“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,” Barack Obama said about aliens in an interview with liberal YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen, dropping what sounds like the biggest presidential admission of all time—before immediately walking it back.
The former president clarified on Instagram that he was speaking statistically: “The universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.”
As for whether E.T. has actually dropped by Earth? Obama says no.
“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,” he wrote.
For the Area 51 faithful who’ve spent decades convinced the Air Force is hiding little green men in Nevada: Obama says you’re wrong. “There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
“Where are the aliens,” he added, laughing.
Obama isn’t the first president to address the alien question. Bill Clinton told Jimmy Kimmel in 2014 that he’d had his aides research Area 51 after taking office, concluding it’s “unlikely that we’re alone.” In 2021, Obama mused on a New York Times podcast that discovering alien life wouldn’t change his politics, because “my entire politics is premised on the fact that we are these tiny organisms on this little speck floating out in space.”
The alien talk was just a small part of Obama’s interview with Cohen. Elsewhere, he addressed the racist video Donald Trump posted depicting Obama and Michelle Obama as apes.
“It’s important to recognize that the majority of the American people find this behavior deeply troubling,” Obama said. “It’s true that it’s a distraction. But, you know, as I’m traveling around the country, you meet people—they still believe in decency, courtesy, kindness.”
He called out the erosion of standards among Republicans: “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. So that’s been lost.”
Obama also pushed back on narratives about Democratic infighting, calling the divisions “exaggerated” and “magnified in the media,” insisting all Democrats share the same core beliefs about equality and market regulation.