President Trump ordered Secretary of War Pete Hegseth late Thursday night to begin releasing the government's files on extraterrestrials, unidentified aerial phenomena, and UFOs. The directive, announced on Truth Social, covers what may be the most broadly anticipated document dump since the JFK assassination files.
Trump framed the move as a response to public demand:
"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."
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell confirmed the department's cooperation, telling Fox News Digital that "the Department looks forward to working with the interagency to fulfill the President's directive."
The timeline for release and the breadth of materials that could become public remain unclear. But the signal is unmistakable: the executive branch is moving where Congress stalled.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has prodded Trump on this issue since last year. When Trump ordered the declassification of files related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., Schumer's response was immediate and telling: "Now do UFOs."
That Schumer and Trump landed on the same page here is notable, though the route each took tells a familiar story. Schumer spent years trying to move the bureaucracy through legislation. Trump picked up his phone and issued an order.
Schumer's most recent legislative push came in 2023, when he served as Senate majority leader under former President Joe Biden. He and Sen. Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican, introduced legislation modeled after the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The bill would have created a review board at the National Archives and Records Administration to collect documents on UFOs and UAPs, with a presumption of disclosure baked in.
It didn't survive intact. A more watered-down iteration became law, and Schumer blasted the result:
"It means that declassification of UAP records will be largely up to the same entities that have blocked and obfuscated their disclosure for decades."
He wasn't wrong about the problem, even if the legislative approach was never going to solve it. When the agencies tasked with secrecy are also tasked with disclosure, the outcome is predictable.
This directive fits squarely within a broader pattern from the Trump administration: using executive authority to crack open files that the permanent bureaucracy has kept sealed for decades. The JFK files. The RFK files. The MLK files. Now this.
Each release carries the same implicit message: the American public has a right to know what its government has been doing, and the intelligence community's instinct to classify everything in perpetuity deserves less deference than it has received from prior administrations.
The UFO question has a longer bipartisan pedigree than most people realize. The late former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, played a key role in funding the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program in the late 2000s. That program received millions to investigate unexplained phenomena. Schumer picked up the effort after Reid's passing. And even former President Barack Obama once said on a podcast that there was alien life, before walking it back shortly after. The interest has always been there. The willingness to act on it has not.
The contrast between the legislative and executive approaches here is instructive. Schumer spent an entire Congress negotiating, compromising, and ultimately watching his transparency bill get gutted into something that left disclosure power in the hands of the very agencies most incentivized to block it. Years of effort. A watered-down result. The bureaucracy won.
Trump issued a Truth Social post and a directive to his Secretary of War. The Pentagon acknowledged compliance within hours.
This is what executive action looks like when it's pointed at the right target. The national security apparatus has spent decades accumulating classified material with minimal accountability. Congressional oversight has proven insufficient to pry it loose. Whether the subject is aerial phenomena or assassinated presidents, the dynamic is the same: agencies classify, Congress negotiates, and the public waits.
Now the public has a president willing to short-circuit that loop.
The real test will be execution. Ordering a release and actually getting the documents into public hands are two different things, as anyone who followed the JFK files saga can attest. The scope of what qualifies, the pace of review, and the inevitable claims of sources-and-methods exemptions will determine whether this directive produces genuine transparency or another round of heavily redacted disappointments.
But the order is on the table. The Pentagon has acknowledged it. And for the first time, the executive branch isn't asking the agencies to police themselves. It's telling them to open the vault. Whatever is in those files, the American people are about to find out.