Former U.S. president Barack Obama doesn’t claim to know the origins of the unidentified flying objects that have been spotted by American military personnel — but if they are from another planet, he’d like to think that knowledge would unite humanity, rather than tear us apart.
Obama opened up about the long-shot possibility that UFOs could lead to proof of aliens this week, in a new podcast interview with New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein.
It was the former president’s second time speaking about UFOs in recent weeks, ahead of a highly anticipated intelligence report to Congress on so-called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) later this month.
In the latest interview, Obama was asked about a hypothetical situation in which the UFOs are proven to be remote drones sent by aliens. In that purely “what if” scenario, humans would only know that aliens exist, but would not be able to contact them.
Obama said such a revelation would not change his approach to politics, “because my entire politics is premised on the fact that we are these tiny organisms on this little speck floating out in space.”
He added that he bases his politics on the notion that “the differences we have on this planet are real, they’re profound, and they cause tragedy as well as joy … The best thing we can do is treat each other better, because we’re all we got.”
Obama did not claim to have any special knowledge about UFOs or their origins, but he did suggest that proof of aliens would cause tremendous upheaval in our society.
“I would hope that the knowledge that there were aliens out there would solidify people’s sense that what we have in common is a little more important,” he said.
“But no doubt, there would be immediate arguments about, well, we need to spend a lot more money on weapons systems to defend ourselves,” Obama said. “And new religions would pop up, and who knows what kind of arguments we’d get into. We’re good at manufacturing arguments for each other.”
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Obama speculated about the UFO question at the end of a wide-ranging discussion that touched on George Floyd‘s death, Donald Trump‘s presidency and current President Joe Biden, who was Obama’s vice president for eight years.
The former president told James Corden last month that he doesn’t know what the UFOs are, despite having access to the best intelligence reports available during his time as president.
“When I came into office, I asked,” he said, in a joking moment on CBS’ Late Late Show with James Corden.
“What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t exactly know what they are,” he went on.
“We can’t explain how they move, their trajectory,” Obama said. “They did not have an easily explainable pattern, and so I think that people still take seriously, trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”
Former president Trump claimed last year that he had heard “very interesting” things about Roswell, the New Mexico city known for an alleged UFO event in 1947.
“I won’t talk to you about what I know about it, but it’s very interesting,” Trump said at the time.
Several so-called UAP videos have surfaced in recent years, which appear to show strange objects buzzing past U.S. warships and plunging beneath the waves during multiple incidents off the coast of the United States. The Pentagon has confirmed many of the videos as authentic and unexplained.
UFOs were deemed a taboo subject for decades, but the topic has seen a renaissance in recent times, dating back to a bombshell report in the New York Times in 2017. That report revealed that the U.S. government had been investigating UFOs in secret for years. It also revealed three UFO videos captured by military personnel on separate occasions, which the Pentagon have since confirmed as authentic.
U.S. officials have taken a more open approach to UFOs since that report surfaced. They launched a UAP Task Force last summer and have been encouraging pilots to report UFO sightings whenever they occur, citing the objects as potential security threats inside restricted airspace.
Three pilots recently spoke out about their own experiences with UFOs in a 60 Minutes special on CBS. Two of them described a close encounter with a “Tic Tac-like” object off the coast of San Diego in 2004, during a days-long event involving the USS Nimitz and several other objects.
Another said that he and his fellow fighter pilots saw UFOs on a near-daily basis off the East Coast near Virginia Beach.
More recently, the Pentagon has confirmed several videos showing UFOs around a U.S. navy group in July of 2019, off the coast of San Diego. Documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell initially released the footage on his social media accounts.
The unclassified report on UFOs is expected to be delivered in Congress sometime this month, although no specific date has been set.
Republican Sen. Marco Rubio has described the report as an important step toward treating the topic more seriously, particularly in light of the potential threat that UFOs might pose.
Many theories have been floated to explain the strange phenomena, and there remains no proof that they are extraterrestrial in origin.
Although much of the UFO hype surrounds the United States, pilots have also been spotting them in Canadian airspace for years. Nevertheless, the Canadian government has said it does not have any dedicated task force for looking into the issue. As of this writing, Prime Minster Justin Trudeau has not spoken publicly about UFOs or the recently released footage.
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, former commander of the International Space Station, dismissed the hype around UFOs while addressing listener questions on CBC Radio earlier this week.
“Obviously I’ve seen countless things in the sky that I don’t understand,” Hadfield said. “But to see something in the sky that you don’t understand, and then to immediately conclude that it’s intelligent life from another solar system is the height of foolishness and lack of logic.”
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