Former President Barack Obama has opened up about what he really knows about what’s out there.
The 64-year-old’s comments on a podcast episode caused such a stir online that he was forced to clarify on Sunday.
Appearing alongside podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen over the weekend, Obama said of aliens, “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them.” The Democrat was responding to a “lightning round” in which Cohen asks a series of rapid-fire questions.
“And they’re not being kept in... what is it?” he continued, prompting Cohen to reply with “Area 51.”
“Area 51. There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States,” he added.
Area 51 is a U.S. Air Force Base in Nevada, and has long been the subject of conspiracy theories stemming from the belief that the U.S. government keeps evidence of alien contact on site, including spacecraft and specimens.
When Cohen then asked what the first question he wanted answered when he became president was, Obama jokingly replied, “Where are the aliens?”
The former president’s response raised eyebrows online, with people flooding social media with speculation about what, if anything, the president had just confirmed in terms of what the U.S. government knows about life on other planets.
The chatter became so loud that it forced the president to clarify his comments in a Sunday Instagram post.
“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify,” he wrote in the post.
“Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” the former president continued. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
Commenters were still not convinced, with one joking, “Blink twice if the aliens made you say this,” while another said, “The conspiracy goes even higher than we thought!”
While Obama was quick to shut down conspiracy theories, members of President Donald Trump’s own family have been quick to spread them, with Donald Trump Jr. claiming on a podcast last year that there is evidence of alien life.
“None of this should surprise all of us, but it should surprise us that we can now say fairly definitively it seems that there’s evidence of non-human intelligence out there engaging with our planet,” Trump said during an interview with reporter Ross Coulthart, who conducted a years-long investigation into “secret alien aircrafts.”
“It’s also almost so shocking. It’s hard to digest. I mean, this would be one of the biggest questions perhaps of eternity,” he added, although he demurred when asked if he had experienced any encounters with unidentified flying objects or UFOs first-hand.
“Not really, I wish. You know, uh, as a pilot I’ve seen some stuff. I’ve spent a lot of time in the air, but I’ve not yet experienced the phenomenon directly,” Trump replied.
Trump also said that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk should be given access to classified government information about aliens, telling Coulthart, “I’ve been down to see SpaceX launch and the technology that he’s been able to create. You would think that they’d want to read in individuals like that.”
Musk, for his part, said in 2023 that he had seen no evidence of aliens. “I’m very familiar with space stuff, and I’ve seen no evidence of aliens,” he told Tucker Carlson in an interview. “So, I would immediately tweet it out in a split second and it would probably be the top tweet of all time… Eight billion likes, you know—next level jackpot if you find aliens.”
