Barack Obama sparked plenty of chatter earlier this year after suggesting aliens were “real” — but anyone picturing a classic green creature may need to temper expectations, at least for now.
The moment traces back to February, when former president Obama appeared on Brian Tyler Cohen’s No Lies Podcast and was asked directly whether aliens exist.
Rather than giving a carefully worded response, he surprised listeners with: “Uh, they’re real, but I haven’t seen them.”
He also dismissed the idea that the US government is hiding extraterrestrials at Area 51, adding: “There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States,” he said.
Obama later addressed the topic again on Instagram, reiterating that he never encountered anything like that while in office.
Now he’s revisited the subject in a conversation with Stephen Colbert on CBS’ The Late Show — and his latest comments are unlikely to thrill dedicated conspiracy theorists.
“Here’s the thing: For those of you who still think that we’ve gotten little green men underground somewhere, one of the things you learn as president is that the government is terrible at keeping secrets,” he said.
Obama argued that if anything so extraordinary were being kept under wraps, it wouldn’t stay quiet for long — especially in the age of smartphones and social media.
“This idea of conspiracy theories — if there were aliens or alien spaceships or anything under the control of the United States government that we knew about, seen, photographs, what have you. I promise you some guy guarding the installation would have taken a selfie with one of the aliens and sent it to his girlfriend to impress her. There would be leaks,” he said.
Even so, he didn’t entirely shut the door on the possibility of contact someday — and even floated the idea of serving as a go-between if that moment ever arrives.
Meanwhile, current president Donald Trump has said his administration plans to make UFO-related material available to the public following NASA’s Artemis mission last month.
Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen embarked on a 10-day trip in space, then met with the president in the Oval Office a few weeks after returning to Earth.
After that meeting, Trump suggested that “a lot of things” involving unidentified objects would be released publicly in the near future.
Months earlier, Trump had reportedly directed the Defense Department to publish records tied to UFO activity, including information related to “alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs)”.
For now, it appears the public will have to wait to see what — if anything — comes out.