Former President Barack Obama was forced to clarify his claim on liberal influencer Brian Tyler Cohen's YouTube channel that aliens are "real" after unwittingly sparking conspiracy theories online.
Since the 1980s, conspiracy theorists have claimed Area 51 in Nevada hides aliens. The idea exploded in 2019, when millions online jokingly pledged to storm the base to “see them aliens.”
When Cohen asked Obama if aliens were real, Obama responded:
“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them. And they’re not being kept in Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
"Where are the aliens?"
You can hear what he said in the video below.
Almost immediately after Cohen's interview with Obama was published, conspiracies swirled that the news that aliens are "real" was being swept under the rug or was being used as a distraction from the scandal surrounding the Epstein files.
Obama—who laughed during the interview when he made his remark—took to Instagram to set the record straight, writing:
"I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify."
"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!"
You can see his post below.
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In 2013, the CIA formally acknowledged the existence of Area 51—though not the UFO crashes, extraterrestrials, or staged moon landings long associated with it.
Declassified documents referred to the 20,700-square-kilometre installation by name after decades of U.S. officials refusing to confirm it publicly.
In The Age of Disclosure, a 2025 documentary that alleges an “80-year cover-up of non-human intelligent life,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio is shown saying unidentified objects have been observed over nuclear facilities, adding that presidents have sometimes operated on a “need-to-know basis” to preserve deniability.
But Rubio offered additional context in an interview with Fox News, noting that his comments in the film were recorded years earlier while he was still in the Senate and reflected allegations he had heard, rather than firsthand knowledge.
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