Comments by former President Barack Obama sparked debate online this Valentine’s Day weekend, after a podcast appearance where he said extraterrestrials were real.

“They’re real,” the former U.S. leader said, adding, “but I haven’t seen them.”

The comments were made in response to questions from host Brian Tyler Cohen in an interview that appeared on his podcast.

Obama elaborated that aliens are “not being kept in Area 51,” joking that he was unaware of any “underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

The former president’s comments sparked heated debate on social media over the weekend, as many speculated about the potential significance—or lack thereof—to Obama’s statements to Cohen during the podcast.

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One obvious reason the former President’s comments on alien life—and specifically the idea of “underground” facilities and similar ideas related to alien conspiracies—recently took hold with listeners has to do with previous comments he made in 2021 to late night TV host James Corden, who asked him questions that included “where we’re keeping the alien specimens and space ship.”

“When it comes to the aliens, there are some things I just can’t tell you on air,” Obama joked with Corden at the time.

“Look, the truth is that when I came into office, I asked,” Obama told Corden during the 2021 interview. “I was like, alright, is there a lab somewhere, where we’re keeping the alien specimens and spaceships? You know, they did a little bit of research, and the answer was no.”

“But what is true,” Obama continued, “and I’m actually being serious here, is that… there’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t exactly know what they are. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory… they did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”

In the 2021 interview with Corden, Obama had been referencing the release of videos by the Department of Defense that had been leaked several years before their official authorized release in 2020.

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