Has the US government confirmed aliens? Here's where things stand

There has been no announcement. No president, Cabinet member, intelligence agency, NASA report or Pentagon report has said that aliens or [non-human intelligence](/explained/non-human-intelligence) exist, or that they have visited Earth. Every official finding published so far points the other way, or says the data are too thin to tell.

What the government does say is narrower: military pilots and sensors keep recording objects nobody has identified, now called unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). "Unidentified" describes missing data. It is not a finding that something came from another world.

The government's official UFO investigator is the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Its March 2024 historical review, which went through records back to 1945, found "no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology." It also found no evidence of a hidden program to reverse-engineer alien craft.

AARO's latest annual report, published in July 2026 and covering June 2024 to May 2025, logged 319 new reports. Every case it resolved turned out to be something ordinary: balloons, birds, aircraft, drones or satellites. The report states that "no evidence suggests that a USG or private entity has ever captured or exploited UAP-derived materials." Most of the remaining cases were archived for lack of data, and nine were flagged for further analysis.

Earlier reports say the same. The intelligence community's first public assessment, in June 2021, could explain only one of 144 military reports (a deflating balloon) and blamed poor data for the rest. The three well-known Navy videos released in 2020 are genuine military footage, but the objects in them are still officially "unidentified," not alien.

NASA's independent UAP study team published its report in September 2023. Its conclusion: "At this point there is no reason to conclude that existing UAP reports have an extraterrestrial source." The panel said the core problem is bad data, and it called for calibrated, systematic observations rather than more eyewitness accounts.

Barack Obama set off a wave of headlines in February 2026 when he answered "they're real" during a lightning round on Brian Tyler Cohen's podcast. The next day he clarified on Instagram: life elsewhere in the universe is likely, but the chance we have been visited is low, and he saw no evidence of contact while he was president.

Donald Trump announced on February 19, 2026 that he was directing the Secretary of War and other agencies to identify and release government files on UFOs, UAP and extraterrestrial life. He also told reporters he did not know whether aliens are real. The files appear on war.gov/UFO under a program called PURSUE (Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters): seven batches between May 8 and October 23, 2026. The Pentagon cautioned that much of the material is "analytically indeterminate" and that many items have not been analyzed at all, and Trump said people could "decide for themselves." Our UFO files hub tracks every release.

Two other 2026 moves are often misread. In March the White House registered aliens.gov; as of late October the address forwards to a White House page about illegal immigration, not extraterrestrials. And in July, Fox News reported, citing a senior administration official, that the president had directed the Department of War and intelligence agencies to let former employees and contractors bring UAP information to AARO or the PURSUE team, with old non-disclosure agreements waived for those sessions. That opens a channel for testimony. By itself, it confirms nothing.

The strongest claims come from individuals, not agencies. In July 2023, former intelligence officer David Grusch told a House Oversight subcommittee under oath that the US has run a decades-long program to retrieve and reverse-engineer crashed craft of non-human origin, and that "non-human biologics" were recovered. He said his information came from interviews with dozens of officials. He did not show documents or physical evidence in public, and AARO says it found no evidence of such a program.

Later hearings added more. In November 2024, former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo testified that "the U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies." In September 2025, Rep. Eric Burlison showed a House task force a military video from October 2024 in which a Hellfire missile fired from a US drone strikes a glowing orb off Yemen. Several members of Congress say they believe the government is withholding information. These are serious allegations made in public, but they are claims, not official findings.

One detail adds to the confusion: US law already uses the phrase "non-human intelligence." The FY2024 defense law, signed in December 2023, set up a National Archives collection of records on "unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence." Naming a subject in a records law is not a finding that it exists.

A real confirmation would look different from everything above: a clear, on-the-record statement by someone with authority, such as the President, the Secretary of War, the Director of National Intelligence, NASA or AARO, that non-human intelligence or extraterrestrial technology exists. Ideally it would come with evidence (data, imagery or material) that outside scientists can examine.

Prediction markets use a similar test. Polymarket's "Will the US confirm that aliens exist before 2027?" resolves Yes only if the President, a Cabinet member, a member of the Joint Chiefs or a federal agency "definitively states" that extraterrestrial life or technology exists by December 31, 2026.

This page answers one question and carries a dated status line at the top. We re-check it after every official step: each PURSUE release, each AARO report, each hearing, and the final FY2027 defense bill, usually signed in December, which will decide whether the UAP Disclosure Act becomes law.

If any US official confirms non-human intelligence, the status line changes first, with the exact words, who said them and a link to the source, and a banner will point to our live coverage. Until then, the honest answer is the one at the top: no.