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Nov. 21, 2025, 6:22 PM ESTBy Austin MullenWhat does the U.S. government know about “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs), aliens and an alleged global alien technology arms race?A brand-new documentary claims to have an answer: more than it’s telling the public.On Tuesday, filmmaker Dan Farah and a group of the film’s subjects screened “The Age of Disclosure” at New York City’s Intrepid Museum aboard the decommissioned USS Intrepid aircraft carrier.The documentary is described by its filmmakers as a look at “an 80-year global cover-up of non-human intelligent life and a secret war among major nations to reverse engineer advanced technology of non-human origin.” It features interviews with more than 30 “U.S. government, military and intelligence community insiders.”“This is one of the most important documentaries ever made,” Jay Stratton, a former director of the covert Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, said at the screening, where a number of stars, including “Karate Kid” and “Cobra Kai” star Ralph Macchio and actor Adrian Martinez, were in attendance.“It will make a huge impact on humanity,” added Stratton, who is featured in the film.A screening of “The Age of Disclosure” at New York City’s Intrepid Museum on Tuesday.Austin Mullen / NBC NewsThe film, which first premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in March, makes its case through a combination of video evidence taken from various military cameras and firsthand accounts from members of the intelligence community who detail declassified events they claim to have witnessed during their time in military service while either on the ground or flying aircraft.“These are otherworldly things that are performing maneuvers that haven’t been seen,” U.S. Rep. André Carson, D-Ind., says in the documentary.Large shapes the size of football fields floating in midair above U.S. nuclear missile sites and aircraft able to travel over 30,000 mph are just a few of the UAPs — a term that the government now favors over the older term “UFOs” — described in their accounts.From left, David Fravor, Dan Farah and Ryan Graves attend “The Age of Disclosure” New York premiere on Tuesday.Dia Dipasupil / Getty ImagesWhile the UAPs they describe often differed in size, shape and movement, they all had one thing in common: The U.S. government had no explanation for what they were or where they were from — or at least not publicly.The film also alleges the existence of an ongoing arms race between the U.S., Russia and China, set off by the discovery of supposed crashed UAPs, with each nation hoping to be the first to crack into alien technology to reverse-engineer it for human use.In the documentary, Secretary of State Marco Rubio says there is a bipartisan effort to push for the declassification of government intelligence related to UAPs. “It’s just not an issue, at least as of yet, in this country, that lends itself to some sort of partisan or ideological divide,” he says in the film.Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., have also called for learning more about the government’s investigation into UAPs.Earlier this year, Burchett introduced the UAP Transparency Act, which aims to require “the President to direct each federal agency to declassify all agency records related to UAP and make such records available on a public website of the agency.”“We’ve been fighting this battle, some of y’all, for 30 years, and maybe longer,” Burchett said during a House Oversight Committee hearing in September. “The government has something, and they need to turn it over to us.”At the screening, where some attendees wore alien-themed outfits, Stratton stressed the importance of the documentary’s serious tone, noting the decades of skepticism and public stigma faced by people who speak out about their experiences with UAPs.Retired Navy Cmdr. David Fravor, whose military aircraft captured video, featured in the film, of his own purported UAP encounter, told the crowd that it takes “a lot of guts” for people to come forward on the record about their experiences.“Some people claim it would cost them their lives if they spoke out about these things,” Rubio says in the film.Due to these safety concerns, Burchett said he also introduced the UAP Whistleblower Protection Act “to provide whistleblower protections to Federal personnel for disclosing the use of Federal taxpayer funds to evaluate or research unidentified anomalous phenomenon material.”Farah, who spent three years making “The Age of Disclosure,” said he hopes the film leads to a national conversation that “puts pressure on the executive branch to reveal the truth” about UAPs and aliens.“Reach out to your elected representatives,” Stratton also said.On Friday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named “The Age of Disclosure” among the 201 documentaries eligible for Oscar consideration.It’s now available to rent or buy on Amazon’s Prime Video and is showing in select theaters.Austin Mullen

What does the U.S. government know about “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs), aliens and an alleged global alien technology arms race

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Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleNov. 22, 2025, 5:30 AM ESTBy David IngramElon Musk can’t stop posting about the political fringe.In recent weeks, the world’s wealthiest person used X to post about immigrants to Britain, saying they will cause the country’s collapse. He posted about examples of violent crime in Minnesota and South Carolina — where he does not live — and about judges in California and New York he believes are too lenient. Musk also smeared trans people, complained about Black-on-white crime, stoked fear about the end of civilization and shared his thoughts about the race of child actors.Musk posted about all those topics and more in a recent one-month period, during which NBC News tracked and analyzed all of his posts for an in-depth look at where the tech billionaire focuses his attention online.Musk left his role in the second Trump administration in May to focus on his companies, and since then he has continued to share a torrent of content on his social media site. Between Sept. 17 and Oct. 17, Musk posted, replied to or shared content 1,716 times on his X account — about 55 times a day, on average.Some of his messages invoke extreme ideas, like the antisemitic “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which says there is a top-down plot organized by Jewish people to replace the white populations of the United States and Europe with nonwhite people. Musk backed the same false theory two years ago, causing a backlash among X advertisers. Though he later said he was “aspirationally Jewish” and not antisemitic, he continues to share the conspiracy theory. He also shared the baseless conspiracy theory that the FBI staged the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.An NBC News analysis of his online activity shows that while Musk may have shifted some of his day-to-day attention back to his companies, his public presence on X is a mix of promoting his business and weighing in on issues that are typically the focus of the far right.Nearly half of his posts, 49%, during the period reviewed by NBC News were about politically charged topics. NBC News classified a post as political if it related to a government official, a political commentator or a policy debate.Musk’s presence on X serves to maintain his political influence as he considers whether and how to become involved in the 2026 midterms or the presidential campaign that will follow.Musk did not respond to a request for comment on the NBC News analysis.“He can make himself inescapable,” said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego.“Regardless of his links at any time to Donald Trump or to Democrats, he still has the potential to capture eyeballs and thus potentially votes,” he said.About 41% of his posts during the same time period were about his companies. His AI startup, xAI, was his most frequent business topic, coming up in 21% of his posts. He touched on automaker Tesla in about 11% of posts and on rocket company SpaceX about 6% of the time.Taken together, the posts offer a near real-time look at what is on the mind of one of the richest and most powerful people in the world as he oversees buzzy companies that fulfill major government contracts or move markets as part of the “magnificent seven.” This month, Tesla shareholders approved a new CEO pay package that could be worth up to $1 trillion if the company meets a series of benchmarks. Musk counts more than 229 million followers on X, and his posts regularly get millions of views.“He’s not just the wealthiest person alive. He’s also one of the most influential, even if he has no formal role in government,” said Rob Lalka, a business professor at Tulane University who studies the tech industry’s impact on politics.“He’s both really good at spotting what will soon be trending and also being one of the people who is defining that in this cultural moment,” he said.During the month that NBC News analyzed, Musk engaged with ideas on the fringe of politics, including an unapologetic attitude toward past British colonialism and a proposed nationwide purge of judges based on a Central American precedent. In an offhand remark, he appeared to claim Mars as legal territory of the United States.“That is not what most average people are sitting around spending their time on, especially in an economy where real wages are not great,” Lalka said. “Most Americans are worried about the price of eggs right now.”Musk, who said he voted for Democrats in 2016 and 2020, has shifted sharply to the right in recent years. During last year’s campaign, he aligned himself with Trump, made appearances in key swing states and poured more than $290 million into Republican efforts. He then joined Trump’s administration as a White House adviser and the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).Musk’s foray into government was rough. He repeatedly clashed with other Trump administration officials over the extent of his authority, DOGE did not drastically affect the federal budget deficit, and the cuts it did make have been blamed by public health researchers for hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide.Tesla, where he is CEO, became a political target, and shares of the company took a beating. In May, he said he was leaving the administration to spend his time at Tesla and limit any more government work to a day or two a week. When he left the White House, Tesla investors cheered.With his White House stint in the rearview mirror, Musk said in September that he was “burning the midnight oil” at work, with weekend meetings related to Tesla and xAI as he crisscrossed the country to visit employees in person.“Daddy is very much home,” he wrote on Sept. 15.Musk also took to his social media platform. One in eight of his posts in the month NBC News reviewed were about crime — slightly more than the share devoted to Tesla — even as crime rates continued to fall. In a Gallup poll in October, only 6% of Americans listed crime as the most important problem facing the country.His posts were often targeted at influencing current events. In early October, before Trump decided against sending federal troops to San Francisco, Musk helped to fuel a narrative that crime was out of control in the city. He posted about crime there 13 times over two days, despite San Francisco experiencing the fewest homicides since 1954.“I think he is mostly speaking to people who already agree with him,” said Darren Linvill, a co-director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub. “He’s not necessarily persuading anyone to come join him. But that still serves a function to maintain his influence and presence as a political actor.”Musk has gone after judges and prosecutors who he said were too lenient. He posted about judges 52 times, including twice when he called for the wholesale removal of “corrupt” judges and cited purges in El Salvador as a model for the United States.Often, Musk focused on cases where the criminal defendants were Black, immigrants or both, and where the victims were white, appearing to play into narratives about interracial crime that are common in conservative media. Experts say there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave, and most violent crime occurs between a victim and a perpetrator of the same race, according to Justice Department survey data.In the 31 days that NBC News analyzed, Musk posted about violent crime every day but two.Immigration was the second-most frequent political topic on Musk’s mind. About 8% of his posts touched on the subject, often aligning with the Trump administration’s own harsh language. He shared immigration-related posts from Vice President JD Vance four times, from the official White House account twice and from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller once. Musk also accused officials in Democratic-led cities of “treason” for resisting immigration enforcement.Musk’s opposition to immigration was global, criticizing politicians in Europe and Asia for allowing in migrants. He warned that mass immigration would “destroy Japan” and lead to “the end of Britain.” Musk, a native South African who became a U.S. citizen in 2002, is an immigrant himself.Joan Donovan, an assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University, said Musk’s frequent posts related to the decline of Western civilization are a thinly veiled callout to racial politics.“This is, of course, a dog whistle about white identity politics and for people who are expressly proud of being white and unapologetic about their own beliefs in white supremacy,” she said.She said that Musk’s embrace of fringe topics, such as a purge of judges, is the kind of content that used to be confined to the internet’s darkest corners.“It’s really reflective of some of the grossest places on Reddit or the type of posting you’d see on 4chan. It’s become a reality-distortion machine,” she said.But lately, racist rhetoric has been surging in the open, with white nationalists such as Nick Fuentes finding more mainstream footing on Musk’s X and in other venues.Race was a major theme in Musk’s posts. Musk, or those whose posts he shared, often depicted Black people in a negative light, and they often did so regardless of the topic at hand.Photos of Black criminal defendants appear to get Musk’s attention. Forty-one times during the month — more than once a day, on average — Musk shared or replied to a post that had an image of a Black person charged with a crime.He posted about alleged Black criminals in Florida, Germany, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina and elsewhere, and in many of the cases the defendants were charged with harming white victims. Sometimes, Musk would include an ominous warning such as, “He will kill again.” One post from another user, the actor James Woods, had eight photos: four Black defendants and four white victims. Woods wrote: “Sad.” Musk replied: “Yes.”Once, when an account denounced six amendments to the U.S. Constitution, including the post-Civil War 15th Amendment, which guarantees the right to vote regardless of race, and the 19th Amendment, which guarantees the right to vote regardless of sex, Musk responded with the “tears of joy” emoji. And on five occasions, Musk replied to or shared content from two accounts that regularly post white supremacist views.There were six posts where Musk portrayed Black people in a positive light: two from a Black influencer saying that Democrats had failed Black Americans, and four posts in which Black people praised conservative influencer Charlie Kirk after his death.Musk spent a lot of time posting about perceived enemies: About 1 in 5 of his posts during the month, or 21%, fell into that category, which for Musk included the news media, civil rights organizations, Hollywood, OpenAI and numerous people who identify as transgender.Beyond politics, one of Musk’s frequent topics is himself. About 6% of his posts during the month referenced his own quotes, videos of interviews he has given or other bits of his life story and the mythology surrounding it. Sometimes he engages in conversation with accounts such as @ElonClipsX, @muskonomy or @muskosophy.When the account @muskosophy posted a quote of his in September — “You don’t have a soul, you are a soul” — Musk responded, “Yes.”David IngramDavid Ingram is a tech reporter for NBC News.Bruna Horvath contributed.

An NBC News analysis of one month of Musk’s social media posts shows what’s been on his mind, including a broad cross-section of fringe political topics.

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Nov. 22, 2025, 8:37 AM ESTBy Mithil AggarwalA U.S.-led peace plan that mirrors several key Russian demands has sent ripples across Europe, with leaders meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in South Africa this weekend in the hopes of making the plan more favorable to Kyiv.”We must all work together, with both the U.S. and Ukraine, to secure a just and lasting peace once and for all,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Saturday ahead of the summit, which the U.S. is not attending.Allies will discuss the current proposal and look at how they can “strengthen this plan for the next phase of negotiations,” he said.President Donald Trump has set Thanksgiving as the deadline for Ukraine to agree to the 28-point framework, which suggests that Russia could be granted more territory than it holds, limits placed on Ukraine’s army, and Kyiv prevented from ever joining NATO — Moscow’s long-sought demands.The U.S. proposals do include a security guarantee modeled on NATO’s Article 5, which would commit the U.S. and European allies to treat a future attack on Ukraine as an attack on the entire trans-Atlantic community, according to a U.S. official, though there are few specifics on what that would entail.Top Ukrainian and U.S. officials will meet in Switzerland to discuss “possible parameters of a future peace,” Rustem Umerov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, wrote on Telegram Saturday. Separately, Zelenskyy’s office said Saturday that the delegation has been confirmed for the talks, which “will take place in the coming days.” President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy.Nicolas Economou / NurPhoto via Getty ImagesThe White House has described the plan as “the best win-win scenario, where both parties gain more than they must give,” saying the proposals were crafted with input from Russia and Ukraine. However, analysts say the plan could amount to a dangerous capitulation for Ukraine, which has previously rejected plans that would require recognizing Russia’s illegal annexations of the entire eastern Donetsk region and Crimea.”Even if parts of this plan were to be shoved down Ukraine’s throat, it would be the end of Ukraine as we know it. It’s a real capitulation,” Michael Bociurkiw, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, who was in Johannesburg, told NBC News by phone.The U.S. was facilitating a “potentially disastrous surrender for Ukraine,” Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, said.”And now we will see yet another panicked scramble by European leaders to head off an outcome that would be disastrous for their own security,” he said, adding that the European response towards “repeated disastrous peace plans has been in words, not action.””There should be nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” Ursula Von der Leyen, the European Commission President, said Friday in a post on X, adding European leaders will also meet in Angola next week.Ukraine must have a “decisive voice in peace talks,” Polish President Karol Nawrocki said late Friday on X. “The price of peace cannot in any way be the achievement of strategic goals by the aggressor, and the aggressor was and remains the Russian Federation,” he added.As European leaders mulled over the plan on the G20 summit’s sidelines, notably absent was Trump, who is boycotting the event over his unfounded claims that the country’s white minority is subject to hate crimes and land grabs.While Trump initially said Vice President JD Vance would attend, he later said there would be no U.S. delegation taking part. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has an International Criminal Court warrant calling for his arrest, is also not attending.How much Europe will actually be able to influence the plan without U.S. involvement remains an open question, and one with implications for both Ukraine’s borders and peace for the broader continent.“They can’t influence this,” said Bociurkiw. “It makes NATO and Europe look weak, and Putin will go on and on to cause more disruptions,” he said.”It’s like a speed train and you have Putin and Trump on it, and then you have Zelenskyy on the departure platform and Europe stuck at the check-in counter,” he added.Giles said the military aspects of the peace plan leave Ukraine effectively defenseless against a future Russian attack.“And since Ukraine forms the front line of the defense of Europe, this is a potentially disastrous outcome for the continent as a whole,” Giles said.Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer arrives to attend a trilateral with France and Germany on the sidelines of a G20 summit to discuss a joint response to a unilateral U.S. plan for Ukraine.Leon Neal / AFP – Getty ImagesLawmakers in Ukraine aren’t particularly happy with the plan either, with Victoria Podgorna from Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy’s political party saying it was giving Russia “amnesty for launching a brutal war.”Zelenskyy said Friday he had spoken with Starmer and his counterparts in Germany and France, adding that he would also talk to Washington to ensure Kyiv’s “principled stances are taken into account.” “Ukraine may now face a very difficult choice, either losing its dignity or the risk of losing a key partner, either the difficult 28 points, or a very difficult winter,” Zelenskyy said, warning his country of a “very difficult, eventful” week ahead.Grand-parents of 7-years-old Polish citizen Amelia Grzesko, killed with her mother Oksana in a missile attack on November 19, mourn during their funeral ceremony in Ternopil, on Nov. 22, 2025.Yurko Dyachyshyn / AFP – Getty ImagesHis warning also came as Ukraine suffers setbacks on the battlefield and Zelenskyy tries to contain the fallout of a $100 million corruption scandal implicating his top officials.On Saturday, the Russian defense ministry said it had captured two additional villages in eastern Ukraine, one in the Donetsk and another in Zaporizhzhia. Russia’s gains, both on the battlefield and in the proposed plan, have drawn a positive response from the Kremlin, where Putin has said it could “form the basis of a final peace settlement,” though adding it was not “substantively” discussed with Russia.Meanwhile, two people were killed in Russia’s southern city of Syzran in a Ukrainian strike on energy facilities, the regional governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev said Saturday on Russia’s state-backed Max messenger app.Mithil AggarwalMithil Aggarwal is a Hong Kong-based reporter/producer for NBC News.

A U.S.-led peace plan that mirrors several key Russian demands has sent ripples across Europe, with leaders meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in South Africa this weekend.

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Nov. 22, 2025, 6:45 AM ESTBy Denise ChowAs representatives from nearly 200 nations were wrapping up talks at the United Nations’ COP30 climate summit this week, the United States was not only absent, the Trump administration also introduced a series of sweeping proposals to roll back environmental protections and encourage fossil fuel drilling.The United Nations Climate Change Conference ended Friday in the Brazilian city of Belém, where delegates gathered to hammer out a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels, boost climate action and limit global warming.For the first time in the summit’s history, the U.S. — one of the top emitters of greenhouse gases — did not send a delegation. Instead, the Trump administration this week announced a plan to open up new oil drilling off the coasts of California and Florida for the first time in decades and proposed rule changes to weaken the Endangered Species Act and limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to protect wetlands and streams.“These rules double down on the administration’s refusal to confront the climate crisis in a serious way and, in fact, move us in the opposite direction,” said Jessie Ritter, associate vice president of waters and coasts for the National Wildlife Federation, a conservation group.Indigenous people take part in a demonstration during the COP30 UN Climate Change Conference on Nov. 17.Pablo Porciuncula / AFP / Getty ImagesThe White House told NBC News Friday that this week’s “historic” announcements aim to “further President Trump’s American energy dominance agenda.”“President Trump is reversing government overreach, restoring energy security, and protecting American jobs by rolling back excessive, burdensome regulations and creating new opportunities to ‘DRILL, BABY, DRILL,’” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. “President Trump serves the American people, not radical climate activists who have fallen victim to the biggest scam of the century.”Ritter said the new proposals signal to the world just how much the U.S. has stepped back from any meaningful climate action.“I doubt that this surprises folks who have been watching in the international arena,” she said. “But it’s unfortunate, given the example the U.S. sets and what our leadership, or lack thereof, emboldens other countries to do.”The Trump administration’s announcement on Thursday that it intends to open up roughly 1.27 billion acres of coastal U.S. waters for oil drilling drew bipartisan pushback.Although the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association for the oil and gas industry, hailed the program as a “historic step toward unleashing our nation’s vast offshore resources,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) pushed to uphold the current moratorium on drilling, which Trump extended during his first term.“I have been speaking to @SecretaryBurgum and made my expectations clear that this moratorium must remain in place, and that in any plan, Florida’s coasts must remain off the table for oil drilling to protect Florida’s tourism, environment, and military training opportunities,” Scott wrote Thursday on X, referring to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Across the country, California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on X that “Donald Trump’s idiotic proposal to sell off California’s coasts to his Big Oil donors is dead in the water.” “We will not stand by as our coastal economy and communities are put in danger,” he said.The drilling directive came just three days after the Trump administration proposed major limits to the Clean Water Act of 1972 that would undo protections from pollution and runoff for most of the country’s small streams and wetlands. The rule would narrow the definition of which bodies qualify as “waters of the United States” under the act.If finalized, the changes would mean that the fewest freshwater resources would be under federal protection since the law was enacted, according to Jon Devine, who heads the water policy team at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group.“By EPA’s own estimate, only about 19% of the country’s wetlands would be protected against unregulated destruction and development if this were finalized,” Devin said.EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin during a cabinet meeting at the White House on Aug. 26.Aaron Schwartz / Bloomberg / Getty ImagesWetlands act as buffers against flooding by absorbing and storing water during extreme rainfall and other high runoff events. As the world warms, coastal and inland flooding is expected to become more frequent and severe.“Many of the places that we already have in the U.S. that are increasingly flood-prone due to climate change are going to be even more in harm’s way,” Devine said.Wetlands and streams also feed into other bodies of water that serve as critical drinking water supplies across the country, so critics fear the policy could make drinking water unsafe in some communities.The third major environmental rollback announced this week was a set of four rules that would erode protections under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. The proposed changes aim to make it easier to remove species classified as threatened or endangered and harder to add new protected species and their habitats to the list. The rules, if passed, would also allow the government to consider “economic impacts” in decisions to list or de-list species.Red wolves shown at the North Carolina Museum of Life + Science in 2017. Salwan Georges / The Washington Post / Getty Images fileTaken together, Ritter said, these three proposals are consistent with the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda.“These decisions prioritize short-term gain, often for a few industries and special interests, at the expense of things that have been widely bipartisan and important issues for people for decades,” Ritter said.The impacts of the changes might not all be apparent right away, she added, but the scale of the long-term consequences could be immense.“It’s truly not an exaggeration that this is going to touch all Americans in some way,” she said. “Everything is connected, and it’s hubris to think that we can have these massive negative effects on our streams and wetlands, our animals, our coastal waters, without impacts to humans.”Denise ChowDenise Chow is a science and space reporter for NBC News.

As the UN Climate Change Conference was happening in Brazil, the Trump administration released proposals to open up offshore drilling and roll back protections for wetlands and endangered animals.

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