Secretary of State Marco Rubio defends UFO film remarks

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is standing by statements he made several years ago, questioning whether unidentified flying objects may be otherworldly visitors.

Mr. Rubio said on Fox News Channel that his comments in the new documentary “Age of Disclosure” appear to have been selectively edited.

The documentary quotes some 30 mainly former officials in alleging a decadeslong cover-up by the U.S. government regarding UFO crashes, technology and even alien bodies. The CIA and the Pentagon supposedly directed the cover-up.

Mr. Rubio is the most prominent of those interviewed and stated in the film that there have been “repeated instances of something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities … is not ours and we don’t know whose it is.”

Asked about the remarks on Tuesday, Mr. Rubio said, “I’m not disavowing that. It was an interview that was done almost, like, maybe three or four years ago when I was in the Senate.”

The film, however, identifies Mr. Rubio as secretary of state.

Mr. Rubio said he was describing allegations made by people who had come forward, including military pilots and senior military officers who stated that government UFO programs existed that “not even presidents were made aware of.”

“So I was describing what people had said to me, not things that I had firsthand knowledge of in that regard,” Mr. Rubio said. “A little bit of selective editing, but it’s OK because you’re trying to sell a show there.”

The secretary said he has not seen the documentary but said, “There have been things that fly over the airspace, restricted airspace, be it where we’re conducting military exercises or the like, and everyone in the government says they’re not ours.

“And so what I worry most about, just me personally, is that some adversary — another country, for example — has developed some asymmetric capability for surveillance or the like that we just are not prepared for,” he said.

“We’re looking for missiles and fighter jets, and they’re coming at us with drones and balloons.”

Mr. Rubio noted that the North American Aerospace Defense Command began searching for high-altitude balloons in 2023 after China sent a spy balloon that went largely undetected across the U.S.

“All of a sudden, they spotted a bunch of balloons flying overhead, and 90% of them were innocent things; a couple of them were Chinese,” he said.

“But we never looked for balloons because our radars aren’t trained for that,” he said.

Mr. Rubio said some of the claims made by naval aviators and people with high-level security clearances were “pretty spectacular,” although he said he is not calling them liars.

“So we have people with very high jobs in the U.S. government that are either (a) liars; (b) crazy; or (c) telling the truth, and two of those three options are not good. I don’t know the answer,” he said.

The Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which investigates what it calls unidentified anomalous phenomena, has stated it found no evidence of extraterrestrial origins for the phenomena.