Donald Trump’s Ex-National Security Adviser on UFO Reports: ‘Inexplicable’

Former National Security Adviser Herbert Raymond McMaster, who served under Donald Trump, has weighed in on unidentified flying objects, calling some phenomena “inexplicable.”
McMaster made the remarks on Friday during an episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, after the host asked about the existence of extraterrestrial life on Earth.
“Years ago, when there were UFO sightings, it was some farmer in the middle of nowhere. Now it’s Navy personnel,” Bill Maher said.
Maher added that if aliens existed, the president would have to be informed when entering office. “Trump was president. He would have blabbed it by now,” he said, before asking McMaster, “What do you think?”
“There are things that cannot be explained. I don’t know what the explanation is for those unexplainable things, but I will say that there are phenomena that have been witnessed by multiple people that are just inexplicable by any kind of science available to us,” McMaster said.
Data from the National UFO Reporting Center showed that across all 50 states, Americans have reported 133,717 UFO sightings since 1995.
California had the highest number of UFO sightings, reporting more than 16,000 in the past 29 years. Florida and Washington followed, with both reporting more than 7,000 sightings. The state with the lowest number of sightings was South Dakota, with just 403. Delaware had a similar number of sightings: 423.
The states surrounding Nevada, the home of Area 51, also reported high numbers of UFO sightings, with Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming recording more than 700 sightings per million residents.
Reported UFO sightings in the U.S. surged in the 1960s—the same decade that saw the first man walk on the moon and Yuri Gagarin orbit the planet.
Since then, UFO sightings have continued to grow, with about 6,000 UFO encounters being reported every year, according to the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, though about 98 percent of them are misinterpretations of airplanes or other man-made equipment, such as Chinese lanterns.
A Pentagon report presented to Congress in March found that there is “no evidence” that the U.S. government had interactions with aliens. It added that most sightings of UFOs or unidentified anomalous phenomena were ordinary objects.
The report said the cause of the uptick in UFO sightings since the 1960s was the U.S. military testing spy planes and space technology.
On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump told podcaster Lex Fridman that he would push the Pentagon to release footage of alleged UFO sightings.
A formal office to investigate reports of UAPs was established under the Biden administration.
According to a 2021 Gallup poll, 41 percent of Americans thought alien spacecraft had visited Earth, an increase from 33 percent two years prior.