Barack Obama clarifies his views on aliens after podcast clip goes viral
Former US president Barack Obama has cleared up comments he made about aliens after a recent podcast clip sent the internet into overdrive.
Appearing on the No Lie podcast with Brian Tyler Cohen, Obama was asked during a quick “speed round” of questions: “Are aliens real?”
“They're real, but I haven't seen them,” he replied.
He went on to joke about long-running conspiracy theories, saying, “They're not being kept in Area 51. There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
The comments quickly spread online, with some taking them as confirmation of extraterrestrial life. A day later, Obama posted a clarification on Instagram.
“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it's gotten attention let me clarify,” he wrote. “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there. 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!”
Obama served as president from 2009 to 2017 and has previously joked about aliens. In 2021, during an appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden, he said that after taking office he asked if there was a secret lab “where we're keeping the alien specimens and space ship”. He said officials looked into it and told him the answer was “no”.
At the same time, he noted that the US government has investigated unexplained aerial phenomena. “There is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are,” he said previously. “We can't explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. I think people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”
