FORMER US PRESIDENT Barack Obama has released a statement to say that, during his terms in office, he “saw no evidence” that aliens have made contact with Earth, days after he said on a podcast they were real.

Speaking during a quick-fire interview round with US podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen this weekend Obama said aliens are real – a clip which has since been viewed millions of times.

“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them and they’re not being kept in Area 51,” he said, referring to the long-running conspiracy theory which contends the US government is hiding aliens at Area 51, a classified air force site in Nevada.

“There’s no underground facility. Unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.

He then joked that the first question he wanted to be answered when he became president was to know where the aliens are.

Former President Obama confirms that aliens are real.

Via @briantylercohen pic.twitter.com/QfMwRJ8jCU

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) February 14, 2026

In a statement today, Obama doubled down on his assertion that aliens are real, but clarified that he has not seen evidence of them on Earth.

“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify,” he said in an Instagram post.

“Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

Obama has previously been open about his love of science fiction and science. At the White House Frontiers Conference in 2016, he referred to himself as a “nerd”.

“I’m a science geek. I’m a nerd, and I don’t make any apologies for it.”

He has named Steven Spielberg’s movie about aliens coming to earth, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, as his third favourite sci-fi movie.

In Wired, Obama described the movie – which treats aliens as a non-threatening presence – as “fundamentally optimistic”. 

He’s also a major fan of the science fiction TV series Star Trek. In 2007, he greeted Leonard Nimoy, the US actor who played Mr Spock in the show, with a four fingered Vulcan salute – a 1960s Star Trek Spock greeting.

Following the death of Nimoy, Obama said: “I loved Spock”.

“Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy,” he said in a statement. “Leonard was Spock. Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed, the centre of Star Trek’s optimistic, inclusive vision of humanity’s future.”