Are Aliens Real? Reasons Why Alien Life May Exist on Other Planets

On November 14, 2004, a training mission near San Diego became one that Commander David Fravor will never forget—and remains one he still can’t explain.

Fravor recalls seeing a Tic Tac-shaped object that moved much faster than the capability of any known weaponry that currently exists. “We’re flying brand new Super Hornets. It was an air defense exercise—two good guys against two bad guys,” Fravor said in a History Channel video interview. Everything seemed normal until the USS Princeton called upon Fravor and company for a real-world task.

Changing course, it wasn’t long before Fravor and the other pilots saw something strange: what appeared to be a sunken plane or submerging submarine moving erratically right under the water’s surface.

“It’s white, it has no wings, it has no rotors, I go ‘holy, what is that?’’’ Fravor said. The UFO had no windows, and it’s reported that infrared monitors failed to pick up on any exhaust fumes.

Fravor says it wasn’t long before his curiosity got the best of him, and he decided to get a closer look. As Fravor began descending toward the water, the craft surfaced, rapidly ascended, and began mirroring Fravor’s flight pattern. Then, in an instant, it zipped past the nose of Fravor’s jet and disappeared.

When Fravor and the other pilots got back to the USS Nimitz, they shared their experiences with the rest of the crew. Shortly afterward, another pilot took off in search of the UFO—and succeeded. This pilot managed to get a lock on the Tic Tac, which happens to be the footage seen here.

The Navy has officially released the footage (after it had originally been leaked), but says the public was never supposed to see it in the first place.

In November 1944, several members of the U.S. Air Force saw what would come to be known as “Foo Fighters,” a name borrowed from the “Smokey Stover” comic strip. The Foo Fighters were described as a type of mysterious aircraft that glowed red and could zip and turn through the skies with incredible ease.

Lt. Fred Ringwald, who happened to be a passenger in a night fighter that was flying over the Rhine Valley, was the first to see the lights. Airmen reported seeing between eight and ten of the aircraft lined up in a row. Concerned that they might be enemy aircraft, the group checked with the ground radar team, who hadn’t registered any odd activity. One of the pilots turned his aircraft around in preparation for a fight, only to find the lights had vanished as quickly as they appeared.

The sightings didn’t stop there, though. In mid-December 1944, a different pilot saw what was described as a display of flashing red and green lights that created a T-formation, which also disappeared as quickly as they came. Several more sightings ensued, and although people tried to come up with explanations for them—the airmen were suffering from “combat fatigue,” the lights were a result of some kind of weird weather phenomena, they came from some new, groundbreaking Nazi technology—they still remain a mystery.

Avi Loeb, an impressively credentialed scientist who taught at Harvard and chaired the university’s Astronomy Department, has put forth an interesting, but seemingly far-fetched, hypothesis: the asteroid Oumuamua is actually space debris from an alien structure or a defunct alien spacecraft.

Coming from anyone else, this might seem crazy. But again, Loeb knows a thing or two about the machinations of space. While truthers are soaking up the Oumuamua theory, however, Loeb’s colleagues are highly disappointed and upset that he’s posited what they’re calling an “insult [to] honest scientific inquiry.”

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A Plethora of Exoplanets

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5,000 Exoplanets: Listen to the Sounds of Discovery (NASA Data Sonification)

On March 21, 2022, NASA confirmed the number of exoplanets is over 5,000, and we can expect that figure to only grow as we improve technology that’s able to probe the nether regions of space.

This means there are thousands of known planets that haven’t been explored at length and several more awaiting discovery that could be comprised of environments with the ability to sustain life.

Who’s to say one (or multiple) exoplanets aren’t already home to intelligent extraterrestrial beings?

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The Odds Are Good

If there are so many other planets in the universe, then “where is everybody?” That’s the question posed by Nobel prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. His following thought experiment on the matter is known as Fermi’s Paradox. In short, he surmised that given humanity’s existence and the age of the universe, it’s incredibly likely that there is other intelligent life out there, despite us not finding any signs of it (yet).

Since then, some scientists have better defined those odds with math.

In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, astronomer David Kipping used Bayesian statistics to determine that the odds of intelligent life developing on an Earth-like planet are a favorable 3:2.

A different study by Chinese astronomers, published in The Astrophysical Journal in 2022, used Monte Carlo simulations to estimate how many “communicating extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations”—CETIs for short—there might be within our galaxy, as well as how long it might take for us to finally communicate with any. The researchers determined there could be anywhere from 42,000 to 111 CETIs in the Milky Way. They also determined it could take anywhere from 2,000 years to 400,000 years for us to be able to communicate with them.

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The Pentagon’s UFO Interests

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In 2007, the Department of Defense (DoD) created a program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) to study “space-related phenomena that could not be easily explained, usually involving the appearance of high-speed, unidentified aircraft,” per New York Magazine’s Intelligencer.

The covert program was headed by military intelligence official Luis Elizondo, who sought to investigate reports of UFO encounters. A decade later, Elizondo quit working at the Pentagon and confirmed AATIP’s existence to the New York Times.

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SETI Institute

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The Story of the SETI Institute

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute was founded by Carl Sagan and Jill Tarter, two astronomers who believe there’s more to interplanetary life than us.

SETI’s mission is “to explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe and the evolution of intelligence.” The Institute works with NASA and the National Science Foundation as a research contractor to pool resources and explore the possibility of intelligent life on other planets. Aside from optical and radio wave signals, SETI uses a laser detection system to look for signs of alien technology.

Yep, an entire scientific organization that seeks to find other intelligent life in the universe actually exists.