Trump won't even tell his son if there were aliens at Roswell


President Trump won't even tell his eldest son what did or did not happen during the Roswell "UFO incident" of 1947.
During a Father's Day interview on Thursday evening, Donald Trump Jr. pushed his dad for answers, telling him that "the only thing I want to know [is] … would you ever open up Roswell and let us know what's really going on there?"
"So many people ask me that question," Trump said, adding: "I won't talk to you about what I know about it, but it's very interesting."
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Trump, for what it's worth, has long claimed to be a skeptic about UFOs, with the New York Post noting that he told reporters last year that "people are saying they're seeing UFOs. Do I believe it? Not particularly." During her 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton notably promised to "open up government files" about hypothetical aliens, including releasing information about Area 51, where conspiracy theorists claim the government took material recovered from the Roswell site. Last summer, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders also assured he'd release any government information about aliens if he was elected in 2020.
In 1947, local reporters in New Mexico claimed that a "flying saucer" crashed on a nearby ranch. An FBI memo from 1950, released in 2011, also echoed claims that "an investigator for the Air Forces states that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico." Conspiracy theorists allege that the U.S. government subsequently conducted a complicated cover-up of evidence of an alien spacecraft, although the U.S. military has repeatedly debunked the theory, and said that what actually crashed was a nuclear test surveillance balloon.
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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.
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