President Donald Trump has said US Air Force pilots told him a round object flew past an F-22 fighter jet at about three times the jet's speed, in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes that aired on Sunday.

Trump described himself as "not too much of a believer" in UFOs, but said the pilots had told him "things that are very strange" during meetings in the Oval Office in his first term and, to a lesser extent, his second.

What Trump said

Correspondent Ross Douthat asked Trump whether anything he had seen, heard or been told suggested there was more behind unidentified objects in the sky than ordinary explanations. Trump pointed to his conversations with the pilots, whom he called "great, great pilots" and "the real deal".

"They're flying an F-22, which is the best there is, the fastest, the best plane that anyone's ever seen," Trump said. "And something goes by them at three times their speed. And it's round. It's not aerodynamic."

Trump did not identify the pilots, and he did not say when or where the encounter is supposed to have taken place. He also offered no radar data, photographs or other records to support the account, and he suggested himself that the object could have been a comet, saying: "So that's the mystery."

No evidence of a secret programme

Douthat then asked Trump about claims by alleged whistleblowers that the government operates a secret programme studying UFOs that even presidents may not know about.

"No, and I haven't heard that," Trump said. "But if there is, I'm going to find out about it right after this interview." He added that there are "a lot of very solid people" who believe such claims are true, while remaining sceptical himself.

The account Trump described is secondhand: he said he heard it from pilots, but the interview did not establish whether those pilots witnessed the same incident, or connect the description to any documented case. Nothing in the interview amounts to confirmation that an extraordinary aircraft exists.

What the Pentagon files show

Trump's remarks come weeks after the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office released a batch of recently declassified records detailing UFO sightings spanning decades. The seventh batch of files was released on 23 October and contains 28 documents from the FBI, the Department of Defense, NASA and the State Department.

Among them was a 2026 account from federal law enforcement agents who reported seeing a matte-black triangular object rise above a mountain ridge, hover silently and then accelerate into a canyon at a speed they compared to a fighter jet. The object was never identified, and the Pentagon report noted that its speed was estimated by witnesses rather than measured by instruments.

The 60 Minutes interview, recorded at the White House on the Friday before it aired, was Trump's first sit-down interview since last week's midterm elections, in which his Republican Party lost control of both houses of Congress.