GoKawiilIn 2006, Donald Trump was firing people on The Apprentice and Dr. Phil was daytime television's reigning tough-love therapist.
Twenty years later, the former is president of the United States, the latter, his informal UFO ambassador—recently trusted with unreleased government files on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) to gauge how the public might handle what's inside.
"Here's what comes in stages. First they acknowledge it, then they confirm it's real, then they tell you where it's from," Dr. Phil said in an August 7 Instagram video discussing UAP disclosure. "And somewhere down that road, maybe, is the big one—the government of the United States standing at a podium and saying out loud, we are not alone."
For most of 2026, a rumor has consumed the world of UFOlogy: President Trump is sitting on a finished speech confirming humanity isn't alone. Whether the “disclosure speech” actually exists is a topic of rabid discussion on X, the r/UFO subreddit, and dozens of extraterrestrial-curious podcasts, but the reasons so many people believe in it are very real. Humans are arguably experiencing the most consequential era for the UFO scene since the ’40s and ’50s, when a mysterious crash outside Roswell, New Mexico, and unexplained radar blips over Washington, DC, birthed decades of legends of little green men and flying-saucers.
There's no doubt that the government has been engaging with the topic. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently confirmed that Stephen Miller, one of the most powerful figures in the White House, has been handed the UAP portfolio.
Tim Gallaudet, a retired Navy rear admiral who helped run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during Trump's first term, testified before Congress about UAP in 2024, and now sits on a UAP Science Advisory Council reporting to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He called the increased government interest “a total change in executive-branch transparency from the last 80 years."
But he’s unsure if that would ever culminate in a speech from a sitting president, because they would “have to acknowledge that we're not in control, that we're not the highest level of intelligence on the planet, and that's going to be a very hard thing for any government to admit."
A White House spokesperson tells WIRED via email that “No such speech is planned—rather, the administration continues to release files as they become available, and the public to make up their own minds about the information uncovered.”
For believers, the modern UAP disclosure began in 2017, when a New York Times article revealed a secret Pentagon program quietly investigating UAPs. The Pentagon went on to confirm in 2020 that leaked videos of Navy pilots tracking seemingly impossible objects were real. A 2021 intelligence report conceded the phenomena existed and remained unexplained, and in 2022 the government established an official investigation office. Then, from 2022 to 2025, Congress held yearly public hearings where pilots, military officers, and intelligence veterans (including Gallaudet) testified under oath.
What’s also novel is that UAP disclosure has bipartisan support. Both the House task force on declassifying federal secrets and the House UAP Caucus are made up of legislators from across the aisle.
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