President Donald Trump's February order directing the Pentagon to release government files on UFOs and extraterrestrial life is moving from promise to practice, and a veteran civilian investigator says the material could shed light on some of the most persistent unexplained aerial incidents of the past half-century.
Joshua Golembeske, a field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), one of the world's oldest civilian UFO research organizations, told the Daily Mail that the disclosure effort is without precedent. He laid out a four-stage framework for how the information might reach the public and identified specific cases, from the 1997 Phoenix Lights to the 2004 "Tic-Tac" encounter off San Diego, that he believes the files could finally address.
The order covers records on "alien and extraterrestrial life," UFOs, and "any and all other information connected" to those subjects. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was tasked with leading the effort to produce the files.
Trump himself has kept the pressure on. At a Turning Point USA rally in Phoenix, he told the crowd that officials had found "many very interesting documents" and that the first public releases would begin "very, very soon." Fox News reported that Trump said he had recently spoken with Hegseth about releasing the study's findings.
Trump has been characteristically direct about his own uncertainty. Aboard Air Force One, he told reporters plainly: "I don't know if they're real or not." That candor, AP News reported, came alongside his accusation that Barack Obama had disclosed classified information when Obama recently suggested on a podcast that aliens were real. Trump quipped, "I may get him out of trouble by declassifying."
Less than a month after the February order, on March 18, the White House registered the domain "aliens.gov." Weeks later the site showed a sign of activity, though it now returns an SSL error, leaving its purpose unclear.
The administration's broader posture on government secrecy has extended well beyond UFOs. Trump has also pushed to release government UFO files through Hegseth, part of a pattern that includes declassification fights over intelligence and law-enforcement records across multiple agencies.
Golembeske outlined a four-stage path to full disclosure. The first stage, he said, is acknowledgment.
"First comes acknowledgment that we are not alone... and then it gets weird."
He argued that the evidence already in the public record is overwhelming. Too many military and public officials have come forward, he said. Too many large-scale studies, too many consistent sightings over decades, too many multi-radar, multi-witness events.
Golembeske went further, claiming that a group of lawmakers now backs Trump in demanding answers and openly challenging what UFO researchers call the "legacy program." He described that program as a decades-long effort encompassing three areas: crash retrieval of unknown technology, reverse engineering through private aerospace contractors, and a coordinated disinformation layer designed to keep the public in the dark.
Vice President JD Vance has added his own voice to the push, going so far as to vow to crack open classified files before leaving office, underscoring how seriously senior administration figures are treating the issue.
Florida Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, Golembeske noted, has said she had seen evidence of "interdimensional beings", a claim that, whatever its merits, signals how far the conversation has moved from the margins of conspiracy theory into the halls of Congress.
Golembeske pointed to several well-known incidents that he believes government files could illuminate. The list reads like a catalog of America's most stubborn aerial mysteries.
On November 14, 2004, Top Gun fighter pilot David Fravor was flying a training exercise off the coast of San Diego when he was rerouted to investigate a strange object. He described a roughly 40-foot white object that mirrored his movements and then accelerated to thousands of miles per hour, reaching a rendezvous point 60 miles away almost instantly. In 2023, Fravor told Congress about the encounter. The incident, tracked by warships protecting the USS Nimitz, remains one of the most credible military UAP reports on record.
Then there is Roswell. In 1947, the U.S. Army initially reported recovering a "flying disc" in New Mexico before quickly retracting the statement, calling the debris nothing but a weather balloon. That reversal has fueled suspicion for nearly eight decades.
The administration's willingness to open classified vaults has drawn comparisons to other recent file-release controversies, including Kash Patel's push to release FBI files on Eric Swalwell's ties to a suspected Chinese spy. In each case, the same question applies: what was the government hiding, and who benefited from the secrecy?
On March 13, 1997, thousands of people across Phoenix and surrounding areas reported seeing a massive V-shaped formation of lights. Military officials later said some of the lights were flares dropped during training exercises, an explanation that satisfied almost nobody who saw them.
Between 1982 and 1986, hundreds of reports emerged from New York's Hudson Valley describing large, slow-moving triangular objects. Investigators later suggested some sightings may have been caused by groups of private pilots flying in formation. Golembeske singled out both the Phoenix Lights and the Hudson Valley wave as cases he would most like to see addressed.
"Personally, I'd be most interested in deeper insight into major UFO waves over the past 50 years, events like the Phoenix Lights and the Hudson Valley sightings, which involved large numbers of witnesses and still lack clear explanations."
The 1978 Fort Dix encounter in New Jersey, where soldiers reportedly saw a glowing unidentified object during a nighttime training exercise, also made Golembeske's list, though that case notably lacks widely released official military records.
Not everyone expects the files to contain proof of alien visitors. The Pentagon created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office in 2022 to collect military UFO reports, and a June 2024 unclassified report found no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology. Congress passed the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act in 2023, expanding the legal framework for transparency, but the institutional default has remained caution.
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb offered a measured take. He told Newsmax that discussions with lawmakers and his own research suggest there are objects the Pentagon and intelligence agencies simply cannot explain. "It definitely looks like there are objects that either the intelligence agencies or the Pentagon cannot figure out," Loeb said. But he insisted the question must be settled by data, not speculation: "It's all about the data. It's not a matter of belief or conviction or opinion."
That is a reasonable standard, and one the federal government has failed to meet for decades. The pattern is familiar: an incident occurs, witnesses come forward, the military offers a thin explanation or none at all, and the files stay locked. The cycle has repeated from Roswell to the Tic-Tac encounter to the New Jersey drone sightings that rattled residents in recent years.
Golembeske himself is not naive about what the public may receive. He suggested the government's track record of retractions and vague denials should temper expectations. But he also argued the sheer volume of credible testimony, from military pilots, radar operators, and elected officials, makes continued silence untenable.
"We're already in disclosure, and something significant has already been found. The evidence is overwhelming that we are being visited, and the government knows it."
That is a strong claim, and it remains unverified by any official government finding released to date. But the question Golembeske poses is the right one, and it applies far beyond UFOs: what, if anything, is being withheld from the public, and why?
The broader push for government transparency under this administration, from intelligence files to long-sealed federal records, reflects a simple principle that should not be controversial. When the government collects information with taxpayer money, the default should be openness, not secrecy. National security exceptions exist for good reason. But "national security" has too often served as a rubber stamp to avoid embarrassment rather than protect the country.
Just The News reported that federal agencies are currently reviewing the documents, though no specific release date has been set. Trump said the first batch is coming. The public will judge the contents for themselves.
Whether the files contain evidence of alien craft, classified military technology, or simply decades of bureaucratic embarrassment, Americans deserve to see them. A government that cannot explain what is in its own skies, or will not, has no business asking the public to trust it on anything else.
