Skip to content

Do aliens exist? We asked five experts to tell us what's really out there

With US government documents getting conspiracies buzzing again, we ask five space scientists: are aliens really out there?

Chynthia Wijaya / Noor Gillani
1 min read
Do aliens exist? We asked five experts to tell us what's really out there

Speculation has been rife about the contents of an unclassified report set to be released later this month from the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) task force.

The document will supposedly provide a comprehensive summary of what the US government knows about UAPs — or, to use the more popular term, UFOs.

While the report is not yet public, the New York Times recently published what it claimed was a preview of the findings, provided by unnamed senior officials who were privy to the report’s contents.

According to the Times’s sources, the report does not provide any clear link or association between more than 120 incidents of UFO sightings from the past two decades, and a possibility of Earth having been visited by aliens.

If the Times’s sources are to be believed, there’s clearly still no good reason to interpret an unexplained object in the sky as evidence of aliens. But does that mean aliens aren’t out there, somewhere else in the universe? And if they are, could we ever find them? Or might they be so different to us that “finding” them is impossible in any meaningful sense?

We asked five experts.

Four out of five experts said aliens do exist

Here are their detailed responses:

Chynthia Wijaya, Deputy Editor, Multimedia, The Conversation and Noor Gillani, Deputy Editor, Science and Technology, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

IdeasSpace

Related Posts

Members Public

Welcome to Dragon Talk: D&D's Shelly Mazzanoble & Greg Tito visit Byteside

We're talking to the co-hosts of the official Dungeons & Dragons podcast about their new book looking back at how the show came to mean so much to the D&D community.

Part of the bright red book cover art, saying "Welcome to Dragon Talk: Inspiring Conversations About"
Members Public

The future of trust and security

Sponsored by IBM. Trust and security have been a big challenge throughout the pandemic, but the events of 2022 have tested these ideas like never before.

The future of trust and security
Members Public

The future of sound production at Trackdown Studios

From Mad Max Fury Road to The Crown, World of Warcraft to The Boys, Sydney's Trackdown Studios makes big productions sound amazing.

The future of sound production at Trackdown Studios