Obama clarifies his 'they're real' podcast comment on aliens

Former US President Barack Obama has sought to quench online speculation about comments he made on aliens on a podcast over the weekend. 

During a round of quickfire questions with podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen, Obama was asked whether aliens were real. 

"They're real," Obama began. "But I haven't seen them. And they're not being kept in Area 51." 

Despite Obama making clear that he had not seen aliens at any of the suspected sites in the US while in office, his definitive opening to the answer prompted speculation that the former president might have some kind of knowledge on the matter beyond a personal opinion based on the balance of probabilities. 

'Statistically ... the odds are good there's life out there' 

Late on Sunday, amid his weekend at the NBA All Star Game in the US, Obama posted a clarification on Instagram, saying he had no greater insight than anyone else. 

"I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it's gotten attention, let me clarify," Obama wrote, reposting the video clip in question. "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!" 

The idea of the existence of other life forms in the universe being statistically highly probable is decades old and was discussed in Cold War-era documents declassified by the US National Security Agency (NSA) as long ago as 2004.

Increased interest amid declassification of long-secret data

The secrecy around Area 51, a top-secret Cold War test site in the Nevada desert, had long fueled conspiracy theories among extraterrestrial enthusiasts.

In 2013, the CIA acknowledged the existence of the site — an open secret anyway by that point — but not of the rumored UFO crashes or other space-based claims.

The base was a testing ground for a variety of top-secret and experimental military aircraft.

In recent years, US intelligence agencies and NASA have also prompted interest by declassifying various records about investigations of UAPs. This stands for unidentified anomalous phenomena, and is the term US authorities now favor over "UFOs" to broaden the definition to include things that are not "flying objects."

Many, but not all, UAPs are thought to be phenomena such as weather or light phenomena, or even innocuous flying objects like birds, drones, or balloons. 

Interest in a recent report from the Pentagon on this matter and a Congressional hearing had been fueled in part by Obama referring to footage of "objects in the skies, that we don't know exactly what they are." An earlier CIA tranche of UFO materials was published in the 1970s.

Edited by: Louis Oelofse