Donald Trump thinks there “could be” alien life in the universe—in large part because U.S. pilots he met while president, who he found to be “like beautiful Tom Cruise but taller,” told him they saw unexplained things in the sky.
“I met with pilots… like beautiful Tom Cruise but taller—handsome, perfect people,” Trump told Logan Paul in an interview on the YouTuber and mixed martial arts fighter’s podcast, Impaulsive.
One Cruise-esque pilot, Trump said, told him, “Sir, there was something there that was round in form and going like four times faster than my super jet fighter plane.”
ADVERTISEMENT
“And I looked at these guys, and they really mean it,” Trump said.
Trump has previously spoken of believing the U.S. has invisible jet fighters—planes “the enemy cannot see”—suggesting his views on scientific subjects may be best taken with a pinch of salt.
Despite this, he has regularly claimed his own, genetically enhanced scientific expertise, supposedly inherited from an uncle who worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
When it came to the subject of aliens, the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee told Paul, “Am I a believer? No, I probably can’t say I am.
“But I have met with people that are serious people that say there’s some really strange things that they see flying around out there.”
He added, “They have people that are very smart and very solid [who] have said they believe there was something out there and, you know, it makes sense that they could be.
“I’ve never been convinced, even despite that, you know. I just, for some reason, it’s not my thing. But a lot of people believe that it’s true. A lot of very good, solid people believe it’s true.”
Contacted for comment, Professor Avi Loeb, director of the Galileo Project at Harvard, told The Daily Beast, “New scientific knowledge must rely on evidence. It is possible that the U.S. government has interesting UAP data that is not available to the public. We can wait for its disclosure, but the sky and ocean are not classified and we can find the evidence ourselves.
“Currently, the Galileo Project observations and expeditions that I am leading are searching for such evidence. We will share it with the public as soon as we have it.”
Loeb also said science was “better than politics,” as practiced by Trump, “because it rests on data and not opinions. Also, it is an infinite-sum game rather than a zero-sum game; everyone benefits from new scientific knowledge.”
Congress has recently devoted precious hearing time to investigations of claims about UFOs.
In March, however, a Pentagon report said there was “no evidence that any U.S. government investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of an [unidentified anomalous phenomena] represented extraterrestrial technology.”
In his interview with Paul—with whom he recently appeared on TikTok—Trump also made a “joke” about immigration policy, saying, “When you say aliens, I say, ‘Are they illegal aliens?’ These [UFOs] might be illegal, but we don’t want to test them."
