Former US president Barack Obama on Sunday clarified on his Instagram that he has not seen any evidence of extraterrestrial life.

His post came hours after he caused a stir on Brian Tyler Cohen’s podcast by suggesting aliens might be real.

On the podcast, Obama was asked rapid-fire questions. When asked, “Are aliens real?” he said, “They’re real but I haven’t seen them.”

He added, “They’re not being kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

The clip went viral.

“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he wrote on his Instagram. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

The comment revived long-running conspiracy theories about Area 51, the classified US Air Force facility in Nevada.

In 2019, an online event inviting people to “storm” the site drew 1.5 million sign-ups, but only a few hundred showed up, and the event ended without major incidents.

Declassified documents released in 2013 showed that the airstrip was used for testing US aerial surveillance projects, including the U-2 and Oxcart programs.

The documents also noted that high-altitude testing of the U-2 led to a rise in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

Addressing Area 51 claims, Obama said, “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 has previously spoken about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, now referred to as UAPs.

In 2021, on The Late Show with James Corden, he noted that the US government has footage and records of objects in the skies that remain unexplained.

“When it comes to aliens, there are some things I just can’t tell you on air,” Obama had said. “But what is true and I’m actually being serious here is that there’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.”