Former President Barack Obama sat down with influencer Brian Tyler Cohen for a friendly conversation that centered on the political divisions roiling the country, but there was one exchange that seemed to unite disparate factions, at least temporarily, in a shared excitement: the moment Obama seemed to confirm the existence of aliens.
“Are aliens real?” Cohen asked the former president point-blank.
“They’re real,” Obama replied, before adding, “But I haven’t seen them and they’re not being kept in Area 51. There is no underground facility. Unless there is this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
The former president went on to joke that the first question he wanted answered when he became president was “Where are the aliens?”
The YouTube video of the one-on-one conversation has attracted more than 4 million views since it was posted on Saturday.
Obama posted the alien clip to his own Instagram account on Sunday evening, but tamped down enthusiasm for his comments in the caption.
“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,” the former president wrote. “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’s view on the possibility of extraterrestrial existence has, with developments in astronomy, become the scientific consensus.
As the journalist Garret M. Graff, author of UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There, reported for Rolling Stone, advances in technology have helped scientists put a figure to the number of habitable planets — planets with the conditions to support life as we recognize it — in the universe. Current estimates hover around one sextillion such planets or one billion trillions.
With those numbers, the odds are heavily in favor of the possibility that life is out there — just very far away. The absolute closest galaxy to ours, the Andromeda Galaxy, is roughly 2.5 million lightyears away; the 100,000 galaxies that make up our next closest neighbors exist in a “cosmic suburb” that spans roughly 520 million lightyears of outer space. As Graff wrote, “The math may very well be on the side of the aliens existing, but that’s largely because the math of the universe itself turns out to be astounding.”
