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For two of Washington’s most diametrically opposed political figures, there is a newfound common ground: whether the truth is out there.
President Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have butted heads since the former came to Washington, D.C. But now both want to expose whether there is life beyond the stars.
Their newfound unity on the subject conjoins a passion of Schumer’s and a moment of expedience for Trump.
Trump, spurred by former President Barack Obama saying on a podcast that there was alien life — then walking it back shortly after — ordered Secretary of War Pete Hegseth late Thursday night to dump the government’s files on extraterrestrials.
“Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War and other relevant Departments and Agencies to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters,” Trump said on Truth Social.
The timeline for release of the documents and the breadth and scope of materials that could become public were unclear, but chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told Fox News Digital in a statement, “The Department looks forward to working with the interagency to fulfill the President’s directive.”
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For Schumer, it’s a passion project years in the making.
Seeking more transparency on UFOs and UAPs is a torch Schumer picked up from the late former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., a friend and mentor of the current top Senate Democrat. It’s also an issue he has prodded Trump to take up since last year.
“Now do UFOs,” Schumer said in response to Trump ordering files related to the assassinations of former President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. to be declassified.
Reid gave the quest to unveil secrets surrounding UFOs and UAPs legitimacy in the late 2000s when he played a key role in funding the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. That public program received millions to investigate unexplained phenomena.
Several years later, Schumer picked up where his predecessor left off. His most recent push came in 2023, when he served as Senate majority leader under former President Joe Biden.
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He and Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., introduced legislation modeled after the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.
That bill, meant to be an amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), would have created a review board at the National Archives and Records Administration to collect the government’s trove of documents on UFOs and UAPs and established a presumption of disclosure for the records, requiring the government to provide a compelling reason why they shouldn’t be released to the public.
Ultimately, their original version did not pass muster, and a more watered-down iteration of the bill became law — an outcome Schumer blasted as an “outrage” at the time.
“It means that declassification of UAP records will be largely up to the same entities that have blocked and obfuscated their disclosure for decades,” Schumer said.
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