• Earlier this week, Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo asked President Donald Trump about the Pentagon's new UFO task force.
  • Trump promised to look into the government's UFO program.
  • The president also answered with a vague, somewhat threatening speech about the power of the U.S. military.

President Donald Trump, when asked about a new Pentagon task force for studying UFOs, replied that he would look into it—and then began boasting about the power of the U.S. military. Some observers saw this as Trump touting his funding of the Department of Defense, while others saw it as a threat to extraterrestrial beings.

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In an interview on Sunday, Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo asked Trump, “Can you explain why the Department of Defense has set up a UFO task force? Are there UFOs?”

“Well, I'm going to have to check on that,” Trump replied. “I mean, I've heard that. I heard that two days ago. So I'll check on that. I'll take a good, strong look at that.”

Trump then went on to talk about the U.S. military:

“I will tell you this: We have now created a military the likes of which we have never had before. In terms of equipment, the—the equipment we have, the weapons we have, and hope to god we never have to use it. But have created a military the likes of which nobody has, nobody has, ever had. Russia, China, they’re all envious of what we had. All built in the USA. We’ve rebuilt it all—$2.5 trillion dollars. As far as the other question I’ll check on it, I heard about it two days ago actually.”

In August, the Pentagon established an official task force to investigate UFO sightings, following confirmed UFO sightings by U.S. Navy pilots between 2004 and 2014. The Pentagon's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force (UAPTF) will investigate the sightings of UAPs, also known as UFOs.

It's the first official U.S. government program affiliated with UFO research since a 2000s-era unit that analyzed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other UAPs lost its funding in 2012, even though multiple sources confirmed with Popular Mechanics that the unit remained active in secrecy after its shuttering.

So what, exactly, was Trump getting at in this interview? One interpretation is that Trump riffed on the possible threat of aliens to talk about how much he had done for the U.S. military. Indeed, the president has spent approximately $2.5 trillion on defense, though there’s been no real increase in America’s overall military strength and number of weapons.

The other possibility? This was Trump directly threatening aliens—or, more likely, the foreign governments behind the UAPs that the Pentagon is investigating—with military action.


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In August 2017, Trump used similar wording to threaten North Korea, stating, “[North Korea] will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which the world has never seen before.”

If Trump did consider aliens a threat, that would likely explain the sudden rush to establish the Space Force, the newest U.S. military branch. It’s not clear, though, why Trump would choose Fox News to threaten aliens with the power of the U.S. military.

So, could the Pentagon fend off a UFO attack? It seems unlikely.

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KARIM SAHIB//Getty Images
The F-22 Raptor, the best air superiority fighter in the world today, would likely do poorly against UFOs.

Even America’s most high-tech military hardware—including the F-22 Raptor fighter, USS Ford-class aircraft carriers, and the thousands of nuclear weapons that make up our strategic nuclear forces—would almost certainly be powerless against any technology advanced enough to travel between stars.

Consider the progress in weapons technology made by mankind over the last 200 years. Military forces of the 1820s, complete with muskets, horses, and field guns, would stand no chance against the armed forces of the 2020s. Alien civilizations could easily be thousands, or even millions, of years more advanced than mankind, with weapons that might seem miraculous to us. The unfortunate truth is Earth is likely ripe for the taking by any alien race technologically advanced enough to travel here.

While it's fun to speculate on wildly unrealistic scenarios, here's the bigger debate: Is there really something here, or did Trump answer two different questions, one of which was never actually asked? If anyone on this planet knows the real truth about UFOs and extraterrestrial life, it would be the President of the United States. So what else might Trump someday reveal?

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Headshot of Kyle Mizokami
Kyle Mizokami

Kyle Mizokami is a writer on defense and security issues and has been at Popular Mechanics since 2015. If it involves explosions or projectiles, he's generally in favor of it. Kyle’s articles have appeared at The Daily Beast, U.S. Naval Institute News, The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, Combat Aircraft Monthly, VICE News, and others. He lives in San Francisco.