Donald Trump has revealed the question the public most often asks him. During a sit-down interview with Greg Gutfeld and an audience, a voter asked the former President if there were really extraterrestrial lifeforms in Area 51, a military installation in Nevada that has long been associated with aliens and government cover-ups. Trump replied, “I think that might be a question I get more than any other. It is the craziest thing.”
Mr. Trump then recounted a story from his White House days and described speaking to a group of Air Force pilots who told him about unidentified flying objects (UFOs) they had witnessed in the sky. They told him they saw a “round object” that went faster than an F-22 aircraft, “which is a very fast plane.”
In a separate interview in June, Trump told the same story, adding that he believes the “deep state” may have kept information from him about what happened at Area 51. The Republican declared that the issue confuses and upsets a lot of people, and while he is not a believer, he has to concede that credible people “say there are some really strange things flying around out there.”
Area 51 is a flight testing facility located at Groom Lake in southern Nevada and administered by Edwards Air Force Base in California. The US government confirmed its existence in 2013 when George Washington University submitted a freedom of information request and obtained a formerly classified CIA document noting that a U-2 spy plane was tested in the area. This accounted for the rumors of alien craft, the document claimed.
Nevertheless, government secrecy surrounding the remote site has fueled speculation of a cover-up for years. Area 51 has not previously appeared on any United States maps, and the federal government had previously avoided confirming its existence out of concern for military sensitivity.
Rumors persist, however, and the most famous one relates to a story from Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. This tale purports that an alien aircraft crashed into the New Mexico desert and a local rancher retrieved debris and took it to the Roswell Sheriff, who passed it on to the military. The Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) subsequently released a press notice saying a “flying disc” had been recovered from the desert. Soon afterward, the RAAF issued another statement insisting that the disc was a weather balloon. This prompted accusations of a cover-up that persist to this day.
