Barack Obama has again insisted that the government isn’t covering up any extra-terrestrial life — and now said that, if it were, it would definitely have leaked.
Speaking to The Late Show host Stephen Colbert (via EW), the former president was questioned over his previous, oddly-worded remark made back in March that aliens were “real” but that he “hadn’t seen them.”
Within days, Obama was forced to later clarify that statement — when he insisted via social media that he’d simply meant that “statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.” Not that he’d ever seen evidence of it, he again assured.
“I thought it was so obvious what I meant,” Obama told Colbert this week. “Here’s the thing: for those of you who still think that we’ve got little green men underground somewhere, one of the things you learn as president is the government is terrible at keeping secrets.
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“This idea of conspiracy theories…” Obama continued, “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 and impress her. It would leak!”
Obama previously admitted that he had asked about the government records regarding alien life when he became president. In 2021, he told late night TV host James Corden that he sought answers on whether there was a lab “where we’re keeping the alien specimens and space ship.” “They did a little bit of research and the answer was no,” he added. However, Obama acknowleged footage and records of objects in the skies “that we don’t know exactly what they are.”
Recent years have seen an increased interest in UFOs, officially referred to as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), particularly as drone technology is improved and global tensions increase (remember those weather balloons?) Still, while many examples can be explained, the US government tracks a list of instances where reported phenomena defy current explanation.
Last month, President Trump said a recent UFO review had turned up “many very interesting documents,” which his administration would release “very soon” so that flying saucer fans can “go out and see if that phenomena is correct.”
For NASA’s part, administrator Bill Nelson recently pledged that the agency would not to conceal the existence of aliens, if they were discovered to be the cause of any UAP it is working to investigate.
Image credit: Angelina Katsanis – Pool/Getty Images
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
