Holding on to a fragile ceasefire amid an increasingly unpredictable war with Iran, US President Donald Trump has opened another front far removed from the Hormuz Strait and talks in Pakistan. The subject is familiar, though, as he announced over the past three days that his government has uncovered “very interesting documents” on UFOs, with their release coming “very, very soon”.
He also ordered a probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into deaths and disappearances that social media chatter has long interlinked and related to unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and “unexplained phenomena”.
Trump’s announcement on UFOs — a favourite subject of alien-conspiracy theorists — came in Phoenix on Friday, at an event by far-right group Turning Point USA of the late Charlie Kirk.
In fact, the announcement was a reminder that he’d already said UFO files would be released, back in February, when files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were coming out and carried Trump’s name scores of times. Iran has gone on to even say the war itself was Trump’s distraction from the Epstein files.
“As you remember, I recently directed the Secretary of War to begin releasing government files relating to UFOs and unexplained aerial phenomena,” Trump told his far-right supporters at the event.
“This process is well underway, and we found many very interesting documents, I must say, and the first releases will begin very, very soon,” he promised to them.
Week of chaos on two fronts
The Iran war is now nearing the end of its second month, and has produced what analysts are calling the largest oil supply disruption in history.
This has driven oil prices up in the US too.
Iran has repeatedly opened and closed the Strait of Hormuz — the chokepoint carrying roughly a fifth of the world’s oil — as peace talks between Washington and Tehran collapsed in Islamabad last weekend. The next round may be held as soon as Monday, according to Trump.
Iran has, meanwhile, fired on oil tankers attempting to transit the waterway, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warning that “no vessel should make any movement from its anchorage in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman”. Trump responded by threatening to resume bombing. And that’s been the trend the past 10 days or more.
It was against this backdrop that businessman-politician Trump took to the Phoenix stage to discuss flying saucers.
“You’ll figure it out,” he told the crowd about what’s in the UFO files.
‘I too would be talking about UFOs if…’
Analysts see a pattern. “I think if I had had the kind of week that this president had had with Iran, with inflation, with the Pope, I too would be talking about UFOs,” journalist-columnist Dana Milbank said. On the UFO files, he added, “Clearly a distraction!”
Milbank’s reference to the Pope was about Trump’s extraordinary public feud with Pope Leo XIV. The first American head of the worldwide Catholic Church, Pope Leo has condemned the Iran war as a “spiral of violence” and urged citizens to contact their political leaders to demand peace.
This triggered Trump social media broadside calling Leo “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy”. The row deepened when Trump posted, and then deleted, an AI-generated image depicting himself in the likeness of Jesus, even as Pope Leo, on an Africa tour, was denouncing leaders who “ravage the world” by spending billions on war.
Amid this, multiple news outlets underlined the Reuters/Ipsos survey that showed only about 27% of Americans approved of the Iran strikes, while 43% opposed them.
Within Trump’s own party, critics such as Republican Congressman Thomas Massie had earlier called UFO talk “the ultimate weapon of mass distraction”, though his comment was aimed primarily at deflection from the Epstein files.
Scientists remain sceptical about the UFO talk anyway. A former head of the Pentagon’s own UAP investigation office, physicist Sean Kirkpatrick, told CBS News that he views Trump’s UFO order as “a distraction for the administration”.
UAP or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena is the official term that has long replaced UFO, to describe objects in the air, sea, or space that cannot be immediately identified or explained.
“I don’t expect to see anything new,” said Sean Kirkpatrick.
Missing scientists, and the FBI
Trump, undeterred, directed the FBI also this week to investigate a cluster of deaths and disappearances involving roughly 10 individuals linked to NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other sensitive defence facilities.
“I just left a meeting on that subject, so pretty serious stuff. Hopefully, coincidence… but some of them were very important people, and we are going to look at it,” he said.
The most prominent case is that of retired Air Force Major General William Neil McCasland, 68, who vanished from Albuquerque in late February without his phone, watch, or prescription glasses.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration was “actively working with all relevant agencies and the FBI to holistically review all of the cases together and identify any potential commonalities that may exist”.
However, experts told CBS News they see no credible link between the cases. Joseph Rodgers of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said the deaths and disappearances were “scattered across several years at different and only loosely affiliated organisations”.
A former US Department of Energy official was blunter: “People do just die. Strokes, heart disease, suicide, mugging, it happens.”
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