Former President Barack Obama says aliens are real, but a famous conspiracy theory about them is wrong.
Obama spoke about extraterrestrials in a new interview with podcast host Brian Taylor Cohen, who asked “Are aliens real?”
“They’re real but I haven’t seen them,” Obama said. “And they’re not being kept in… what is it? Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
Conspiracy theorists have long believed that a UFO crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, and that aliens and flying saucers were being studied in a secret military base in Nevada known as “Area 51.” UFO sightings are also frequently reported in Upstate New York and other parts of the United States.
Obama joked to Cohen that it was the first question he asked when he became president in 2009: “Where are the aliens?”
On Sunday night, Obama clarified in a statement that he has not seen any evidence that aliens have made contact with the U.S. or anywhere else on Earth.
“Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” Obama wrote on Instagram. “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!”
Former U.S. Air Force Maj. David Grusch testified in 2023 that the U.S. has captured unidentified flying objects (UFOs), which are officially described as “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs). He also claimed the U.S. government has likely been aware of “non-human” activity since the 1930s, but the Pentagon denied his allegations of a widespread coverup.
An official government report released in 2021 said officials could not give a definitive explanation of aerial phenomena spotted by military pilots, but found no evidence they were linked to aliens. A separate NASA report in 2023 said life on other planets was likely but had no evidence of UAPs with extraterrestrial origin, encouraging the public to focus on science over sensationalism.