No extraterrestrial specimens are kept at Area 51, a secretive military base, though, according to the former US president

Former US President Barack Obama has said he believes that aliens are "real" but dismissed longstanding conspiracy theories that the US is concealing proof of extraterrestrial life at a secretive military facility called Area 51.

Obama made the remarks on the No Lie podcast with Brian Tyler Cohen released on Saturday. Asked whether aliens "are real," the ex-president replied in the affirmative, adding "I haven't seen them, and they're not being kept in Area 51."

"There's no underground facility, unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States," he added.

When asked what question he most wanted answered upon becoming president, Obama joked that it was: "where are the aliens?"

Area 51 is a highly classified US Air Force facility at Groom Lake in southern Nevada. The CIA officially acknowledged the site's existence in 2013, when declassified documents revealed it had been used since 1955 to test the U-2 spy plane and other experimental aircraft.

The facility's secrecy sparked decades of speculation about extraterrestrial research, including theories that crashed alien spacecraft were stored there and that it was a venue for meetings with extraterrestrials. There have been a few UFO sightings in the area, but the CIA claimed they were test flights of the U-2 spy plane.

However, conspiracy theories have also been fueled by hundreds of alleged UFO sightings elsewhere. Pentagon officials told Congress in May 2022 that there were nearly 400 reports of unidentified aerial phenomena by military personnel, up from 144 tracked between 2004 and 2021. In 2024, the Pentagon stressed, however, that it had "no evidence to indicate extraterrestrial life has visited the planet."

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said that he was not a "believer" in extraterrestrial life, adding, though, that he had met with "serious people that say there's some really strange things that they see flying around out there."

(RT.com)