Obama on UFOs: There are 'records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are'
WASHINGTON - Former President Barack Obama shared his thoughts on recent sightings of UFOs that have left millions wondering if we’re truly not alone in this universe.
During an appearance Monday night on "The Late Late Show with James Corden" on CBS, Obama said, "when it comes to aliens, there are just some things I can’t tell you on air."
He said that when he became president he asked about aliens, joking that he inquired about a "lab somewhere."
"The answer was no," Obama said.
"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 know exactly what they are," Obama added. "We can't explain how they move, their trajectory," he 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."
The former’s president’s comments come following recently leaked Pentagon footage of a spherical flying object seen flying off the coast of San Diego which shows an unidentified flying object soaring through the air before suddenly diving into the ocean.
RELATED: Video shows spherical UFO off California disappearing into ocean
The footage was published on May 14 by documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell and was later confirmed as authentic by the Pentagon, according to a report from FOX 8.
There is currently an upcoming report that is expected to be released to lawmakers in June regarding what is known about UFOs.
When former President Donald Trump signed into law the massive $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief package in 2020, it triggered a countdown to a deadline by which the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense must provide lawmakers a report on everything they know about UFOs like the ones seen in the recently leaked footage.
Buried within the thousands of pages of legislation under the "Committee Comments" section of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, a stipulation requested a report to senators on intelligence and armed services committees regarding any information surrounding UFO sightings and whether they present any potential threat.
While the exact nature of the purported extraterrestrial threats was unknown, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe spoke with FOX News’ Maria Bartiromo in March, saying "there are a lot more sightings" than the public is aware of.
Ratcliffe said there have been objects observed by U.S. military craft and satellites that have achieved forms of flight that would normally be impossible with any known human technology.
"When we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain," he continued.
"Movements that are hard to replicate that we don't have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom," Ratcliffe explained.
In September, the U.S. Navy acknowledged that videos showing the 2004 and 2015 UFO encounters by U.S. Navy pilots were released by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge and published by The New York Times were of real "unidentified" objects.
"The Navy considers the phenomena contained/depicted in those three videos as unidentified," Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher told The Black Vault, a website dedicated to declassified government documents.
RELATED: Pentagon confirms recently released video of pyramid-shaped UFOs near San Diego is authentic
After the release of the videos, reports surfaced of a top-secret Pentagon program conducting classified briefings for more than a decade, analyzing various encounters between military craft and unidentified aerial vehicles.
In July, the Pentagon stated that the program was disbanded, but a Senate committee report from June revealed spending on a program called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force.
FOX Television Stations reported in June of last year that U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio had requested a detailed analysis on the findings of the task force.
The reveal of both the task force’s existence, as well as Rubio’s data request, came in a June 17, 2020 Select Committee on Intelligence report authored by Rubio on the Intelligence Authorization Act.
In regards to Ratcliffe’s comments on unexplained technology observed by U.S. military personnel and detailed in the upcoming report, at least one scientist can attest to having observed something similar.
Astrophysicist and former consultant for the UFO program since 2007, Eric W. Davis, told the New York Times in July of last year that he gave a classified briefing to the Defense Department agency in March 2020 regarding "off-world vehicles not made on this Earth."