Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
The Trump administration registered aliens.gov on Tuesday. The job fell to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is either a sign that no one else was available to do it or that the administration considers alien disclosure a cybersecurity matter. Both explanations are troubling.
"We're getting a website?" (fotokitas/depositphotos)
The move follows President Trump’s announcement last month that the government would release files related to alien life and unidentified aerial phenomena, citing “the tremendous interest shown,” presumably in distracting everyone from the Epstein Files. This is the same metric the administration uses to gauge demand for virtually everything, including TrumpRx, a direct-to-consumer prescription drug site, and the Trump Gold Card, an expedited immigration program that sounds like something you’d buy from a commercial during daytime television. Aliens.gov joins this growing family of .gov domains that read like rejected Shark Tank pitches, each one more confident and dumber than the last.
The announcement came after Trump accused former President Obama of spilling classified information during a podcast appearance in which Obama said aliens were “real.” Obama later clarified that he was trying to keep up with the speed round format, which is apparently how national security disclosures work now. He noted that while the statistical vastness of the universe makes extraterrestrial life probable, the distances involved make contact unlikely, and that he saw no evidence of aliens during his presidency. It was the most reasonable thing anyone had said on the subject in months, which is probably why it satisfied no one.
Trump himself has maintained a carefully noncommittal position, telling reporters he doesn’t know if aliens are real but has met “serious people” who described encounters. He did not name the serious people. He did not describe the encounters. In 2024, Trump said he was not a “believer,” deploying the word as though extraterrestrial life were a lifestyle choice one could opt out of, like veganism or jazz.
Congress has held several hearings on UAPs in recent years, during which retired military officials alleged that elements of the government conducted disinformation campaigns against UAP whistleblowers, which is the kind of sentence that either means something terrifying or nothing at all, depending on how much sleep you’ve had recently. Former Defense Department official Luis Elizondo claimed the U.S. and its adversaries possessed UAP technologies, a statement that went largely unchallenged because, by that point, the hearings had reached the portion where everyone stares at the table.
The government sure does love its redactions these days. (GoDaddy)
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s own 2024 report from the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, a name that sounds like it was generated by an AI asked to produce the most bureaucratic phrase possible, found no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology. It did, however, flag 21 cases with “anomalous characteristics,” which is the government’s way of saying “we don’t know, but officially.”
Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has been leading the push for the release of the Epstein files, responded to the aliens.gov news by calling it “the ultimate weapon of mass distraction,” adding that the Epstein files “aren’t going away… even for aliens.” This was the most grounded statement anyone in government made all week, and it came from Massie, which tells you everything about the week.
No timeline has been given for when aliens.gov will go live. CISA hasn’t commented. The domain sits in a registrar, registered and inert, like a business card for a company that hasn’t decided what it sells yet. Somewhere in Washington, someone who was hired to protect the nation’s digital infrastructure is now responsible for a website about aliens, and presumably has updated their LinkedIn accordingly.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
