The alien files the US government has been sitting on may finally be coming out. President Trump ordered the Pentagon to release its UFO records, former President Obama said aliens are real, and in Japan the running joke is that Junichi Yaoi is warming up backstage. So the X-Files weren't fiction after all?

Trump Orders the UFO Files Released

On February 19, 2026, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he had directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other agencies to begin identifying and releasing government files on aliens and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

His stated reason was the "tremendous interest" in the subject. The material, he added, should cover any and all information connected to these complex matters. The order reached beyond the Pentagon to the FBI, the Energy Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and NASA.

Whether actual classified material would surface, he did not say.

The Catalyst: Obama's "Aliens Are Real" Remark

The trigger was a podcast interview released on February 14. Asked whether aliens exist, Obama answered that they are real, though he had not seen one.

The reaction was loud enough that he clarified on social media the next day: statistically the universe is vast enough that life somewhere is likely, but the distances between solar systems make a visit improbable, and he saw no evidence during his presidency that extraterrestrials had made contact.

Trump's response was that Obama had aired classified information and should not have. Pressed by reporters, he said he did not know whether aliens are real, then added that he might declassify material to get Obama off the hook.

A Short History of America's UFO Investigations

The starting point is Roswell, 1947. From 1952 to 1969 the Air Force ran Project Blue Book, which examined roughly 12,000 sighting reports before closing with the finding that none posed a threat to national security.

The debate reopened in 2017, when former Defense Department officials leaked Navy footage of unidentified objects to the New York Times and others, and the Pentagon confirmed the videos were genuine. Congress held its first UFO hearing in more than fifty years in May 2022, and that July the Pentagon stood up the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

At a House hearing in 2023, former intelligence official David Grusch testified that the government secretly runs programs to recover crashed craft and reverse-engineer non-human technology. A Defense Department report published in March 2024 reached the opposite conclusion: no evidence that UAP are extraterrestrial technology. AARO's caseload reached 1,652 reports, most of them explained by balloons, drones, birds and satellites.

Part of a Broader Disclosure Push

The order sits inside a pattern. In 2025 the administration opened files on the Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, and from December that year the Justice Department began rolling out its Jeffrey Epstein investigative records. Trump had talked about releasing UFO material during the 2024 campaign, so the directive doubles as a promise kept.

Congress split. Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who chairs the UAP task force, welcomed it, and Democratic Senator John Fetterman said it was something both parties could get behind. Republican Representative Thomas Massie, writing in February, dismissed the whole thing as the ultimate weapon of mass distraction.

Japan's UFO Culture and Its Regulars

Japanese social media met the news with variations on "Junichi Yaoi is warming up" and "Junichiro Nirasawa is on standby."

Yaoi, born in 1935, was the Nippon TV director and producer behind the UFO specials that ran from the 1970s into the 1990s and made the subject a national craze. He first took it up seriously on the late-night show 11PM, then built specials for Thursday Special. Area 51, Roswell, Majestic 12: much of the standard repertoire reached Japan through his programs. Even the Japanese habit of reading UFO as "yuufoo" rather than spelling out the letters is traced to a caption on his show.

Nirasawa runs the publisher Tama Shuppan and works as a UFO and paranormal researcher. On Beat Takeshi's year-end paranormal special on TV Asahi, he spent more than thirty years arguing about whether UFOs are real with Yoshihiko Otsuki, born in 1936, a plasma physicist and professor emeritus at Waseda University. Nirasawa would hold up a photograph and make his case; Otsuki would answer that plasma explains it. The exchange itself became a fixture of the Japanese New Year season.

Japanese UFO culture has an entertainment streak. What is often discussed in the United States as government mistrust or conspiracy has in Japan been carried by variety shows and the occult magazine Mu, founded in 1979, as a matter of romance and curiosity. Foreign researchers also take an interest in the utsurobune, a disc-shaped vessel said to have washed ashore in Hitachi Province, today's Ibaraki Prefecture, in 1803.

Update: What the May Release Contained

On May 8, 2026, the Pentagon posted its first tranche of documents and images at war.gov/UFO. The interagency effort carries the acronym PURSUE, for Presidential Unsealings and Reporting System for UAP Encounters.

The material included a 25-second clip filmed in Greece in 2023, 21 seconds of infrared video submitted by US Northern Command in 2024, and a 1972 Apollo 17 photograph showing three points of light in a triangle. The Pentagon labeled the cases unresolved, attached a warning that its descriptions should not be read as analytical judgments or factual determinations, and said the public could make up its own mind. Nothing decisive was in there.

Obama, appearing on television in May, said the Pentagon is not hiding information.

In Japan, the story mostly rekindled an older romance and curiosity about the subject. Yaoi and Nirasawa trending again says something: here, UFOs have been the fun thing rather than the frightening one.

How are UFOs and aliens talked about where you live? Do you think your government is holding something back? Tell us.

References