After Claiming Aliens Are 'Real,' Obama Clarifies

Former President Obama is walking back his belief in aliens after touching off a mini-panic over the weekend. On an appearance on Brian Tyler Cohen's No Lie podcast, Obama was hit with a lightning-round question: "Are aliens real?" He replied, "They're real but I haven't seen them," and added that they weren't stashed at Area 51—"unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States." That was enough for headlines worldwide to cast the former commander in chief as confirming extraterrestrial life, per the Guardian. A Buzzfeed headline put it thusly: "Barack Obama Just Casually Confirmed Aliens Exist, And The Internet Is Losing Its Mind."

By Sunday night, Obama was on Instagram doing cleanup. "Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there," he said. But, he added, the distances between solar systems are so immense that the odds of aliens having dropped by Earth are "low," and he "saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us." His comments brushed up against one of America's favorite government myths: that Area 51 in Nevada is a secret alien warehouse. The classified facility did host covert projects—including the U-2 and Oxcart spy plane programs, per the Guardian. Those high-altitude flights helped fuel UFO reports decades before a podcast quip could do the same.