The former US president Barack Obama told a podcast that aliens were real but that he was yet to see any himself.
In an interview with the progressive podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen, Obama was asked whether he believed extraterrestrial life existed.
“They’re real,” he said. “But I haven’t seen them. 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.”
Area 51 refers to a classified US air force facility at Groom Lake in southern Nevada. The secrecy surrounding its use has made it a favourite target of conspiracy theorists speculating on the existence of UFOs and extraterrestrial life.
Obama was not asked a follow-up question on the issue by Cohen, an omission widely criticised given the striking nature of the former president’s claim. Instead, Cohen asked what the first question Obama wanted answered was when he entered the White House. “Where are the aliens?” Obama joked in response.
A YouGov poll published in November found that 56 per cent of Americans think aliens definitely or probably exist. This included 61 per cent of Democrats, who were more likely to hold this belief than Republicans, 46 per cent of whom said the same.
The former president has previously declined to rule out the existence of extraterrestrial life. In 2021 he told the talk show host James Corden he had asked if aliens were being studied in a secret lab and was told the answer was no.
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“When it comes to aliens, there are some things I just can’t tell you on air,” he said, adding: “But what is true — and I’m actually being serious here — is that there’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.
“We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. So I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is. But I have nothing to report to you today.”
Obama later posted on Instagram that he wanted to “clarify” his comments, writing that he was “trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round” while speaking on the podcast.
“Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he wrote. “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 extra-terrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”