Tag Archives: aliens

In 1977, still smarting from the box office failure of his first film, The Duellists, Ridley Scott, ever the steely Northumberland pragmatist, decided that he needed to pick himself up and do what he’d always done throughout his career: He would put his head down and barrel forward with work. …

When is it OK to kill an alien life-form? In the movies, the answer is usually pretty simple: It’s OK in self-defense, especially if it inspires a rousing speech about human exceptionalism. But in the real world, the choice is neither straightforward nor abstract. Many missions to neighboring worlds could, …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 2020, scientists detected a gas called phosphine in the atmosphere of an Earth-sized rocky planet. Knowing of no way that phosphine could be produced except through biological processes, “the scientists assert that something now alive is the only explanation …

After a year of eyebrow-raising headlines about government whistleblowers alleging that the military was running secret programs focused on alien spaceships and a months-long study and dogged investigative work through the shadows of classified Pentagon programs, the United States Defense Department announced Friday that it found no evidence that the …

Across the 75 years since something—something—crashed outside Roswell in early July 1947, the very name itself has taken on a life of its own: Today, it’s shorthand for UFOs, extraterrestrials, and a vast government conspiracy, perhaps even where the very idea of the deep state itself was born. The city …

Consider the possibility of alien plants. After all, plenty of exoplanets likely have conditions friendly to the development of plants, even if evolution there never makes it as far as complex organisms and animals. But if moss, algae, and lichen envelop lush exoplanets in the faraway realms of the Milky …

On September 12, ufologist and journalist Jaime Maussan presented what he claimed to be evidence of alien life to the Congress of Mexico. On September 19, Mexico’s scientific community gathered for a conference to ask a simple question in return: “Extraterrestrials or Llama Skeletons?” The answer was right there in …

It was like an alien unboxing—but they were just Nazca mummies from Peru. Toward the end of a public hearing in the Green Room of the Chamber of Deputies Congress of Mexico, Jaime Maussan, ufologist, journalist and host of the Mexican television program Tercer Milenio, announced a surprise. The well-known …

Seventy-six years after the infamous Roswell incident, when a high-altitude balloon—or something—crashed in southeastern New Mexico, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has now officially weighed in on UFO sightings. Don’t get too excited: They haven’t proven, or disproven, the existence of aliens. Instead, the report released today …

An influential group of researchers is making the case for new ways to search the skies for signs of alien societies. They argue that current methods could be biased by human-centered thinking, and that it’s time to take advantage of data-driven, machine learning techniques. The team of 22 scientists released …