When you think of aliens, what do you imagine? A tall, green figure with human-like features and large black eyes? A tiny entity, the size of a grain or smaller, that feeds on elements in the atmosphere? Both of these would be correct. Really, anything you can think of that isn’t an Earth-born creature. Alien life is quite literally any living thing that doesn’t exist on Earth.
To go with aliens often comes the idea of UFOs, or Unidentified Flying Objects. You can’t have a human-like alien without its spaceship.
In recent news, three military officer veterans testified in Congress, claiming that Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (also known as UAPs, which is the official term the government uses for the objects) have been found and are being reverse engineered behind closed doors. This case was highly anticipated, and you can watch the hearing here. The program that does this has been long standing and hidden from the public, they claimed. The Pentagon has denied the officers’ claims.
Without proper evidence to back the claims of one of the veterans, David Grusch, it’s not certain if what he said is real. It’s safe to say that anyone that comes out about something like this is at risk of losing their job, so would it be worth it? Would it be strange to give that up to make false claims?
A lot of people are superstitious about the truth of aliens existing. We live in a universe with billions of planets, far more than we can see. How likely is it that even just one of these planets harbors life? One of the main things used when calculating the probability of alien life is the Drake Equation. This equation is modeled with a long list of numbers.
A lot of images have come to life over the past years that claim to show a UFO. Mostly all of these photos are grainy, and many have more likely than not been made up. In this day and age, photo editing to make things look more real is more accessible than ever. It’s easy to post an image of something as extremely rare as a UFO and get popular for it. Along with that, a lot of these unidentified objects can probably be explained to be civilian-caused.
So, if aliens have been claimed to exist by an actual government personnel, why hasn’t it become big news?
In short, it kind of has, but not in the way that one might assume. Nowadays with almost everyone owning phones or some device that can access the internet, most of our news comes out of online news sources. Some of it comes from social media, like X (previously known as Twitter). This recent information, which came to the light in June-July of 2023, has grown popular on TikTok. Some people tell it as actual news. However, a large majority of people, especially Generation Z (Gen Z), have been sharing the news as a joke. Some people have made videos that have listed far more things to be concerned about other than aliens, such as: rising rent prices, minimum wage, and car prices.
Is there a reason to be concerned about aliens? A lot of horror movies and books portray them as evil and with malicious intentions. All throughout history, they’ve mostly been shown in fiction to not be the most nice beings out there. But is that a good reason to be afraid?
Steven Hawking, among others, has said that we should be careful, in case any alien life might be aggressive. For a long time, we have been releasing soundwaves into space, both intentionally and not. If a civilization had the technology, they could read and interpret these signals. However, like the Drake Equation states, the chance of alien life being so complex with such advanced technology that they could capture these signals is slim. It’s definitely possible, but space is massive. There’s a reason that the space programs have not publicly announced finding alien life.
In short, the answer to “should we be concerned about aliens?” is no. At least, not within one person’s lifetime. 80-90 years is not a very long time when in relativity to space. However, that doesn’t mean that aggressive alien life is not possible. It’s not a good reason to go fearing an alien invasion, though, and as it’s been seen, most people in newer generations don’t actually care.
Another claim that Grusch has made is that the United States have been aware of alien life since the 1930s. He has also said that he’s faced retaliation for coming out with the information, but has not gone any further into detail. The Pentagon has refuted all of these claims, with Defense Department spokeswoman Sue Gough saying that investigators have not found “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”
Grusch also testified that the government has retrieved non-human biological matter from these UAPs.
The response of the government has been them sharing a bunch of information about unexplained aerial objects. However, it has been found that a lot of these are civilian-caused. Hot air balloons, drones, and birds are just some of them.
So do aliens really exist? It’s unclear, because we don’t have actual solid evidence that they do. These few whistleblowers were retired, so they lost their positions for their claims, so it begs the question. But while some people believe that something human-like is out there, others don’t. It would be incorrect to say that aliens really do exist, because nothing has been publicly confirmed and proven to be true. However, with all of this news coming to life, it’s a question that has started to be asked more and more. Maybe one day, we will know the truth.
