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Edward Snowden in connection from Russia during the Wired Next Fest 2019 at the Giardini Indro Montanelli on May 26, 2019 in Milan, Italy.
- Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who blew the lid on the US government's classified mass surveillance programs, shut down a conspiracy theory that the US is secretly housing alien lifeforms.
- Speaking on an episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, which aired on Wednesday, Snowden said he did not find any evidence of extraterrestrials when he snooped through the databases of the CIA and NSA.
- "Everybody wants to believe in conspiracy theories because it helps life make sense," he told Rogan. "It helps us believe that somebody is in control, that somebody is calling the shots."
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Edward Snowden shut down the conspiracy theory that the US government is secretly harboring aliens at its top secret facilities during an episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, which aired on Wednesday.
Snowden, an American whistleblower who revealed details of classified US government surveillance programs in 2013, addressed rumors about secret extraterrestrial lifeforms in his recently released memoir "Permanent Record."
"I know, Joe, I know you want there to be aliens," he said. "I know Neil deGrasse Tyson badly wants there to be aliens. And there probably are, right?"
"I do," Rogan responded.
Speaking to Rogan from Russia, where he has been granted asylum, Snowden said as far as he knew the US government has not made contact with aliens and is not housing them at their facilities, like that of Area 51 in Nevada.
"But the idea that we're hiding them - if we are hiding them - I had ridiculous access to the networks of the NSA, the CIA, the military, all these groups. I couldn't find anything," he asserted.
He said, he found no evidence of extraterrestrial life during his time spent snooping through government databases when he worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Read more: How Area 51 became the center of alien conspiracy theories
He admitted that it was entirely possible that knowledge of alien contact were "hidden really damn well" from people with direct access to classified information.
"Everybody wants to believe in conspiracy theories because it helps life make sense," he told Rogan. "It helps us believe that somebody is in control, that somebody is calling the shots."
In his book, which came out last month, Snowden shut down other popular conspiracy theories, like the idea that the US faked the moon landing, or that climate science is a hoax.
"For the record, as far as I could tell, aliens have never contacted Earth, or at least they haven't contacted US intelligence," he wrote.
"Yes, man really did land on the moon. Climate change is real. Chemtrails are not a thing," he added.