Trump's X Files: Close Encounters of the extraterrestrial, political or psychological kind?

On 15 February, Barack Obama, former President of the United States, disclosed in a podcast that aliens are real.

Asked whether aliens were real, he replied:

‘They’re real but I haven’t seen them. 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.’

On 19 February, Donald Trump said Obama should not have released classified information in a podcast:

‘He gave classified information, he’s not supposed to be doing that.’

On 20 February, President Trump announced on Truth Social that he was ordering the release of files about aliens:

‘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.’

Obama has since clarified his comments:

‘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. Really!’

People are rightly wondering whether the ‘little green aliens’ are a red herring — or perhaps a dead cat strategy — to deflect attention from the Epstein files. After all, a vast number of files have not yet been released.

Just as some people are coming to the conclusion that the world is ruled by a sick paedophile elite, they are distracted by a more discomfiting possibility — aliens are real.

Or is Trump attempting to seize the narrative before any Epstein disclosures reveal uncomfortable truths about him?

In recent years, the media periodically offer a reprieve from the usual noise about polar bears dying, coral reefs boiling, lockdowns ‘working’ to save lives, and how women can have penises — all quite remarkably framed as ‘true’ — and instead breathlessly speculate about whether aliens might be real.

Watch, in the coming days, as journalists scoff while simultaneously appearing uneasy at the possibility. There will be a flurry of coverage. But we have been here before.

Did you notice that UFOs have been rebranded as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena ( UAPs )? It is a significant — and arguably unnecessary — shift after decades of the ubiquitous ‘UFO’. There isn’t one new meaning for the acronym, but two, as it stands for both unidentified aerial phenomena or sometimes unidentified anomalous phenomena. In 2021, the ODNI published a report ‘Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ which explains that there are five categories of UAP, including airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, industry developments, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’. It also notes that the limited data leaves most completely unexplained and some demonstrate inexplicable advanced technology and may pose a threat to national security.

Your understanding of ‘it’ — whatever ‘it’ may be — is being disrupted. Assumptions are unsettled, beliefs reshaped.

In August 2020, the Pentagon approved a new Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. Investigations, however, stretch back decades. The US military has studied UFOs since 1947, including the infamous Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 to 1969 and examined thousands of sightings.

The Pentagon has, or at least once had, its own real-life ‘X Files’ unit, investing $22 million into the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Although funding officially ended in 2012, work reportedly continued, according to Luis Elizondo, the intelligence official who led the programme.

Congressional hearings have featured testimony from a former intelligence officer claiming the US government possesses ‘intact and partially intact’ craft, along with ‘non-human’ pilots. The committee was told of a multi-decade programme dedicated to collecting and reverse-engineering crashed vehicles.

The US Navy officially released three videos showing unidentified aerial objects, years after leaked clips circulated online. While confirming the footage was genuine, the Navy maintained it should never have been made public.

For years, journalists treated such matters with open scepticism. Yet official reports and hearings have gradually shifted the tone, lending unexpected credibility to a subject long relegated to the domain of conspiracy theorists.

Tucker Carlson’s debut Twitter video in 2023 declared that ‘UFOs are actually real’, amassing tens of million views within hours. Established outlets from the Spectator to the Guardian pondered whether we had finally discovered aliens. The Wall Street Journal commented ‘Believers come out of the shadows after congressional hearings; “we’re not the people with the tinfoil hats anymore.”’

It is worth remembering that these headlines are not media confections but stem from disclosures by the CIA and the Pentagon. Whether the reports from the literal masters of the psyop are real, exaggerated or something else entirely remains unclear. But it seems fair to say that they do want you guessing.

This is called ‘seeding’. Ideas are being scattered, planted and watered by the intelligence and military themselves.

And in one of the weirdest examples, in September 2022, a flying saucer briefly appeared on a US intelligence agency website. The National Intelligence Manager for Aviation’s logo depicted various aircraft — alongside a UFO. When questioned, the ODNI attributed this to an ‘erroneously posted unofficial logo’. I wrote about this in 2023 on Substack.

The ‘erroneous’ logo.

How does such an error occur? What if the goal was simply to seed the idea?

The men in black have been dangling little green men and flying saucer puppets for decades. It’s impossible to understand what is real and what the intentions are. We’re supposed to be confused. We’re probably supposed to be concerned. Which means that if the curtain is drawn back dramatically, you should retain your open-mindedness and scepticism.

Another explanation is that our obsession with aliens is actually a projection of our fear of the ‘alien’ (other/demon/evil) within us, similar to the stories which have always haunted us from vampires to Godzilla. Even now, some respected writers are speculating that UFOs are a spiritual phenomenon and aliens are demons. (To be clear, just as I don’t know if aliens are real, I don’t know if they are ‘demons’. No one does. This is all speculation.)

In these very dark times, aliens may be projection of our awareness that something very dark is coming, a dangerous shadow, looming closer and closer, threatening to engulf us. (Times are so very dark you may even prefer to be beamed up by the mysterious little green men.)

We always place our monsters outside ourselves. It’s more comfortable that way.

For me, the most intriguing possibility remains that aliens may indeed be real. Perhaps we will be fortunate enough to find out.

The truth is out there, as The X Files famously suggested. Just don’t trust a government to tell you the truth.