"There is an agreement between the U.S. government and aliens": Former Israeli space security chief's wild claim

This might just be the wildest alien theory you have come across to date, and it came straight from Haim Eshed, the former head of Israel’s Defense Ministry’s space directorate. 

During an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot in 2020, Eshed said that aliens not only exist but have also been in contact with his country and the United States for years.

"There is an agreement between the U.S. government and the aliens. They signed a contract with us to do experiments here," he said, adding that the agreement covered an “underground base in the depths of Mars,” which houses American astronauts and alien representatives. These aliens, Eshed alleged, are from a “galactic federation” that is equally curious about humanity and is trying to understand the fabric of the universe.

If the U.S. government is involved in a secret cooperation with a “galactic federation,” then naturally the president should also be in the know. Eshed claimed that Donald Trump, who’s currently in his second term as the president of the country, was “on the verge of revealing” the existence of the extraterrestrial beings but was stopped by the galactic federation, which apparently wanted to prevent mass hysteria. 

“The Unidentified Flying Objects have asked not to publish that they are here, humanity is not ready yet,” said Eshed, who had overseen the launch of Israel’s first satellite, Ofek 1, in 1988, and numerous others into space. “They have been waiting until today for humanity to develop and reach a stage where we will understand, in general, what space and spaceships are,” he added.

As for why he had not spoken about any of this before, Eshed’s explanation, in a way, echoed the opinion of the so-called galactic federation about humanity. "If I had come up with what I'm saying today five years ago, I would have been hospitalized," he told Yediot. "Today, they're already talking differently. I have nothing to lose. I've received my degrees and awards, I am respected in universities abroad."

Interestingly, about a year before Eshed’s interview came out, Trump had signed the National Defense Authorization Act on December 20, 2019, to establish the U.S. Space Force, which became the first new branch of the armed services since 1947. 

“Space is the world's newest warfighting domain," Trump said at the signing. "Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital. We're leading, but we're not leading by enough, and very shortly, we'll be leading by a lot.”

The claims made by Eshed, who was 87 at the time, sparked a joke fest on social media, with many new accounts claiming to be representatives of the so-called galactic federation. Meanwhile, Isaac Ben-Israel, the former chairman of the Israel Space Agency, thought Eshed had gone overboard with his claims.

“Is there intelligent life outside [Earth]? 10 years ago, most scientists believed chances are very low. We now believe chances are significant,” he told The Times of Israel. “This doesn’t mean there’s a ‘Galactic Federation’ and they landed on Earth—this is too much.”

In May this year, the U.S. Department of War began releasing never-before-seen files on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) as part of the Trump administration’s transparency push. But the files are far from conclusive evidence of alien life.

The image, released by the Department of War, is an artistic interpretation of a reported incident potentially involving UAP in the western United States in 2026