Hours after Barack Obama caused a frenzy by saying aliens were real on a podcast, the former US president has posted a statement clarifying that he has not seen any evidence of them.

In a conversation with the American podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen over the weekend, Obama appeared to confirm the apparent existence of aliens during a speed round of questioning where the host asks guests quick questions and the guests respond with brief answers.

After he was asked “Are aliens real?”, Obama said: “They’re real but I haven’t seen them.”

He went on: “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 comment was picked up by media outlets around the world, with headlines such as “Former US president Barack Obama says aliens are real” and “‘They’re real’: Obama’s shock alien claims”. Time Magazine covered the drama, reporting: “Obama says aliens are real, but they aren’t at Area 51”.

However, following the media frenzy, Obama released a statement on Instagram on Sunday evening.

“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 said. “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!”

There is a long-running conspiracy theory claiming that the US government is hiding extraterrestrials at Area 51, a highly classified air force site in Nevada.

In 2019, after 1.5 million people signed up to “storm” the site, approximately 150 social media influencers gathered around the airstrip but the event ended anticlimactically, with only a few arrests, and ultimately turned into a music festival.

Declassified documents released in 2013 revealed that the secret airstrip was actually used for aerial testing of US government projects including the U-2 and Oxcart aerial surveillance programs.

“High-altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side-effect – a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs),” the documents said.