“I just think that younger people are more—we have more tech that we’re able to access whereas historically the government did kind of try to silo this information and gaslight people,” she said. “And so I think right now the aspect of, ‘Hey, maybe we’re not the only thing out there’ is a very real question that many people ask themselves, and the stigma doesn’t seem to be as strong with the younger generation starting with Gen X onward.”
The president, in announcing the declassification of the UFO files, made a similar acknowledgement. “I thought I’d save it for this crowd,” Trump told the young conservative audience at a Turning Point USA event in April, “because you’re a little bit out-there.” Doubling down on his outreach, he recently posted an AI-generated meme of himself and Secret Service officers escorting an alien in handcuffs.
The congresswoman, however, insists that the UFO question has more wide-reaching appeal. “The UAP topic specifically is one of the biggest, most bicameral and bipartisan things in Washington, DC,” she said, pointing to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s starring role in a 2023 hearing with intelligence whistleblowers who claimed that the federal government is covering up UAP and alien activity.
Luna also referenced former president Barack Obama’s comments on a February podcast in which he seemed to confirm the existence of aliens, before later clarifying that he had seen “no evidence” of them and was speaking somewhat in jest.
“When you have Barack Obama and President Trump on the same page on something, you know you’re cooking,” Luna said. While perhaps an oversimplification of the 44th president’s position on extraterrestrials, her point speaks to the persistence of the topic as a cultural phenomenon. Even if, as with the JFK, RFK, and MLK files, the UFO materials released so far have offered little in the way of concrete revelation, they can feed subtler appetites. “The importance of this release is primarily psychological,” Harvard physicist Avi Loeb told Fox Weather after the initial dump. “It brings this subject to the mainstream of discussion both publicly but also within science.”