“Calling Occupants of Interplanetary, Most Extraordinary Craft! You’ve been observing our earth and we’d like to make a contact with you.”
In 1977, when Karen and Richard Carpenter released their cover version of the trippy, alien-friendly song by Klaatu, they cleverly subtitled it The Recognised Anthem of World Contact Day. The song filled the airwaves, quickly became a smash hit and the Carpenters and radio DJs everywhere were besieged by demands to know when this contact day was taking place.
Now, as if the United States does not have enough to be getting on with, Donald Trump, nudged on by speculative remarks by former president Barack Obama, announced on Thursday night that he has decided to let loose the alien files. Everything is to be declassified! The instruction was pre-empted by an off-hand opinion by Obama, during a podcast quickfire round, which contained this rather startling view on aliens. “They’re real, but I haven’t seen ‘em.”
Obama is hardly the first occupant of the Oval Office to allow that yes, there may well be something else out there. Even before the Carpenters went intergalactic, Jimmy Carter was stunned, in 1969, to find himself among a small gathering in Leary, Georgia, transfixed by the sight of a bright orb. The unidentified flying object changed from blue to white and ducked behind pine trees near the local Lions Club.
READ MORE
The visitors hung around for about 12 minutes before deciding they had seen enough of the Peach State. Carter declared it “the darnedest thing I’ve ever seen”. He subsequently made an official report to the government about his sighting and vowed never to dismiss Americans who swore they’d been visited by, or temporarily abducted by, lifeforms from other galaxies.
Ronald “Dutch” Reagan, flying in a small Cessna for a function in Bakersfield during his governorship of California had, in 1974, an even more unnerving experience when he and everyone on board saw an orb flying alongside them. Nothing if not game, Reagan ordered the pilot to follow it for about 10 minutes before the craft abruptly ascended into the skies.
“I just saw a UFO,” Reagan reportedly said afterwards. After he became president, advisers had a task in preventing him from alarming his fellow Americans with his belief that they were not alone.
But when No Drama Obama teases the idea that Men In Black might have been little more than a documentary dressed up as high drama, then the public is going to sit up and listen. The clip generated millions of views.
Avi Loeb, the professor of science at Harvard and one of the most outspoken advocates for the possibility of other lifeforms, weighed in on the latest development.
“The question of whether we are alone, of whether we have a neighbour, is a question of great importance to the future of humanity, to people everywhere and it should not be withheld from public view,” he said.
YouGov polling from 2025 found that 47 per cent of Americans believe aliens have either definitely or probably visited Earth at some stage in the past. Quizzed about his own view on the matter on Air Force One during the week, Trump was uncharacteristically reticent.
“I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”
It seems odd that a man who is capable of offering strident opinion on everything from magnets to badgers should remain neutral on a subject as vast as extraterrestrial life. It was hard to tell whether the concept left him terrified or merely bored. Either way, he was leaving it up to others to decide.
But on Thursday, he issued a social media post to the effect that he will be “directing the secretary of war and other relevant departments and agencies to begin the process of identifying and releasing government files relating to alien and extraterrestrial life”.
The idea of Pete Hegseth being in charge of alien affairs is, of course, at some instinctive level, terrifying. But Trump teased UFO enthusiasts with the promise of a barrage of information “connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important matters.”
The peculiar thing was that on another heavy, heavy day in world affairs, featuring the potential fall of the House of Windsor in Britain, Jeffrey Epstein’s malignant shadow and potential strikes against Iran on the horizon, the fizz of interest in the possibility of alien lifeform felt like light escapism. For a few minutes, Obama and Trump were just two guys wondering about flying saucers.
It brought to mind Reagan’s remarks to the United Nations back in 1987 about the dubious upside of an invasion from other planets.
“I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet I ask you: is not an alien force already among us?”
The question remains a live one.
Of course, that was almost four decades ago, so perhaps the aliens have, in the parlance of the current administration, “self deported”. Or maybe Aldous Huxley’s stranger at the bar had it right when he suggested: “Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
