Former President Bill Clinton told "The Late, Late Show" host James Corden this week he had sent federal agents to Nevada's Area 51 to look for aliens when he was president in the 1990s.
"When I was president — and I had a chief of staff, John Podesta, who loves science-fiction — we made every attempt to find out everything about Roswell. And we also sent people to Area 51 to make sure there were no aliens in the deep of it, because Area 51's very important," Clinton told Corden as the crowd was laughing — although Clinton seemed to be serious.
Clinton then grabbed Corden's hand when asked, "Who did you send?" and replied, jokingly, "Oh, if I told you that" — an apparent reference to the classified intelligence joke, "If I tell you, I would have to kill you."
"No, but I sent Sandy Berger, who passed away, sadly, a couple of years ago, who was my national security adviser," Clinton continued, getting serious again. "But I said, 'We've got to find out how we're going to deal with this,' because that's where we do a lot of our invisibility research in terms of technology — like how do we fly airplanes that aren't picked up by radar and all that.
"So that's why they're so secretive, but there's no aliens as I know."
Clinton was asked the question about the recent congressional reviews of UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena), including reports of U.S. Navy staffers picking up objects defying human understandings of science and movement.
"First of all, that's a legitimate question now," Clinton responded, as the crowd laughed. "The short answer, but not the most meaningful one, is I don't know about this."
Clinton added, among scientists and experts he had spoke with, there is a belief intelligent life is between "85% likely" and "95% likely."
"And these are people who spend their lives doing this," Clinton continued. "He said we think, in other words, it's very unlikely that there is not life.
"There are a billion — not a billion planets — a billion solar light systems. There are lots of mysteries out there."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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