13 Reasons To Believe Aliens Are Real

7/30/2018 13 Reasons to Believe Aliens Are Real
Reasons to Believe
How seriously should you take those recent reports of UFOs? Ask the Pentagon. Or
read this primer for the SETI-curious.
By David Wallace-Wells, James D. Walsh, Neel Patel, Clint Rainey, Katie Heaney,Eric Benson, and Tim Urban
http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/03/13-reasons-to-believe-aliens-are-real.html 1/42
Every generation gets the abduction fantasy it deserves. Ours is ET versus Trump. Painting by Zohar Lazar
March 20, 2018 8:00 am
In the good old days, the arrival of UFOs on the front page of
America’s paper of record might have seemed like a loose-thread
tear right through the fabric of reality — the closest that secular,
space-race America could have gotten to a Second Coming. Two

decades ago, or three, or six, we would’ve also felt we knew the
script in advance, thanks to the endless variations pop culture had
played for us already: civilizational conflicts to mirror the real-world
ones Americans had been imagining in terror since the beginning of
the Cold War.
But when, in December, the New York Times published an

undisputed account of what might once have sounded like crackpot
conspiracy theory — that the Pentagon had spent five years
investigating “unexplained aerial phenomena” — the response
among the paper’s mostly liberal readers, exhausted and beaten
down by “recent events,” was markedly different from the one in
those movies. The news that aliens might actually be visiting us,
regularly and recently, didn’t provoke terror about a coming space-
opera conflict but something much more like the Evangelical dream
of the Rapture the same liberals might have mocked as kooky right-
wing escapism in the George W. Bush years. “The truth is out there,”
former senator Harry Reid tweeted, with a link to the story. Thank
God, came the response through the Twitter vent. “Could
extraterrestrials help us save the Earth?” went one typical reaction.
Related Stories
Reports: The Pentagon Spent Millions on UFO Research
What the New York Times UFO Report Actually Reveals
Suddenly, aliens were an escapist fantasy — but also more credible

(legitimized by the government!) than mere fantasy. That Pentagon
report, which featured two gripping videos of aerial encounters, was
just one beat in a recent search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence (or
SETI) drumroll: In October, an object passed through our solar
system that looked an awful lot like a spaceship; astronomers spent
much of 2016 arguing over whether the weird pulses of light coming
from a distant star were actually evidence of an “alien
megastructure.” An army of Silicon Valley billionaires are racing to
make first contact, and our new superpowered telescopes are
discovering more conceivably habitable planets every year.
Then, in March, a third video emerged, featuring a Navy encounter

off the East Coast in 2015, with the group that released it hinting at
an additional trove. “Why doesn’t the Pentagon care?” wondered a
Washington Post op-ed — surely the first time the newspaper of
Katharine Graham was raising a stink about aliens. The next week,
President Trump seemed to announce he was creating an entirely
new branch of the military: “We’ll call it the Space Force.” You could
be forgiven for thinking you’d woken up in a science-fiction novel.
At the very least, it is starting to seem non-crazy to believe. A recent
study shows half the world already does.
Searching the Universe for Extraterrestrial Life: A

Timeline
Alien dreams have always been powered by the desire for human
importance in a vast, forgetful cosmos: We want to be seen so we
know we exist. What’s unusual about the alien fantasy is that, unlike
religion, nationalism, or conspiracy theory, it doesn’t place humans
at the center of a grand story. In fact, it displaces them: Humans
become, briefly, major players in a drama of almost inconceivable
scale, the lasting lesson of which is, unfortunately: We’re total
nobodies. That’s the lesson, at least, of a visit from aliens, who
got here long before we were able to get there, wherever there is; if
humans are the ones making first contact, we’re the advanced ones
and the aliens are probably more like productive pond scum, which
may be one reason we fantasize about those kinds of encounters a
lot less than visits to Earth. Of course, when the aliens are the
explorers, we’re the pond scum.
But a lot of people in the modern world will take that bargain, which
should probably not surprise us given how dizzying, secular, and,
um, alienating that world objectively is. Most conspiracy theory is
fueled by a desire to see the universe as ultimately intelligible — the
bargain being that things can make sense, but only if you believe in
pervasive totalitarian malice. Alien conspiracy theory keeps the
malice (cover-ups at Roswell, the Men in Black). But rather than
benzo comforts like order and intelligibility, it offers the psychedelic
drama of total unintelligibility — awe, wonder, a knee-wobblingly
deep, mystical experience of existential ignorance.
Floating Down (1990), by David Huggins, who makes oil paintings about his encounters with aliens. As
featured in Love & Saucers, a 2017 documentary about the artist.
Every extraterrestrial era has its own fantasy of

consequentiality. Crop circles began as a phenomenon of the English
countryside, then spread to the far corners of the onetime British
Empire (Australia, Canada) after World War II, when the U.K. was
falling unmistakably back in the ranks of nations and when its
provincial subjects would have felt some understandable desire to
demonstrate that, somehow, their lives really mattered. American
encounters were invariably rural as well — typically farmers and
ranchers, mostly in the country’s interior and the deserts and
mountains of the West, in decades the country as a whole spent
rapidly urbanizing and then industrializing its farmland so
systematically it looked like Monsanto was trying to exterminate the
American farmer along with the cotton bollworm.
These incidents, which never occurred in cities, where other

witnesses could have verified them, were often reported as horror
stories even as they may have expressed secret desires. But the pop
culture of the same era introduced another mode: the suburban
encounter, often still private and personal but more ooey-gooey New
Age than abductions and anal probes. The two major authors were
Steven Spielberg, who gave us broken-family theology in Close
Encounters of the Third Kindand E.T., and Carl Sagan, who gave
us Cosmos and Contact,which, when it was turned into a movie,
featured an eerie seascape that was basically a secular heaven,
maintained by offscreen aliens explicitly playing the role of gods.
Stephen Hawking, who died in March, was also a godfather of a sort,
not just a physicist but a sage and guru for a generation of squishy-
lefty seekers curious about life beyond Earth; among his last acts
was partnering with Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire building a
giant SETI laboratory at UC Berkeley. Americans used to regard the
space race with not just national but something like collectivist pride
— all those government engineers from the new middle class.
Suddenly, it’s the rich kids with the cool toys and the keys to the
rocket ship.
Alien dreams have always been

powered by the desire for human
importance in a vast, forgetful cosmos:
We want to be seen so we know we
exist.
Which does mark a change. Beyond the mysticism, American stories

of alien encounters have been (often anxious) meditations on the
status of American power — meditations informed, surely, by both
the memory of European settlers, for whom “first contact” was a
story of triumphant genocide, and sympathy for those they
trampled. Given the option, America will always prefer to play the
cowboy, and through the post–Cold War 1990s, the dominant alien-
encounter template was still the swaggering military strut
of Independence Day. (The closest thing we got to a counterpoint
was the cover-up paranoia of The X-Files, which just expressed a
darker faith in the same American power.) By the time we got an
alien epic for the War on Terror era, even Spielberg staged it as a
story about armed conflict: The War of the Worlds. Of course, in
that story, the winner was always going to be the humans — that is,
the Americans. And then came the financial crisis, the recession,
and Trump, and the new hope that E.T. may take pity on us.
Elsewhere in the world, where things are looking up, relatively

speaking, you might expect a different perspective on aliens — and
indeed, as The Atlantic’s Ross Andersen documented last fall, the
Chinese have recently opened the world’s largest radar facility to
listen for signs of aliens, wherever they are out there. But even our
future Chinese overlords, projecting power for the first time into the
ever-receding reaches of the universe, are a bit nervous about aliens;
as Andersen points out, their popular science fiction bears the
evidence. And why wouldn’t they be? They have their own memory
of colonial contact — the Opium Wars, the end of that empire — to
reckon with. And, besides, the unknown is just scary. Things have to
get pretty bleak before you take a chance on the arrival of a total
blank slate, just for the sake of change. —David Wallace-Wells
1. The Government Literally Just Admitted It’s

Taking UFOs Seriously
And, according to researchers, it’s only pretended to end the
program.
A 2004 encounter near San Diego between two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets and an “unknown object.”
In 1952, a CIA group called the Psychological Strategy Board

concluded that, when it came to UFOs, the American public was
dangerously gullible and prone to “hysterical mass behavior.” The
group recommended “debunking” campaigns to tamper the public’s
interest in unexplained phenomena. But the government seems to
have been interested, too: In December, the Pentagon confirmed the

existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
Created in 2007 by senators Ted Stevens (who reported being
chased by a mysterious object), Daniel Inouye, and then–Majority
Leader Harry Reid, and funded with $22 million of “black money”
from the Department of Defense’s budget, the program investigated
and evaluated reports of UFO sightings, many of which came from
American service members.
So much of what the program uncovered remains classified, but

what little we know is tantalizing. Based on data it collected, the
program identified five observations that showed mysterious objects
displaying some level of “advanced physics,” also known as “stuff
humans can’t do yet”: The objects would accelerate with g-forces too
strong for the human body to withstand, or reach hypersonic speed
with no heat trail or sonic boom, or they seemed to resist the effects
of Earth’s gravity without any aerodynamic structures to provide
thrust or lift. “No one has been able to figure out what these are,”
said Luis Elizondo, who ran the program until last October, in a
recent interview.
Elizondo has also talked about “metamaterials” that may have been
recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena and stored in
buildings owned by a private aerospace contractor in Las Vegas;
they apparently have material compositions that aren’t found
naturally on Earth and would be exceptionally expensive to
replicate. According to a 2009 Pentagon briefing summarized in the
New York Times, “the United States was incapable of defending
itself against some of the technologies discovered.” This was a
briefing by people trying to get more funding — but still.
Related Stories
Why Believing in UFOs Is More Fun When You’re the Only One
Here’s a Video of a Navy Jet Encountering a UFO
Some of the accounts Elizondo and his team analyzed supposedly

occurred near nuclear facilities like power plants or battleships. In
November 2004, the USS Princeton, a Navy cruiser escorting the
aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego, ordered two
fighter jets to investigate mysterious aircraft the Navy had been
tracking for weeks (meaning this was not just a trick of the eye or a
momentary failure of perspective, the two things most often blamed
for unexplained aerial phenomena). When the jets arrived at the
location, one of the pilots, Commander David Fravor, saw a
disturbance just below the ocean’s surface causing the water to roil
around it. Then, suddenly, he saw a white, 40-foot Tic Tac–shaped
craft moving like a Ping-Pong ball above the water. The vehicle
began mirroring his plane’s movements, but when Fravor dove
directly at the object, the Tic Tac zipped away.
The Pentagon has said funding for the program ran out in 2012 and
wasn’t renewed. But Elizondo has claimed the project was alive and
well when he resigned in October. —James D. Walsh
2. Harry Reid Says We’re Not Taking Them

Seriously Enough
The former Senate majority leader is definitely a truther.
Eric Benson: I’m curious about just where your interest in this
subject comes from.
Harry Reid: Bob Bigelow [the founder of Bigelow Aerospace and

Budget Suites]. He’s a central figure in all this. When he was a young
man, he heard a story from his grandparents about driving down
from Mt. Charleston, near Las Vegas, where they saw a so-called
flying saucer, for lack of a better description. Bob became a very
wealthy man. He would pay for these conferences about UFOs, and
he would bring in scientists, academics, and a few nutcases.
There were people trying to figure out what all this aerial
phenomena was. Bob started sending me tons of stuff. Mainly what
interested me is that so many people had seen these strange things
in the air.
EB: So tell me how this program got started.
HR: I was in Washington in the Senate, and Bob called me and said,
“I got the strangest letter here. Could I have a courier bring it to
you?” I said sure. He didn’t want to send it to me over the lines, for
obvious reasons.
The letter said, “I am a senior, longtime member of this security

agency, and I have an interest in what you’ve been working on. I also
want to go to your ranch in Utah.”
Bigelow had bought a great big ranch. All this crazy stuff goes on up
there — you know, things in the air. Indians used to talk about it,
part of their folklore.
So I called Bigelow back and said, “Hey, I’ll meet with the guy.” The
program grew out of that, to study aerial phenomena.
We decided it would be [funded by] black money. I wanted to get

something done. I didn’t want a debate where no one knew what the
hell they were talking about on the Senate floor.
EB: I saw that you tweeted, “We don’t know the answers, but we
have plenty of evidence to support asking the questions.” To you,
what’s the most compelling evidence to support asking the
questions?
HR: Read the reports. We have hundreds of — Eric, two, three

weeks ago, maybe a month now, up in Montana, they had another
strange deal at a missile base up there. It goes on all the time.
EB: Do you know things about this program that you can’t discuss
publicly?
HR: Yeah.
3. Scientists Are Suddenly Much More Bullish

About the Possibility of Life Out There
The universe is really big, people.
Just 30 years ago, we had not discovered a single planet outside

our solar system. Now we know of more than 3,000 of them, and we
know nearly every star in the night sky has at least one planet in its
orbit. “Even people who are not terribly interested in science know
that we’ve found that planets are as common as fire hydrants —
they’re everywhere,” says Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the
SETI Institute. “One in five or one in six might be a planet similar to
the Earth.”
That doesn’t mean we’ll ever find an exact replica of Earth, but
maybe we don’t have to. Our study of other planets and moons in
the solar system shows us many worlds possess the ingredients
necessary for life — an atmosphere, organic compounds, liquid
water, and other necessities. (The moons orbiting Jupiter and
Saturn, for example, feature whole subsurface oceans.)
And even though these places are extremely harsh environments,

that doesn’t mean as much as we might once have thought it did;
recent discoveries on Earth itself demonstrate that life is much
tougher than we thought. We’ve found organisms in blisteringly hot
geysers in Yellowstone National Park, in the darkest crevices under
the most ungodly pressures in the deep ocean, in dry hellscapes like
the Atacama Desert in Chile (an analogue for Mars). These
“extremophiles” don’t need a warm and fuzzy paradise to call home
— in fact, they have already evolved to live in environments as harsh
as those on other planets. Some, like tardigrades, can even survive
the bleak vacuum of space itself. If there’s life in most of those
places, “it’s going to be pond scum,” says Shostak. “But it’s alien
pond scum. It shows that biology is all over.”
And where there’s biology, there may well be intelligence, and our
increasing understanding of evolution also tells us life can evolve
faster than we ever anticipated. Millions of years is a long time for
us, but it’s the blink of an eye on the cosmic scale. Blink too fast, and
you’ll miss that pond scum turning into an intelligent civilization
sending out messages every which way, looking for friends.
And we’re now at the point where we could one day find those
messages and send a reply. New technology gives us a better chance
to actually make contact with extraterrestrials. Our radio telescopes
can scan more of the night sky for an intelligent message than ever
before. Our optical telescopes and observatories can peer farther
into space and look for new planets, moons, and perhaps even signs
of something altogether artificial (see “Tabby’s Star”). Our ability to
parse volumes of data in mere seconds means we could conceivably
survey much of the galaxy in just a few decades. That’s why, in the
past few years, Shostak has continually bet a cup of coffee with
everyone he knows that humans will find aliens by around 2029.
“We’d have to be dead above the neck if we weren’t interested in
this,” says Penelope Boston, the director of the NASA Astrobiology
Institute. —Neel Patel
4. They’re Especially Bullish About These Planets

Adventures in the “Goldilocks zone.”
Scientists now think every one in five or six planets might be

habitable, based on two general criteria: They’re rocky, and they
reside in a region of the star’s orbit called the “Goldilocks zone,”
where it’s not too cold and not too hot, but just right to allow for
liquid water to form on the surface. And where there’s water, there
can be life. Extraterrestrial researchers and enthusiasts are most
excited about these seven:
Proxima B: The closest exoplanet ever discovered is also a

potentially habitable world in its own right, if the intense stellar
winds don’t make it barren. It’s not totally inconceivable we might
be able to actually send a probe and study it directly this century —
even travel to it ourselves one day.
TRAPPIST-1 System: The red dwarf at the center of this

possesses a whopping seven planets in its orbit — three of which
reside in the Goldilocks zone, but all of which seem to possess some
degree of potential habitability — and they’re so close to one another
that life on one planet could quickly spread to another.
LHS 1140b: This wouldn’t be a planet we could colonize. It’s

almost seven times the mass of the Earth and 40 percent larger,
making it a “super-Earth.” But its mass means that it would retain a
thicker atmosphere capable of keeping it warmer and more
comfortable for life than most other places.
Ross 128 b: One of the best chances we have so far at finding life
on another planet. It orbits an inactive red-dwarf star, meaning it’s
likely not being bludgeoned by solar radiation. And we’ve detected
strange signals emanating from the nearby host star — signals that
perhaps have intelligent origins?
Mars: Mars has water, as we’ve known since 2015. Although the
planet looks like a barren wasteland these days, there’s little reason
to write off any chance we might find aliens residing in some cavern
or crevice.
The Ocean Worlds (Europa, Enceladus, Titan): Many of

Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons show signs of possessing a liquid
ocean underneath the surface.
GJ 1214b: Nicknamed “waterworld” by scientists; signs of potential

clouds give us some hope the planet has an atmosphere.
—N.P.
5. And There Is “Documentation”

In 2012, the photographer Steven Hirsch asked UFO-convention
attendees who claimed to have had personal contact with
extraterrestrials to draw and describe their experiences. A
sampling below.
Camille: A beam of solid blue light came through her ceiling and transported her onto a table where she
was surrounded by beings in white robes with high collars.
Bruce: An alien woke him from his bed to show him the moons of Saturn.
Lisa: A gray alien knocked at her door and handed her two babies, leaving her with a hole in her head.
Steve: He saw a beeping, bright white light; it zapped his friend up.
Nancy: Her body responded to the “low hum” of the UFO spacecraft, a memory she accessed in
regression therapy.
Rita: She has been visited by a golden reptilian alien throughout her life.
6. That “Asteroid” Looks an Awful Lot Like a

Rocket Ship
For science-minded SETI freaks, the last decade has been a
particularly exciting one.
‘Oumuamua.
We May Have Just Seen an Actual Flying Saucer

When ‘Oumuamua — the name means “first messenger” in
Hawaiian — was discovered floating through the solar system in
October, SETI nuts immediately started checking the boxes that
suggested the rod-shaped object might be an alien spacecraft of
some kind. After all, it’s the first interstellar object we’ve ever seen
pass through the solar system. UFO enthusiasts point out that rods
(along with flying saucers) are the two most common shapes cited
by witnesses in UFO sightings, and the cigar shape would allow it to
be slim enough to avoid collision with other objects as well as
maximize aerodynamics for travel. Both the SETI Institute and the
Breakthrough Listen initiative pointed their instruments toward the
object but found no unusual signals emitting from it. Of course,
maybe it’s an ancient relic from an interstellar civilization, or maybe
the aliens just weren’t interested in making contact (that asteroid-
ness could’ve just been camouflage). With the object on its way out
of the solar system, we may never know.
And There Could Be an Alien Megastructure Much Farther

Out
In the fall of 2015, Penn State astronomer Jason Wright posited that
erratic shifts in brightness coming from a newly discovered star
1,280 light-years from Earth couldn’t be explained by exoplanets or
other astrophysics that we understand. He theorized, instead, that
the fluctuations may be the result of massive objects passing in front
of the star, in a kind of orbit — a whole array of massive satellites or
other kinds of structures, presumably produced by a civilization of
advanced intelligence. Whoa.
Aliens Could Be Dancing to Earth Music Right Now

Last year, two planets were discovered orbiting a red dwarf 12.36
light-years from Earth. At least one of these planets is in the
Goldilocks zone, so METI International decided to beam some
musical signals over to the planet. With a closer proximity to Earth
than most potentially habitable exoplanets, it’d be an exciting planet
to start an interstellar pen-pal relationship with — assuming there’s
someone around to hear our notes and listen to them as a
welcoming tune instead of a battle cry.
And We’re Getting Radio Signals From … Something

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the most mysterious phenomena
ever observed by scientists. Though they last only a few
milliseconds, these pulses, first detected in 2007, emit more energy

in that time than the sun does in 24 hours. Three more were found
this month, and we’re no closer to understanding their origin —
except that they’re coming from outside the Milky Way. So
naturally, many experts have begun to think perhaps they’re
produced by an ultra-advanced civilization from afar, trying to speak
to us through signals we can barely comprehend.
—N.P.
7. These Masters of the Universe Are Obsessed

(They Are Also All Men)
Which space-besotted billionaire will be the first to make contact?
Robert Bigelow
As a child, Bigelow watched the government test atomic bombs from
his bedroom window and he and his classmates could see the
mushroom clouds bloom over the Mojave Desert from their school
playground. To some, such memories are the stuff of dystopic Cold
War hellscapes, but Bigelow remembers them as an epiphany. Even
back then, Bigelow knew he wasn’t going to be a scientist (he was
lousy at math), so he resolved himself to make as much money as
possible in the hopes that he could one day fund his own space
program. He went on to make at least $1 billion with Budget Suites
of America, long-term motel rentals around the Southwest. He now
runs Bigelow Aerospace, which holds contracts with NASA and was
a primary contractor for the Department of Defense’s Advanced
Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
Elon Musk
Musk is hell-bent on using his $21 billion to colonize Mars. His
company SpaceX has been trying desperately to reduce the cost of
space travel in the hopes of beginning a million-person colonization
of Mars. “If [we’re not in] a simulation, then maybe we’re in a lab
and there’s some advanced alien civilization that’s just watching
how we develop, out of curiosity, like mold in a petri dish,” says
Musk.
Paul Allen
When Congress cut off funding for NASA’s hunt for
aliens in 1993, Allen gave millions to the SETI
Institute; in 2009, the Allen Telescope Array started
Photo: Paul searching the cosmos. Allen has given an additional
Allen/Twitter
$30 million to the project, a sum that bought him a
guarantee that if the array detects an extraterrestrial communiqué,
Allen will be the first nonscientist to know.
Yuri Milner
Last year, Milner — named after a Russian cosmonaut — announced
a plan to send spaceships to Saturn’s moon Enceladus in search of
alien life. Milner is also funding Breakthrough Listen, a ten-year
project to use a telescope in West Virginia to search for messages
from intelligent life, and Breakthrough Starshot, in conjunction with
Mark Zuckerberg and the late Stephen Hawking.
Jeff Bezos
His company Blue Origin is competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to
launch reusable rockets (and comically rich tourists) into space.
While Musk played himself in a cameo in Iron Man 2, Bezos
appeared as an alien Starfleet official in 2016’s Star Trek Beyond. (It

was not a speaking role.)
“Why do I feel so much like Sigourney Weaver?” Bezos said last

March as he piloted a giant manned robot at Amazon’s MARs
conference.
Franklin Antonio
Antonio cofounded Qualcomm, a mobile tech company, in the
mid-’80s. He’s also the company’s chief scientist and has given
millions to SETI research. Last year Antonio gave $30 million to the
University of California San Diego’s school of engineering and
followed that donation up with a contribution to Roy Moore’s failed
senate campaign.
8. As Are Some Prominent Military and

Government Folks
You see a lot more as a test pilot than as a farmer in Iowa.
Nick Pope
“Know that there are people who watch our skies to protect the
sleeping masses,” Britain’s former chief UFO investigator warns
in his memoir. “But also know that not all potential intruders into
our airspace have two wings, a fuselage, and a tail, and not all show
up on our radar.” Pope’s ominous counsel follows time he spent in
the ’90s inspecting thousands of paranormal incidents from crop
circles to purported bedside abductions. He took that job certain
this kind of stuff “only happened to weirdos,” but unexplainable
sightings soon convinced him that “there is a war going on” with
aliens. Worse, the U.K. Defense Ministry cut his old UFO desk’s
funding in 2009, so whatever’s out there “could attack at any time,”
Pope believes. Earthlings’ diminished odds have gotten him more
fatalistic lately, too: After scientists suggested ‘Oumuamua — a
bizarre-shaped asteroid that’s the first interstellar object to pass

through our solar system — might be an alien spaceship,
he argued in December we “probably wouldn’t survive an alien
invasion” anyway, because if they find us, it’s clear who has the
upper hand.
Paul Hellyer
Canada’s Defense minister during the Cold War, now 94, believes
that at least 80 species of aliens have been visiting Earth for
millennia. One group is called the Tall Whites (because they can
reach basketball-goal height) or Nordic Blondes (because they look
like they’re “from Denmark or somewhere”). Unfortunately, the
others may include ecoterrorists: “We’re doing all sorts of things
which are not what good stewards of their homes should be doing,”
he told media in 2014. “They don’t like that, and they’ve made it
very clear.” Hellyer adds that many technological “breakthroughs”
were aped from these extraterrestrials. Microchips and fiber optics,
for instance, were taken off crashed alien vehicles and reverse-
engineered. The aliens have a special technology that would solve
climate change as well, he claims, but the Illuminati are hiding it
because it would devastate oil interests.
Philip Corso
Corso’s military career was long and illustrious, from rebuilding
Rome’s government after World War II as an Army Intelligence
captain to having worked the Pentagon’s foreign-technology desk in
the ’60s. He doesn’t appear to have said a word publicly about aliens
until 1997, when Simon & Schuster published The Day After
Roswell — with a foreword by Strom Thurmond — just 13 months
before Corso died. It was his tell-all outlining a decades-long
Roswell cover-up while plugging his own clandestine exploits, which
he claimed involved reverse-engineering technology found on alien
spacecrafts. This is how the world got lasers, particle beams,
microchips, even Kevlar, Corso said. Skeptics argue that regular
Earth people’s R&D behind technology like lasers is impossibly well

documented.
Barry Goldwater
Had he won election in 1964, one of his White House’s first acts
might have been releasing top-secret UFO files. He harbored a
lifelong fascination with the truth about extraterrestrial contact,
much of it stemming from his desire to “find out what was in” the
mysterious Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, home to
the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. In the ’80s, it surfaced he’d spent
decades corresponding with UFO investigators and harassing the
military for access to the hangar’s so-called Blue Room, where
conspiracy theorists believe alien bodies from Roswell are
preserved. (“Not only can’t you get into it,” his friend General Curtis
LeMay supposedly snapped in 1975, “but don’t you ever mention it
to me again.” Goldwater claims he didn’t.) After retiring in 1987, the
senator told Larry King the Earth is “one of several billion planets in
this universe. I can’t believe that God or whoever is in charge would
put thinking bodies on only one planet.”
Roscoe Hillenkoetter
After he’d served as the first CIA director (he’d been appointed by
President Truman), Hillenkoetter retired from a distinguished Navy
career in 1957 and took a gig at a brand-new private research group
called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena.
Its chief purpose was pressuring the government to disclose what it
knew about UFOs, via investigations like Project Blue Book.
Hillenkoetter went after the intelligence community, writing angry
open letters that said things like: “It is time for the truth to be
brought out in open congressional hearings.” When he pointed out
in 1960 that the Air Force had investigated 6,312 UFO reports to
date, but was seemingly trying “to hide the facts,” the military
reminded Americans that “no physical evidence, not even a minute
fragment of a so-called flying saucer, has ever been found.”
Of course, another theory popped up in the ’80s — that

Hillenkoetter had helped run a secret committee all along of
politicians, military officers, and scientists called the Majestic 12.
Ufologists claimed this cabal was formed in 1947, once Truman
started panicking over what to do with all the alien spacecrafts the
government kept finding. The group’s existence is based on
government files that allegedly materialized in 1984. The FBI denied
their authenticity entirely, but they and the Majestic 12 remain
popular grist for conspiracy theories, having figured in Blink-182’s
song “Aliens Exist” and even one of Twin Peaks’s side plots.
Dennis Kucinich
Kucinich’s 2008 presidential campaign didn’t suffer from his
admission, made during a live TV debate, that, back in 1982, he’d
seen a UFO at friend Shirley MacLaine’s Washington State home.
(He was polling around 4 percent at the time.) But the current
candidate for Ohio governor got mocked plenty; one joke among
Beltway insiders was he wanted the “little green vote.”
Staff were prepped to deny the encounter when reporters asked

about the passage in MacLaine’s 2007 New Age self-help
book, Sage-ing While Age-ing, that revealed Kucinich didn’t just see
a UFO but had also felt “a connection in his heart and heard
directions in his mind.” The other witnesses — a Juilliard-trained
trumpeter working as MacLaine’s bodyguard and his model
girlfriend — also report having seen a trio of triangle-shaped
aircrafts flying in tight formation. Her house was 50 miles from Mt.
Rainier, a “saucer magnet” for UFO buffs because of all the nearby
sightings, including America’s very first “flying saucer” in 1947.
Kucinich had the community’s full support, even if he spent years
playing coy.
It helped that in Congress he did things like trying to ban space-

based weapons. A 2001 bill he authored himself prohibited America
from using “radiation, electromagnetic, psychotronic, sonic, laser, or
other energies” for the purposes of “information war, mood
management, or mind control of such populations.” It explicitly
singled out “chemtrails,” a term for jet condensation trails when
conspiracy theorists believe they’re being used for biological
warfare. In 2008, however, he only confirmed he’d seen a UFO,

then pointed out, accurately, to moderator Tim Russert that “more
people in this country have seen UFOs than I think approve of
George Bush’s presidency.”
John Podesta
When WikiLeaks published the Hillary Clinton emails, a weird
number of Podesta’s mentioned aliens and involved contact with
believers like Tom DeLonge and astronaut Edgar Mitchell. As Bill
Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, he was known as an X-Files fanatic
who’d “call the Air Force and ask them what’s going on in Area 51.”
In 2014, he spent 13 months advising President Obama — and what
was his “biggest failure”? According to him, failing to get
government files declassified on the 1965 Kecksburg, Pennsylvania,
UFO incident.
Then during Bush’s term, he began publicly crusading for NASA to
release UFO documents to journalist Leslie Kean, the person
ultimately behind the Times’ Pentagon exposé.
Podesta has kept his personal ET beliefs under wraps, but in Kean’s
best seller UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on
the Record, he gamely wrote a foreword that argues: “It’s time to
find out what the truth really is … The American people — and
people around the world — want to know, and they can handle the
truth.”
Pavel and Marina Popovich

This husband-wife duo was one part world-renowned cosmonaut
(Pavel) and one part the Soviet Union’s most celebrated female pilot
(Marina). They held among their titles that of sixth human in orbit,
first Soviet female to break the sound barrier, and holder of more
than 100 aviation world records. Once their illustrious flying careers
ended, both became ufologists. Pavel headed up Russia’s UFO
association and claimed to have seen an unidentified aircraft zip
past his airplane on a trip home from Washington, D.C., with a
group of scientists. People onboard said it was triangular, brightly

lit, and rocketed by at 1,000 miles per hour.
Marina one-upped him, though — she claimed to have seen multiple

UFOs and a “Bigfoot creature” — and after they divorced, she
became the acclaimed expert, not Pavel. She began preaching a
UFO glasnost of sorts under Gorbachev, claiming the Soviet
government had pieces of five spaceships in its possession and
reports of 14,000 UFO sightings, yet for decades researchers were
“either fired or put in psychiatric hospitals.” Her eventual book,
simply called UFO Glasnost, spoke candidly about how Leonardo da
Vinci, Jules Verne, and Ray Bradbury were alien mediums and
Gorbachev had the markings of an extraterrestrial emissary because
“he’s an epoch-making phenomenon.”
—Clint Rainey
9. (And This Genius Thinks He Can Talk to Them)

In January, Stephen Wolfram — a computer-scientist philosopher
and the author of a “universal” programming language that
informed the alien communication in the movie Arrival — wrote an
exceedingly long blog post about how best to communicate with
aliens.
Tim Urban: You created a language you think we might be able to

use to communicate with aliens. So what exactly is it that we would
want to say to the rest of the universe if we had the chance?
Stephen Wolfram: I think the main difficulty is the definitional

one. You talk about alien life, you talk about intelligence; what are
those things abstractly?
We know the specific example that we have historically been

exposed to: life on Earth, human intelligence. The question is, when
you generalize away from that, what do you get to? One of the things
that I’m fond of quoting is the statement “The weather has a mind of
its own.” What does this mean? What is the abstract kind of thing
that’s like the mind? It’s the ability to do sophisticated computation.
That’s something that exists in the weather, just as it exists in our
brains, just as it exists in lots of living systems. And then, what’s
different between the weather and its sort-of-mindlike thing and our
human intelligence? The fundamental answer to that is our human
intelligence has its particular cultural, civilizational history and the
weather doesn’t.
TU: So is it that history that we’d want to communicate?
SW: Yes, I think the thing to realize is that we in our civilization

have followed a particular path. There are an infinite number of
possible paths that we could’ve followed. To any other intelligence,
our path would be quite mysterious.
TU: Right, so we actually have unique information to communicate.

You could have the most sophisticated species, and we can still tell
them something they don’t know about our history.
SW: I’m particularly amused by Elon Musk’s car going into space.
That is so extremely aligned with the notion of grave goods from
ancient Egypt, where you’re taking things from your everyday life to
be buried with you. It’s charming.
10. There Have Been Enough Well-Known

Encounters to Fill Encyclopedias
Here, just a small sampling of the classics.
Barney and Betty Hill.
Barney and Betty Hill’s Abduction

The Hills (above) claimed that in 1961 a bright light swooped over
their car on a New Hampshire road and that they woke up a few
hours later and the car had been “magnetized.” With regressive
hypnosis, both were able to recall being abducted and probed by the
little gray men, which soon became the de facto alien description.
(The Hills’ captors were, interestingly, very similar to Selenites —
the five-foot moon inhabitants H.G. Wells invented for The First
Men in the Moon.) Betty astonished authorities when she began
drawing a map of the constellation the creatures claimed to be from.
Initially it looked like nonsense, until a few scientists noticed its
resemblance to Zeta Reticuli, a system inside the constellation
Reticulum largely unknown in that year. Their case generated
widespread publicity, partly because they were a mixed-race couple
in the ’60s, and turned into the flagship example of a “close
encounter,” though not until years after the fact (skeptics argue the
delayed report is a sign it’s a hoax). The hype ultimately culminated
in The UFO Incident, a 1975 made-for-TV movie starring James Earl
Jones and Estelle Parsons.
Antonio Villas-Boas’s Seduction

In 1957, small aliens with huge heads allegedly came for Villas-Boas,
a young Brazilian farmer. Villas-Boas was forced inside their vessel,
where the creatures took blood samples from, of all places, his chin,
and rubbed in some sort of gel. Soon after, a blonde female with big,
almond-shaped eyes joined him. She began rubbing his body, then
initiated sex. After they were done, she left quickly, which gave
Villas-Boas the impression that he was being used to better the
aliens’ “stock.” He didn’t react well, as he suddenly felt exploited
as “a good stallion” by these foreign chin-fetishists.
Weird as it was, Boas’s encounter, with its probing and forced sex,
became the archetypal alien abduction. Reportedly skittish at first,
he eventually told his story to João Martins, the writer behind
popular magazine O Cruzeiro’s “Flying Saucers’ Terrible Mission”
series. Doctors confirmed Boas had suffered radiation poisoning,
but Martins ultimately soured on Boas’s story, for one because his
spaceship sketch bore remarkable similarities to the Soviet Union’s
Sputnik. He turned out all right, though: He got a law degree, had
four kids, and died believing his children had a half-sibling living in
space.
The “Wow!” Signal

In 1977, Ohio State’s Big Ear radio telescope intercepted a 72-second
burst of sound that bore signs of having come from interstellar
space, which could be a sign of extraterrestrial communication. The
anomaly measured 1,420 megahertz, a frequency in the “water
hole,” the term for a radio-emission range thought ideal for
intergalactic messages because it’s unusually quiet. Jerry Ehman,
the astronomer who spotted it, was so excited that he scribbled a
giant “Wow!” on his printout. Astronomy’s explanations for the
bizarre phenomenon include secret spy satellites and a passing
comet nobody knew about in 1977. But many admit nothing explains
it adequately, and even if the signal doesn’t prove aliens exist, it’s
still a “tug on the cosmic fishing line.” To date, it remains the best
evidence of alien communication ever obtained.
Foo Fighters
In the middle of World War II, things took a mysterious turn for Air
Force pilots flying overnight missions. They reported seeing lights
chasing their aircraft. The number varied (sometimes it was one;
other times ten), and so did the colors (red, orange, and green). But
the unidentified objects shared in common that they moved very
fast, up to 200 miles per hour, yet could dart on a dime. These pilots
— among the world’s best — admitted the objects generally flew
circles around them. Their lore grew among the squadrons. In 1944,
a crew flying along the Rhine in Germany described seeing “eight to
ten bright orange lights” whiz by “at high speed.” Neither ground
control nor their own planes caught anything on radar, and when
one pilot turned toward the lights, they reportedly “disappeared.”
They called their mystery air companions “foo fighters,” an inside

joke based on a phrase the comic-book character Smokey Stover
used to declare (“Where there’s foo, there’s fire”). The term flying
saucer hadn’t caught on yet, or else it would’ve sufficed. Some
witnesses assumed they were tracer fire, reflections from ice
crystals, or high-tech weaponry developed by the Nazis, while the
government had a boring explanation as always: They were
“electrostatic (similar to St. Elmo’s fire) or electromagnetic
phenomena,” though which one and wherefrom were “never
defined.”
Kecksburg UFO Crash

In 1965, an intense fireball streaked over southern Canada and
Detroit and dropped debris over Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Officially, it was declared a midsize meteor, but eyewitnesses in the
small Pennsylvania town of Kecksburg claimed they’d found an
acorn-shaped object about the size of a VW Beetle in the woods that
was festooned with hieroglyphics. Newspaper reporters on the
ground said the military conducted a “close inspection” of the crash

site, and despite the official line being that the search yielded
“absolutely nothing,” conspiracists maintain the object was packed
onto an Army flatbed truck and that the whole thing was a Roswell-
level cover-up. Leslie Kean’s Coalition for the Freedom of
Information managed to secure some of the government’s files but
reportedly not anything enlightening.
However, a second explanation surfaced in the early aughts: It was

Die Glocke, purportedly a top-secret weapon Nazis developed that
let them time-travel. By dumb Back to the Future–esque luck, it had
come to rural Pennsylvania in the year 1965. These proponents
argue Nazi SS officer Hans Kammler was navigating the device when
it crash-landed in Kecksburg, allowing him to escape Allied troops
in the days before VE Day and successfully integrate into postwar
U.S. society.
Kenneth Arnold’s “Flying Saucer”

Kenneth Arnold, a respected pilot, claimed in 1947 he’d seen nine
mostly flat objects whip past Mount Rainier at speeds he timed at
1,760 miles per hour. “They were shaped like saucers,” he reportedly
explained, “and were so thin I could barely see them.” A neologism
was born.
Arnold he demanded military personnel explain what the

contraptions were, if they knew, since he’d dismissed any possibility
of them being guided missiles or new types of jets. His best guess?
“From another planet.” Dozens of others came forward with similar
sightings, from as far away as Oklahoma and Arizona. But Arnold
didn’t enjoy his newfound celebrity. He said people had started
shrieking in cafés when they saw him and fleeing. He described the
situation to reporters as “out of hand” and regretted having people
“look at me as a combination of Einstein, Flash Gordon, and
screwball.”
Phoenix Lights
On March 13, 1997, thousands of people in southern Arizona say
they saw weird lights move across the night sky in a flying V. Most of
their reports came in between 7 and 10:30 p.m. along a 300-mile
stretch from Phoenix, through Tucson, and to the Mexico border. A
majority of people spied the pattern passing overhead (it was
supposedly several football fields long), but the Air Force also sent a
team of A-10 Warthogs from nearby Barry Goldwater Range on a
training exercise that same night, and, as luck would have it, those
planes dropped some stationary flares just outside Phoenix,
considerably complicating any UFO conspiracies with a second set
of strange bright lights.
Witnesses claim to have watched the first set of lights — the low-
altitude wedge formation — coast by with their binoculars; they say
the lights were red, had a singular white one at the V’s tip, seemed
engineless, and even banked southeast at one point. Actor Kurt
Russell now claims he saw them while up in a private plane near the
Phoenix airport, but air-traffic control told him the radar was clear.
Governor Fife Symington reportedly witnessed the V-shaped as well.
At the time he felt sure it wasn’t aliens, but his mind changed in
2007, after retiring from politics: He told media that as a pilot, he
knows “just about every machine that flies,” and these lights
definitely weren’t terrestrial.
The “Warminster Thing”

Warminster’s long, controversial association with UFOs began in the
English town on Christmas Day in 1964, when a local woman heard
a “crackling sound” rip over her head. Other so-called sonic attacks
plagued scores of others in town around the same time.
Townspeople had no clue what was behind them, so they began
blaming the “Thing.” Additional reports of inexplicable lights in the
sky made it clear the “Thing” might have hailed from outer space.
Travis Walton’s Abduction

In 1975, a team of loggers claimed their 22-year-old co-worker
Travis Walton disappeared for five days after a glowing disc in the
Arizona woods zapped him with a “bluish ray.” Intrigued, he’d
reportedly wandered underneath the hovering object, and it
abducted him. He claims he awoke on a table in a sterile-looking
room surrounded by three “well-developed fetuses” wearing tan
robes. He tried to flee, passed out, then regained consciousness only
once the aliens had ditched him on the Arizona roadside.
The story received loads of publicity — authorities thought Walton

had been murdered, and seven eyewitnesses corroborating a single
close encounter was unheard of. The National Enquirer ultimately
paid the group $5,000 for the story, after they passed polygraphs
and Walton agreed to be interviewed by the tabloid’s “prestigious”
hypnotist. In 1993, Paramount released Fire in the Sky, a movie
it said was based on “the most famous case of UFO abduction ever
recorded.” Skeptics have shot holes in what they assume was a hoax
and note that James Earl Jones’s NBC movie The UFO Incident had
aired two weeks before Walton’s own UFO incident. The encounter
has a cult following to this day, though, enough that a first edition of
Walton’s 1978 memoir The Walton Experience now
fetches hundreds of dollars online.
The Battle of Los Angeles

On February 25, 1942, reports filtered in of a glowing object floating
over Culver City. Air-raid sirens sounded; the Army proceeded to
pepper it with 1,400 anti-aircraft shells. Eventually it disappeared
from view, but not before a citywide blackout was ordered, shell
fragments got lodged in surrounding buildings, and five civilians
died. The Navy later explained it had been a weather balloon. But
ufologists suspected an alien spacecraft, which would explain why
an hour’s worth of heavy artillery had failed to eliminate a single
weather balloon.
Steven Spielberg would mercilessly satirize the incident in 1941, a

“comedy spectacular.” But ufologists immediately suspected an alien
spacecraft, which would explain why an hours’ worth of heavy
artillery had failed to eliminate a single weather balloon.
Conspiracists site a famous L.A. Times photo as extra proof; it
seemingly caught searchlights trained on a very un-balloon-like
object getting barraged with shells. The next day’s Times ran an
editorial on page A1 (“Information, Please”) demanding the Army
and Navy release more info, “if only to clarify their own conflicting
statements about it.”
—C.R.
11. And Continuing Right Up to the Present Day

New encounters happen all the time — even to famous people. When
Guillermo del Toro spotted one in Guadalajara, he says, “It was so
crappy. It was a flying saucer, so clichéd, with lights.” Above, a
sampling from ufosightingsdaily.com over recent months.
January 18, Japan.
February 4, Popocatépetl, Mexico.
February 28, Cleveland, Ohio.
March 7, Bangs, Texas.
12. We Even Have Some Pretty Developed

Theories About Why We Haven’t Heard From ET
Yet
Maybe we’re the pond scum.
The Aliens Are All Dead

Let’s start with the most depressing theory: Maybe we haven’t found
extraterrestrials because they’re all dead — at least now. The
universe is 13.78 billion years old, and in that amount of time, there
might have been plenty of civilizations that evolved and went
extinct.
The Aliens Are All Sleeping

But maybe they’re not dead — just hibernating. Another theory
suggests that perhaps there’s an extraterrestrial species out there
that’s so advanced it cannot efficiently make use of its technology
right now, because the universe’s temperature is currently too high.
Good news, though: The universe’s temperature is cooling down
(even as Earth’s is heating up). So aliens may have decided to take a

snooze for a few trillion years while they wait for colder weather
that’s more suited.
The Aliens Are Hiding

If even a genius like Stephen Hawking thought that aliens might
destroy us if they ever were to find us, then maybe we should be a
little afraid. Perhaps the aliens think the same thing, so they’ve gone
into hiding — from us. If another civilization were technologically
savvy enough and had enough resources, it could build a massive
orbital structure like a Dyson sphere to keep it cloaked from
detection. Or it might use high-powered lasers to provide an optical
façade that keeps its planet from being detected by telescopic
instruments.
The Aliens Are Still Evolving

Maybe alien life is actually everywhere — it’s just not intelligent
enough to speak with us. It took about 3.5 billion years of evolution
to turn single-celled microbes into humans. Maybe we just
happened to evolve faster and earlier than everyone else.
Humans Haven’t Spent Enough Time Looking

Realistically speaking, we’ve only had the proper equipment to
search for aliens for a little over half a century. On the scale of the
cosmos, that time frame is less than a fraction of the blink of an eye.
The process could take centuries or even millennia — optimistically
speaking.
The Aliens Are Already Here

This is where the conspiracy theorists get to go nuts. Yes, maybe the
aliens are already here and we just haven’t figured it out yet. They
might be taking some time to study us before unveiling themselves,
or maybe they have already let themselves be known to certain
groups. The truth isn’t out there — it’s here.
—N.P.
13. And in the Meantime, Aliens Can Be Whatever

We Want Them to Be
Joseph O. Baker is a sociologist and the co-author of the 2010
book Paranormal America.
Katie Heaney: Why, when we think of aliens, do they all look the
same — three feet tall, gray or green, big black eyes?
Joseph O. Baker: It didn’t used to be that way. UFO narratives

became much more popular in the 1950s and ’60s, and during that
era, the descriptions of the aliens would be almost humanlike in
form. If you see drawings that some of the so-called contactees
made, the aliens almost look like Swedish people — very attractive
blond types with shining eyes. The abductee narrative really took
over pop culture in the 1970s and ’80s, and after that, there’s this
homogenization of the public perception because of all the stories
and TV and movies about abductions.
KH: Even those guys look pretty human — why do we have such a
hard time imagining radically different forms of life?
JB: We’re the people doing the projecting here. Much the same way
people do with God — really, what sense does it make for a
supernatural entity to have a gender or be humanoid
Anthropomorphized supernatural entities tend to be more
compelling.
KH: Is there a reason why so many of the abduction stories feature

“probing”?
JB: The probe part of the abduction narrative took over in some
sense because it tends to be the most salacious aspect of these
stories. It’s almost become shorthand for alien abduction. But the
stories of abduction among believers are really diverse, and usually
probing is only one small part of it. Men will report having sperm
extraction, and women will report having eggs extracted. Positive
encounters tend to be akin to religion in some ways, in which beings
of higher enlightenment show people the errors of humanity, or help
them reach a higher plane of consciousness.
KH: Who is likely to believe?
JB: Men, and people with lower levels of income, are more likely to
believe. We don’t really find strong patterns by education, and if we
do, there’s usually a slight positive effect. But one of the strongest
predictors you can find for believers is their extreme distrust of the
government. That’s part of the reason it got so big in the ’70s, when
trust in institutions was low. Trump might actually increase belief in
UFOs.
Another one of the strongest predictors is not participating as

strongly in forms of organized religion. In some sense, there’s a bit
of a clue there about what’s going on with belief — it’s providing an
alternative belief system.
KH: Most alien-encounter stories give aliens one of two motives:

Either they want something from us or they want to kill us. What
does that say about us?
JB: It shows that we have a high level of perceived self-importance.

The idea that, in this vast universe, these beings sought us out in
this tiny corner of the spiral arm of the Milky Way to come learn
omething
from us, or eliminate us, is a bit flattering.
KH: I’ve heard that sightings are way down in the smartphone era,
when people presumably don’t take a story as proof enough.
JB: Well, it’s easier to hoax things now than it used to be. I would
think that with an increased availability of videos, if it was going to
do anything, it might lead to more belief, but from most of what I’ve
seen, it looks more like stasis. Rates of reported sightings and rate of
belief have been pretty stable. The 2005 Baylor Religion Survey
found that 25 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with
the statement “Some UFOs are probably spaceships from other
worlds.”
A Brief History of ‘Alien Dreams’
1899: Nikola Tesla notices rhythmic sounds on a radio receiver and

is convinced they’re communications from Martians.
1924: At the request of David Todd, former head of the astronomy

department at Amherst College, the Navy agrees to limit
unnecessary radio communications from its largest bases for one
day so that he can listen for alien signals as Mars passes closer to
Earth than it’s been in over a century.
1960: The modern search for ETs begins when Frank Drake uses an
85-foot radio telescope in the hills of West Virginia to scan stars for
signs of intelligent life; he later develops an equation to estimate the
number of advanced civilizations.
1969: Jimmy Carter, candidate for Georgia governor at the time,

sees a strange light.
1992: NASA formally begins its own SETI program.
1993: Congress eliminates funding for NASA’s SETI program.
1999: UC Berkeley launches SETI@home, a screen saver available

to the public that enables anyone’s idle computer to analyze data
collected by radio telescopes.
2016: Breakthrough Listen launches; it will collect as much data in

a day as past SETI projects collected in a year.

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7/30/2018 13 Reasons to Believe Aliens Are Real

March 20, 2018 8:00 am

space-race America could have gotten to a Second Coming. Two

But when, in December, the New York Times published an

Reports: The Pentagon Spent Millions on UFO Research

What the New York Times UFO Report Actually Reveals

Suddenly, aliens were an escapist fantasy — but also more credible

Then, in March, a third video emerged, featuring a Navy encounter

Searching the Universe for Extraterrestrial Life: A

Every extraterrestrial era has its own fantasy of

These incidents, which never occurred in cities, where other

Alien dreams have always been

Which does mark a change. Beyond the mysticism, American stories

Elsewhere in the world, where things are looking up, relatively

1. The Government Literally Just Admitted It’s

In 1952, a CIA group called the Psychological Strategy Board

have been interested, too: In December, the Pentagon confirmed the

So much of what the program uncovered remains classified, but

Here’s a Video of a Navy Jet Encountering a UFO

Some of the accounts Elizondo and his team analyzed supposedly

2. Harry Reid Says We’re Not Taking Them

Harry Reid: Bob Bigelow [the founder of Bigelow Aerospace and

EB: So tell me how this program got started.

The letter said, “I am a senior, longtime member of this security

We decided it would be [funded by] black money. I wanted to get

HR: Read the reports. We have hundreds of — Eric, two, three

3. Scientists Are Suddenly Much More Bullish

Just 30 years ago, we had not discovered a single planet outside

And even though these places are extremely harsh environments,

4. They’re Especially Bullish About These Planets

Scientists now think every one in five or six planets might be

Proxima B: The closest exoplanet ever discovered is also a

TRAPPIST-1 System: The red dwarf at the center of this

LHS 1140b: This wouldn’t be a planet we could colonize. It’s

The Ocean Worlds (Europa, Enceladus, Titan): Many of

GJ 1214b: Nicknamed “waterworld” by scientists; signs of potential

5. And There Is “Documentation”

6. That “Asteroid” Looks an Awful Lot Like a

We May Have Just Seen an Actual Flying Saucer

And There Could Be an Alien Megastructure Much Farther

Aliens Could Be Dancing to Earth Music Right Now

And We’re Getting Radio Signals From … Something

milliseconds, these pulses, first detected in 2007, emit more energy

7. These Masters of the Universe Are Obsessed

appeared as an alien Starfleet official in 2016’s Star Trek Beyond. (It

“Why do I feel so much like Sigourney Weaver?” Bezos said last

8. As Are Some Prominent Military and

bizarre-shaped asteroid that’s the first interstellar object to pass

Earth people’s R&D behind technology like lasers is impossibly well

Of course, another theory popped up in the ’80s — that

Staff were prepped to deny the encounter when reporters asked

It helped that in Congress he did things like trying to ban space-

warfare. In 2008, however, he only confirmed he’d seen a UFO,

Pavel and Marina Popovich

group of scientists. People onboard said it was triangular, brightly

Marina one-upped him, though — she claimed to have seen multiple

9. (And This Genius Thinks He Can Talk to Them)

Tim Urban: You created a language you think we might be able to

Stephen Wolfram: I think the main difficulty is the definitional

We know the specific example that we have historically been

TU: So is it that history that we’d want to communicate?

SW: Yes, I think the thing to realize is that we in our civilization

TU: Right, so we actually have unique information to communicate.