President Barack Obama has just opened up discussion for one of the world’s biggest mysteries: whether aliens are real and where they are. Let’s get into it!
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In a recent interview with YouTuber and Political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen, the former president sat down to discuss Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, Donald Trump and the 2028 election. Yet, what really has folks talking online is Obama’s response when asked if aliens are real.
“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,” he replied casually, as if he didn’t just blow the roof off one of the biggest conspiracies ever.
Wait, What? One user on TikTok was just as confused, asking others to confirm what the former president had just said: “Did a former president say aliens are real? This should be breaking news. He knows something we don’t know,” added another.
Continuing his response, Obama quickly added that aliens are not being locked away in any underground facilities as many might assume.
“They’re not being kept in Area 51,” Obama said. “There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
Area 51 is a military testing and training site, according to the military news site, Military. It has been so commonly thought that aliens are being held in Area 51 that, in 2019, conspiracy theorists created a viral meme that soon became a real plan to “storm” the test site. In the end, only 75 people showed up, and they returned with no extraterrestrial life, according to the BBC.
After folks in the TikTok comments heard Obama’s response and ran to take it as confirmation for the existence of aliens, he took to Instagram to clarify his stance on the subject.
“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,” he wrote in the caption.
However, even though Obama admitted he doesn’t know for sure whether aliens are real, the government has been researching whether there are any intelligent life forms outside of Earth.
In July 2023, three military veterans testified in Congress that the United States had collected non-human biologics from unidentified flying object crash sites, according to NPR.
If that didn’t spook you out enough, in September 2025, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing for witnesses to testify about the unidentified flying objects (UFOs) they had seen. This followed accusations that the federal government was not being transparent with the American public about sightings, according to CBS News.
During the session, videos dated from 2023 and 2024 were shown as evidence for UFOs and witnesses testified to sightings dating back as far as the 1980s. One witness, award-winning investigative journalist George Knapp, spoke about a terrifying UFO incident from 1982 that he claimed almost started World War III.
In his testimony, Knapp said he obtained Soviet documents in the 1990s that revealed Russia almost launched intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) toward the United States after UFOs interfered with their control system, per CBS News.
“These UFOs perform incredible maneuvers. They split apart. They fuse back together. They appear and disappear,” he said. “The launch control codes for the ICBMs lit up. Something entered the correct codes. The missiles were fired up and ready to launch, and they could not shut it down. The Russian officers were panicking. The UFOs go. They disappeared. The launch control system goes back to normal.”
Ultimately, whether aliens exist continues to be a mystery, but Obama’s comments only intensified the belief that we are not alone in this world.
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