Obama jokes he was told there’s no secret government alien lab but said video of UFOs is real

• A former Navy pilot said pilots training off the US coast saw UFOs every day.
• The sightings are being investigated by a Department of Defense special task force.
• Former President Barack Obama joked of his own curiosity about aliens and said sightings are real.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

Former President Barack Obama joked that he was told there was no secret lab testing alien samples when he took office in 2008 but acknowledged that footage of unidentified aircraft was real.

During an interview on"The Late Late Show with James Corden," Obama was asked to weigh in on reports of UFOs.

"When it comes to aliens, there are some things I just can't tell you on air," Obama joked.

-Blake Scheurle (@blakemecakes) May 18, 2021

A former US Navy pilot told CBS's 60 Minutes earlier this week that pilots training off the US coast sighted UFOs – also known as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) – nearly every day.

Videos of the incidents were declassified in 2019 and the Department of Defense launched a special task force to investigate them last August. A report on the sightings is expected in June.

The former president said he asked about the topic when he became president.

"I was like alright, is there the lab somewhere where we're keeping the alien specimens and spaceship? And you know, they did a little bit of research and the answer was no," he joked.

Obama confirmed that there's footage and records of unidentified objects in the skies.

"We don't know exactly what they are, we can't explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is. But I have nothing to report to you today, " Obama said.