Trump claims he has access to UFO files. Here’s what experts say

Donald Trump suggested in a recent interview with celebrity influencer Logan Paul that he has access to UFO files after being asked about what information he had about the existence of alien life.

The former president, appearing on Paul’s ImPaulsive podcast, was asked what files or documents he was privy to on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)—the term used by defense officials referring, in part, to sightings of what are colloquially called UFOs.

Trump’s conversation comes amid heightened interest in the topic, following the Pentagon‘s release of declassified documents detailing instances reported to it by airmen and other service personnel.

Last summer, 36-year-old Air Force veteran David Grusch caused a media storm after he said that a top-secret U.S. military program had found the wreckage of several fully intact unidentified aerial craft, claiming some of which contained dead nonhuman pilots.

A 2023 report from the Office for the Director of National Intelligence found that there were 510 UAP sightings in 2022, higher than the 366 seen in 2021. Of these, 171 were considered to “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis.”

During the podcast, when asked about aliens, Trump said he had spoken to Air Force personnel who had claimed to see aircraft “round in form, going like four times faster than my super jet fighter plane.”

“I have met with people that are serious people that say there are some really strange things they see flying around out there,” he added.

Pressed whether he had access to information on alien life and UAPs, Trump replied, “I have access…and I speak to people about it, I’ve had actually meetings on it, and they will tell you there’s something going on.

“When they say things, things are going four times faster than my beautiful top-of-the-line airplane that goes, you know, real fast, Mach 2, right?”

Newsweek has contacted media representatives for Donald Trump via email for comment.

Newsweek has also spoken to experts on what access Trump may have and if that privileges him to any information about UFOs while he is no longer in office.

What can Trump access?

The answer to this has been addressed, in part, through the discussion that followed Trump’s handling of confidential documents, claiming that he had the authority as a former president to hold on to papers—a claim that Newsweek has previously explored.

There is no evidence to suggest that information on UAPs was among the documents at Mar-a-Lago or otherwise.

Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and a University of Maryland professor, told Newsweek that at the end of a president’s time in office, all official presidential records by law come into legal, physical custody of NARA, with any classified documents stored to protect unauthorized access. A former president may request to access records with additional clearances for classified information.

However, Baron said, “Former presidents do not have the right to request presidential records of the incumbent president or records created in presidential administrations other than their own.”

Furthermore, under NARA regulations, the incumbent president also has the right to assert executive privilege to withhold records from the former president, with the archivist providing notice of any request made by a former president to the incumbent.

President Joe Biden has restricted Trump from some information, specifically intelligence briefings, arguing the former president could reveal sensitive information. Speaking to CBS Evening News in February 2021, Biden said the decision had been motivated by Trump’s “erratic behavior, unrelated to the insurrection.”

Asked what his worst fear was if Trump continued to receive the briefings, Biden said: “I’d rather not speculate out loud.”

“I just think that there is no need for him to have the intelligence briefing,” he added.

“What value is giving him an intelligence briefing? What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?”

While this restricts some documentation, these briefings are usually only offered as a courtesy and, in any case, are unlikely to contain information about UAPs unless they present an immediate or near-future security risk.

However, under the Presidential Records Act, Trump can only access material that originated in his four years as president per the archivist’s approval, according to Gail Helt, a former CIA official and a professor of political science at King University.

“These would be documents that originated inside his White House, not the intelligence community or DOD,” Helt told Newsweek.

“He would have no continued access, nor the right to such continued access, to any classified documents that originated with the CIA, FBI, DOD, etcetera, at all. Those are not his property; those belong to the intelligence community (IC) or, rather, to the nation, which trusts the IC to keep them secret.”

Helt added that “if he wanted a briefing on a particular national security issue, or to access the classified intelligence record on UAPs from his four years in office, he would need to request that access from the White House.”

There has been no suggestion that the documents found at Mar-a-Lago contained any information on UAPs.

Though Helt said, “I don’t think that the fact that classified documents related to UAPs were not mentioned as having been present in the Mar-a-Lago stash suggests that they were not there.

“We don’t know exactly what was in that trove of documents, and given the sensitivity of the topic of UAPs generally, I doubt anyone would call out the existence of such documents even in vague terms.

“Such documents could well have been present, and we may never know.”

“Reporting and evidence suggests that there are still missing documents or boxes that were not found or searched, perhaps at Bedminster,” Lindsay Chervinsky, an award-winning presidential historian, told Newsweek.

“Accordingly, there is no evidence to suggest he has those documents among the items that were collected and returned, but we don’t really know what he has that we don’t know about.”

Some documents released by the Pentagon and NASA on UAPs are declassified and Trump requesting these would be no different from any other member of the public accessing them, with no additional privileges granted to presidents.

So what’s left?

Based on the descriptions given to experts about Trump’s privileges, and the fact that the only papers he could access would be those created in the White House while he was in office—and not from security agencies that are coordinating investigations into UAP sightings—it is not entirely clear what information he could have, if any.

In 2023, Trump told podcast host Hugh Hewitt that he had been briefed about UAPs while in office, saying that he interviewed “a couple of people from the Air Force” without elaborating. This could be the information he may be referring to, but what more those briefings would have revealed beyond the reports that have already been declassified and investigated by the Pentagon isn’t clear.

In December 2020, Trump signed a $2.3 trillion government funding bill that also compelled intelligence services to provide Congressional committees with an unclassified report about UAPs, helping the topic’s popularity to skyrocket. However, that effort was engineered by Congress, not the president, and Trump was out of office for more than a year by the time it was released.

While it’s feasible that Trump may have held notes or information that passed through the White House at some point, when pressed for detail Trump has remained vague.

Considering what little he has said, his limited access to White House documents, no access to Pentagon documents, and the fact that the great deal of Congressional and Washington attention to UAPs has occurred during the Biden presidency, it seems unlikely that Trump is holding on to any wild truths or information not already revealed through committee hearings and Pentagon reports. That does not mean he has nothing, but in all likelihood, whatever he possesses may be pretty slim and inconsequential.