President Donald Trump made a bizarre claim Thursday on Air Force One after being asked about a recent video clip that went viral online. The clip, in which Barack Obama said that aliens are real but that he hadn’t seen them, sparked new speculation about what the U.S. government may know about life on distant planets. But Trump says Obama somehow leaked classified intelligence while talking about extraterrestrials.
“Something that got a lot of attention this week, Barack Obama said that aliens are real. Have you seen any evidence of non-human visitors to Earth?” Trump was asked by Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy.
“Well, he gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that,” Trump said about Obama.
Doocy jumped in to ask, “So aliens are real?” interrupting Trump as he was in the middle of speaking.
“Well, I don’t know if they’re real or not. I can tell you he gave classified information,” said Trump. “He’s not supposed to be doing that. He made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information.”
It’s not clear what Trump was talking about, since Obama’s comments didn’t appear to cover anything specific and merely referred to the former president’s belief that there must be intelligent life out there. Many viewers expressed their dismay that the interviewer, Brian Tyler Cohen, didn’t follow up on Obama’s answer when he had the chance.
Trump went on to say that he didn’t have an opinion on aliens, adding, “I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it. Do you believe it, Peter?”
Doocy responded that if the president can declassify anything that he wants, as Trump has previously argued, then maybe it was fine. Trump responded, “I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.”
That was a point where Doocy probably should’ve followed up by asking about what he’d be declassifying and whether it involved information confirming the existence of aliens. But instead, it seems another reporter chimed in to joke about “illegal aliens.”
When you look back at what Obama actually said during his viral podcast interview, it’s difficult to figure out what may have been “classified.”
“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,” Obama said in the viral clip. “And they’re not being kept in, what is it? Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the President of the United States.”
In a follow-up post to Instagram, Obama tried to clarify his remarks by writing that he saw no evidence during his presidency that aliens had made contact with humans, but “statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.”
Conspiracy theorists insisted after Obama’s comments that he must have been trying to send a secret signal about the existence of aliens. And after Trump’s very strange insistence that Obama had leaked classified intelligence, those theories seem much more credible.
On the other hand, Trump’s motivation for such comments may be purely related to distraction. The president’s approval rating is in the toilet, and he likes to throw everything at the wall in times of crisis to see what sticks.
Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump, recently told the podcast Pod Force One that he might already have a speech prepared about UFOs.
“I’ve heard kind of around, I think my father-in-law has actually said it, that there is some speech that he has, that I guess at the right time, I don’t know when the right time is, he’s going to break out and talk about and it has to do with maybe some sort of extraterrestrial life,” Lara Trump said, according to the Hill.
As Trump reportedly prepares to bomb the shit out of Iran, it seems likely that none of us will remember any of this talk about aliens by next week. But it’s a fun distraction in the meantime.
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