Former President Barack Obama took to social media on Sunday to clarify comments he made about extraterrestrials being real.
In an interview with podcast host Bryan Tyler Cohen over the weekend, Obama appeared to confirm the existence of aliens.
The topic came up during a “lightning round” where Cohen asked a series of questions, including “Are aliens real?”
“They’re real but I haven’t seen them,” the former president replied. “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.”
The second question asked by Cohen during the round was, “What was the first question that you wanted answered when you became president?”
To which Obama replied laughing, “Where are the aliens?”
The former president’s responses about extraterrestrials became viral and Cohen’s video has received more than 4 million views as of Feb. 16.
The abundance of attention Obama received from his response prompted him to further elaborate in an Instagram post.
“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify,” he began. “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!”
This is not the first time the former president has spoken out about aliens.
While appearing on “The Late Late Show with James Corden” on CBS in 2021, Obama was questioned about unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and aliens from musician Reggie Watts.
“What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there are, there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are,” he said, according to WGNTV.
In 2017, the U.S. government set up a multimillion-dollar program to investigate UFOs, Politico wrote.
In 2020, CNN reported that the Pentagon released three short videos of what appears to be UFOs rapidly moving while recorded by infrared cameras.
NASA’s Curiosity rover detected organic molecules on Mars in 2025 that scientists said could be potential chemical remnants of ancient life on the planet.