Barack Obama has clarified remarks about extraterrestrial life after a short clip from a podcast appearance triggered headlines suggesting he had confirmed aliens are real.
The exchange took place during a rapid-fire segment on Brian Tyler Cohen’s programme, released on Saturday. Asked directly whether he believes extraterrestrials are real, Obama replied, “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them.”
He quickly added:
“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 soundbite travelled fast. Media outlets around the world amplified the line, and it fed back into one of the most persistent American conspiracy theories: that the government is secretly housing alien life at Area 51, the classified air force site in Nevada long associated with speculation about UFOs.
By Sunday evening, Obama moved to slow the momentum. In an Instagram post, he said the clipped exchange did not reflect his considered view, noting that the speed of the questions shaped the tone of his response.
“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 extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
The clarification shifts the emphasis from certainty to probability, not a declaration of known alien presence, but an acknowledgement of how vast the cosmos is, paired with a clear denial of any evidence of contact during his time in office.
The original exchange itself leaned into humour. When Cohen asked what question Obama most wanted answered upon becoming president, he replied with a laugh:
“Where are the aliens? Where are the aliens?”
Area 51 has long served as shorthand for secrecy and speculation. In 2019, an online call to “storm” the facility drew 1.5 million sign-ups, though only about 150 people showed up on the day, and the event drifted into a small festival after a handful of arrests. Declassified documents released in 2013 showed the base had been used for testing aircraft such as the U-2 and Oxcart surveillance programmes, rather than for housing extraterrestrials.
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