Trump: Obama revealed classified information when he said aliens exist

(Patria) - President Donald Trump on Thursday accused former President Barack Obama of revealing classified information when he recently said aliens exist, Reuters reported.

"He pulled it out of classified information... He shouldn't be doing that," Trump told reporters on Air Force One as he traveled to Georgia. "He made a big mistake."

During an interview with podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen released on Saturday, Obama was asked if aliens exist.

"They are real, but I haven't seen them and they aren't kept in... Area 51. There's no underground facility unless there's a huge conspiracy and they've hidden it from the president of the United States," Obama said.

Area 51 is a classified U.S. Air Force facility in Nevada that conspiracy theorists speculate houses alien bodies and crashed spacecraft. CIA archives released in 2013 state it was a testing site for secret spy planes.

His remarks offered no indication that the former president relied on classified information.

"During my presidency, I saw no evidence of alien contact. Really!" Obama wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday.

In the post, Obama explained his belief that aliens exist by saying the statistical probability of life beyond Earth is high because the universe is so vast. He added that the chances of alien life visiting Earth are slim given the distances involved.

On Thursday, Trump said, "I don't know if they're real or not," when asked if he had seen evidence of aliens.

The White House said it had nothing to add to the president's comments. Obama's office did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment.

The Pentagon has made efforts in recent years to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects, and senior military officials said in 2022 that they had found no evidence to suggest aliens had visited Earth or crashed there.

A 2024 Pentagon report stated that U.S. government investigations since the end of World War II have found no evidence of extraterrestrial technology and that most sightings were misidentified as ordinary objects and phenomena.