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Trump on UFO disclosure: “I’m looking,” but he’s “not high on the list”

Asked on Newsmax whether he will be the president who discloses the truth about UFOs, Trump retold a pilots’ story about a round object faster than an F-22 — and said he’s “not high on the list” on the subject.

October 19, 2026 · 3 min read · By The Phenomenon Files

Asked whether he would be the president to “finally disclose the truth” about UFOs, Donald Trump told Newsmax host Rob Finnerty on October 15: “I’m looking.” In the same breath he added, “I’m not high on the list of the, that particular subject.” The exchange took about two minutes of a wide-ranging interview at the White House, according to the transcript published by Roll Call’s Factbase.

Finnerty had asked several questions at once: whether aliens are real, whether Earth has been visited, whether the United States is reverse-engineering their technology, and whether Trump would be the one to say so. Trump answered none of them directly. “I wasn’t much of a believer,” he said. “I do know we see some pretty strange things.”

The pilots’ story, told again

Instead he described meeting Air Force pilots — “about five or six of them,” he said, and a minute later “I’d say about five” — whom he called “solid people” and not “conspiracy theorists.” In one case, Trump said, a pilot saw “a round object, which is not an ideal shape for going fast, that went faster by four times than an F-22.” He said he asked whether it could have been a comet, and the pilot replied, “It wasn’t, sir.”

Trump did not name the pilots, say when or where the sighting happened, or say when the meetings took place. The account is secondhand — the President’s retelling of what pilots told him — and it is not new. In June 2024 he told Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast about aircraft “round in form, going like four times faster than my super jet fighter plane,” according to Newsweek. That September he told Fox News’s Gutfeld! that “three or four pilots” had been in the Oval Office, one of whom described “a round object that was going four times faster than my F-22,” The Debrief reported. The number of pilots has varied from telling to telling.

“We are releasing everything”

Trump also said: “We are releasing documents. We are releasing everything.” In February he announced on Truth Social that he would direct Pete Hegseth and other agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life,” UAP and UFOs. Since May 8 the Pentagon has published six batches, about 450 files in all, at war.gov/UFO under its PURSUE program, from Cold War reports to recent military videos. Every file is on this site, with the government’s description and an archived copy.

Many of the released files are partly redacted. Michael Shermer, a skeptic who sits on the UAP Science Advisory Council, a group of outside scientists that advises the government on UAP, wrote in The Boston Globe this month that the videos the council is studying are “filled with redactions,” which he said presumably hide information “that would allow us to calculate distance, speed, location, and size” of the objects. So far, in his opinion, the council has “found no verifiable evidence of contact with or discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence.”

What the record shows

Nothing in the interview pointed to new evidence, and Trump did not say a disclosure announcement was planned. The Pentagon’s UFO office, AARO, said in its FY2025 annual report, published in July, that the 370 cases it resolved all had ordinary causes, and that it had found no evidence of recovered UAP material. It moved 191 of the year’s new reports to an “active archive” because they lacked enough data to assess; they stay open to future resolution.

Trump gave no date, place or sensor data for the encounter he described, so it can’t be checked against the released files. Until the pilots or the Air Force put the details on the record, it remains an anecdote — one the President has now told at least three times.