Comments by former President Barack Obama sparked debate online this Valentine’s Day weekend, after a podcast appearance where he said extraterrestrials were real.
“They’re real,” the former U.S. leader said, adding, “but I haven’t seen them.”
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The comments were made in response to questions from host Brian Tyler Cohen in an interview that appeared on his podcast.
Obama elaborated that aliens are “not being kept in Area 51,” joking that he was unaware of any “underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
The former president’s comments sparked heated debate on social media over the weekend, as many speculated about the potential significance—or lack thereof—to Obama’s statements to Cohen during the podcast.
Apparently, the response was significant enough that it prompted Mr. Obama to seek to offer clarification, taking to social media on Sunday to offer additional context for what he intended to convey at the time.
“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify,” Obama wrote in a posting that accompanied a video clip featuring the exchange with Cohen.
“Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” Obama wrote.
“But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low,” he added, “and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
Obama’s Record on Aliens and UAP Sightings
One obvious reason the former President’s comments on alien life—and specifically the idea of “underground” facilities and similar ideas related to alien conspiracies—recently took hold with listeners has to do with previous comments he made in 2021 to late night TV host James Corden, who asked him questions that included “where we’re keeping the alien specimens and space ship.”
“When it comes to the aliens, there are some things I just can’t tell you on air,” Obama joked with Corden at the time.
“Look, the truth is that when I came into office, I asked,” Obama told Corden during the 2021 interview. “I was like, alright, is there a lab somewhere, where we’re keeping the alien specimens and spaceships? You know, they did a little bit of research, and the answer was no.”
“But what is true,” Obama continued, “and I’m actually being serious here, is that… there’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t exactly know what they are. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory… they did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”
In the 2021 interview with Corden, Obama had been referencing the release of videos by the Department of Defense that had been leaked several years before their official authorized release in 2020.
“The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified,’” an official Pentagon statement issued at the time of their authorized release in April 2020 read.
“I have nothing to report to you today,” Obama added during the 2021 appearance, before joking that Corden’s bandleader, Reggie Watts, might be an alien himself.
Obama also told late night host Steven Colbert in 2020 that he “certainly asked about” UFOs while he was in office, although when pressed for additional details, Obama said “I can’t tell you,” adding that “it used to be that UFOs and Roswell was the biggest conspiracy. And now that seems so tame, right? The idea that the government might have an alien spaceship? That’s nothing.”
Several past U.S. presidents have commented on UFOs—or UAP as the U.S. military now calls them—over the years, which include George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and current President Donald Trump. Additionally, former presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter both claimed to have seen UFOs themselves prior to entering the Oval Office.
According to the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), “No single explanation addresses the majority of UAP reports.”
“We are collecting as much data as possible, following the data where it leads, and sharing our findings whenever possible,” AARO says in a statement appearing on its official website.
“We will not rush to conclusions in our analysis,” the statement adds, noting that “In many cases, observed phenomena are classified as ‘unidentified’ simply because sensors were not able to collect enough information to make a positive attribution.”
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.