Bigelow said he advised the president to deliver the line casually, on his way to boarding Air Force One—no evidence, no press conference, just confirmation. Trump hasn’t said it. Yet.
If the cycle of presidents and UFO disclosure feels familiar, that’s because it is. For nearly 80 years, someone has always supposedly been on the verge of revealing the truth, but no president has ever delivered.
“Politicians overpromise,” says Greg Eghigian, a professor of history and bioethics at Penn State and author of After the Flying Saucers Came. “The reality is that even presidents are not privy to a lot of classified information that lies within the bowels of the military and intelligence community bureaucracy.”
Still, for the believers, the stakes justify the hope.
“Often in the mainstream, when this topic gets brought up, there’s a giggle factor. I can tell you who is not giggling about this: senior members of the administration, senior intelligence officials, senior members of the military, senior members of Congress,” says Jordan Flowers, executive director of the Disclosure Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for UAP transparency. “When the door closes, no one ever says, ‘Oh, this is all made up, isn’t it?’ No. The door closes and they say, ‘We know there’s something happening here, we know this is serious, what do we do about it?’”
But that discourse still hasn’t been confirmed, at least in a meaningful way to the general public.
“A speech from the President of the United States confirming the existence of things in our airspace that we do not understand would unequivocally contribute to the public taking this issue seriously,” says Flowers.
Eghigian, however, isn’t so sure a Trump pronouncement would settle anything, particularly from “this president, who has a long history of not telling the truth.”
If the past is any indicator, this could be another nothingburger.
“Unless something radically different happens, which I know a lot of people are counting on, what we could probably expect is that this will eventually die down,” he says, citing an 80-year history of “intense moments where societies are really focused on the subject, and then all of a sudden interest wanes, and then all of a sudden it appears again.”
Right now, interest is arguably at anall-timee high. Few politicians enjoy a public spectacle as much as Trump, and what spectacle could be bigger than news that transcends our planet, and potentially our galaxy. Maybe the rumor just becomes another footnote on presidents and UFO lore. Or maybe it becomes the most important proclamation in human history, delivered by a reality TV star, with a talk show shrink by his side.