After his remarks about extraterrestrial life went viral, former United States President Barack Obama has backtracked on his comments, clarifying that there has been no evidence of contact between aliens and humans.
What happened?
Obama said, “They are real, but I haven't seen them,” while he was on a podcast with left-leaning political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen. The podcast was released on Saturday, and Obama, in a rapid-fire question-and-answer segment, was asked whether he believes extraterrestrials are real.
Obama told Cohen that the aliens were not being kept at Area 51. “There is no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the President of the United States.”
The clip went viral, and global media outlets picked up his comments, an apparent admission regarding the existence of aliens. The claims added further fuel to a long-standing conspiracy theory that aliens were being held at a highly classified Air Force site in Nevada, popularly known as Area 51.
Obama walked back
Hours after the podcast was released, the 44th President of the United States took to Instagram to clarify that the viral clip did not capture his actual assessment of whether aliens exist, due to the speed of the questions posed to him.
“Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there,” he wrote in the Instagram post, “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we've been visited by aliens are low. And I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
Belief not new
Given the long-standing conspiracy theory, there was an attempt to storm Area-51 in 2019, with 1.5 million people signing up to ambush the facility. However, only about 150 social media influencers reached the site, and the event ended in a few arrests and a music festival.
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