Former U.S. president Barack Obama said on Saturday that extraterrestrials are “real,” though he added he has never seen them himself, offering a partial answer to a question that has long fascinated the public.
Obama made the remarks in a conversation with political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen, who asked him directly whether aliens exist. “Yes, they’re real... but I haven’t seen them,” Obama replied.
After acknowledging their existence, Obama also rejected another popular theory, saying they are not being held at Area 51, the secretive U.S. military facility in Nevada long rumored to house captured alien craft. “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 has addressed the topic before. In a 2021 appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden, he said there are recordings of unidentified objects in the sky that remain unexplained. “There is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are,” he said, noting that researchers continue to study the phenomenon.
That same year, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report documenting 144 cases of what the government officially termed “unidentified aerial phenomena,” reported by military pilots since 2004. In 2023, the Pentagon’s UFO research office launched a public website run by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, providing access to information on reported sightings as part of efforts to identify potential threats to flight safety and national security.
Current President Donald Trump has expressed skepticism. In a July 2024 interview with Logan Paul, he said he could not say he believed in aliens but had met “serious people” who claimed to have seen strange flying objects. Months later, when asked whether he would release footage of unexplained phenomena, Trump said, “I’ll do that. I would do that. I’d love to do that. I have to do that.”