Obama Tells Liberal Podcaster Aliens Are Real

The following is an edited transcript excerpt from The Michael Knowles Show.

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Liberal podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen just interviewed Barack Obama, and the former president decided to make a little news.

Obama declared that aliens are real.

I asked @BarackObama if aliens are real. pic.twitter.com/ZPw5zT9PfD

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) February 14, 2026

Credit: @briantylercohen/X.com

Cohen: “Are aliens real?”

Obama: “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in — what is it?”

Cohen: “Area 51.”

Obama: “… Area 51. There’s no underground facility. Unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.” 

Cohen: “What was the first question you wanted answered when you became president?” 

Obama: “Where are the aliens?” 

That’s a funny answer. But Cohen just moves on. 

Brian Tyler Cohen has set the new gold standard for incompetence at interviewing. There’s no follow-up. 

A president of the United States declares that aliens are real, and Cohen decides to not follow up on it. Oh, how do you know that? How do you know aliens are real?

Obama has now come out to clarify his statement, offering a whole lot of liberal nonsense about the distance between solar systems:

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. 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!

Liberals always say things like this — the solar system is so large, statistically there has to be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

But they never explain why that is. Because in order to ascertain the probability of something, you have to know how that thing came about in the first place. You have to know something, anything, about that thing. And at the level of pure nature, we don’t.

Now from a theological and anthropological level, I think we do know. But from the point of view of nature, we do not know how life came about. We don’t know, for instance, how one goes from inorganic to organic matter. There have been a zillion theories over the years, and none of them have been proven, but some of them have been disproven. 

So the argument that the universe is really, really big actually does not imply that there is intelligent life — or life of any kind anywhere else.

But the reason that the libs love aliens is because the existence of aliens diminishes the distinction of human beings. It makes us less special. That’s usually their explicit argument.

They say things like, What, you think you’re so special? A universe that’s eight gazillion bajillion miles wide and expanding, with countless worlds — you think you’re so special?

And my answer — and I believe the Christian answer — is yes, I think we’re pretty special.

The deeper reason the libs always promote aliens is because it diminishes the Incarnation. Because Christ is a man, because God becomes a man. He doesn’t become E.T., he doesn’t become a gazelle. He becomes a man, and he raises our very humanity to inestimable dignity.

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And the libs (and demons) want to diminish that. Satan falls from heaven because he can’t bow down to a man. Basically that’s what’s at the heart of this. I’m not saying that all the libs who promote the alien stuff are actively working with demons. I’m not. I really am not. I don’t see demons under every rock. But it is curious that so much of liberalism comes down to a prideful attempt to exalt man above his station and ends by degrading man below his station.

It begins by this notion that we’ll have no kings or priests. Man will only be free when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. We’re just humanists now. We’re going to raise humanity up. We’re going to maximize individual autonomy.

And then what’s the end of it? The end of it is we degrade ourselves. We pretend that we’re just sacks of meat that exist only for pleasure. We promote things like abortion, slaughtering babies, and degrading humanity. We promote things like suicide, slaughtering ourselves, again degrading humanity.

We reduce ourselves below the station to which we’ve been raised. No surprise there. So when Obama says, look, I’m clarifying, I don’t see any evidence of aliens — I think he’s probably being honest here. I think his knee-jerk reaction of, well, of course aliens exist, the certainty in that just comes from his liberalism: we have to be — humans aren’t special. You think you’re so special?

But we are. We are actually.

It’s actually a harder truth. It is a more realistic view, but it’s more difficult, and it entails more responsibility to say yes, we are special. It’s kind of weird, right, that we, among all of the created things, have rational wills. Isn’t that kind of weird that we can conceive of abstract things? Unlike every animal and plant and all organic matter on Earth? We are finite and mortal, we die — but we have this immortal, eternal aspect to ourselves because we can reason.

Isn’t that kind of weird that nothing else that we’ve ever encountered or really even can conceive of has that combination of flesh and reason and will?

That makes us kind of special.

You are special, believe it or not.