Would anything surprise us at this point?

“Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters,” U.S. President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social on February 19, 2026, adding a “GOD BLESS AMERICA!” for good measure.

It’s possible that Mr. Trump, ever in competition with his predecessor, was trying to prevent former President Barack Obama from stealing his thunder.

Mr. Obama caused quite a stir last week when he seemed to let a great state secret slip during a podcast interview.

“They’re real,” former President Barack Obama told podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen in response to a question about the existence of alien life in the universe.

“But I haven’t seen them,” Obama added hastily. “They’re not being kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility — unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the President of the United States.”

Later, Obama attempted to walk back his off-the-cuff comments. But by then, it was already too late to stop the wild speculation online.

“I was trying to stick to the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention, let me clarify: Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” Obama posted to social media. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

Social media commenters were, needless to say, a bit more than skeptical. 

Perhaps Obama should have left off the “Really!” Normally, the former president doesn’t have to work that hard to convince his social media followers of anything.

Mr. Obama’s belated denials were further called into question after President Trump suggested the former president had breached the rules regarding classified information disclosure.

“He gave classified information, he’s not supposed to be doing that,” President Trump told the press. “I don’t know if they’re real or not, but I can tell you he gave classified information. He made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information. No, I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”

They certainly do.

A growing number of Americans believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial life somewhere in the universe. Or perhaps even closer.

Depending on how the question was asked, 56% of Americans said aliens definitely or probably exist, according to a November 2025 YouGov poll. The same poll found that about 47% believe aliens have definitely or probably visited Earth at some point.

Change the question to “does intelligent life exist on other planets,” and that number climbs to a comfortable majority of 65%.

65% of Americans don’t agree about anything.

But scientists, astronomers, physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians have been asking some form of this immortal question for thousands of years: “Where is everyone?”

Enrico Fermi posed this exact question to his fellow Manhattan Project scientists during one memorable lunch meeting at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the summer of 1950.

It was the dawn of the atomic age. Scientists who had just unlocked the power of the atom were now thinking seriously about rockets, interstellar travel, and the age of the universe. During lunch with colleagues Edward Teller, Herbert York, and Emil Konopinski, the discussion drifted to UFO reports and the possibility of faster-than-light travel.

Fermi reportedly did a few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations and then asked, simply: “Where is everybody?”

He meant: if intelligent civilizations are common and space travel is even moderately feasible, the galaxy should already be teeming with evidence of them.

And yet, nothing.

Essentially, Fermi wondered — as many still do: If the universe is so vast and so old — and it is —  there is one potentially habitable planet for every grain of sand on Earth. 

So, where is everybody?

Especially as, since the 1920s, our understanding of the size of the universe has changed drastically.

In the early 1920s, astronomers believed the Milky Way was the entire universe —  about 100,000–300,000 light years across. Now we understand the observable universe to be closer to 93 billion light years across. That’s an enormous difference.

Put it this way: Modern scientists used to think the universe was the size of a peppercorn or a large marble, when it’s really the size of the moon. That’s like the difference between a basketball and Jupiter.

And that’s just the known universe, the observable universe. The known-unknowns put us in the realm of infinity. The unknown-unknowns would likely throw us even farther.

With hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone — many older than our sun — and countless planets likely capable of supporting life, intelligent civilizations should have had millions or even billions of years to emerge, expand, and leave detectable traces. Yet we see nothing. No probes. No signals. No megastructures blotting out starlight. The paradox isn’t that aliens must exist. It’s that statistically, they probably should — and the silence is deafening.

The silence has also become a bit…scary.

Scientists do have some theories as to why we haven’t heard anything from our extraterrestrial neighbors. Some of them are downright frightening.

Popularized by sci-fi author Liu Cixin, the “Dark Forest” theory says the universe is like a dark forest at night.

Every civilization is a hunter. No one knows who is peaceful and who is hostile. And because the cost of being wrong is extinction, the safest strategy is silence — or preemptive destruction. So advanced civilizations hide, stay quiet, or eliminate others before being detected.

The silence isn’t emptiness: It’s fear.

Plenty of astronomers and physicists share this fear.

Carl Sagan was fine with SETI (listening for signals), but he drew the line at broadcasting our own. In the 1990s he wrote that announcing our presence to unknown civilizations might be risky.

Stephen Hawking went even further.

In 2010 he warned that contacting advanced aliens could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. Civilizations capable of interstellar travel, he argued, might not be benevolent. He explicitly advised caution about advertising our existence.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: We’ve already been leaking radio for over 100 years. If someone is close enough to hear us…

They probably already have.

Are we about to find out for sure?

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)