Former US President Barack Obama has clarified his position on extraterrestrial life, saying there is no evidence that aliens have come into contact with Earth after his comments on a podcast went viral.
President Obama made headlines over the weekend after appearing to acknowledge the existence of aliens in an interview with American podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen.
Toward the end of the interview, which covered a variety of serious issues, including the killing of protesters by immigration enforcement officers in Minnesota, Cohen posed a series of “lightning rounds” of questions, starting with “Are aliens real?”
“They’re real, but I’ve never seen them,” Obama replied. “And they’re not trapped…what? Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this huge conspiracy and it’s hidden from the President of the United States.”
The second question in that round was, “What’s the first question you wanted answered when you became president?” To which President Obama laughed and answered, “Where are the aliens?” The interviewer didn’t dig deeper into your answer and just moved on to the next question.
President Obama’s answer was picked up not only by people on social media, but also by international media. On Sunday night, President Obama issued a statement clarifying his position.
He posted a clip of his original comments on Instagram, along with a short statement: “I was trying to live up to the spirit of speed rounds, but in the interest of attention, let me be clear: Statistically speaking, the universe is so vast that there is a good chance there is life out there.”
“But the distances between our solar systems are so great that it is unlikely that aliens will ever visit us, and we have seen no evidence that extraterrestrials have made contact with us during my time as president. Really!”
This is not the first time President Obama has spoken out on this issue. Appeared on “Late Late Show with James Corden”. “The truth, and I’m talking seriously here, is that there are images and recordings of objects in the sky, and we don’t know exactly what they are.
“You can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They didn’t have an easily explained pattern. So I think people are still really trying to investigate and figure out what it is.”
Area 51, a highly classified US Air Force facility located in Groom Lake in southern Nevada, has long been the subject of conspiracy theories about extraterrestrial life.
One well-known UFO conspiracy is that the remains of a flying saucer that supposedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 were brought to Area 51 for reverse engineering experiments to replicate an extraterrestrial spacecraft.
A June 2019 YouGov poll found that 54% of U.S. adults believe the government likely knows more about UFOs than it is telling.
CNN’s Chris Cillizza contributed to this report.
