Former president barack obama sat down with influencer Brian Tyler Cohen A friendly conversation was sought that focused on the political divisions roiling the country, but there was one exchange that seemed to unite disparate factions, at least temporarily, in a shared enthusiasm: the moment when Obama seemed to confirm the existence of aliens.
“Are aliens real?” Cohen asked the former president point-blank.
“They’re real,” Obama responded, before adding, “But I haven’t seen them and they’re not kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility. Unless there’s this huge 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 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 night, but tamped down enthusiasm for his comments in the caption.
“I was trying to continue in the spirit of the quick round, but since it has attracted attention, let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that there is a good chance that there is life out there,” the former president wrote. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances that we have been visited by extraterrestrials are low, and during my presidency I saw no evidence that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
Obama’s opinion on the possibility of extraterrestrial existence has become, with advances in astronomy, the scientific consensus.
As journalist Garret M. Graff, author of UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Extraterrestrial Life Here and Out There, reported for rolling stone Technological advances have helped scientists estimate the number of habitable planets (planets with the conditions to support life as we recognize it) in the universe. Current estimates are around one billion trillion planets of this type.
With those numbers, the odds are very much in favor of the possibility that there is life out there, but very far away. The closest galaxy to ours, the Andromeda galaxy, is approximately 2.5 million light years away; The 100,000 galaxies that make up our nearest neighbors exist in a “cosmic suburb” that spans approximately 520 million light years of outer space. As Graff wrote: “It’s entirely possible that the mathematics is on the side of the existence of aliens, but that is largely because the mathematics of the universe itself is astonishing.”
