White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Denies Extraterrestrial Evidence
On 5 November 2011 the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy formally responded to a 'We the People' petition, declaring that the US government had no evidence of extraterrestrial life, no evidence of contact, and that no evidence was being withheld from the public.
Background
The Petitions
In late 2011 two petitions uploaded to the Obama White House's 'We the People' online platform called on the administration to formally disclose any government knowledge of extraterrestrial intelligence or contact. Both petitions crossed the threshold of public signatures required for an official response.
The Response
On 5 November 2011 Phil Larson, a space policy expert in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), issued a brief formal statement titled Searching for ET, But No Evidence Yet. It stated in plain language that the US government had "no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race" and that "there's no credible evidence of extraterrestrial presence being withheld from the public's eyes."
Later Controversy
In the decade that followed, the statement aged poorly. By 2017 the New York Times had reported on the Pentagon's secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP); by 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had issued a preliminary UAP assessment acknowledging hundreds of unexplained encounters; and by 2022–2023 Congress had established an official All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Coulthart in In Plain Sight treats the 2011 OSTP response as a concrete example of public denials that were later contradicted by the US government's own disclosures.