By: Rajini KG
February 17 2023
False: Joe Biden said the flying objects spotted in North America are "visitors of an extraterrestrial nature."
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Fact-Check
The Verdict False
The video of President Joe Biden has been digitally edited to make it look like he made this claim, but he never said any such thing.
Claim ID 036d94b6
Context
U.S. officials said four mysterious flying objects were shot down in North America. The first object was shot on February 4 in South Carolina, the second on February 10 in Alaska, the third on February 11 in central Yukon, Canada, and the fourth on February 12 over Lake Huron, Canada, according to Reuters. This gave rise to speculation about the existence of UFOs and alien activity, with false and misleading videos related to flying objects spotted in America doing the rounds online. One such video was uploaded by Twitter user "lidon syn" with a caption that reads "| USA BIDEN STATEMENT | I am here today to inform you that a number of flying objects have been seen in many areas of our country ... that the FBI has informed me that there is a strong possibility that these are visitors of an extraterrestrial nature (translated from Spanish)." The 38-second video tries to depict United States President Joe Biden making these remarks at a press conference. Many users believed this and shared the video with the same narrative.
However, this video is a clipped and edited version of a longer video of Joe Biden addressing a press conference on November 9, 2022, and appears to have been created to mislead people.
In Fact
First, we conducted a keyword search on Google and the White House's official website to find Biden's speech about “visitors of an extraterrestrial nature”. There are no news reports or official records of Biden making any such statement.
Next, we did a reverse image search on one of the video keyframes and found that the video is an old one from 2022. On November 9, 2022, Biden spoke about the U.S. midterm election results. A video of the press conference was uploaded on the White House's official YouTube channel on November 10, 2022. At 4 minutes and 10 seconds, Biden speaks about how the U.S. handled global inflation during the pandemic and also about Russian President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine. Biden's gestures and hand movements starting from 4 minutes 10 seconds to 4 minutes 49 seconds, match the viral video. His attire and stage background, where four flags can be seen, also match the viral video. This confirms that the audio embedded in the video has been edited to sync it with the lip movements from Biden's original comments.
On February 16, 2023, Biden addressed a press conference about the Chinese balloon and unidentified objects shot down recently. He said, "The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research." He did not make any references to extraterrestrial life or aliens during the press conference.
The Verdict
The video of Biden's remarks on global inflation during a press conference in November 2022 was digitally altered to falsely depict him confirming the existence of extraterrestrial activity or aliens. Therefore, we are marking this claim as false.
