Donald Trump has come tantalisingly close to revealing what he was told about UFOs while President, as he divulged fighter jet pilots told him ‘they saw things that were very strange’.
Trump, who served as the 45th President of the United States between 2017 to 2021 and is seeking re-election, also refused to rule out there could be life on Mars or other planets ‘that we don’t know’.
The 78-year-old politician shared his thoughts on extra-terrestrials with podcaster Joe Rogan, in an engaging interview that also covered the unopened JFK and Martin Luther King assassination files, as well as his own recent brush with a would-be killer.
Speaking about ‘the people coming from space’, while looking upwards and pointing, Trump said it had not been something of specific interest to him, but he was left intrigued after speaking to pilots claiming to have witnessed UFOs over America.
He said during Friday night’s podcast: ‘I interviewed a few people, it’s never been my thing, I have to be honest. I have never been a believer.
‘So I interviewed jet pilots that say they saw something. If you saw them you’d love to have them [on your show]…that were solid people, perfect, great pilots, everything.
‘And they said, ‘we saw things sir that were very strange, like a round ball that wasn’t a comet or meteor, it was something and it was going four times faster than an F22, which is a very fast plane.
‘And it was round, which in theory is a great shape [for flying].’
Rogan, 57, then asked Trump if he spoke to the pilots because he felt ‘compelled’ to do so because of a ‘personal interest’ in the issue.
Trump admitted: ‘A little bit, its not a great interest for me, but its still an interest.’
He then added that the question he is asked ‘as much as almost any question’ is whether there are aliens visiting the earth.
‘What do you think?’ pressed Rogan.
‘There’s reason not to think Mars and all these planets [don’t] have life,’ he replied.
When Rogan said scientists had as yet not found any evidence of life on Mars or any other planet in the solar system, Trump revealed that he believes there still could be.
‘Well maybe its life that we don’t know,’ he replied.
Trump added that while the sighted UFOs ‘could be’ drones or Chinese spy balloons, he remained swayed by the eyewitness accounts of the fighter pilots he spoke to.
He added: [They are] solid, beautiful people. [They said] this is something sir, this is something. They’re not conspiracy guys.’
The pair went on to discuss an infamous 2004 UFO incident in which top Navy pilots spotted ‘Tic-Tacs’ flying at incredible speed off the California coast, which were also picked up on sonar moving swiftly underwater.
On November 14 2004, Top Gun fighter pilot David Fravor was flying a training exercise close to San Diego when he was re-routed to investigate a strange object spotted on radar by warships protecting his aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz.
What he found was a roughly 40ft white object with no windows or wings, shaped like a Tic-Tac, flitting about above the sea that was roiling below it, disturbed by something large submerged beneath the surface.
Commander Fravor told Congress in 2023 that as he circled the object, it turned to mirror his movements, then shot off past him at thousands of miles per hour, somehow stopping a second later at a secret pre-designated rendezvous point 60 miles away that only he and a handful of Navy staff on his ship were given ahead of their training exercise.
Fellow F-18 pilot Lieutenant Chad Underwood then flew out and caught the object on video – footage that was published by the New York Times in 2017, igniting a firestorm of intrigue about the government’s knowledge of UFOs.
Kevin Day, who was Senior Chief Operations Specialist aboard the USS Princeton at the time in charge of monitoring the skies with radar to protect the Nimitz, said that in the 10 days prior to the incident he saw similar objects on his radar behaving inexplicably.
Day said groups of about 10 objects were repeatedly detected 80,000ft above them, where the Earth’s atmosphere becomes space, dropping down to 20,000ft in less than a second, then following the ships by flying through the air at a relatively leisurely 115mph, before zooming off towards Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico where they seemed to disappear under the sea.
‘They originated from sub-earth orbit. They came in groups of five to 10 at a time. If you added up all the groups, it was about 100 contacts,’ Day said.
‘The very first group had 10 objects. They sat right around 80,000ft or so, off the east coast of Catalina Island. They just sat there for a time.
‘Then they would drop down as a group, instantly, down to between 20,000 and 28,000ft off the coast of Catalina Island, about 10 miles east of it.
‘The really weird thing was, a single object would leave that group and travel very slowly right over the top of us, at between 20-28,000ft at about 100 knots, which was really slow.
‘It would just track above us, and then the next one would depart, and the next one,’ he added. ‘All the groups did that.
‘All 100 of them, to the best of my knowledge, disappeared in the same spot in the sky. And that spot was about 60 miles north of an island off the coast of Mexico called Guadalupe Island.
‘Everyone was looking at me like, what is this? And I didn’t have good answers.’
Sean Cahill, who was a Chief Master-At-Arms on the Princeton, said he saw lights in the sky matching the movements of the objects Day saw on his radar.
Rogan said that he invited Fravor onto his show to speak about his experience, mentioning that he had described seeing ‘this thing go from below sea level to 50,000ft in a second’.
‘That’s stuff to beat,’ smiled Trump.
Rogan continued: ‘They don’t know what it is, they saw something making a disturbance in the water, they got video evidence of this thing, two different fighter jets with pilots saw it, there’s visual evidence, photographic evidence, video, radar.
‘Whatever the hell it is would turn a human being into jello if you were inside of it.’
Trump nodded as Rogan spoke, but did not elaborate further on the episode.
Speaking about US fighter jet capabilities he said: ‘When you fly in these jets, the pilots have to be in great shape.
‘When you fly in some of these things its amazing, you’ve got to be special [to be a pilot].’