Former President Barack Obama appeared on the The Late Show with James Corden on Monday night to crack wise with the comedian and his band. Corden hit the President—who appeared via satellite—with a number of questions. When Corden turned over control of the interview to bandleader Reggie Watts, the conversation got extraterrestrial. “All this talk about them aliens,” Watts said. “I was wondering if you have a theory about that.”
Obama fidgeted in his seat. “When it comes to aliens, there are some things I just can’t tell you on air,” Obama said. “The truth is that when I came into office I asked ‘Is there a lab somewhere where we’re keeping the alien specimens and spaceships?’ They did a little bit of research and the answer was ‘No.’”
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“But what is true is that there is footage and records of objects in the sky that we don’t know exactly what they are. How they move, their trajectory,” Obama continued. “They did not have an easily explainable pattern. So I think that people still take that seriously and try to figure out what that is. But I have nothing to report to you today.”
Obama isn’t the first president to question Washington and the Pentagon about what it knows about aliens. Bill Clinton famously wanted to know what was going on at Area 51 and said he wouldn’t be surprised if aliens had already visited us. Trump’s presidency was marked by an increase in discussion of UFO activity and rumors circulated that he would spill state secrets about extraterrestrials. Of course, it’s impossible for us to say what any president actually knows.
A recent interview with former Navy pilots about the strange things they’ve seen in the sky aired on 60 Minutes, lending more legitimacy to the latest wave of UFO obsession. The Pentagon has declassified a lot of information about the phenomenon in the past few years and the intelligence community has a June 1 deadline for publishing a report detailing what it knows.
