Editorial: On Barack Obama and the aliens

Chicago Tribune Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune on Feb 20, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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We got a kick out of an old chestnut among conspiracy theorists — whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and whether any of those aliens have visited Earth — that rose to the surface earlier this week thanks to the musings of none other than former President Barack Obama.

Obama’s off-the-cuff remarks to a podcast host had those of us of a certain age revisiting memories of FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully fending off vaguely sinister government officials in their attempts to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding alien visitations in “The X Files.”

Here was the 44th president of the United States participating in a “speed round” of questions put to him by podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen just out and out saying this about aliens: “They’re real. But I haven’t seen them.”

If only a president had said as much back in the day, Mulder and Scully would have been spared a lot of trouble.

During the podcast, Obama hastened to add that Area 51, the part of New Mexico that the conspiracists for years have claimed is home to an underground bunker with alien remains and such, isn’t a thing — “unless there is an enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

All in good fun, right? Alas, even former presidents of the United States can’t just josh about such things.

The next day, after Obama’s ET commentary went viral, the ex-president felt the need to clarify matters. “I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us,” he said on Instagram. “Really!”

His belief that intelligent life is out there, he said, is based on the vastness of the universe and the statistical unlikelihood that humans are the only such form of life.

So what happened? Did the Men in Black show up with one of those memory-eraser gizmos to take care of Obama’s inappropriate revelation?

Sigh. Cue the conspiracy theorists again. And, Mulder and Scully, sorry about that — get back to work.

Oh, well. For our part, as it pertains to extraterrestrial life, we’re going to acknowledge we just don’t know and leave it at that.

But we also will say that it was nice — for a nanosecond or two — to have the public’s focus on a topic that doesn’t involve the future of democracy as we know it or whether the rule of law will survive, etc.

For that little bit of relief, we say, “Thanks, Obama!”

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