Contents:
At the very least, it is starting to seem non-crazy to believe.
A recent study shows half the world already does. 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. In fact, it displaces them: Humans become, briefly, major players in a drama of almost inconceivable scale, the lasting lesson of which is, unfortunately: 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.
Every extraterrestrial era has its own fantasy of consequentiality.
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: 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. Which does mark a change. Given the option, America will always prefer to play the cowboy, and through the post—Cold War s, 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. 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. 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. But the government seems to have been interested, too: So much of what the program uncovered remains classified, but what little we know is tantalizing. Some of the accounts Elizondo and his team analyzed supposedly occurred near nuclear facilities like power plants or battleships. In November , 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.
Then, suddenly, he saw a white, foot Tic Tac—shaped craft moving like a Ping-Pong ball above the water. But Elizondo has claimed the project was alive and well when he resigned in October. The former Senate majority leader is definitely a truther. 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. So tell me how this program got started. Could I have a courier bring it to you? 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. We decided it would be [funded by] black money. I wanted to get something done.
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. 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, of them, and we know nearly every star in the night sky has at least one planet in its orbit. 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.
Some, like tardigrades, can even survive the bleak vacuum of space itself. It shows that biology is all over.
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 ability to parse volumes of data in mere seconds means we could conceivably survey much of the galaxy in just a few decades. Scientists now think every one in five or six planets might be habitable, based on two general criteria: Extraterrestrial researchers and enthusiasts are most excited about these seven:.
One of the best chances we have so far at finding life on another planet. In , the photographer Steven Hirsch asked UFO-convention attendees who claimed to have had personal contact with extraterrestrials to draw and describe their experiences. For science-minded SETI freaks, the last decade has been a particularly exciting one. 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. With the object on its way out of the solar system, we may never know. 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. At least one of these planets is in the Goldilocks zone, so METI International decided to beam some musical signals over to the planet.
Though they last only a few milliseconds, these pulses, first detected in , emit more energy in that time than the sun does in 24 hours. 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.
If that's true, Bigelow supposedly has actual artifacts from UFOs, Sheaffer said, "and in fact has such a large quantity that he needs to modify his buildings to accommodate them? That is just utterly bizarre. We need an explanation of exactly what buildings were modified at federal expense, and what do they contain? This impression, he said, is reinforced by the fact that a constituent of Sen.
Reid Robert Bigelow received funding through the program. The center was started by Hynek, who served as the astronomical consultant to Project Blue Book. Hynek himself was initially dubious of the whole UFO business, but after culling through hundreds of reports by witnesses, he became convinced UFOs were worthy of serious study.
In broad terms, the outing of the AATIP and its investigation of military UFO sightings "confirms something that has been believed for many years … that these sightings are still happening," Rodeghier said. Rodeghier said he hopes the core of AATIP information that has been gathered can be released to the public and made available for scientific analysis. We need high-quality data about UFOs to do better science," Rodeghier said. Leonard David is author of "Mars: The book is a companion to the National Geographic Channel series "Mars.
Originally published on Space. Oberg here points out that given the spacecraft's speed, these spots aren't dancing at all, they're traveling more or less at pace with the shuttle. Oberg writes them off as small pieces of ice or insulation that have detached from the shuttle but are still keeping pace with it. In the interview, Oberg also highlights two other commonly misinterpreted phenomena: To understand how they work and how they can be confusing to Earthlings , check out the full interview.
An ESA scientist used this image to calculate how fast the meteor was moving. Request Reprint or Submit Correction. The Hottest Toys and Games for Christmas