Do you think aliens in ufos have visited Earth? (And all things UFO)

GREEN BANK, W.Va. — It came from space, hurtling at tremendous speed: a mystery object, reddish, rocky, shaped like a cigar. Its velocity was so extreme it had to have come from somewhere far away, in the interstellar realm. The astronomers in Hawaii who spotted it in 2017 named it ‘Oumuamua, Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first.”

But what was it, exactly? A comet? An asteroid?

Or maybe … an alien spacecraft?

That conjecture incited headlines, as well as eyerolls from most scientists. But here in West Virginia, the people involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — commonly called SETI — decided to aim a giant radio telescope at it, just to be sure.

Aliens are having a moment. Fascination with the concept of extraterrestrial visitors isn’t new, but it has enjoyed a 21st-century efflorescence. Military pilots have seen things that look otherworldly. The Pentagon has established an office to look into the sightings. Congress has held hearings. Even NASA got into the game, training the cool logic of science onto a scorching-hot cultural topic.

Somewhere along the line, UFOs got rebranded. Unidentified flying objects are now, per government edict, unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).

For SETI researchers, the hypothetical existence of aliens is foundational. Nestled in the remote mountain town of Green Bank, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory has a role in one of the most ambitious SETI projects, called Breakthrough Listen.

The project buys time on the towering Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, which has a steerable dish 300 feet in diameter. If there are aliens transmitting radio signals anywhere near us in the galaxy, that big dish is all ear.

Confirming an alien radio signal would be possibly the most consequential and disruptive scientific discovery of all time. SETI scientists have no doubt that the search is worth the effort.

“I think if we didn’t do that, and turned our back on our cosmological neighbors, that would be a sad thing for me,” David MacMahon, the chief scientist on Breakthrough Listen, said this fall during a visit to Green Bank.

That’s why the Breakthrough Listen team pointed the big telescope at the mystery object ‘Oumuamua, listening for signs of intelligent life.

“It was absolutely silent,” reports Matt Lebofsky, lead engineer on the project.

Silence: That is all astronomers have heard since the first SETI search was conducted at Green Bank in 1960.

Only a small fraction of our galaxy has been studied. Absence of evidence, as everyone knows, is not evidence of absence. Aliens may not consider radio waves to be a useful or dignified way to communicate. They could be pathologically shy. Or, at least with the kind of technology we have today, they could be just a little bit out of range……..


https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/11/25/aliens-uaps-scientific-evidence/