Former U.S. President Barack Obama said aliens are “real,” but emphasised that he never encountered any indication of extraterrestrial contact while in office.
He made the remark during a rapid-fire segment of an interview with podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen in Los Angeles on 14 February.
When asked "Are aliens real?."
He replied jokingly, "They’re real, but I haven't seen them," before dismissing the idea of hidden facilities at Area 51.
“There's no underground facility. Unless there's this enormous conspiracy. And they hid it from the President of the United States.”
When pressed on what he first wanted to know after entering the White House, Obama replied: "Where are the aliens?", laughing with Cohen as he recalled the moment.
The clip went viral, prompting Obama to issue a clarification on social media on 15 February.
He wrote that, statistically, the scale of the universe makes the existence of life elsewhere plausible, but that the distances between solar systems make the likelihood of contact extremely low.
He added that he saw no proof that extraterrestrials had ever visited Earth.
“I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!” Obama said later in a post on social media.
Area 51 is a remote U.S. Air Force installation in southern Nevada whose existence was formally acknowledged in 2013 when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released Cold War records confirming it had been used to test the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and later the A-12 Oxcart programme.
The documents showed the facility operated as a high-security range for advanced surveillance projects, with secrecy maintained to protect classified aircraft capabilities.
The site became further embedded in public imagination through the 1947 Roswell incident in New Mexico, where debris initially reported as a “flying disc” was later identified as part of Project Mogul, a Cold War balloon programme designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests.
The Roswell episode helped shape decades of speculation, though no released U.S. government records have tied Area 51 to extraterrestrial activity.
Interest surged again in 2019 when a viral campaign titled “Storm Area 51” attracted millions of online pledges to gather near the base.
Local authorities prepared for a large turnout, but only a few thousand people arrived in Nevada, and the gatherings remained peaceful.
Reuters reports that Congress held its first public hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) in more than 50 years on 17 May 2022, where Pentagon officials confirmed hundreds of military sighting reports.
In July 2023, senators introduced measures requiring the release of government UAP records and expanding federal data-collection efforts.
The U.S. Air Force reminded the public that the installation is an active, restricted military site and that unauthorised entry is prohibited.
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