To hell with your Fermi paradox: we’ve got presidential declarations.
During a podcast interview with political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen released Sunday, former president Barack Obama casually remarked — and in the eyes of certain wild-eyed conspiracists, confirmed — that aliens exist.
“They’re real,” Obama said coolly when asked about their existence, “but I haven’t seen them.”
“And they’re not being kept in… what is it? Area 51,” he continued. “There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
As Obama conspicuously sipped his tea, Cohen fired off another query: “what was the first question that you wanted answered when you became president?”
Obama replied with a smile: “Where are the aliens?”
If you take Obama at his word, it was fresh-off-the-grill nothingburger. Like NASA’s top scientists and most well-informed space enthusiasts, the 42nd president was saying that though he strongly suspects life is out there somewhere, he’s seen no confirmation of it himself.
But the remarks, which came during the podcast’s “lightning round” segment, kicked up a storm of speculation, especially amid official investigations into the UFO phenomenon reaching the floor of Congress. Self-proclaimed body language experts came out in droves, analyzing the eye contact Obama made during the exchange. Particularly galaxy-brained observers even pointed to how confidently Obama asserted his point as a counterintuitive indication that he must’ve seen some definitive evidence of aliens’ existence during his stint in the Oval Office.
Meanwhile, Obama was probably reminded of what it was like to be president, when every comment and gesture carries the authority of office and is scrutinized and fed into a vicious news cycle. Point in fact, he issued a follow up statement on Instagram to clarify what he intended with his aliens remarks, saying that he was only trying to “stick with the spirit of the speed round.”
“Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he elaborated. “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!”
We wouldn’t be surprised if that sparked yet more conspiracy theorizing. Obama is getting nervous, they could say. The deep state pulled a few strings to remind him of who’s really in charge. The Greys’ ambassador denounced the reckless comments on the floor of the Shadow Council, sparking a momentary diplomatic crisis.
This isn’t the first time Obama generated headlines for talking about aliens (which in fact has happened a surprising amount). In a 2015 appearance on the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show, he joked that aliens would block the release of Area 51 files, because “they exercise strict control over us.”
Of course, the most likely explanation is also the most dull: that you can take Obama literally when he says he suspects alien life is out there somewhere, but that he’s seen no direct evidence in an official capacity. Perhaps the strongest evidence for that banal conclusion: if the government really did did have evidence of aliens, Obama’s outburst-prone successor Donald Trump probably would have accidentally blurted it out by now.
More on extraterrestrial life: If Scientists Ever Find Strong Evidence of Alien Life, Communicating It Will Pose Serious Issues