That would be 2,739 visits from aliens per day, every day, for the past 100 years! So to end up with alien wreckage stashed away at Area 51, we would need one hundred million visits from alien spacecraft. Which means the chance of a crash is one in a hundred million. That begs the question: do we think an alien spacecraft that can travel for thousands of years, across interstellar distances, is more robust and better designed than our planes? Cover ups?Ĭould it be aliens have crashed on Earth and the US government is just covering it up, as Republican Congressman Tim Burchett claimed in his reaction to the hearing?įor airlines belonging to the International Air Transport Association, the chance of plane crash is about one in a million. And any signals originating from civilisations on those planets are incredibly weak and difficult to detect. So for planets hundreds or thousands of light years away, travel times are likely in the many thousands of years. Over interstellar distances, that’s a killer. But even at that speed it would take a signal roughly four years to travel between Earth and the nearest star in our galaxy, which is four light years away.īut Einstein’s theory of special relativity tells us that, in practice, the speed of a physical object such as a spacecraft will be slower than the speed of light.Īlso, thanks to the inverse square law of radiation, signals get weaker in proportion to the square of the distance they have travelled. Speeds are limited to the speed of light, which is around 300,000 km per second. The vast volume of the universe makes it very difficult to achieve interstellar travel, receive signals, or communicate with any potential far-off lifeforms (at least according to the laws of physics as we know them). While I believe life will almost certainly exist among the trillions of planets in the universe – the sheer scale of the universe is a problem.

On top of that, we’re not even sure sharks exist and, if they do, what they would look like or how they would behave. If the Milky Way is considered equivalent to the Earth’s oceans, the sum total of our decades of searching is like taking a random swimming pool worth of water out of the ocean to search for a shark. But after decades of many teams of experts using powerful telescopes, we still haven’t covered much territory. On and off over the past decade, I’ve used radio telescopes to perform wide ranging experiments to search for technosignatures – signs of technological civilisations on planets elsewhere in our galaxy (the Milky Way).

So the search for extra-terrestrial life is a legitimate pursuit, subject to the same burden of evidence that applies to all science. But the leap to aliens requires far more substantial and direct evidence – incredible evidence – that can be widely scrutinised using the tools of science.Īfter all, the existence of life elsewhere in the universe is a fascinating question of science and society. There is no doubt unexplained phenomena have been observed, such as in footage obtained by navy pilots (above) showing fast moving airborne objects. The hearings did include closed classified sessions that presumably dealt with more sensitive security information. None of the public testimony went any way towards supporting a conclusion that alien spacecraft have crashed on, or visited, Earth. Footage of three UAPs from US Navy pilots.

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