Originally published 2021-05-22.
In May 2021 Barack Obama told James Corden that, as president, he had asked whether the US government was hiding alien specimens or spacecraft, and was told it was not. He then made a more serious point: the military does have videos and records of objects in the sky that nobody has been able to explain. He did not say those objects were alien, and he said he had nothing new to reveal.
Here is what he actually said, why it made headlines, and what official investigations have found since.
What Obama said on The Late Late Show
The interview aired on The Late Late Show with James Corden on 18 May 2021. Corden raised the topic of aliens, and Obama opened with a joke, teasing: “When it comes to aliens, there are things I just can’t tell you on air.”
He then explained that soon after taking office he had asked whether there was a secret lab holding alien bodies and craft. According to his account, officials looked into it and came back with a no. The audience laughed, and so did he.
Then his tone shifted. Stressing that he was now being serious, he said there is “footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.” He added that their movements and trajectories did not fit an easily explainable pattern, that people inside government still took the job of investigating them seriously, and that he personally had nothing to report.
Why his comments made news
Former presidents rarely discuss the subject at all, so even a careful, half-joking answer attracted attention around the world. The timing mattered too. Only days earlier, on 16 May 2021, CBS’s 60 Minutes had broadcast a segment in which former Navy pilots described repeated encounters with unidentified objects.
One of them, former Lieutenant Ryan Graves, said his F/A-18F squadron began spotting objects over restricted airspace southeast of Virginia Beach in 2014, after a radar upgrade, and that the sightings continued almost daily for at least a couple of years. He called them a security risk because nobody knew what they were, telling CBS: “I am worried, frankly.”
A few months before that, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe had said in a Fox interview that there were sightings without good explanations and that he hoped to say more once the material was declassified.
A report from the US intelligence community was also due in June. Obama’s comments landed in the middle of that build-up, which is why so many outlets ran them.
UFO, UAP: what the terms mean
The Pentagon and intelligence agencies prefer the term unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, later broadened to unidentified anomalous phenomena. The change is partly about tone. “UFO” has become shorthand for alien spaceships, while “unidentified” simply means that observers could not work out what they saw.
That distinction is exactly the one Obama drew. Saying an object is unexplained is a statement about the limits of the evidence, not a claim about where the object came from. A blurry infrared video, a sensor glitch, a balloon seen from an unusual angle or a foreign drone can all produce footage that is hard to interpret.
What the June 2021 report found
On 25 June 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published its Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, which Congress had requested in late 2020. It reviewed 144 reports, most of them from US Navy personnel, dating from 2004 to 2021.
Only one case was identified with high confidence: a large, deflating balloon. The other 143 remained unexplained, largely because the data was too limited. The report proposed five broad categories of possible explanation: airborne clutter such as birds and balloons, natural atmospheric phenomena, secret US government or industry programmes, systems belonging to foreign adversaries, and an “other” bin for anything that did not fit.
Crucially, the report did not say any of the objects were extraterrestrial. It concluded that better data collection was needed before firm answers could be given.
What later investigations concluded
In 2022 the Pentagon set up the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to handle these reports systematically. It has since opened hundreds of cases. Roughly half have been resolved with ordinary explanations, such as weather balloons; the rest remain open, mostly because there is not enough information to reach a conclusion.
In March 2024 AARO published a review of the historical record going back decades. It found no empirical evidence of alien technology, no recovered extraterrestrial craft or artefacts, and no hidden programme that had been concealed from Congress. In other words, the answer Obama said he received in 2009 is the same one official reviews have reached since.
Common myths about the interview
“Obama admitted aliens exist.” He did not. His one line about things he could not say on air was clearly a joke, and his serious remarks were about unexplained objects, not alien visitors.
“The government confirmed the videos show alien craft.” The Navy confirmed the videos were genuine recordings, not that the objects were from elsewhere. Unidentified does not mean unearthly.
“Every case is a mystery.” Many reports turn out to be balloons, drones, birds or sensor artefacts once enough data is gathered. The truly puzzling cases are the ones with the least information.
The takeaway
Obama’s answer was a fair summary of where things stood in 2021: real footage exists, some of it is genuinely hard to explain, and the government takes it seriously as a matter of airspace safety. What nobody, including a former president, has produced is evidence that any of these objects came from another world. Curiosity is reasonable; leaping from “unexplained” to “alien” is not.
Sources: 1News: Barack Obama talks UFOs with James Corden; CBS News, 60 Minutes: UFOs regularly spotted in restricted airspace; Wikipedia: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena; Wikipedia: All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Original tip via Futurism.
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