Whistleblower Edward Snowden said that he searched databases before he left his job as a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) and found no evidence that the government was hiding the existence of aliens.

“I know you want there to be aliens,” Snowden told Joe Rogan during an interview for the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast released Wednesday. “If we are hiding them — I had ridiculous access to the networks of the NSA, CIA, military, all these groups — I couldn’t find anything. If it’s hidden, and it could be hidden, it’s hidden really damn well especially for people on the inside.”

{mosads}He also said “there probably are aliens,” but dismissed conspiracy theories that the government is hiding their presence from the American public.

During the interview, Snowden also detailed his time as a contractor for the NSA. He left the agency in 2013 and leaked thousands of documents to journalists outlining the government’s surveillance of American citizens through their internet use and phones.

“I saw something wrong. I saw that, basically, the government was violating the law and what I believed to be the Constitution of the United States, more broadly human rights, for everyone in the United States and around the world,” Snowden told Rogan during the three-hour discussion. “There were domestic surveillance programs. There were mass surveillance programs that worked internationally. Basically, everything they could monitor, they were monitoring.”

Snowden’s appearance on the popular podcast comes as part of an extensive media tour following the release of his new book, “Permanent Record.”

“They don’t want to see books like this getting written,” Snowden said in the interview.

Snowden currently lives in Russia, where he sought political asylum after fleeing from the U.S.