After stating that the truth is indeed out there, former President Barack Obama clarified his comments regarding extraterrestrial life.
Following up his interview that discussed “real” aliens — conducted by political podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen and published on Friday, February 13 — Obama, 64, took to Instagram two days later to address his claim. “I was trying to stick with the spirit of [Cohen’s] 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,” he wrote.
Obama, who served as the 44th President of the U.S. from 2009 to 2017, concluded, “I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
The politician had stated during the podcast interview that he hadn’t “seen” aliens himself while in office. “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,” Obama told Cohen, 37. He also noted that getting to the bottom of extraterrestrial life was the “first question” he wanted answered after becoming the President. “Where are the aliens?” he recalled asking authorities.
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Fans took to Obama’s Instagram post with light-hearted jests at his interview comments, with one fan writing, “Which aliens made you clarify this statement 😂,” and another writing, “Blink twice if the aliens made you say this.”
Obama shone a public light on his extraterrestrial curiosity during an appearance on The Late Late Show in 2021. While speaking to the former show’s host, James Corden, Obama said, “The truth is that when I came into office, I asked, right, I was like, ‘Alright, is there the lab somewhere where we’re keeping the alien specimens and spaceship?’ And … they did a little bit of research and the answer was no.”
He also noted to Corden, 47, at the time, “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. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”
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Obama also said during a 2021 appearance on The Ezra Klein Show podcast, recorded after his Late Late Show spot, that if aliens were proven to exist that the impact of the confirmation would alter Earth as we know it.
“There would be immediate arguments about, like, well, we need to spend a lot more money on weapons systems to defend ourselves,” he said at the time. “New religions would pop up. And who knows what kind of arguments we would get into. We’re good at manufacturing arguments for each other.”
Obama noted that the world of politics, however, would not be impacted, “Because … politics is premised on the fact that we are these tiny organisms on this little speck floating in the middle of space.”
