All the online excitement over former president Barack Obama’s whimsical remark that aliens are real, only to witness him walking it back in a clarification the next day, only serves to illustrate that presidents don’t know anything when it comes to UFOs. Presidents, at least those in the modern era, aren’t told what’s going on, and they are just as much in the dark about the phenomenon as is the general public.

Taking this line of reasoning a step further, the whole Obama episode might serve to support the hypothesis that the UFOs have nothing to do with space aliens but have always been entirely a product of human ingenuity.

Anyway, here is one retelling of Obama’s statements, as reported in The Guardian newspaper, excerpted in bold print and enclosed in brackets, and a link to the article, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/16/barack-obama-no-evidence-aliens-real-interview-podcast:

[In a conversation with the American podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen over the weekend, Obama appeared to confirm the apparent existence of aliens during a speed round of questioning where the host asks guests quick questions and the guests respond with brief answers.

After he was asked “Are aliens real?”, Obama said: “They’re real but I haven’t seen them.”

He went on: “They’re not being kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

… However, following the media frenzy, Obama released a statement on Instagram on Sunday evening.

“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,” he said. “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!”]

Let’s all get one thing straight: UFOs are very real, but they’re not necessarily synonymous with extraterrestrials. There have been too many examples of credible witnesses observing them, often at close range.

To support this fact, I will note just a few high-profile encounters from UFO lore.

In the 1960s UFOs were observed hovering over U.S. nuclear missile launch facilities. During these encounters, the launch-control systems were shut down, and there has been much speculation over the years that space aliens were involved. However, the Wall Street Journal in 2025 revealed that these encounters actually stemmed from a Defense Department operation. The Journal revealed that the Pentagon ran these top-secret electromagnetic tests over U.S. nuclear missile systems to learn whether the nuclear bunkers would still function if they received a direct hit from Soviet nukes. This fact, however, was never revealed to the public.

In the year 2000 police officers from several jurisdictions in rural Illinois encountered a large delta- or triangular-shaped object moving slowly at low altitude and then suddenly darting around the night sky. The object accelerated instantaneously, and I have proposed the technology might have been using the Casimir effect.

One of the officers took a photo of the object with his Polaroid camera, and although the photo is very low quality, it does reveal an object in the sky. It was there. So, this object was quite real, but rather than jumping automatically to the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs, it would be wise to first exhaust ALL other possible explanations.

The one possible explanation that I have been fixated on for years is that the Pentagon has possibly developed a range of extraordinary advances in propulsion that have been kept from the public ever since the first important UFO encounter after World War II, that of Kenneth Arnold in 1947.

I further propose that the UFOs over Washington, D.C., in 1952 were likely the result of a deliberate test ordered by then-president Harry Truman, who ordered a similar demonstration of the Flying Wing aircraft a few years earlier, when the aircraft flew at low altitude over our nation’s capital. I suggest that he likely ordered the 1952 operation to determine whether platforms equipped with an advanced field propulsion system could out-maneuver conventional aircraft. I further propose that the reason these encounters happened on two separate occasions exactly one week apart was that the president was not satisfied with the first flyover and wanted to see how well these platforms would perform against state-of-the-art jet fighters.  

There are so many other examples of UFO encounters involving credible witnesses that have yet to be adequately explained.

At any rate, whether we want to believe in the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs or the terrestrial hypothesis for UFOs, the fact remains that there isn’t a shred of solid evidence supporting the former. That means either hypothesis carries equal weight.