Over the past month, the Pentagon has released two tranches of files concerning “unidentified anomalous phenomenon” (formerly, UFOs — “unidentified flying objects”). The document dumps were, in large part, videos accompanied by little to no context, save minimal geographical notations, featuring luminous objects flitting about variously sized screens more often than not obscured by multiple black-box redactions. These grainy, bouncing, mostly black and white clips are reminiscent less of old-school flying saucer flicks than of primitive video games — instead of a state-of-the-art production worthy of our nation’s 250th birthday, we get Bicentennial-era tech.
Perhaps 10 years of Donald Trump “flooding the zone with shit” — as his former adviser Steve Bannon described the on-again off-again POTUS’s media strategy — has degraded our collective attention span. Whatever the reason, this partial declassification of government secrets has been met not with the awe and emotional frenzy seen in the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s latest foray into extraterrestrial spectacle, Disclosure Day, but with more of a national “meh.”
The graphics recall some boxy computer with green text on a black screen in the background of an X-Files episode circa 1994.
When those white binders purportedly filled with Epstein revelations that were handed out to MAGA influencers way back in February 2025 were discovered to be previously released — and generally banal — information, pundits across the political spectrum reacted with outrage. But last month’s tales of aliens among us seem not to have penetrated much into the citizenry’s consciousness. In fact, former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene — a certified expert on how to throw bloody chum (including tales of nefarious space lasers) to the MAGA faithful — rolled out a two-fer on X, blasting the guv’ment’s ho-hum disclosures:
I really don’t care about the UFO files.
I just don’t.
I’m so sick of the “look at the shiny object” propaganda while they wage foreign wars, let rapist and pedophiles run free, and ruin the value of our dollar.
Unless they roll out live aliens and test demo UFOs or actually admit what we know this really is then I have way better things to do on this Friday.8:51 AM • May 8, 2026 • 1.7M Views
The most transparent administration in history still hasn’t released all the Epstein files or arrested anyone, but rolled out some UFO files today so you would get so excited that you forgot you are paying over $4.50/gallon because they are fighting another foreign war they said they would no longer fight.
Happy Friday everyone!9:41 AM • May 8, 2026 • 432.5K Views
But even apostate Trumpers such as Greene — justly outraged at her former guiding star’s wag-the-dog war in Iran meant to divert Americans from economic worries, naked corruption, pedophilia scandals, etc. — could perhaps not have envisioned the high-octane gaslighting of the administration’s recently launched whitehouse.gov/aliens/ site, which opens with old-school Courier-ish text scrolling across the screen:
For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret.
Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives.
They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.
At this point, anyone paying attention to the White House’s snarky — when not outright cruel — media mien will realize that the aliens under discussion are not from outer space but are immigrants of various legal statuses. So we now have the highest office in the land misdirecting those seeking information about extraterrestrials to a site that demeans and dehumanizes migrants. After giving a very dubious arrest count of over 3,129,000 “aliens” — Wired magazine reports that such a figure “does not correspond to any enforcement total published by immigration authorities and is roughly seven times larger than the actual ICE arrest count since January 2025” — the site delivers this nasty de-pronouning of human beings:
If you’ve witnessed an Alien abduction, do not be alarmed.
The Alien is in good hands.
We will take care of it… and return it safely to its place of origin.
Next come exhortations to “Report Suspicious Aliens” and a link to an “ICE tip line.” Additionally, early versions of the post included “aliens” whose country of origin was the United States. Those egregious bits of truth have since been scrubbed from the site.
The graphics recall some boxy computer sporting green text on a black screen in the background of an X-Files episode circa 1994. Along with the earlier nothing-burger UAP disclosures, it would be nice to think that Donald Trump is as incompetent a fascist as Ed Wood, the notoriously bad Plan 9 From Outer Space auteur, was a filmmaker. But that is to grossly underestimate both the can-do charm of Wood’s 1957 “so-bad-it’s-good” classic and the POTUS’s feral wiles and savage drives to self-enrichment.
Still, even as Trump has transformed the presidential bully-pulpit into something more akin to open mic night for insult comics, state legislators in New Mexico might finally find out if the truth is really out there.
Jeffery Epstein’s Zorro Ranch is roughly 140 miles from Roswell, New Mexico, where an alien spacecraft reportedly crashed in 1947, leaving mysterious debris and strange bodies scattered across the desert. Whether this incident was truly the tip of some alien invasion spear or, as the U.S. Air Force asserted in 1994, merely wreckage from a highly classified Cold War spy project, will roil conspiracy forums for as long as ones and zeroes stimulate our cones and rods.
More down-to-earth, however, is a project ramping up in the Land of Enchantment to begin a systematic search of the Zorro Ranch grounds. Authorities have reopened an investigation that had been halted by the feds in 2019 (under the first Trump administration), ostensibly because parallel criminal inquiries could gather conflicting testimony exploitable by defense lawyers. Whatever the reason, local police and detectives are now talking to witnesses about assaults, rapes, and possibly murders and burials of girls and young women that allegedly took place on Epstein’s property.
Maybe, finally, some combination of those Epstein binders and that grainy UAP film footage will actually pay off — if aliens ever actually traversed light-years to greet us in places like Roswell, the least we can do is take a short drive from there to Zorro Ranch and dig up a few thousand acres of desert.
Because, at this point, after more than a decade of Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric and comfort-the comfortable, afflict-the-afflicted policies, it is obvious that our country — with its eroding democracy and backsliding on human rights — is alien to much of what we knew before 2016. Despite decades of sci-fi thrillers on the big screen, it’s clear that our most dangerous enemy by far is not little green men in grainy skies but an orange troll in the White House. ❖