U.S. President Donald Trump checks his hair before sitting down for a podcast interview at the Varsity restaurant, in Rome, Georgia, U.S., February 19, 2026. REUTERS Kevin Lamarque
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has been releasing many classified documents related to years of government study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and one political theorist thinks something else is afoot.
Writing for The Bulwark on Wednesday, Yaniv Regev explained that Trump's UFO obsession is less about transparency, national security, a casual interest in science fiction films and his populist supporters advocating for the tearing down of institutions. It's about politics. Not the politics of distraction, as Alex Jones claimed, but the politics of manipulation.
The "release the documents" argument, he said, makes sense intuitively. After all, the government hides too much, transparency is good, and a more "informed citizenry is an empowered one." It certainly would play well in polling, but Regev thinks it's being weaponized.
Regev compared Trump to his international counterparts like Jair Bolsonaro and Viktor Orban, each of whom "built a political career railing against hidden elites and demanding the state be exposed to the light — and each, once in power, governed with conspicuous contempt for the accountability he'd once claimed to champion."
Leaders like Trump are trying to build "distrust" while "casting themselves as truthtellers willing to rip back the curtain, populists reify this distrust, transforming it into a political force they can control," wrote Regev. "If there’s a curtain to be torn, as the populists howl, we must conclude there is something big hiding behind it."
So, the files have been released, leaving more questions than answers. Regev described them as the Department of Defense making clear that they have investigated many of the reports and their experts can't crack it.
The Trump administration seems to think, why not let the masses have a crack at it? "Here’s some footage we cannot explain. You figure it out," he said.
But in the case of the UFO files, there's no real way of understanding the data that was released. It's simply a cache of videos and field reports. There are no conclusions or even revelations about what the government learned or discovered.
Like the Jeffrey Epstein investigation the files consist of large batches of raw data with large blocks of black text. The transparency law passed by Congress said that the only redactions were to be the survivors. It bred further mistrust and conspiracy theories that the Justice Department and the political "elite" were continuing to hide things from the public. Regev characterized it a kind of "transparency-to-conspiracy pipeline."
He closed by saying that "transparency maximalism" is like having the sunlight so bright it doesn't just disinfect, but it's so blinding that it leaves people unable to see clearly.