Former US President Barack Obama said he’s seen no evidence that aliens have made contact with Earth, clarifying his position on extraterrestrials after comments he made in a podcast went viral.

Obama found himself in the spotlight over the weekend after he appeared to confirm the existence of aliens in an interview he did with US podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen.

Towards the end of the interview, which dealt with a range of heavyweight issues such as the killing of protesters at the hands of immigration enforcement agents in Minnesota, Cohen posed a series of questions in a “lightning round,” starting with: “Are aliens real?”

“They’re real but I haven’t seen them,” replied Obama. “And they’re not being kept in… what is it? Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

The second question in that round was “what was the first question that you wanted answered when you became president?,” to which Obama replied, laughing: “Where are the aliens?” The interviewer did not delve into the response, instead going straight onto the next question.

Obama’s answer was picked up by international media, as well as people on social media. On Sunday evening, Obama issued a statement to clarify his position.

He posted the clip of his original comments on Instagram, accompanied by a short statement, saying: “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!”

It’s not the first time that Obama has spoken out on the issue. In an appearance on “The Late Late Show with James Corden.” He said: “What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there are, there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are.

“We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”

Conspiracy theories involving extraterrestrial life have long abounded about Area 51, a highly classified United States Air Force facility located at Groom Lake in southern Nevada.

One popular UFO conspiracy is that in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico, remains from a flying saucer that supposedly crashed were taken to Area 51 for reverse engineering experiments in order to replicate the extraterrestrial spacecraft.

In June 2019, a poll conducted by YouGov found that 54% of US adults think it is likely the government knows more than it’s telling about UFOs. (CNN)

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