Washington, DC: In keeping with popular belief among Americans about the existence of life beyond earth, former US president Barack Obama has claimed that aliens are “real”. He, however, said that he doesn’t know where they are.
Obama was responding to YouTuber Brian Tyler Cowen’s question about the existence of aliens. In the interview released on Saturday, Obama said the aliens are real, but quickly dismissed conspiracy theories that they are being kept at Area 51, a secretive US Air Force base in Nevada.
They’re real,” he said, further adding, “…but 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,” Obama said, as reported by NDTV.
For years now, Area 51 has attracted the attention of those who believe in aliens across the world. The area has been associated with alien and unverified UFO sightings. There were also reports of aliens and their spacecrafts being kept at a secret underground location there.
The US government didn’t officially acknowledge the base’s existence until 2013. It’s said to be a testing ground for advanced military aircraft.
There is growing interest in the US in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), the government’s term for UFOs. The Pentagon has established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to investigate UAP sightings, and Congress has passed laws requiring the government to disclose more information about these incidents.
Obama’s statement is being seen as interesting in this context. While there is no concrete evidence of the existence of life beyond Earth, scientists keep scanning the vast reaches of outer space in the hope of finding a clue.
Scientists recently received a breakthrough because of a crowd-sourced project aimed at searching for alien intelligence. The project named, the SETI@Home was launched in 1999, and millions of volunteers worldwide participated, aiming to identify unusual radio signals in data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
The huge radio telescope collapsed in 2020 due to a cable failure, and the project ended abruptly, but citizen scientists have identified more than 12 billion signals of interest in 21 years of data.
Researchers are now checking and analysing the results, as after 21 years, the team narrowed down the signals to 100 promising candidates, currently being re-examined using China’s FAST radio telescope.
