Barack Obama Says Aliens Are Real When Pressed About Presidential Secrets

Barack Obama says aliens exist.

Former President Barack Obama, 64, said in an interview with YouTuber and political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen released on Saturday, Feb. 14, that aliens are real — though he added that he has never seen any himself.

Near the end of the sit-down conversation, Cohen asked about extraterrestrial life during a quick-fire “lightning round,” simply saying, “Are aliens real?”

“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,” Obama replied. He then addressed a long-running rumor about Area 51, the classified U.S. Air Force facility in the Nevada desert.

“And they’re not being kept in … what is it? Area 51,” Obama said. “There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

When Cohen later asked what question Obama most wanted answered upon becoming president, Obama joked in response to the earlier topic.

“Where are the aliens?” he said, laughing.

Obama has made similar remarks before. During an appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden in 2021, he joked that when he took office, he asked whether there was a lab where alien specimens and spaceships were being kept.

Obama also discussed the idea of confirmed extraterrestrial life on a 2021 episode of The Ezra Klein Show podcast, suggesting it would likely reshape politics and society. He said it could spark arguments about expanding defense spending, fuel the rise of new religions, and trigger fresh divisions.

Still, he added that it would not alter his own political outlook, which he said is rooted in the belief that humans are small beings on a tiny speck in the vastness of space.

As for Area 51, the U.S. government did not publicly confirm the facility’s existence until 2013, after years of denials and secrecy. Officially known as the Nevada Test and Training Range, it remains off-limits to civilians and is guarded and heavily restricted.

Because of its secrecy — and the fact that little is publicly known about what happens there — the site has become a magnet for conspiracy theories. Some claim it houses an underground lab where the U.S. government studies aliens, though officially it is used as a training and testing range for the Air Force.