The White House has opened up a new section on their website called "We the People," which allows citizens to post a petition about a matter they want the White House to address. If the petition obtains a certain number of signatures within a given time period, the White House says they will review the issue and make an official response. One of the first petitions they will need to respond to will be one which requests the president to "formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race."Political activist Stephen Bassett of the Paradigm Research Group posted the petition on September 22, and five days later breached the 5000 signature mark. His petition reads:

We, the undersigned, strongly urge the President of the United States to formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race and immediately release into the public domain all files from all agencies and military services relevant to this phenomenon.

We emailed Bassett asking if he believed Obama really knew anything about extraterrestrials visiting the earth, and he responded that "Whether or not he knows it to be true, he could easily find out." However, believe it or not, past presidents have tried to find out and run into a dead end.

Bill Clinton's efforts to look into the UFO subject are well documented. The best archive of this material is at Grant Cameron's PresidentialUFO.com. One of the more interesting stories was printed in a book by Clinton's friend Webster Hubbell. Hubbell was a friend of the Clintons from Arkansas, and was indicted for fraud in the Whitewater scandals. Before his indictment he was assigned to the Attorney General's office as the Associate Attorney General. Hubbell wrote in his book Friends in High Places:

Clinton had said, "If I put you over at Justice, I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?" Clinton was dead serious. I had looked into both, but wasn't satisfied with the answers I was getting.Cameron told me he had amassed enough evidence to show that Clinton was very interested in UFOs, but that not even the president has the power to demand that sort of information. Clinton himself hinted that this might be the case. In an interview in Hong Kong, Clinton was asked about his UFO interests. He admitted that he had looked into Area 51 and the alleged Roswell UFO crash of 1947, but didn't find anything.