Aliens are real. Or maybe not.
The possibility of mystical beings watching over us or even walking among us is not just the ramblings of the fringe and Reddit users, but a key political and societal debate in the U.S.
President Donald Trump, on Thursday, February 19, 2026, announced that he was directing the Pentagon to review and release all government files related to “alien and extra-terrestrial life,” and Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), earlier known as UFOs or Unidentified Flying Objects.
This was triggered after former President Barack Obama said on a podcast that “aliens are real,” then clarified that he only meant the odds of there being aliens out there is very real — just as the distances between worlds are vast, which could be why they have yet to make contact with earth.
Mr Trump accused Mr Obama of revealing “classified information” and said that he would get him out of trouble by “declassifying” documents.
Old wine, new bottle
Questions about the existence of aliens (not non-citizens and illegal migrants, who are also called “aliens” in the U.S.) are not new. It has been part of the American political debate for decades, with at least two Presidents claiming to have seen UFOs themselves.
Critics have called Mr. Trump’s and his predecessors’ claims as being more political than scientific and have hinted at the possibility of aliens being used as cover-ups for domestic issues.
The history of America’s obsession with “little green men” is almost as interesting as finding extra-terrestrial beings. Let’s take a look.
Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter
President Jimmy Carter is the first and only U.S. president to officially report a UFO sighting. On January 6, 1969, while waiting for a Lions Club meeting in Georgia, he and others allegedly witnessed a bright, self-illuminated object in the sky.
In 1973, he submitted a report to the International UFO Bureau and said that “he would never again ridicule anyone who says they’ve seen unidentified objects.”
During his 1976 campaign to be President, Carter vowed to release every piece of information that the U.S. government had on UFOs, a promise he later broke, citing ‘national security.’
Ronald Reagan also expressed interest in the study of extra-terrestrial life and reportedly saw a strange light accelerating at high speed while flying near Bakersfield.
Famously, during the 1985 Geneva Summit, Mr. Reagan asked Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev if the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would unite to fight an alien invasion. Gorbachev agreed, and this is said to have contributed to nuclear disarmament talks during the Cold War era.
“Flying Saucer” and Kenneth Arnold’s sighting
On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot flying near Mount Rainier, Washington, allegedly spotted nine shimmering objects flying in a diagonal chain. Arnold described the objects as moving “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” Headlines later changed this term into “flying saucer”, setting the tone for UFO sightings and alien studies till date.
Saucers over Washington, D.C.
| Photo Credit:
National Archives and Records Administration
Project Sign
Following the alleged saucer sighting by Arnold, the US government started Project Sign, the first attempt to determine if “flying saucers” were real. In 1948, an official document authored by the project’s staff concluded that the UFOs were likely interplanetary in origin.
But the Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt Vandenberg rejected the report and ordered the burning of the document, citing lack of physical evidence.
Project Grudge
During 1949-1951, the U.S. government undertook a project with only one goal in mind: to debunk and explain away every theory about aliens. The project concluded that all sightings were either a result of misrepresentation of conventional entities like balloons, mass hysteria or hoaxes.
This project’s opinion led to the most famous project to examine extra-terrestrial life.
Project Blue Book
This project, run from 1952 to 1969, was the most rigorous examination of UFO sighting claims yet and was the first time that IBM computers and mathematical modelling were used to examine such data.
First page of the packet given to people claiming to have seen a UFO, from the Status Report: Project Blue Book, Dec. 31, 1952
| Photo Credit:
National Archives and Records Administration
The project appointed a dedicated Blue Book Officer at every U.S. Air Force base who collected data about UFO sightings for the project to examine. The results, though still non-committal, were the first time the country became serious about these sightings.
Influence of movies, music, and literature
Aliens have always fascinated filmmakers, authors and even songwriters. Be it H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds or Katy Perry’s song E.T., extra-terrestrial beings have long been used as allegories to warn citizens of external threats like nuclear bombs, social apathy or even a lack of communal cohesion.
Objects in the sky: Distractions or a real issue?
The U.S. leads the world in reporting UFO sightings. According to the National UFO Reporting Centre, a non-profit organisation, the country has reported over 100,000 such incidents since 1947. This is vastly different from other countries, where such sightings are few and far between. Do aliens only visit America?
Critics have argued that the political heft extra-terrestrial life gets in the U.S. may be just to distract the electorate from ‘real issues.’
Federica Bianco, an astrophysicist at the University of Delaware, told Scientific American that “the timing (of Mr. Trump’s announcement) convinces me that this is but a move to distract the people in the United States from multiple ongoing political and societal crises and the failures of this administration.”
In February 2026, Congressman Thomas Massie criticised President Trump’s order to release ‘alien files’ as a “weapon of mass destruction” to take away attention from the ‘Epstein files.’
But a 2019 Gallup poll found that four in 10 Americans believe that some UFOs that people had spotted were indeed alien spacecraft. Conversely, half believe that all such sightings can be explained by human activity or natural phenomena.
Are we alone, or do we have company?
Just like Mr Obama, many scientists believe that there is a statistical likelihood of extra-terrestrial life existing in the universe. They may not be the anthropomorphised, green beings of the movies, but microorganisms or other similar life.
The other possibility is that humans are totally alone in a universe that is constantly expanding.
Whatever the case may be, aliens and UFOs are back in American polity, and they are here to stay, seemingly as tools of distraction and hopefully also of real, rigorous scientific inquiry.
(With inputs from Reuters)
