Donald Trump says he doesn’t really believe in UFOs. Then he tells a story that makes it sound like he half does. In an interview with Ross Douthat that aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, the president described meetings in the Oval Office with Air Force pilots who told him “very strange” things. As UNILAD Tech reported, the most striking was about a round object that flew past an F-22 at three times its speed.
It’s a great story. It’s also very light on detail, and Trump has told a version of it before with a different number. So we looked at what he actually said, what “three times the speed of an F-22” would mean in real terms, and what the government’s own UFO files have turned up this year.
The short version
- Trump says pilots told him a round, “not aerodynamic” object passed their F-22 at three times their speed.
- In October on Newsmax, and in 2024 on Gutfeld!, he said four times.
- Three times an F-22’s top speed is roughly 4,500 mph, well into hypersonic territory.
- He gave no date, place, pilot names, radar data or video.
- The Pentagon has released 478 UFO files since May under its PURSUE program. None has been linked to this encounter.
What Trump said
The president was careful to open with a disclaimer. “I’m not too much of a believer,” he said. Then he described the pilots, at length: “These are not people that you would say are conspiracy theorists. They don’t even know what it means, but they’re great, great pilots, young, handsome. They have beautiful, nice flat top, I’d like to have a haircut just like them, they look perfect like Tom Cruise.”
Then came the claim itself. “They’ve told me things that are very strange,” Trump said. “They said that in certain cases they said, ‘Yes there’s something going on out there,’ because they’re flying an F-22 which is the best there is, the fastest, the best plane that anyone’s ever seen, and something goes by them at three times their speed and it’s round, it’s not aerodynamic, it’s round.”
He allowed that it could have been “a comet” and said it remains a mystery. When Douthat asked about whistleblower claims of a secret UFO program hidden even from presidents, Trump said, “No. And I haven’t heard that.” He said he’d look for answers if one existed.
The number keeps changing
This isn’t the first time Trump has told this story, and the details shift with each telling.
| When | Where | Pilots mentioned | Speed claimed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sept 2024 | Gutfeld! (Fox News) | Three or four | 4x an F-22 |
| Oct 15, 2026 | Newsmax | About five or six | 4x an F-22 |
| Nov 8, 2026 | CBS, 60 Minutes | Not specified | 3x their speed |
It isn’t clear whether these are all the same encounter. Trump hasn’t said when it happened, where, or who the pilots were. He described most of the meetings as happening in his first term, with some in his second. That’s a normal way for a secondhand story to drift. It just means the speed figure is a recollection, not a measurement.
How fast is “three times an F-22”?
The F-22 Raptor’s top speed is usually given as about Mach 2.25, or roughly 1,500 mph at high altitude. It can also “supercruise” at around Mach 1.8 without afterburners. If the pilots meant three times the jet’s top speed, that’s about 4,500 mph. Four times is about 6,000 mph. Both are well past Mach 5, the line where speeds become “hypersonic.”
For context, the fastest crewed jet ever to fly, the SR-71 Blackbird, topped out around 2,200 mph. NASA’s uncrewed X-43A reached about Mach 9.6, close to 7,000 mph, for a few seconds in 2004. A round object doing 4,500 mph in the lower atmosphere would heat up, push a powerful shock wave and, below a certain altitude, cause a sonic boom. That’s not proof it didn’t happen. It’s a reminder of how extraordinary the claim is.
Why speeds seen from a cockpit are tricky
Judging how fast something is moving from inside a fighter jet is harder than it sounds. To know an object’s speed, you need to know how far away it is. A small object close by and a large object far away can look identical, and the jet’s own speed adds a layer of motion on top.
NASA’s independent UAP study team ran into exactly this in 2023 when it looked at the Navy’s famous “GoFast” video. The object in the clip appears to skim the ocean at high speed. NASA’s analysis found it was more likely moving at about 40 mph, roughly wind speed, and that the effect came from parallax as the jet flew past. Radar can settle questions like this. That’s why the absence of radar or sensor data in Trump’s account matters.
What the government’s UFO files actually show
Trump’s comments come as his administration is releasing UFO records in bulk. In February he ordered agencies to find and declassify files on “alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” The result is PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, run through the Department of War at war.gov/ufo.
There have been seven batches so far. The first, on May 8, was the biggest at 158 files. Later releases included a 116-page dossier of green orbs and fireballs seen near Sandia Base in New Mexico between 1948 and 1950, about 25 sightings of “cold orbs” by an AC-130 gunship crew over the Gulf of Oman in 2021, and an FBI interview about a triangle over Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan in 2002. The latest batch, on October 23, had 28 documents and no video, including a memo about two federal agents who reported a matte-black triangular object near a secure US facility this year.
What none of the files has done is confirm anything alien. The Pentagon describes them as unresolved cases where there wasn’t enough evidence to reach a conclusion. Scientists and skeptics have pointed out that many records were already public or could be camera artifacts, balloons or debris. And so far, nothing released has been tied to the F-22 encounter Trump keeps describing.
Some people inside that world want more. Dr. Eric Davis, who worked for decades with the Pentagon’s UFO programs, has said Americans “have a right to see” what’s going on and urged Trump to waive nondisclosure agreements to protect whistleblowers. If the president really has met pilots with a story like this, the simplest next step would be to put their account, and any sensor data, into the next PURSUE batch.
The appetite for this is clearly there. Questions about what’s flying overhead have spilled well beyond UFO circles, from what an ex-astronaut says is already in orbit to NASA’s slow, careful hunt for possible signs of life on Mars. The difference is that those come with data.
Sources and further reading
- UNILAD Tech: Trump shares “very strange” accounts of round UFOs speeding past Air Force fighter jets
- CBS News: Full transcript of Ross Douthat’s interview with President Trump
- IBTimes UK: “Three times their speed”: Trump details pilots’ UFO encounters
- Department of War: PURSUE UAP records
- UAP.GLOBAL: 2026 UAP file releases timeline
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