The US government just registered a domain named aliens.gov

The United States' Executive Office of the President has registered the domain name aliens.gov, according to a bot that monitors federal domain registrations, in a move that is likely to fuel fresh speculation about the Trump administration’s stated plans to release government records related to aliens and unidentified flying objects.

The domain was registered on Wednesday shortly after 6.30am, according to the monitoring account. No website was active at the address at the time of writing, and the administration has not publicly explained the purpose of the registration.

The move comes about a month after Donald Trump said he would direct the government to begin releasing files related to aliens, extraterrestrial life and unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, the term now commonly used by US officials in place of UFOs.

Public interest in the subject has remained high in recent years. US Senator Chuck Schumer has pressed for the declassification of government material relating to unexplained aerial sightings, while footage released through Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars initiative brought renewed attention to Pentagon videos showing unusual objects observed by US Navy pilots. Congress has also held a series of hearings on the issue. In one of the most closely watched congressional hearings on the issue, three military veterans testified before lawmakers in 2023, including a former Air Force intelligence officer who alleged that the US government had operated a secret, “multi-decade” programme to reverse engineer recovered craft. He also claimed that non-human “biologics” had been recovered from alleged crash sites.

That momentum slowed last year after the Wall Street Journal reported that much of the information in circulation was tied to a disinformation effort and what it described as an elaborate Pentagon hazing ritual.

The topic returned to public attention in February when Barack Obama discussed aliens during an interview with American YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen. When asked whether aliens were real, Obama said, “They’re real but I haven’t seen them and they’re not being kept […] in Area 51. There’s no underground facility. Unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the President of the United States.” The clip quickly spread online.

Days later, Obama sought to clarify the remark in an Instagram post, saying he had been responding in the spirit of a rapid-fire exchange. He wrote that while the size of the universe made the existence of life elsewhere statistically plausible, he had seen no evidence during his presidency that extraterrestrials had made contact with Earth.

The exchange prompted questions for Trump during a press conference aboard Air Force One four days later. When asked about Obama’s comments, Trump said, “Well he gave classified information, he’s not supposed to be doing that.” When pressed on whether aliens were real, Trump said he did not know, but repeated his claim that Obama had disclosed classified material. After a reporter noted that a president could declassify information, Trump replied, “Well maybe I’ll get him out of trouble. I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.”

Later that day, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would direct the government 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)”. He said the order would extend to “any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters”.

The proposed release follows a broader pattern in the Trump administration of promising to declassify records linked to subjects that have long attracted public fascination and conspiracy theories, including the assassinated president John F Kennedy and the financier Jeffrey Epstein. Those disclosures, particularly in the Epstein case, have had wider consequences, including the publication of incriminating images and the identification of previously unnamed victims.