Month: February 2026

Regarding President Trump’s Order to Release the UFO/Alien Files: Let the Redactions Begin!

President Trump ordering the release of all UFO/space-alien records and documents at the Pentagon and various other federal agencies is the biggest crock I’ve heard in years.

First of all, the only people who will benefit from such a fiasco are the manufacturers of black ink, which will flow in copious volumes to support the multifarious redactions this will entail.

The notion that any one president could snap his or her fingers and demand transparency on this issue is laughable.

If you fall for this, you’re beyond gullible. When it comes to the entire subject of UFOs, the executive branch is not in control of public disclosure. Only the Pentagon can dictate such disclosure.

Since most, if not ALL, of the unsolved UFO cases on the books are rooted in top-secret U.S. military technologies, NOT extraterrestrials, these documents will NEVER be released to the public. They simply cannot be released to the public because doing so would constitute a breach of national security on a scale never before realized.

If people want to believe the UFO phenomenon is based on E.T. visitations, bless their hearts.

At any rate, I refer you to an excellent column by New York Times writer Ross Douthat, published today (Feb. 21, 2026)

Here is just a brief portion, bolded, in quotation marks and in brackets, and a link to his interesting piece. I encourage all to read his appraisal of the situation: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/opinion/obama-trump-aliens.html:

[“… Second, why has the national security state produced a steady supply of would-be whistle-blowers who claim to have encountered some sort of hidden “legacy program” dedicated to contact with nonhuman intelligence? Are these figures liars? Are they self-deceived, perhaps through some kind of misunderstanding of normal classified programs? Is this all just circulation of rumors associated with the former Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and his creation of a clandestine U.F.O.-studying group inside the Pentagon? Is it possible that some permanent government disinformation apparatus exists to encourage false U.F.O.-related beliefs in government officials? And if so, is it part of a continuing effort to deceive the public as well? … If it can’t or won’t resolve any of them, though, it will only strengthen my sense that parts of our government, for some unknown reason, are very happy to encourage Americans to wander in a strange and haunted fog.”]

Thank you Mr. Douthat, and if I may, let me be so presumptuous as to opine on what I believe the “unknown reason” is for keeping Americans in this disinformation-induced fog.

It is almost certainly because the Pentagon has developed advanced propulsion technologies far and away more capable than conventional systems, a secret so immense, a quantum leap so monumental, that it requires ANY means of subterfuge necessary to keep the public, and Congress, in the dark.

I am talking about, at the very least, some form of electromagnetic field propulsion system, the kind first witnessed by Kenneth Arnold in his seminal 1947 encounter in Washington state. The kind of propulsion advance that wowed then-President Harry Truman in a demonstration he himself likely ordered over Washington, D.C., in 1952. The kind that baffled and befuddled onlookers of giant delta-shaped UFOs over the Hudson Valley and Belgium in the 1980s and 1990s and over rural Illinois in the year 2000. The kind that shut down nuclear missile control systems when UFOs were inexplicably seen hovering over silos in the 1960s. The kind that was behind the confounding encounter of a disc-shaped craft seen floating over Chicago O’Hare International Airport in 2006, etc., etc., etc.

I propose that ALL of these instances represent tests of this kind of technology. A technology that isn’t new, but rather has been in development and refinement for many decades, hidden under the veil of the Pentagon’s burgeoning black budget. A technology that cannot be rolled out on the tarmac for the public to see because then, soon afterward, everyone would have it. Soon afterward, our adversaries would have it, and then we would longer enjoy a monopoly of this technology.

Anyway, let’s call this viewpoint the “terrestrial hypothesis” for UFOs, as opposed to the extraterrestrial hypothesis (i.e., the UFOs are space aliens), which has dominated the whole national conversation about this phenomenon since the beginning.

Well, then, the terrestrial hypothesis would suggest that the whole bizarre inventory of encounters involving U.S. military personnel and civilians alike have always been top-secret Pentagon technologies known only to a small circle with a “need to know.”

So, why the disinformation? Because as soon as you entangle the entire subject of UFOs within the rhetorical quagmire of space aliens you relegate the whole story to the fringe. The public and the media don’t take it seriously. The only people who do take it seriously are those who are already convinced that it’s E.T. or are just cynically profiting from the space-alien hype.

Over the decades, we’ve seen a series of books and articles by former military personnel who claim to have encountered extraterrestrials. It’s a legacy that in my opinion goes back many years and includes The Day After Roswell, published in 1997. (If you are interested, please read my review of The Day After Roswell, which I regard as a masterpiece of disinformation, here, https://emilvenere.com/files/138490884.pdf)

The goal of this disinformation is not necessarily to convince people that the UFOs are extraterrestrial, but to muddy the whole subject, to distract people who might otherwise suspect that the Pentagon has achieved amazing propulsion breakthroughs that would be highly disruptive if they became known to the public. Breakthroughs that have nothing to do with extraterrestrials, but that were dreamed up and perfected by the same species that has brought us a host of other powerful innovations, from nuclear weapons to lasers, microchips to advanced medical imaging and so on and so forth.

No assist from space aliens needed!

As to why the Pentagon would sometimes be flying these weapons over populated areas, perhaps it’s real-world training, a “living lab” to hone tactics and to study how well they perform against state-of-the-art, white-world technologies like F-16s. There have been examples of military training exercises taking place over populated areas. This excellent article in The War Zone documents one such exercise over Los Angeles: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/38753/those-mysterious-gray-helicopters-were-landing-on-multiple-downtown-la-rooftops-last-night

Anyway, this terrestrial hypothesis for UFOs leads to many follow-up questions and concerns, chief among them: Is there a shadow space program that runs parallel to NASA and the Space Force that is far more capable than either of those entities? If so, how far have we gone? Do we have military bases in deep space?  Are any of these top-secret platforms nuclear-powered? Have we gone interstellar?

Obama’s Aliens-are-Real Episode Illustrates a Sad Truth: Presidents Don’t Have a ‘Need to Know’ About UFOs, and These Objects Likely Aren’t E.T.

All the online excitement over former President Barack Obama’s whimsical remark that aliens are real, only to witness him walking it back in a clarification the next day, only serves to illustrate that presidents don’t know anything when it comes to UFOs. Presidents, at least those in the modern era, aren’t told what’s going on, and they are just as much in the dark about the phenomenon as is the general public.

Taking this line of reasoning a step further, the whole Obama episode might serve to support the hypothesis that the UFOs have nothing to do with space aliens but have always been entirely a product of human ingenuity.

Anyway, here is one retelling of Obama’s statements, as reported in The Guardian newspaper, excerpted in bold print and enclosed in brackets, and a link to the article, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/16/barack-obama-no-evidence-aliens-real-interview-podcast:

[In a conversation with the American podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen over the weekend, Obama appeared to confirm the apparent existence of aliens during a speed round of questioning where the host asks guests quick questions and the guests respond with brief answers.

After he was asked “Are aliens real?”, Obama said: “They’re real but I haven’t seen them.”

He went on: “They’re not being kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

… However, following the media frenzy, Obama released a statement on Instagram on Sunday evening.

“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he said. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”]

Let’s all get one thing straight: UFOs are very real, but they’re not necessarily synonymous with extraterrestrials. There have been too many examples of credible witnesses observing them, often at close range.

To support this fact, I will note just a few high-profile encounters from UFO lore.

In the 1960s UFOs were observed hovering over U.S. nuclear missile launch facilities. During these encounters, the launch-control systems were shut down, and there has been much speculation over the years that space aliens were involved. However, the Wall Street Journal in 2025 revealed that these encounters actually stemmed from a Defense Department operation. The Journal revealed that the Pentagon ran these top-secret electromagnetic tests over U.S. nuclear missile systems to learn whether the nuclear bunkers would still function if they received a direct hit from Soviet nukes. This fact, however, was never revealed to the public.

In the year 2000 police officers from several jurisdictions in rural Illinois encountered a large delta- or triangular-shaped object moving slowly at low altitude and then suddenly darting around the night sky. The object accelerated instantaneously, and I have proposed the technology might have been using the Casimir effect.

One of the officers took a photo of the object with his Polaroid camera, and although the photo is very low quality, it does reveal an object in the sky. It was there. So, this object was quite real, but rather than jumping automatically to the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs, it would be wise to first exhaust ALL other possible explanations.

The one possible explanation that I have been fixated on for years is that the Pentagon has possibly developed a range of extraordinary advances in propulsion that have been kept from the public ever since the first important UFO encounter after World War II, that of Kenneth Arnold in 1947.

I further propose that the UFOs over Washington, D.C., in 1952 were likely the result of a deliberate test ordered by then-president Harry Truman, who ordered a similar demonstration of the Flying Wing aircraft a few years earlier, when the aircraft flew at low altitude over our nation’s capital. I suggest that he likely ordered the 1952 operation to determine whether platforms equipped with an advanced field propulsion system could out-maneuver conventional aircraft. I further propose that the reason these encounters happened on two separate occasions exactly one week apart was that the president was not satisfied with the first flyover and wanted to see how well these platforms would perform against state-of-the-art jet fighters.  

There are so many other examples of UFO encounters involving credible witnesses that have yet to be adequately explained.

At any rate, whether we want to believe in the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs or the terrestrial hypothesis for UFOs, the fact remains that there isn’t a shred of solid evidence supporting the former. That means either hypothesis carries equal weight.