Joe Rogan shared a theory behind President Donald Trump planning to release previously unseen files he said are “related to Alien and Extraterrestrial Life,” which the Department of Defense began doing Friday, arguing one aspect doesn’t “make sense.”
Rogan discussed the matter Thursday on his “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast with Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), and while the stand-up comedian has frequently talked about his lifelong interest in UFOs, he argued that the timing of this disclosure is rather curious.
“What doesn’t totally make sense is, why now disclosure?” Rogan said.
“Other than, I mean, this is being cynical — the Iran war is not going very well. The American public’s very upset. A lot of people don’t think we should have ever been involved in that in the first place. And we need some good news. We need something to distract us.”
The Iran war has already cost at least 13 U.S. service members and more than 3,000 Iranians their lives. It has also led Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes, resulting in high gas prices and fears of a global energy crisis.
Trump has been teasing the release of UFO files since February. The Pentagon on Friday said documents will be shared on a rolling basis “in the interest of total transparency.” Burchett agreed that the effort could serve as a distraction but also wondered if Trump “even cares.”
“If I was going to do it, now would be the time I’d do it,” Burchett said. “But I don’t think Trump really even cares … about trying to get everybody off-target by disclosing UFOs. … I just think he genuinely sees that America needs to know this stuff.”
The files published Friday include government documents dating to the 1940s: moon landing images, astronaut transcripts, footage of unexplained moving objects, copies of eyewitness reports and renderings depicting what people claimed to have seen in the skies.
Catch the bulk of the UFO exchange around 1:07:30:
“Well, he also realizes America wants to know it,” Rogan told Burchett. “And, he’s an outsider. I mean, even though he’s the president, he is in a lot of ways, he’s an outsider. And I mean, this is his last term, right? So it’s like, if someone’s going to do it — do it.
“You want to leave a legacy, be the guy who releases all these files.”
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) appears far less enthused, as the former Trump ally has spent months pushing for a different kind of disclosure from him: his ties to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the full release of any remaining government files on the case.
“I really don’t care about the UFO files,” Greene wrote Friday on X. “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.”
She concluded, “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.”