Extraterrestrial Life, features and articles | Educational Science

Nov 3, 2022

Most UFOs are 'Chinese surveillance' drones and 'airborne clutter,' Pentagon officials reveal

Intelligence agencies in the U.S. have spent the last few years analyzing footage of hundreds of recent UFO encounters, and they want the American people to know: It's still not aliens. According to several U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) officials who spoke anonymously to The New York Times last week,...

Nov 5, 2022

Scientists are working on an official 'alien contact protocol' for when ET phones Earth

If extraterrestrial life sent us a message tomorrow, how would humanity respond? According to researchers, we don't know yet — and that's a problem. That's why, for the first time in 35 years, a team of policy experts and scientists have united to establish a set of alien-contact protocols for...

Dec 5, 2022

Search for alien life just got 1,000 times bigger after new telescope joins the hunt

One of the world's largest telescopes has just joined the hunt for signs of alien life elsewhere in the cosmos. Since 2016, the Breakthrough Listen project has been quietly using radio telescopes to listen for unusual radio signals, or technosignatures, from potential advanced extraterrestrial civilizations within the Milky Way. The...

Dec 15, 2022

Aliens haven't contacted Earth because there's no sign of intelligence here, new answer to the Fermi paradox suggests

Why haven't aliens gotten in touch? Maybe they think Earth is boring. A new preprint paper published to the arXiv database suggests that intelligent extraterrestrials might not find planets that host life particularly interesting. If life has evolved on many planets in the galaxy, then aliens are probably more interested...

Dec 19, 2022

US military reports 'several hundred' UFO sightings in 2022, Pentagon officials claim

The U.S. government's brand new UFO-tracking office has been open for half a year but business is already booming. Over the last six months, the office — named the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — has received several hundreds of new UFO reports from U.S. military personnel, office director Sean...

Dec 21, 2022

One of the world's largest lasers could be used to detect alien warp drives

Scientists have proposed another use for the world's largest gravitational wave observatory: scanning for the ripples in space-time left in the wake of gargantuan alien spaceships. Gravitational waves ripple out when objects with mass move through space. Bigger objects — such as planets, neutron stars or black holes — produce...

Dec 27, 2022

7 out-of-this-world alien stories from 2022

A metallic sphere zooms across the flight path of a military jet. A mysterious signal in the world's largest telescope sparks international alarm. And scientists discover that potential Martian life may have wiped itself out eons ago. It's been a busy year for all things out there. Here are seven...

Jan 6, 2023

Why hasn't ET phoned Earth? Maybe aliens are waiting for the exact right moment.

Aliens may be waiting until a cosmic version of high noon to send out their signals to us, scientists have suggested. In a new study, researchers hunted for technological signs of E.T. during the moments when exoplanets pass directly in front of their suns, from Earth's point of view. These...

Jan 13, 2023

Pentagon is struggling to explain more than 170 fresh UFO reports, new document reveals

The U.S. government has been inundated with hundreds of UFO encounter reports in the past year, and about half of them remain inexplicable, according to an unclassified document released by the Pentagon Thursday (Jan. 12). The 11-page report, filed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), reveals...

Jan 19, 2023

Alien life could be turning harsh planets into paradises — and astronomers want to find them

Once life gains even the tiniest foothold on a planet, it may have the power to transform that world, forcing us to broaden our definition of habitable, new research suggests. We don't really know where life might arise. We have only one example of a life-hosting planet, Earth, which started...

Jan 20, 2023

Is the sun a node in a gigantic alien space internet? Scientists scanned the skies to check.

Are aliens using a quirk of the sun's gravity to transmit information through an interstellar communication network? For the first time ever, astronomers explored this intriguing possibility and scanned for signals coming from hidden nonhuman probes orbiting the sun. So far, the method hasn't turned up signs of spacefaring aliens,...

Feb 3, 2023

8 possible alien 'technosignatures' detected around distant stars in new AI study

Using a new machine-learning algorithm, scientists have picked up eight extraterrestrial signals that seem to bear the hallmarks of technology. The research, published Jan. 30 in the journal Nature Astronomy, doesn't claim to have really found proof of intelligent aliens; a brief follow-up search for the signals detected in the...

Feb 13, 2023

US shoots down UFOs over Lake Huron and Canada

An unidentified flying object (UFO) was shot down over Lake Huron in Michigan on Sunday (Feb. 12) — the fourth such object detected over the U.S. in a little over a week. The flying object, which reports suggest was octagonal in shape and had strings hanging off of it, was...

Feb 14, 2023

Why are we seeing so many UFOs over America all of a sudden?

In the span of two weeks in February 2023, U.S. military pilots shot down four mysterious objects spotted over the United States and Canada. The military identified the first of these objects as a 200-foot-tall (60 meters) Chinese spy balloon, floating approximately 60,000 feet (18,200 meters) over Alaska in late...

Mar 15, 2023

'Unstable' moons may be obliterating alien life across the universe

The moon crashing into Earth may sound like an unrealistic doomsday scenario or the stuff of sci-fi disasters. But for some planets in other star systems, such catastrophic collisions may be common. New research published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society uses computer simulations to show...