At a campaign event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point USA this week, Trump claimed that the government had found "a lot of very interesting files" in the process of reviewing UFO-related materials, and said that the first batch of materials would be released "very, very quickly".
From campaign rallies to White House directives
Let's rewind to February of this year. Trump officially signed an executive order requiring the Pentagon, intelligence communities, and relevant federal agencies to compile and release classified government files related to UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) and UFOs, with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in charge of the execution.
More than two months have passed since the directive was issued. At the rally on April 17th, Trump officially updated the public on the progress for the first time: "We've found a lot of very interesting files," he told supporters at the event. "You can all see for yourselves whether those phenomena really exist."
The audience erupted in cheers, but no one knew whether "very fast" meant days, weeks, or months.
The truth is actually written in the report, but nobody buys it.
Before Trump gave the order, the Pentagon had actually accumulated decades of investigative records regarding UAP sightings. In 2024, the Department of Defense released a comprehensive historical report with a straightforward conclusion: since the end of World War II, the US government had never found evidence of extraterrestrial technology in any related investigations; the vast majority of sightings were ultimately confirmed to be ordinary aircraft or natural phenomena that had been misjudged.
Two years earlier, in 2022, several senior U.S. military officials gave the same answer during congressional hearings: there were no alien visits and no UFO debris, but the public still did not buy it.
After all, the US government's statement, "We've checked, and there's nothing there," remains shrouded in secrecy regarding what they checked, who investigated, and the scope of the investigation. This gap in transparency allows conspiracy theories to thrive.
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