HUNT VALLEY, Md. (TNND) — Former President Barack Obama has clarified comments he made last week about the existence of aliens.
He said in an Instagram post on Sunday that he was trying to “stick with the spirit” of his interviewer, political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen, who questioned him about a variety of topics in a podcast released Saturday. Obama told Cohen during a speed round that aliens are real.
“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify,” the president wrote in his post. “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 lightheartedly said during the interview that his first question as president was “where are the aliens?”
“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in Area 51,” Obama said.
“There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
Journalists and social media users wrote about Obama’s comments. The Washington Post, for example, published an article titled, “Aliens are ‘real,’ Obama says, as Washington shrugs.” X users also posted about the president’s remarks.
The existence of aliens has been debated by scientists. In 2023, NASA published a report on unidentified flying objects, or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), which a study team was unable to make conclusions on. The lack of reliable accounts of UAP make it challenging to learn about the phenomena or form judgements of it, the study group explained in its report.
“Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) are one of our planet’s greatest mysteries. Observations of objects in our skies that cannot be identified as balloons, aircraft, or natural known phenomena have been spotted worldwide, yet there are limited high-quality observations,” the team said.
“Despite numerous accounts and visuals, the absence of consistent, detailed, and curated observations means we do not presently have the body of data needed to make definitive, scientific conclusions about UAP,” the group added.
YouGov, a research and analytics firm, found last year that most Americans believe in aliens. Its poll results showed in November that 56% of adults, including 61% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans, said there is extraterrestrial life.
