsive to the President’s initiative and of interest to the American public.”
There are also concerns that “Trump might announce that the deep state is aware of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence on earth, noting there are ‘UFO people’ who want this kind of disclosure to come before the midterms,” Politico reports, pointing to a recent column in the New York Times.
According to the report, Loeb scoffed at the suggestion his council could be used a tool for the president’s midterm chances.
“If there is clear evidence beyond a reasonable doubt for alien tech, this will constitute the biggest scientific discovery ever made and the most important milestone in human history,” he said. “The relevance to the midterm elections is secondary.”
‘They’re using me’: UFO hunters ‘have gotten nothing’ despite Trump order
