Hours after Barack Obama caused a frenzy by saying aliens were real on a podcast, the former US president has posted a statement clarifying that he has not seen any evidence of them and that he was merely trying “to stick with the spirit” of an interviewer’s rapid round of questioning.
In a conversation with the American podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen over the weekend, Obama appeared to confirm the apparent existence of aliens during a segment in which the host asks guests quick questions and the guests respond with quick answers.
After he was asked “Are aliens real?”, Obama said: “They’re real but I haven’t seen them.”
He went on: “They’re not being kept at 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 response plunged the former president into a contentious subject that is fed by prevalent public distrust of the federal government and has ensnared several other US leaders. In 2016, Hillary Clinton vowed during her presidential campaign that she would “get to the bottom” of the alien conspiracies if elected. Donald Trump said on a podcast two years ago he had pondered alien life.
“Am I a believer? No, I probably, I can’t say I am,” Trump said. “But I have met with people that are serious people that say there’s some really strange things that they see flying around out there.”
The issue has also been given a degree of credibility by lawmakers holding congressional hearings into unidentified flying objects since the 1960s.
In 2022, during the Biden administration, the Pentagon said it wanted to remove any shame in reporting “unidentified aerial phenomena” because they could represent national security threats.
“Our goal is to eliminate this stigma by fully incorporating our operators and mission personnel into a standardized data-gathering process,” said Ronald Moultrie, then-under secretary of defense for intelligence and security.
Scott Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence, told the hearings, “The message is now clear: if you see something, you need to report it.”
A recent government report showed that more than 750 new UAP sightings had been reported between May 2023 and June 2024. They included video of a Hellfire missile from a US reaper drone appearing to bounce off a glowing orb off the coast of Yemen.
“We’ve never seen a Hellfire missile hit a target and bounce off,” said Lue Elizondo, a former senior intelligence official with the Pentagon.
Obama’s podcast comment was picked up by media outlets around the world, with headlines such as “Former US president Barack Obama says aliens are real” and “‘They’re real’: Obama’s shock alien claims”. Time Magazine covered the drama, reporting: “Obama says aliens are real, but they aren’t at Area 51”.
However, following the media frenzy, Obama released a statement on Instagram on Sunday evening.
“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he said. “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!”
Nevertheless, his original comments inflamed long-running conspiracy theories that Area 51, a highly classified air force site in Nevada, holds evidence of government contact with extraterrestrials.
Declassified documents released in 2013 revealed that the secret airstrip was actually used for aerial testing of US government projects including the U-2 and Oxcart aerial surveillance programs.
“High-altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side-effect – a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs),” the documents said.