Barack Obama Said Aliens ‘Are Real’

It says a lot about how crazy our world is these days that the former president of the United States can casually say “[aliens] are real” in a podcast, and it was a story for maybe a weekend afternoon. Part of the reason this is not a bigger revelation is that Barack Obama squashed it, putting out a statement after this answer raised some eyebrows to try to lower them and downplay what he said. He shared the entire video of his off-the-cuff reply while being peppered with questions in a lightning round on the podcast No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen, and provided a clarification afterwards of what was trying to say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Barack Obama (@barackobama)

The “statistically” argument Obama speaks of is the Fermi paradox. All we know about the universe points towards the notion that there just have to be other earth-like planets like ours that contain the conditions for life–and not one or two, but billions of them. A 2019 peer-reviewed study from Penn State scientists that utilized data from the Kepler Space Telescope found that about one in six of the 20 billion sunlike stars in the Milky Way could house an earthlike planet in its goldilocks zone. Enrico Fermi was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and when the subject of the vastness of the universe and flying saucer reports came up at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950, Fermi famously blurted out at lunch with other scientists, “where is everybody?” 

Definitely not at “in…what is it? Area 51,” according to the former president! “There’s no underground facility” Obama additionally volunteered about this famed base whose name he just couldn’t recall a second ago. It’s easy to dismiss this all as jokey bullshitting on a podcast that doesn’t mean anything, but like many much more earthly defenses of Obama’s underwhelming presidency, this downplays the fact that he is one of the most powerful humans to have ever existed and he has agency too. Everyone reading this can bullshit about aliens, but presidents have a far bigger responsibility to be circumspect with their words due to the power they carry, especially when it comes to information you can only get with a security clearance. Area 51 is a very real place housing very secretive aerospace technology, and when someone who has definitely been briefed on Area 51 talks about it, their words inherently carry more weight even if they are joking about conspiracy theories. Given that there was a group of people who planned to storm Area 51 in 2019, it is irresponsible for someone as influential as Obama to just be throwing stuff like this out with no basis in reality. 

Obama took this seriously as president too, so it’s hard to see how he would just throw total fabricated bullshit out there like he’s doing a bad Joe Rogan impression. He told late night host James Corden in 2021 that “When I came into office, I was like ‘All right, is there the lab somewhere where we’re keeping the alien specimens and spaceship?’ And you know, they did a little bit of research and the answer was ‘no.’ But what is true—and I’m actually being serious here—is that 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.”

But what really makes Obama’s rapid fire statement notable is how it echoes something President Bill Clinton said in 1995. It touches on the same themes, and includes the same qualifiers accompanied by similar voice inflections that make my Fox Mulder brain wonder if our presidents are trying to tell us something.

Despite smiling throughout this answer, by all accounts, Bill Clinton did not look at this subject as a joke. Quite the opposite. His Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell wrote in his own memoir that Clinton asked him to find out all he could about two things: who killed President John F. Kennedy and what the government knows about UFOs. “He was dead serious,” Hubbell wrote in his memoir. “I had looked into both, but wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was getting.”

It’s easy to dismiss both these similar statements as light-hearted joking in a podcast and in a retort to a kid, but what if you take these words from a combined sixteen years of presidents at face value? I think they both become very interesting, mainly due to the qualifiers that no one made them put around their hyperbole.

Clinton: “As far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.”

Obama: “There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

These are basically the same ‘if it’s true, they didn’t tell me’ statement. I also find the “underground facility” quote from Obama notable, because as someone whose reporting into this subject has taken a branch of their investigation into widespread rumors of underground facilities across America allegedly housing very secret stuff, it sure raised my eyebrows when Obama pulled that detail out of the ether unprompted. The other common angle, although less eyebrow-raising for important verbiage reasons I’ll detail in the next paragraph, is what both presidents said about whether they have seen aliens or not.

Clinton: “If the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn’t tell me about it either, and I want to know.”

Obama: “[Aliens] are real, but I haven’t seen them.”

Yet again, two presidents feel the need to say they have not been shown potential information. The word “aliens” is notable here, because that’s not a word that Chuck Schumer and Republican Senator Mike Rounds put in their UAP Disclosure Act they have tried and failed to pass three years in a row. The word “extraterrestrial” that Obama used in his Instagram caption is not in their bill either, and that is the word the Pentagon and AARO lean on in their denials of the government’s knowledge of this subject too. David Grusch is a whistleblower who testified to Congress in 2023, and he took a ton of heat for the wild claims he made under oath, despite the Intelligence Community Inspector General finding the formal complaint he filed “credible and urgent” in July 2022 (I think it’s important context to note that a man who accused other people of murder under oath almost three years ago is not currently in prison). He and many other whistleblowers use the phrase “non-human intelligence” in lieu of “alien” or “extraterrestrial,” something that appears 14 times in the UAPDA, the craziest piece of legislation I have ever read.

When Christopher Sharp of the Liberation Times initially asked the Pentagon whether they could confirm or deny these claims around “non-human intelligences,” they declined to go beyond existing on the record statements saying that its All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) could not find verifiable information “of extraterrestrial materials.” Words matter, especially on a playground for intelligence agencies like UFOs, and the words different people use are noteworthy. One would hope that presidents receiving briefings from intelligence agencies every day would understand that, and if you accept that fact and treat them like immensely powerful leaders who have heard things you and I never will, and not discount Joe Rogans, their words seem to matter a lot more. My gut tells me there’s more meat on the bone in the video Obama shared than in the caption he wrote for it.

Clinton and Obama aren’t the only presidents who have expressed an interest in this mystery. President Harry Truman created Project SIGN in 1947, which would eventually become Project Blue Book, the first ever systematic government UFO investigation that spanned across multiple decades. Truman did not take the new UFO reports coming in that seriously, but he told his military aide, Col. Robert Landry in 1948 that “If there was any evidence of a strategic threat to the national security, the collection and evaluation of UFO data by Central Intelligence warranted more intense study and attention at the highest government level.”

As governor of Georgia in 1973, future president Jimmy Carter filed an official UFO report about his 1969 sighting in Leary. Ronald Reagan was a lifelong science fiction fan, and he and his pilot Bill Paynter said they encountered a UFO while flying in a Cessna Citation near Bakersfield, California in 1974. “It went straight up into the heavens,” Reagan said of the unknown object. Towards the end of his two-term presidency, he gave a famous speech about aliens and world peace amidst the Cold War to the 42nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly. “Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond,” President Reagan said in 1987. “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

Invoking an outside alien threat was a common theme in Reagan’s presidency. In 2009, former Leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev said that Reagan asked him at the 1985 Geneva Summit ‘What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?’ Gorbachev told Charlie Rose that he told his US counterpart, “no doubt about it.” This was such a frequent device the former president leaned on that Reagan biographer Lou Cannon said that National Security Advisor Colin Powell “would roll his eyes and say to his staff, ‘Here come the little green men again.’”

In a vacuum, it’s easy to roll your eyes and dismiss these comments by Barack Obama as an inartful lightning round retort to a fun and light-hearted question, and instead put your faith in the statement he and his team had time to write that clarified his off-the-cuff comments. But since the dawn of the nuclear age, we have had more presidents who have taken a public interest in UFOs than not, and many have expressed their reservations around government UFO transparency. This 30-second clip fits neatly into a larger context of multiple presidencies sincerely asking this existential question.

If UFOs are a sideshow bereft of substance, then a lot of presidents have wasted a lot of their time and our taxpayer dollars on it. The reason Congress is so interested in this subject is because they think they may have been lied to about money they apportioned, yet professional debunkers like Mick West and other folks like him without security clearances are dead certain that they know more than the people who do have security clearances. Many reasonable doubters I come across in my UFO digging ask me how the government could possibly keep something like this a secret all these years, and I like to answer that question with one of my own: what if they haven’t? What if presidents have been telling you for decades that there’s a genuine mystery here, they looked into it and feel that something is possibly being covered up, and this big mess is all so not a secret that some random schmuck like me even had someone in the know tell them about it?