An Australian teenage girl’s death, suspected to be preceded by consensual “choking” during sex, has renewed calls to ban showing the act in porn.

This latest tragedy, reportedly believed to involve sexual strangulation, comes just months after the UK banned porn showing the practice. But despite all the noise, most people still aren’t aware of just how dangerous the trend is.

Sexual strangulation or “choking” during sex, as it’s referred to colloquially, has become wildly popular—especially among adults aged 18 to 35, despite the risk of severe injury, brain damage, and even death. Some researchers argue that porn is to blame for that normalization, but members of the adult industry say that banning depictions of choking won’t stop this kind of content from flourishing or serve as the kind of sex education and media literacy the public sorely needs.

“With the misinformation that’s out there, especially online, many people do think that maybe at lighter pressures they might be ‘safe,’ and that’s not the case,” says Debby Herbenick, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health and one of the leading researchers on sexual strangulation. Herbenick cautions that applying sustained pressure to the front and sides of the throat—via your hands, an object, or otherwise—can lead to blood clots and stroke, tears in the carotid arteries, vision impairment, and cumulative brain injuries.

“It’s these things that we wouldn’t even notice,” she says. “Those tiny, incremental changes in your vision, or your brain, or so on.”

Or, in the most extreme cases, death. Pressing on the front of the throat can lead to airway collapse, Herbenick says. Two weeks ago, a 16-year-old girl in Sydney passed out after authorities believe she was strangled by her equally young partner during sex. She died after being taken to a local hospital in critical condition, and the investigation is ongoing. It’s unknown what her exact injuries were.

The Australian Social Services Minister has since said the government is “very seriously” looking at efforts to ban pornographic depictions of choking in sex, in line with the country’s recently passed age-verification laws that ban social media for children under the age of 16. But critics of these social media bans say they don’t actually work and make it harder for teens to access news and information they need, including sex education around the dangers of choking and strangulation.

The data regarding rates of young people choking and being choked during sex can appear staggering. In Herbenick’s 2021 survey of nearly 5,000 college students in the US, 58 percent of women had been choked during sex and a quarter had been first choked by age 17. Researchers in Australia similarly found rates of around half of people aged 18 to 35 engaging in the practice. Herbenick found that women are usually the ones being choked by men during heterosexual sex and that sexual and gender minorities are also more likely to be choked during sex.

“There are other people who say ‘I asked them to choke me or I said it was OK, but then they really pushed past my limits or it was a lot harder than I expected, or I asked them to stop and they didn’t,’” Herbenick says. She also says that while some young men enjoy the act, others “tell us that they don’t want to be choking their partners, but they think they’re supposed to, or they get asked all the time.”

Most of the self-reported occurrences of sexual strangulation among US college students Herbenick surveyed were described as consensual, but when choking is nonconsensual, it can be even more dangerous. In fact, strangulation is one of the strongest predictors for murder in an abusive relationship.

It’s important to distinguish between the different types of intimate partner strangulation: as a form of abuse, nonconsensual introduction of strangulation into what may have started as a consensual hookup, fully consensual choking, and fictional depictions of choking, like what is usually happening in legal pornography and television. But with the exception of staged or implied choking (like placing a hand over a partner’s neck without actually applying pressure), all of these kinds of strangulation carry major and even deadly health risks for the person on the receiving end.

Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University whose work has contributed to pornography regulation in the UK for 20 years, says the amount of porn involving strangulation has risen over the past few decades and corresponds with an increase in children viewing strangulation content.

“If you ask young people, ‘Where do you get your ideas for sex or sexual activity?’ they say ‘porn.’ And you think, ‘Well, yeah, of course you do,’” McGlynn says. “I think its ubiquity in porn does mean that’s why we see large numbers of young people engaging in this practice consensually, because they think through scripts they’ve seen in mainstream porn that it’s normal, it’s expected.”

The UK’s recent ban on porn showing strangulation or suffocation falls under the country’s Online Safety Act, which requires social media platforms, search engines, and other web services to proactively remove illegal material and employ controversial age-verification measures. According to McGlynn, the strangulation ban was adopted in April but hasn’t been implemented or enforced yet, meaning the government has yet to take action against any companies or individuals.

“The platforms aren’t going to act in and of themselves,” she says. “They’re only going to act if they think the regulator is going to take action against them.”

McGlynn believes that within a few years of the ban on strangulation in porn actually being enforced, a new generation of young people may grow up without seeing choking as a standard part of sex. It’s an optimistic view—one that isn’t shared by everyone.

Cherie DeVille, a well-known pornographic actress, points to the fallout from age-verification laws—requiring proof of age to access adult content—as an example of the futility of banning porn. Consumers can simply use VPNs to get around local laws and turn to the unregulated world of sexually explicit content, often hosted by foreign platforms that don’t comply with any of the laws that major companies are forced to obey.

DeVille, who was a physical therapist prior to entering the adult film industry, describes how talent liaisons assist in the negotiation of what is allowed in specific scenes before filming, including choking, which she says never involves putting actual pressure on the trachea.

Pornhub echoed its consent policy for performers in an email statement to WIRED, writing, “We can be confident that the acts that appear in our content are completely consensual, unlike other platforms that don’t have the same consent requirements.” Meanwhile, adult creators on OnlyFans are wary of posting anything involving choking after the service was forced to clamp down on most hardcore content in 2021 to avoid banks freezing payments. (OnlyFans didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether choking and sexual strangulation are technically banned on the platform.)

While Herbenick says that young men are more likely to learn about sexual strangulation from porn, young women are more likely to learn about it from memes, mainstream entertainment, or even erotic fanfiction about One Direction. HBO director Sam Levinson featured it in early episodes of Euphoria and The Idol. It was the opener to a chart-topping Jack Harlow song, where he crooned about choking a woman but not being a “killer.”

“Porn is an appealing boogeyman to say we can stop this by regulating this very specific type of speech, despite the fact that this is ubiquitous throughout culture,” says Mike Stabile, the director of public policy for the Free Speech Coalition, which is the nonprofit trade association for the US adult industry. “The solution is education. The solution is to talk about consent rather than try and find a singular cause that, if you were able to censor it, will solve the problem.”

Herbenick agrees about education. She says one of the biggest cultural changes we need to make is for parents to talk to their kids and teenagers about the dangers of strangulation and the type of messaging they’re consuming about choking during sex—whether it’s in porn or the Billboard Hot 100.

True diligence is following the improbable path. I read the sentence in a detective novel in childhood, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then the phrase stayed with me forever after.

For a long time I wrote True Diligence in stylized curly letters on the inside page of every notebook, or sometimes on the front cover. I had notebooks for writing down clues, because even at 9 I wanted to work for the Internal Intelligence Service. What child doesn’t secretly wish to be a spy?

We were terrified and fascinated by Service in equal measure. Service was dark cars moving down the block, men and women in forgettable clothing stopping our parents on the street for brief random interrogations. Service was the force that made people disappear—when I was in the first grade, my friend from across the street climbed into the back of a black car with her parents, and their apartment stood empty for a year before other people moved in—but also Service carried a kind of dark glamour, an aura of power that called to us.

We played Ghosts and Agents all the time, my friends and I, but eventually they drifted off into other interests and I still wanted to be a spy, so after high school I applied successfully to the Service Academy in Los Angeles. I was talented and moved through school quickly, and afterward I was posted to Fillmore, a pretty town about 80 kilometers north of LA. My parents came to visit me there in my first year.

“This is lovely, Ibari,” my mother said, when she stepped off the train. The town made a good first impression. The central station was beautiful, one of those Southern California structures with no serious boundary between indoors and out, a tiled platform that turned into a waiting area with benches, then archways opening out to the street.

My parents had been on the train since Ohio, and they looked worn and dazed, blinking in the relentless sunlight. I was only in my mid-twenties at that point, which is to say I hadn’t thought much about the reality of aging parents, and their haziness was a glimpse into a future where I was the adult and they were confused. I didn’t like it.

“Not a cloud in the sky,” my father said.

“Do we need a taxi?” my mother asked. “I wouldn’t mind walking a bit, stretching my legs.”

“My house is close,” I said. “We can easily walk there if you’d like.”

“Downtown residency permit?” my father asked, and whistled softly.

“What can I say,” I said. “I’ve been well-behaved.”

I’ve spent a long time thinking about the nature of life in a surveillance state, which is perhaps obvious given my work, but there are observations I’ve made that I share with no one, and one of them has to do with the way in a place like this, reality splits into two.

This will seem a bit obvious­—there’s your actual job, which is Service, and then there’s your cover, which is what you tell everyone you do—­but for a long period of my life, at the beginning of my career, there was truth in both versions.

At the Service Academy I’d been trained in espionage and investigation, obviously, in relevant law, in the ins and outs of running down leads, interrogation, documentation, maintaining relationships with confidential informants, etc., but also I’d earned a master’s in urban planning, and this was my cover. As far as my parents and everyone else in my life was concerned, I was an up-­and-­coming academic with a tenure-­track job at the local college. My parents didn’t know I was Service, because no one in my life knew I was Service.

Here was the branching, as I thought of it, the point where one reality split off into another: It was actually true that I was a junior professor in an urban planning department. I’d applied for and earned that position, or so I told myself—­if strings were pulled behind the scenes, that was well above my pay grade—and I took that job seriously. With that being the case, was it really just cover? It was a real job, a real life. When I introduced myself as a college instructor in urban planning, it wasn’t a lie. There was an expansiveness about it. It was like getting to live two lives at once.

But in every version of reality I had an absolutely clean record, no subversion or other crimes of any kind, which had qualified me for a permit to live in an attractive neighborhood close to downtown. My parents and I walked out of the train station and up the hill together, and as an exercise in gratitude I tried to see Central Avenue through their eyes: the double row of palm trees, the century-­old restored movie theater, the candy-­colored awnings above the shops, an overall impression of having been unmoored from time and history sometime around 1965.

“I feel like I’m in a time capsule,” my mother said, and then quickly, “In a good way, I mean. It’s nice here.”

“It is nice,” I said. I­ really did like it here, for the most part. In Fillmore, as in most backwaters without a significant history of subversion, the State operated with a fairly light touch: identity cards, neighborhood permits, and facial recognition technology, like everywhere, but none of the random interrogations and drone surveillance that one might expect in larger cities.

My father took a nap on my couch while my mother and I went for a walk. We took a circuitous route that led us back through downtown. As we turned back onto Central Avenue, my attention was diverted by a scene playing out farther up the block and across the street. A black van had pulled up in front of the florist’s. The shop had been open an hour earlier, but now a crew had gone to work on it: The sign had been painted over, and two men were carting armloads of flowers into the van. The owners—­a couple in their sixties whom I’d been surveilling for some time—­were standing nearby, seemingly in shock. A second van pulled up, and the couple were led inside. They didn’t resist.

In a moment, the two vans were gone, and with them all trace of the business and the business’s owners. The shop was locked and blank now, no merchandise, no signs, the erasure complete. I knew, because I’d reported on this couple to my supervising officer, that they’d criticized the State on social media. They might be sent to prison, or to a black site, but I thought it more likely that they’d be sent to a work camp servicing the massive agricultural operations in the valley, a decade or so of picking strawberries or kale in the sun and sleeping in locked dormitories. People were rarely able to return to their previous life after that. I didn’t expect to see them again.

“This weather’s perfect,” my mother said.

Dinner that night was at a metal table I’d purchased for my backyard grove, as I thought of it: two ancient orange trees and a lemon tree that together formed a canopy. This was my favorite place in the world, and the main reason why I’d bought the house.

“Ibari,” my mother said, “I brought something for you from home.”

Home, for them, was Ohio, where they’d moved from New York when I’d left for the academy. I’d never lived there, and hearing the place called home was obscurely irritating. My mother had brought an ancient canvas tote bag to the table—could this possibly be the same one she’d used for grocery shopping in my childhood in New York?—and from it she pulled a battered old notebook, on which TRUE DILIGENCE and associated curlicues took up the entire front cover.

“Good lord,” I said. “Where did you find that?”

“I was cleaning out the storage unit,” she said, “and thought you might like to have it. What does the phrase mean?”

“True diligence?” I was going for lightness. I felt I’d succeeded. “Just a phrase I liked when I was a little kid. I think I must have seen it on TV or read it in a book somewhere.” If asked, I could have cited the book title, the author, and possibly the page number. Why was I lying about it? Because lying was my job. I pushed this thought down.

“I opened it up,” she said, “before I knew what it was. You should’ve been a detective.”

“Why,” I said, “what’s in it?” She was passing it across the table. I opened it, and for a moment didn’t understand what I was looking at. A timetable? No, the times of day when the neighbor at the apartment building across the street entered or left the building, except it was all only between 4 pm and 6 pm, because that was the time when I was sitting at my desk by the window doing homework, between school and dinner. He came and went a lot during that period, which I’d apparently found suspicious. The heading was straightforward: Times when Andy Commidy (sp?) enters or leaves home, with separate columns for enters and leaves. His schedule was remarkably consistent. I’d started the notebook after my friend across the street had disappeared, I remembered now. I was 7. But all these years later, I couldn’t remember my friend’s name.

“Wow,” I said, “I’d forgotten what a weird kid I was.”

“You should’ve been a detective,” she said again. Could she possibly know? It wasn’t possible, I told myself, but on the other hand, how did I know my mother wasn’t Service too? One of the more exhausting aspects of life in a surveillance state is that anyone can be surveilling you at any time, including the person whom you are yourself surveilling.

“I like the academic life,” I said. “It’s peaceful.”

“Anything you did here would seem peaceful, I’d think,” my father said. “Nice little town.”

“Well, Ibari,” my mother said, and raised her wineglass. “It looks like you’ve found a quiet life in a beautiful place.”

“Here’s to that,” my father said, and I smiled and joined them in sipping wine. Why did that comment bother me so much? She’d meant it kindly. Soon enough they returned to Ohio, and I settled back into the rhythms of my life. I was good at my work, both in Service and at the college. My students seemed to like me well enough, and I enjoyed teaching them. My Service work involved surveillance on a handful of local people, adults much older than me, who’d attended the last pro-democracy demonstrations a decade earlier.

It was easy work, observing their activities, listening to their mind-numbingly boring phone calls, meeting regularly with their next-door neighbors, friends, and colleagues. In my cover life, I liked my colleagues at the college. My home was beautiful. The dating pool was small, but I maximized it by dating both women and men. I collected a few local friends and enjoyed their company.

But in the years that followed my parents’ first visit, my mother’s comment—a quiet life in a beautiful place—stayed with me in a way I didn’t understand. It was like a splinter I could ignore for months at a time. Occasionally, in unexpected moments, I was struck by an uneasy sense that I was living the wrong life, or conducting my life in the same way I checked items off my grocery lists, or doing the wrong thing, or in stasis.

Sometime around my 40th birthday, while my friend Nico was visiting, I broke my glasses. I was picking oranges in the backyard when it happened. I’d taken the glasses off for only a moment, to wipe sweat from my face, but managed to drop them. I stepped back, looking at the ground in the dim greenish light under the orange tree, and heard a quiet snap under my shoe. The nose bridge was broken.

“You got a backup pair?” Nico asked, from the lounge chair. She’d been reading a book.

“In my office at the college,” I said.

“Do you have tape?”

“Probably. Keep reading, I’ve got this.” But all I seemed to have in the house, tape-­wise, was a reflective silver tape that my cousin Anton had left behind on a recent visit, when he’d come for a few days with his 4-­year-­old twins, who were forever immersed in complicated art projects. The tape was very narrow but surprisingly strong. I carefully wound it around the broken section, then the right lens popped out, so I added more tape on the right. The glasses felt secure when I put them on, but the overall look was insane. I was staring in the mirror when the doorbell rang.

“Nice repair job, Ibari,” the UPS driver said. He came around often enough that we were on a first-­name basis. In those days I did a lot of online shopping.

“Thank you. I just stepped on them.”

“Happens to the best of us,” he said, and raised his device close to my face. “Voice?”

“My voice is my passcode,” I said reflexively, and waited, with the driver, for the signature of my voice and the image of my face to match with my address in the UPS system, so that the driver could leave the small package he held, which I thought was probably my new toothbrush. Instead, his device emitted a sharp warning beep.

“Seems like there’s a problem with the face scan,” the driver said.

“Let’s try that again.” He raised the device.

“My voice is my passcode.” The beep came again.

“Try again without the glasses?”

“My glasses have never been a problem,” I said, but took them off anyway. “You’re sure you can’t just leave the package?”

“Without ID verification?” The driver grinned. “I didn’t know you did stand-up. OK, take three?”

“My voice is my passcode,” I said, with the glasses in my hand, and this time the machine produced a melodic chime.

“There you go,” the driver said. “Enjoy the rest of your day.”

I thanked him, and brought the little package in. I felt very strange. It was as if a curtain had been pulled aside, just for a second, and I’d seen the machinery hidden behind it. I’d never ­ really thought about facial recognition systems before, because they were everywhere and always had been, my face recorded and uploaded to a central database several times a day since earliest memory. The question was whether the glasses could thwart any facial recognition software, or if it was just a faulty UPS scanner. I returned to the backyard with a feeling of carrying a dangerous secret. I wanted to test my glasses again.

“Nico,” I said, “you want to go for a walk, maybe get some iced tea downtown?”

Nico smiled. “Your poor glasses,” she said. “Yes, iced tea sounds perfect.”

We walked slowly, in the direction of iced tea. It was a hot day, but the solar fans in the business district created a gentle breeze. There was a man walking a block or so ahead of us. One of the former pro-democracy agitators whom I’d been surveilling. I’d studied him so carefully that I’d have known him anywhere.

“When do you need to be back in LA?” I asked.

“I thought I’d take the 4 o’clock train.” It was still only late morning. As we entered the tea shop, a discreet scanner embedded in the door frame flashed white—Face not found—­but confirmation didn’t come until I reached the front of the line, ordered an iced tea, and stared directly into the screen to pay with credit.

“I’m sorry,” the barista said, and swiveled the screen so I could read the message: Facial recognition error. “I can’t remember the last time this happened.”

“Oh,” I said, “no problem, let’s do fingerprints.” I pressed my right index finger to the screen, and a moment later a green check mark appeared. Nico was studying the muffins.

“I think these glasses are throwing off the scanners,” I said.

Nico went still for just a second, and shook her head. The movement was barely perceptible. She was still looking at the baked goods.

“The muffins here look good,” she said, as if I’d said nothing.

This was when I understood: My friend was Service. I had no doubt that she was who she said she was, which is to say an associate professor in the physics department at UCLA, but also she was something else. It shouldn’t be disappointing, I told myself. A lot of people were Service. I was Service. The barista could be Service. Anyone around you, at any given moment, could be observing and reporting. But was she reporting on me? We were quiet on the walk back to the house. The iced tea tasted like cardboard.

“I’ve never reported on you,” Nico said, when we were close to my house. She spoke so quietly that I barely heard her, and I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that she’d waited until our backs were to the downtown camera array.

“OK.” I felt vastly relieved. I knew that rationally there was no reason to believe her, but all my life I’ve had a sense of intuition, and I felt very strongly that she was telling the truth. And then, because she was my closest friend and she’d taken the risk first: “I’ve never reported on you either,” I said.

She didn’t stop walking, but I heard a slight intake of breath.

“You know,” she said, again very softly, “I think it doesn’t take that much to become a ghost.”

“You’re probably right.” I appreciated the warning. Ghost was slang for a person who ran afoul of the State. A ghost is undesirable. A ghost lives in the shadows. A ghost is not entitled to a home, or health care, or the protections of the law, or a social security number, bank account, credit, or entry into most spaces, because does a ghost even really entirely exist?

Excerpted from the book Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel. Copyright © 2026 by Emily St. John Mandel. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

When the life-simulation game Paralives was released in early access, Danielle Udogaranya’s hand ached at the thought of making new Black hairstyles for it.

It wasn’t because she didn’t want to create for the game. Udogaranya, better known as Ebonix, has spent over a decade creating custom content for life-simming games with the goal of helping people see themselves on digital screens. Her hesitation stemmed from the physical toll it takes to craft the perfect digital coil, braid, and kink—painstakingly long hours and tedious precision.

“I thought to myself, why am I still having to do this?” Udogaranya, a technical artist who has a degree in psychology, tells WIRED.

Fans of games like The Sims spend time flipping through her sites, downloading custom hair packs inspired by real-life styles not otherwise available in-game. As of now, the Ebonix Patreon has over 115,000 members, and hundreds of both free and paid content items.

The reason behind the demand for custom content in life-simming games is both simple and disappointing: Natural Black hairstyles have been historically underrepresented, and the technology used to make them has been slow to improve.

“With new games coming out now, I’m still seeing the issues, and I’m still seeing the ‘Killmonger locs.’ God forbid we get more than three options,” Udogaranya says, in reference to the stiff, short-dreaded style featured by Michael B. Jordan’s character in Black Panther that became a go-to for many games as well as some other films. Similar examples can be seen in old and new franchises alike, including Tekken 8, Spider-Man 2, Apex Legends, Horizon Zero Dawn, and more. The reason for this Black hair default? Textured hairstyles in games have been reliant on code that was not made for them.

“If you’re making straight hair, it’s very easy to taper the ends and then make it cute,” Udogaranya explains. “But when you’re trying to add a black texture on it, it looks like a hot dog.” Thus, immovable, cylindrical “Killmonger locs” are simpler to make than other natural styles.

Black hair in video games has long been a design afterthought—at best—since some of the first Black characters entered the scene. In early 8-bit era games, like SEGA’s Heavyweight Champ, which came out in 1976, Black hairstyles appeared to emphasize minstrel-like stereotypes. During the rise of fighting games in the ’80s and ’90s, where more characters per game were introduced, Black hair was limited because Black player selections were limited. For example, in Street Fighter, there was only one Black character out of the 12 options. When The Sims came out in 2000, the game allowed limited customization, with hair swatches connected to different face options. Though the game allowed for three skin-tone swatches—fair, medium, and dark—natural hairstyle options were virtually nonexistent.

In the decades that followed, 3D animation and customization in gaming continued to flourish, but Black hair has trended toward only a handful of swatches, most of which provided little to minimal movement. However, there have been efforts to tackle this industrywide issue. Dove and Open Source Afro Hair Library launched Code My Crown in 2023, which provides a “complete and free guide for coding textured hair and protective styles in video games,” according to a press release. And, while most of the natural hairstyles in The Sims 4 come from expansion and stuff packs costing around $10 to $40 each, EA has begun to release free downloadable content for players looking to diversify hairstyles. Its latest DLC provides one new natural hairstyle with its pack of six outfits.

Despite these pushes, Udogaranya wanted to make natural hair creation easier and more user-friendly. “After doing some research, and looking at all of the hair tools that are available still to this day, Black hair has just been accommodated in tools that are primarily created for straight hair.”

Udogaranya came across the scholarly paper Curly-Cue: Geometric Methods for Highly Coiled Hair. Published in 2024, it presented new coding techniques to improve both the look and movement of Black hair in 3D animation. With this insight, Udogaranya coded a plug-in for Blender—the free, open-source 3D creation app she normally uses to make custom content.

The Loc & Kinky Strand Generator Tool allows fellow custom content creators to make textured styles that normally could take weeks in under an hour. In just a few clicks, a user can switch from a curl to a coil to a loc. Udogaranya trained her own local AI to assist with automating the processes she did by hand and to fine-tune the code, but no generative AI was used. To use the tool, creators still have to design by hand and can’t type in prompts to generate their styles.

“The whole point of [the Loc & Kinky Strand Generator] tool is that when you do go to draw a strand or apply the actual modifier to a strand, it immediately gives you that kink,” Udogaranya says.

Though the life-sim gaming industry has struggled with diversity, there have been efforts for improvement—in some cases, thanks to Udogaranya herself. In addition to making custom content, she has also served as a gaming consultant for The Sims 4, Life by You, and Love Island: The Game. For other IPs, such as Paralives, Udogaranya notes that there is a shift in interest for Black hair inclusion. Because of this, Udogaranya hopes to eventually make the Blender add-on an independent app and create a licensable version. She tells WIRED that there has been interest from creators for games like Paralives, Roblox, and Second Life, as well as from game developers like Triple-A studios.

The tool is still under development but has been undergoing beta testing. Udogaranya says the test feedback has been “overwhelmingly positive.” Elements of the tool are also patent-pending.

Udogaranya hopes her tool will help eliminate the time, effort, and monetary barriers both content creators and game developers have when it comes to Black hair representation in games. “There’s limitations on the exploration of your identity and self-love and self-worth when the tools that you need are genuinely just missing,” she says. “ I’m ready to get rid of all of that and provide the absolute basic identity identifiers when it comes to games and animation.”

In 2006, Donald Trump was firing people on The Apprentice and Dr. Phil was daytime television’s reigning tough-love therapist.

Twenty years later, the former is president of the United States, the latter, his informal UFO ambassador—recently trusted with unreleased government files on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) to gauge how the public might handle what’s inside.

“Here’s what comes in stages. First they acknowledge it, then they confirm it’s real, then they tell you where it’s from,” Dr. Phil said in an August 7 Instagram video discussing UAP disclosure. “And somewhere down that road, maybe, is the big one—the government of the United States standing at a podium and saying out loud, we are not alone.”

For most of 2026, a rumor has consumed the world of UFOlogy: President Trump is sitting on a finished speech confirming humanity isn’t alone. Whether the “disclosure speech” actually exists is a topic of rabid discussion on X, the r/UFO subreddit, and dozens of extraterrestrial-curious podcasts, but the reasons so many people believe in it are very real. Humans are arguably experiencing the most consequential era for the UFO scene since the ’40s and ’50s, when a mysterious crash outside Roswell, New Mexico, and unexplained radar blips over Washington, DC, birthed decades of legends of little green men and flying-saucers.

There’s no doubt that the government has been engaging with the topic. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently confirmed that Stephen Miller, one of the most powerful figures in the White House, has been handed the UAP portfolio.

Tim Gallaudet, a retired Navy rear admiral who helped run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during Trump’s first term, testified before Congress about UAP in 2024, and now sits on a UAP Science Advisory Council reporting to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He called the increased government interest “a total change in executive-branch transparency from the last 80 years.”

But he’s unsure if that would ever culminate in a speech from a sitting president, because they would “have to acknowledge that we’re not in control, that we’re not the highest level of intelligence on the planet, and that’s going to be a very hard thing for any government to admit.”

A White House spokesperson tells WIRED via email that “No such speech is planned—rather, the administration continues to release files as they become available, and the public to make up their own minds about the information uncovered.”

For believers, the modern UAP disclosure began in 2017, when a New York Times article revealed a secret Pentagon program quietly investigating UAPs. The Pentagon went on to confirm in 2020 that leaked videos of Navy pilots tracking seemingly impossible objects were real. A 2021 intelligence report conceded the phenomena existed and remained unexplained, and in 2022 the government established an official investigation office. Then, from 2022 to 2025, Congress held yearly public hearings where pilots, military officers, and intelligence veterans (including Gallaudet) testified under oath.

What’s also novel is that UAP disclosure has bipartisan support. Both the House task force on declassifying federal secrets and the House UAP Caucus are made up of legislators from across the aisle.

This year, the drumbeat of government interest turned into a drumroll about a potential Trump speech. In January, filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee claimed a disclosure speech was imminent, pegged to the 79th anniversary of the alleged Roswell crash on July 8. Few took him seriously.

But in February, the president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, gave the idea new legs, saying on the Pod Force One podcast she’d heard Trump had a speech ready touching on “some sort of extraterrestrial life.” Around the same time, Barack Obama mused in a podcast interview with Brian Tyler Cohen that aliens are “real” before conceding “I haven’t seen them.” Trump then accused his predecessor of disclosing classified information, and announced that he was directing agencies to release their files on “alien and extraterrestrial life.”

What followed was bizarre even by this administration’s standards. In May, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself escorting a handcuffed gray alien, and a mysterious loading page appeared on the domain aliens.gov, leading to rampant speculation within the UFO community that the big reveal was coming. But when the White House finally launched aliens.gov late in the month, it ended up being a Star Wars–style website that functioned as an ICE tip line—with aliens being a reference to undocumented people.

The machinery of disclosure kept grinding forward. Since May, the government has released five batches of declassified videos and documents onto the Department of War’s website. Detractors say the files lack context and the videos prove little.

Even after the Roswell date passed, rumors about a disclosure speech intensified. In late July, Liberation Times—an independent news website with a record of breaking UAP stories—reported that a speech confirming some UFOs are of non-human origin had been prepared for Trump.

The site’s founder, Christopher Sharp, tells WIRED the story began with a call from a source he deeply trusts.

“They basically said, ‘Look, I’m quite shaken, because it looks like Trump may make some kind of announcement on UAP disclosure’.” Another source described the speech itself, he says, alleging it basically reads, “we’re not alone, we have captured some of these or retrieved some of these things, they’re of non-human origin, and that there is a reverse engineering effort.”

Sharp was also told Trump wouldn’t deliver it unless unspecified conditions were met.

“If you’re the president, you have to be sure that there’s firm evidence,” he says. “The worst thing you can do is come out with this speech and then whatever you put out could be debunked straight away … You’ll go down in history as a laughingstock.”

In August, the rumor hit a fever pitch. Robert Bigelow, the billionaire aerospace mogul who has bankrolled UFO research for decades and once owned Utah’s infamous Skinwalker Ranch (a 500-acre plot of land renowned for alleged alien and paranormal activity and later the namesake of a popular History Channel series), told veteran Las Vegas journalist George Knapp that he’d met Trump in the Oval Office months earlier and personally handed him a speech containing a single sentence: “A non-human, intelligent presence has been on Earth for a very long time, using spacecraft and with performances completely beyond our capabilities and our human physics.”

Bigelow said he advised the president to deliver the line casually, on his way to boarding Air Force One—no evidence, no press conference, just confirmation. Trump hasn’t said it. Yet.

If the cycle of presidents and UFO disclosure feels familiar, that’s because it is. For nearly 80 years, someone has always supposedly been on the verge of revealing the truth, but no president has ever delivered.

“Politicians overpromise,” says Greg Eghigian, a professor of history and bioethics at Penn State and author of After the Flying Saucers Came. “The reality is that even presidents are not privy to a lot of classified information that lies within the bowels of the military and intelligence community bureaucracy.”

Still, for the believers, the stakes justify the hope.

“Often in the mainstream, when this topic gets brought up, there’s a giggle factor. I can tell you who is not giggling about this: senior members of the administration, senior intelligence officials, senior members of the military, senior members of Congress,” says Jordan Flowers, executive director of the Disclosure Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for UAP transparency. “When the door closes, no one ever says, ‘Oh, this is all made up, isn’t it?’ No. The door closes and they say, ‘We know there’s something happening here, we know this is serious, what do we do about it?’”

But that discourse still hasn’t been confirmed, at least in a meaningful way to the general public.

“A speech from the President of the United States confirming the existence of things in our airspace that we do not understand would unequivocally contribute to the public taking this issue seriously,” says Flowers.

Eghigian, however, isn’t so sure a Trump pronouncement would settle anything, particularly from “this president, who has a long history of not telling the truth.”

If the past is any indicator, this could be another nothingburger.

“Unless something radically different happens, which I know a lot of people are counting on, what we could probably expect is that this will eventually die down,” he says, citing an 80-year history of “intense moments where societies are really focused on the subject, and then all of a sudden interest wanes, and then all of a sudden it appears again.”

Right now, interest is arguably at an all-time high. Few politicians enjoy a public spectacle as much as Trump, and what spectacle could be bigger than news that transcends our planet, and potentially our galaxy. Maybe the rumor just becomes another footnote on presidents and UFO lore. Or maybe it becomes the most important proclamation in human history, delivered by a reality TV star, with a talk show shrink by his side.