Obama clarifies comments on aliens being real, says he saw ‘no evidence’ they’ve made contact

Former U.S. president Barack Obama took to Instagram on Sunday to clarify comments he’d made on a podcast about aliens being real, saying he did not see evidence that aliens have made contact with us. 

The statement came in the wake of social media buzz following a video showing Obama’s answer to a lightning round of questions with podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen, when the former U.S. president was asked: “Are aliens real?”

“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in Area 51. There’s no underground facility. Unless, there’s this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States,” Obama answered. 

Obama’s Instagram post added more context to his answer. “I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. 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!” Obama wrote in the post. 

Area 51 and conspiracy theories

Secrecy around Area 51, a top-secret Cold War test site in the Nevada desert, has long fuelled conspiracy theories among UFO enthusiasts, even prompting a “Storm Area 51” event in 2019 that quickly went from a viral internet meme to a legitimate concern for local officials when two million people signed up to participate — though only about 3,000 actually showed up. 

In 2013, the CIA acknowledged the existence of the site, but not UFO crashes, black-eyed extraterrestrials or staged moon landings.

Declassified documents referred to the 20,700-square-kilometre installation by name after decades of U.S. government officials refusing to acknowledge it. 

In The Age of Disclosure, a 2025 documentary that made claims of an “80-year cover-up of non-human intelligent life,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was shown saying there have been instances where unidentified objects have been seen over nuclear facilities, adding that “presidents have been operating under a need-to-know basis” in order to have deniability. 

But in a later interview with Fox News, Rubio added some context to what he’d said in the documentary, clarifying that his interview for the documentary had been filmed a few years earlier, when he had been in the U.S. Senate, and that he had been describing allegations he’d heard rather than his own experiences.  

“I was describing what people had said to me, not things that I had firsthand knowledge of in that regard. A little bit of selective editing, but it’s OK because you’re trying to sell a show there,” Rubio said, though he also said he is not “disavowing” the comments he made in the documentary interview. 

Obama was also asked on the podcast about a recent video U.S. President Donald Trump published to his Truth Social account depicting Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, with their images superimposed on top of the bodies of apes.

“There’s this sort of clown show that’s happening in social media and on television, and what is true is that there doesn’t seem to be any shame about this among people who used to feel like you had to have some sort of decorum and a sense of propriety and respect for the office, right? That’s been lost,” Obama said.

Trump declined to apologize for the post — which was later taken down — despite calls to do so.