Bill Maher is an American comedian, political satirist, and television host best known for HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, which he has hosted since 2003. A longtime critic of organized religion and of dogma on both the political left and right, he became one of the most prominent mainstream entertainers to endorse UAP disclosure when, in March 2026, he told his HBO audience that he believed non-human craft were observing Earth.

Born in New York City in 1956, Maher graduated from Cornell University in 1978 and worked as a stand-up comic before hosting Politically Incorrect, which ran on Comedy Central from 1993 and on ABC from 1997 until the network cancelled it in 2002 after his remarks about the September 11 attacks. Real Time premiered in February 2003 with a format built on a panel of politicians, journalists, and authors, an online "Overtime" segment, and a closing monologue of "New Rules." He also made the 2008 documentary Religulous, launched the Club Random podcast in 2022, and received the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in June 2026.

UFOs first appeared in his work mainly as a rhetorical foil: in 2008 he argued on Real Time that spaceships from other worlds were more plausible than the miracles claimed by religion. His interest became explicit in late 2025. On his October 31 show he interviewed Dan Farah, director of the documentary The Age of Disclosure, and said that whatever the objects were, "they're flying saucers." On March 20, 2026, he asked Rep. Anna Paulina Luna whether full disclosure was coming, and Luna said members of Congress had received a briefing from an agency task force whose information would be declassified.

A week later Maher devoted his closing New Rule, "The Disclosure Moment," to the subject. Pointing to sworn testimony from former Navy pilots such as David Fravor and from intelligence whistleblowers, he argued that the people describing the objects were "guys with buzz cuts and security clearances," said the maneuvers pilots reported did not fit drones or foreign aircraft, and concluded that anyone who still doubted aliens were watching might be the real conspiracy theorist. He repeated the line on social media, where pilots and UAP advocates shared it widely; biologist Jerry Coyne, after first reading the segment as satire, called the evidence behind it thin.

Maher has not reported on UAP himself; his significance lies in reach. A comedian known for mocking faith-based belief, speaking on a premium HBO platform, gave the disclosure argument one of its largest mainstream audiences of 2026. He has since kept the subject in his monologues, joking about later government UFO file releases, while remaining primarily a political commentator.