Ever since the alleged UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, people have been obsessed with a conspiracy theory that the United States government has been hiding evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life. And a metric ton of pop culture, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to The X-Files, has been based around said conspiracies.
(The segment starts around the 9:26 mark.)
Of course, few people in government would have access to such information were it true. Presumably however, one of those people would be the President of the United States. Which is why Stephen Colbert asked our 44th president Barack Obama if he ever bothered to ask during a recent interview (via Boing Boing). While occupying the Oval Office, did Obama actually dig into all this? It turns out, he sure did.
Barack Obama is a known sci-fi/fantasy nerd, who grew up loving Spider-Man comics and Conan the Barbarian. So of course, it only makes sense that once he became President, he’d look into what our government’s knowledge of UFO’s actually is. “I certainly asked about it,” Obama says. Colbert presses for more of a definitive answer, at which point 44 says, “I can’t tell you that.” As the talk show host surmises, if there was no truth to any of this stuff, one would simply say, “there’s nothing to it?” Right?
CBS
The world today is currently awash with ridiculous conspiracy theories on every subject. Belief in some of these is actually eroding our collective intellect. Obama told Colbert “It used to be that UFOs and Roswell was the biggest conspiracy. And now that seems so tame, the idea that the government might have an alien spaceship.” Truthfully, an alien ship crashing and a cover-up to hide that information is still believable. Shapeshifting lizard people in elected office? Maybe not so much.