The Galactic Federation is a claimed alliance of extraterrestrial civilizations said to be in contact with human governments. The idea has circulated for decades in New Age and contactee circles, and it reached mainstream news in December 2020, when Haim Eshed, a retired Israeli brigadier general who led his country's defense space programs for nearly three decades, said the United States and Israel had long been dealing with it.

Contactee belief supplied the name. Sheldan Nidle, who said a Galactic Federation had contacted him, built a following around predictions of a mass landing by December 1996, a date that passed without one. Later contactees, including Elena Danaan, describe a "Galactic Federation of Worlds," an account promoted by the exopolitics writer Michael Salla. Former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer, who began speaking publicly about UFOs in 2005, said aliens feared humanity's nuclear weapons; a resurfaced clip shows him saying he knew little about the Federation itself.

Eshed's claims, made in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth tied to a book of conversations with him, went further. He said the U.S. government had an agreement with aliens to conduct experiments on Earth, that an underground base on Mars hosted American astronauts, and that President Trump had been on the verge of revealing this but was asked to wait to avoid mass hysteria. Isaac Ben-Israel, then chair of the Israel Space Agency, praised Eshed's record but said a Galactic Federation landing on Earth was "too much," the Pentagon declined to comment, and NASA said it had found no signs of extraterrestrial life. In 2026 Eshed reappeared in a video with Uri Geller, saying men in black had visited him after the interview, an account resting on that video alone.

No document, recording, or official confirmation has emerged to support the existence of a Galactic Federation. The term's significance is as a bridge between contactee spirituality and the official-disclosure era: when a decorated former defense official repeated it, a decades-old belief gained mainstream coverage, and it continues to circulate in 2026 alongside secondhand accounts such as barrister Jonathan Caplan's recollection of what Hellyer told him.