Trump could help these 'obsessed' believers — and they don't understand why he won't

President Donald Trump has a number of supporters who believe in various conspiracy theories, and he has thrown sops to many of them throughout his administration — but there is one group that feels overlooked.

“After a largely alien-free first 12 months, the president has committed himself to UFO disclosure in 2026,” wrote The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt on Sunday. “In February, Trump directed various departments to release ‘government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life’, and the White House took the unusual step of registering domain ‘aliens.gov’ in March, setting pulses racing among believers online.”

Gabbatt added, “UFO watchers have been further buoyed because the president is surrounded by extraterrestrial believers in his professional and personal life.”

Yet this excitement occurs only after more than a year of Trump ignoring issues related to UFOs, and Jordan Flowers — the executive director of the Disclosure Foundation — said they would be “cautiously optimistic that there can be incremental information released that would help us understand what is happening here.” For example, Flowers called for the government to agree to a request made by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fl.) to release 46 Pentagon videos showing UFOs.

“The Disclosure Foundation is hosting an event on UAPs with Mike Rounds, the Republican senator from South Dakota, in Washington in June, which Flowers said could prompt ‘a dramatic sea change in being able to discuss this topic credibly on Capitol Hill,’” Abbott reported.

In her letter to the Defense Department demanding the videos be released, Luna predicted that there would be “a lot of cool stuff” once the government got around to releasing it. Yet as an anonymous Defense Department official told The Guardian, “the Department of War’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is working in close coordination with the White House and across federal agencies to consolidate existing UAP records collections and facilitate the expeditious release of never-before-seen UAP information.”

AARO currently carries a caseload of more than 2,000 reports of UFO sightings dating back to 1945, the end of World War II and beginning of the Cold War. All of the reports were submitted by military personnel, pilots and/or government employees. In addition to AARO in the United States, there are UFO investigation programs run by the governments of Brazil, Canada, France and Japan.

There are even high-ranking lawmakers on the Democratic side calling for Trump to be transparent about UFOs. Last year Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer challenged President Donald Trump to release information about UFOs, tweeting “now do UFOs” in terms of Trump declassifying important top secret documents.

“Keep in mind that declassification doesn’t necessarily come with explanations,” Haley Morris, co-founder of the military pilot-led nonprofit Americans for Safe Aerospace, the world's largest UAP advocacy organization, told this journalist for Salon Magazine in 2025. Morris added that the “best case is that with transparency, people can see the UAP mystery for themselves and hard data is made available for the scientific community to try and get some answers.”