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President Trump told CBS News‘ “60 Minutes” that Air Force pilots have described a round object flying past an F-22 fighter jet at three times the plane’s speed, an account he gave while describing himself as a skeptic on UFOs.
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Shop NowThe remarks came in a wide-ranging interview with correspondent Ross Douthat, recorded at the White House on Friday and published by CBS on Sunday, November 8. It was Trump’s first sit-down interview since the midterm elections, and it also covered immigration, corruption, Iran, artificial intelligence, possible successors and his own mortality.
Douthat asked whether anything Trump had seen or been told suggested there was more to unidentified objects than people enjoying looking at the sky. Trump said he is “not too much of a believer,” but recalled meeting Air Force pilots in the Oval Office during his first term and “a little bit” of his second.
He called the pilots “really good, solid people” and “the real deal,” and said they were not the kind of people anyone would call conspiracy theorists. They told him, he said, “things that are very strange.”
Trump described one encounter involving an F-22, which he called “the best there is.” In his telling, something went past the pilots at three times their speed. “It’s not aerodynamic, it’s round,” he said. Fox News Digital said it had reached out to the White House for comment on the account.
The account is secondhand. Trump is relaying what pilots told him, and the meetings he described took place over his two terms rather than at a new briefing. According to Fox News, he did not identify the pilots or say when or where the encounter happened, and nothing in the interview establishes what the object was.
Douthat then raised claims from whistleblowers that the government runs a secret UFO program that even presidents may not know about. Trump said he had not heard that. “But if there is I’m gonna find out about it right after this interview,” he said.
Fox News noted the remarks came weeks after the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) released a batch of declassified records. One 2026 federal account in that material described a silent, black triangular object that accelerated into a canyon. It was never identified, and its speed was estimated by witnesses rather than measured by instruments.
