President Donald Trump said Thursday he will direct multiple U.S. government agencies to declassify files related to aliens and UFOs.
The move came five days after former President Barack Obama sparked interest in the topic by saying aliens are real.
Obama made the comments in a Feb. 14 interview with political commentator and podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen, who asked Obama a lightning round of questions, including whether aliens are real. Obama’s answer in the affirmative quicklywent viral on social media.
Aboard Air Force One Feb. 19, Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked Trump: “So aliens are real?”
“Well, I don’t know if they’re real or not,” Trump said. “I can tell you (Obama) gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that. He made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information.”
Doocy then said Trump, as president, can declassify anything he wants to.
“I may get him out of trouble by declassifying it,” Trump responded, referring to Obama.
Hours later, Trump said on Truth Social he would do just that.
“Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs),” Trump’s Feb. 19 post read.
Here are Obama’s comments during Cohen’s speed-round interview, when the former president answered several questions in a short period of time.
Cohen: “So I want to do a little bit of a lightning round here, because it’s not often I’ll get access to the president of the United States. So a couple questions here. Are aliens real?”
Obama: “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in, what is it?”
Cohen: “Area 51?”
Obama: “Area 51. There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
Declassified documents released in 2013 during Obama’s presidency acknowledged the existence of Area 51, saying that the secret government space was used as an aerial testing ground for U.S. government projects.
Obama clarified his podcast remarks on social media, saying, “I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
While not discovered, there’s a possibility that there could be life on other planets; NASA researchers said in August 2025 that they found a long-lasting source of chemical energy in the ancient past of planet Ceres that could have made it possible for microorganisms to survive. NASA noted that this doesn’t mean that Ceres had life, but that there was likely “food” available should life have ever arisen on Ceres.
In 2024 the Pentagon’s UFO office, called the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, said it found “no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technologies.”
Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier examines the trail of UAP research over decades and the alleged information past U.S. Presidents have been briefed on regarding so-called ‘unexplained encounters’ on ‘Special Report.’
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Did former President Barack Obama finally answer one of the world’s biggest mysteries?
During an appearance Saturday on Brian Tyler Cohen’s podcast, the former commander in chief was asked directly if aliens were real.
“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,” Obama answered.
Enigma has received more than 9,000 witness sightings of mysterious objects within 10 miles of United States’ shorelines since August 2025, according to the company’s website.(iStock)
Saturday’s interview was not the first time Obama talked about the possible existence of extraterrestrial life.
During a 2021 appearance on “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” Obama said that after taking office, he sought information on aliens and whether they were being studied in a secret lab. He was told the answer was “no.”
But Obama did note that officials are seriously investigating aircraft that behave in seemingly unexplainable ways.
Crowdsourced data in 2025 mapped clusters of UFO and underwater object sightings along U.S. coastlines.(iStock)
“There is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are,” he said. “We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. I think people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”
Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy later asked President Joe Biden about Obama’s comments, referring to unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).
UAPs have gained attention in recent years, including from the federal government.
Congress passed the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act in 2023 and the Department of War has also created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.
Let Them Come: Onslaughtis a retro sci-fi bullet heaven game, launching November 11 for Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One.
Combine and upgrade incredible weapons in order to decimate the never-ending hordes, avoid environmental hazards or use them to your advantage.
Check out these bitesize tips to learn the basics and prepare for success on the battlefield.
Brace yourself for a relentless alien assault in Let Them Come: Onslaught– launching today on Xbox Series X|S – where bullet heaven gameplay collides with the gritty spirit of retro sci-fi classics.
Each run challenges you to create the perfect build from an arsenal of over-the-top weapons and explosive upgrades, shredding alien hordes in a display of retro-fueled chaos. And to give you the upper hand on this hostile alien world – where even the planet is trying to kill you – we’ve collated some top tips to ensure victory for Xbox players everywhere.
Outlast The Onslaught
Offense Is King: In order to not get overtaken by the swarm, you must make sure your damage output is growing steadily throughout your run. There are also many offensive options to upgrade in the Armory between runs to make sure you have the firepower needed to survive.
But Don’t Neglect Defense: Although offense should be prioritized, defense is also essential in the long run. The Shield that can be equipped when leveling up will protect you from one hit and reactivates after a cooldown. Combining the Shield, Health Regen and Armor Plating can drastically extend your lifetime.
I-Frames Are Your Friend: There are a few ways to get invincibility frames: after taking a hit, after a Super Shield runs out, or after using the Soldier’s dash ability. Get used to how long you have invincibility so you can sneak through enemy waves and reposition.
Chaining Up Dashes: If you have multiple dash charges available, you can chain them in quick succession to get through huge waves of enemies. There are enough invincibility frames for you to stay untouchable as long as you chain dashes.
Hunting For Health Packs: Health packs can sometimes drop from mini bosses, but the most reliable way to find them is in common crates. It’s worth exploring the level and breaking them to heal steadily throughout a run.
Emergency Healing: When leveling up, you’ll sometimes be offered an option to increase your Max HP by 150. Selecting this option will not just increase your max health, but also heal you by that amount. When you are close to death, it can be a life saver.
Not All Enemies Hit as Hard: Bigger enemies tend to deal more damage than small ones or enemy projectiles. If you are surrounded and you know you can’t avoid taking damage, try to get hit by a small Spiderling to limit the damage received and use the invincibility frames to flee through tougher enemies.
Hunting For Credits: Credits are also primarily found in common crates, but they can be awarded from completing specific missions as well. A great way to earn more credits is to purchase the Extermination Contract upgrade in the Armory – this will randomly give you more credits for killing mini bosses. After killing the main boss of a level, you will be rewarded with a bonus enemy wave that drops credits. Finally, did you know that completing a level gives you a bonus multiplier on the credits earned? And playing on Hard Mode will also reward you with an additional credit multiplier!
Missions or Supply Drops? During runs, bonus missions and supply drops can trigger at the same time, and you’ll have to make a choice on which one to go to. There are a few factors that can help you make that split second decision.
With missions, you can see what the reward will be in the upper right corner of the screen. If you like the proposed reward, you should prioritize doing the mission first, because with Supply Drops you never know what the reward is until you break it.
Missions also usually show you how far you are from the target. So if you are about to run out of time and the mission is still too far, it’s better to change your priority and go get the supply drop instead.
Weapon Of Choice
Weapon Balance: Different weapons serve different roles. Some are good to push back enemies, but will deal less damage. Some can be aimed to target specific enemies while others attack randomly and work better when the screen is full of enemies. Some damage enemies near you while others have longer reach. The key to a successful run is to experiment with weapon combinations and find the style that fits your needs.
Invest In Your Weapons: Many weapons begin to show their potential at Level 3. For example, the Shotgun gets Double Shot, the Electric Grenades are now fired in batches of two, and the Flamethrower will make enemies catch on fire. If you find that your build is struggling, it might be because you have too many weapons under Level 3.
Shotgun Versus Repulse: Both of these weapons are specialized in pushing back enemies. Repulse is better when it comes to pushback in general because enemies get pushed all around you, but the Shotgun deals more damage and can cripple enemies, reducing their movement speed. If you have issues surviving the enemy hordes, you could try using both, but you might have trouble defeating the boss at the end of the level due to limited damage output.
Autogun Versus Blaster: Both of these weapons have low cooldown and automatically aim for the nearest enemy, making them easy to use. The Blaster requires more skill, however, because you’ll need to stand still to increase the firing speed. At low level, this weapon is a bit underwhelming, but at high level it’s a great tool to focus on bosses with nonstop damage output.
Electric Grenades Versus Rocket Barrage: These weapons share a lot in common. They both fire in random directions and deal lots of damage in a large area. The biggest difference is that the Grenades attack close to you while the rocket barrage fires further away. Depending on your build, you might want to prioritize one over the other. Or get both for huge damage output, but you’ll be relying on RNG to hit the right targets.
Let Them Come: Onslaught blasts its way onto Xbox Series X|S on November 11, 2025. Now you’re fully prepared for the horrors that await you on this hostile alien world. Happy hunting!
Let Them Come: Onslaught
Digital Bandidos
☆☆☆☆☆ 1
★★★★★
$7.99
Brace yourself for the explosive action of Let Them Come: Onslaught, a fast-paced roguelite shooter where survival means adapting, upgrading, and unleashing devastating firepower. Battle relentless alien swarms across procedurally generated stages, unlocking new weapons and stacking brutal upgrades with every run. Whether you’re clearing the screen with flamethrowers, orbital strikes, or Photon Sabers, the power is in your hands. Experiment with different loadouts, refine your strategy, and master the retro-inspired bullet heaven loop. With an original synth-driven soundtrack by Cartridge 87 and escalating waves of enemies, this game will push you to the limit.
New evidence has dumped cold water on this provocative hypothesis. MeerKAT, a radio telescope operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, recently detected a radio signal from 3I/ATLAS. Before you get excited, this isn’t a technological radio signal used for transmission. It’s a natural radio emission and some of the strongest evidence yet that 3I/ATLAS is a naturally occurring comet.
The astronomers who identified the signal posted a brief description of their findings on The Astronomer’s Telegram, a website where researchers announce new astronomical discoveries. They explain that MeerKAT detected lines of radio absorption by hydroxyl radicals (OH) at two different frequencies: 1,665 megahertz and 1,667 megahertz. This indicates that 3I/ATLAS was behaving like a normal comet as it zipped around the Sun last month.
D.J. Pisano, a researcher and professor of extragalactic multi-wavelength astronomy at the University of Cape Town, reported the findings alongside several collaborators. The findings have not yet been peer reviewed.
What MeerKAT’s discovery means
Between July and October, astronomers kept a close eye on 3I/ATLAS as it approached the Sun. MeerKAT observed the comet on October 24—just five days before 3I/ATLAS reached its closest point to our home star, also known as perihelion.
The closer a comet is to perihelion, the faster it sublimates due to increasing solar radiation. This is when ice on the comet’s surface rapidly transitions from a solid to a gas without entering an intermediate liquid state. It’s also what gives comets their signature comas and tails.
During sublimation, each frozen water molecule (H2O) on the comet’s surface splits into a hydroxyl radical (OH) and a hydrogen atom (H). Thus, hydroxyl radicals are a product—and therefore an indicator—of cometary sublimation.
If 3I/ATLAS were a metal spacecraft, telescopes wouldn’t detect these molecules. Previous failed attempts to spot them helped fuel speculation that this interstellar object could be technological—a hypothesis first proposed by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb and colleagues. In a blog post about MeerKAT’s new findings, Loeb acknowledged the new findings and the apparent natural cometary phenomena at play but still did not explicitly rule out a technological explanation.
Not just a comet
Just because 3I/ATLAS is almost definitely a natural comet, that doesn’t mean it isn’t extraordinary. It’s only the third interstellar object ever discovered by astronomers, and its highly unusual characteristics offer a glimpse of the far-off solar system it hails from.
Astronomers have found evidence to suggest that 3I/ATLAS contains one of the highest carbon dioxide to water ratios ever seen in a comet and that it could be older than our solar system. Another preprint study shows that 3I/ATLAS exhibits “extreme negative polarization” that suggests it is a completely new type of comet—unlike any observed before.
3I/ATLAS is now departing our solar system, but astronomers—and several deep-space probes—will still have opportunities to study it before it disappears. The more information scientists gather about this interstellar visitor, the more it seems to surprise us.
Daniel Whiteson and Andy Warner’s upcoming book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? And Other Questions about Science and the Nature of Reality presents the best combination of all these things. The book imagines what it would be like to discuss physics with aliens, drawing from a diverse array of experts in the history and philosophy of science—accompanied by Warner’s delightful illustrations plus physics puns and hypothetical donuts.
Co-author Daniel Whiteson is a particle physicist at CERN and the University of California, Irvine, as well as a science communicator and host of the podcast Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe. Gizmodo spoke to Whiteson about the philosophical nature of the search for aliens and what it reveals about our own humanity. The following conversation has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.
Gayoung Lee, Gizmodo: Okay, so, do aliens speak physics? What is this question even asking?
DanielWhiteson: I don’t know if aliens speak physics! That’s why I wrote this book, to argue both sides of this question. I feel like a lot of physicists assume that the physics we are doing is universal… that the way we’re doing things and our way of life is the only way.
I wanted to push back on that a little bit and explore and make the opposite argument and suggest that there might be a lot of humanity in the physics that we’re doing—the way we think about it, the questions we’re asking, the answers we accept, and our path into physics.
Gizmodo: At the very start of your book, you introduce an extended version of something called the Drake equation. What is it, and how have you reimagined it?
Whiteson: The Drake equation is a fun way to organize your thoughts about whether there are other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. There have to be stars or planets for them, life that evolved to develop sentience and technology, and they have to do it all roughly within a time window that we can communicate with them.
It breaks these features apart because they are separate issues. It emphasizes something really crucial: you’ve got to have all the pieces to work. If any of those numbers go to zero, you’re out of luck.
But in the book, we’re not just interested in intelligent aliens. We want to find intelligent aliens that do science the way that we do so we can learn from them. Otherwise, it’s just too big a space to explore, and all those things must come together for this intergalactic science conference that is my personal fantasy.
Gizmodo: Okay, so let’s unpack some of these additions. The first one is about whether aliens do science at all.
Whiteson: Sure. This was tricky to tackle. I think a lot of people assume that if aliens arrive, they’re technological—because they’ve gotten here. They have some way to cross the vast distances between the stars, so they must have a scientific understanding of how they did that.
But historians of science and philosophers of science understand that technology doesn’t require science. We’ve been using stone tools for millions of years. We had technology in terms of writing, fermentation, metallurgy, and agriculture. These are technological improvements that have improved our lives without us understanding how they worked.
Having a scientific mindset is going to accelerate your technology, but it’s not essential. So that’s what we dig into in that question. Is science actually essential? What is science anyway?
Gizmodo: So assuming aliens are scientific, another element is whether they ask the same questions.
Whiteson: One motivating piece of philosophy for me was this question of emergence—why is the universe understandable at all? We can use fairly simple mathematical tools to understand the world around us. Instead of the universe just being filled with chaos, somehow this simplicity emerges.
We don’t know what the fundamental layer of reality is—if it even has one. So, all of our science studies emergent phenomena. It might be that it’s sort of a way we filter the universe. The universe is crazy and filled with all sorts of buzzing noise, but we see certain stories that are of interest to us.
On the other hand, if emergence is something that’s part of the universe—like there’s just some way things average out—then we’ll have that in common with aliens. They’ll study planets the way that we do. They’ll study particles the way that we do. They’ll see the same simple stories. But it’s not something we know the answer to until they show up.
Gizmodo: Do you think there’s any point in trying to communicate with animals on Earth to prepare for aliens? It can be argued that interspecies communication among animals on Earth has practically zero bearing on how an extraterrestrial, intelligent being might message us.
Whiteson: I think I would disagree. I mean, I agree that it’s unlikely that learning dolphin is going to help us communicate with the aliens. But the fact that we’ve failed to communicate with those species tells us that we have a lot to learn about talking to other species and that more practice and more success could set us up for more success in the future.
There are definitely some assumptions we’re making and some barriers we haven’t pushed through. So, we can’t understand why or how whales are singing to each other and how bats are clicking to each other, but there’s definitely something going on there.
Gizmodo: The extended Drake equation isn’t a yes-or-no question on whether aliens exist. It’s an ideal scenario in which we could have a meaningful, intellectual exchange with them.
Whiteson: Yeah.
Gizmodo: I’m sensing that makes it even harder for us to encounter the “ideal” alien civilization. In your view, what is the worst-case scenario that doesn’t end with everyone on Earth dying?
Whiteson: (Laughs) Yeah, well, one amazing outcome is that we have everything aligned with them. They just tell us the answers, and we’re catapulted into the future of science—incredible!
More frustrating, what you might call a worst-case scenario, is that there is nobody else out there doing science the way that we are. They’re not interested in our questions. They’re looking for different answers. They see a different slice of the universe—we’re alone at the table at the Intergalactic Science Conference. That would be unfortunate.
From a philosophical point of view, it might be more fun if the aliens don’t satisfy any of our requirements, because that’s when we learn about our own peculiarities. Like, “Oh, wow, that is interesting that we do this science this one way, and everybody else is doing it that way. What does that mean about being human?”
So I think the philosophers would be more excited if we were the only ones in the galaxy doing science this particular way. But the physicists would be frustrated for sure.
Gizmodo: On that note, is the search for intelligent alien life really humanity’s own ego search?
Whiteson: Oh, for sure. Definitely. On one hand, we want to find aliens similar to us, because it validates us. On the other hand, that discovery, finding lots of human-like aliens, would make us less special.
My favorite thing about searching for aliens is that any answer is mind-blowing and wonderful in its own way. So, I’m definitely pro-aliens, no matter what. Even if the aliens show up and do send us to the hydrogen mines, I still think that would be interesting. I’m that much pro-alien visitation—I’ll take the risk!
Gizmodo: The book presents an impressive union of philosophy and science, but you’re a physicist at heart. So, having written this book, doing the research for it… How has the process changed the way that you approach your own work as a scientist?
Whiteson: Good question. You know, I’ve always been interested in philosophy at an amateur level. But I realized that particle physics is filled with people who have strong philosophical opinions but think philosophy is a waste of time. They have this [Richard] Feynman attitude that physicists need philosophers the way birds need ornithologists.
If you ask them, is the top quark real? Was it there before we discovered it? They’ll say, “Of course, what are you, an idiot? Of course it is. It’s physical; it’s there. We found it; we didn’t create it.”
… I found those two things in conflict. Yeah, we didn’t create these particles, but we never see them, we don’t hold them in our hands, and we don’t interact with them. We’re telling stories about the way the universe works. But in the end, those are stories, and they’re stories that satisfy us. We don’t know if the same stories would satisfy other people, so it definitely shines a light on my own work and makes me wonder what it means.
But even if physics isn’t universal, it doesn’t make me less interested in doing physics. I still think it’s a super fun puzzle to try to unravel the universe. We’re in this intimate relationship with the universe, and it matters what matters to us. It’s part of being human.
Do Aliens Speak Physics? is being published by W. W. Norton & Company and will be available online or in hardcover on November 4, 2025.
In 1950, famed astrophysicist Enrico Fermi posed a profound question during a casual lunch with colleagues: Where is everybody? In other words, if there’s an extremely high probability that advanced alien civilizations exist somewhere, why haven’t we found evidence of them?
That’s how the story goes, at least. But regardless of the circumstances surrounding its utterance, that question—known today as the Fermi paradox—has captured the minds of researchers ever since. In a new paper, which has not yet been peer reviewed, astrophysicist Robin Cordet proposes “radical mundanity” as one possible explanation.
Cordet, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, suggests the galaxy is home to a modest number of alien civilizations that aren’t that much more advanced than our own. Because their technology is similarly limited, neither civilization can detect the other.
“The idea is that they’re more advanced, but not much more advanced. It’s like having an iPhone 42 rather than an iPhone 17,” Corbet told The Guardian. “This feels more possible, more natural, because it’s not proposing anything very extreme.”
An alternative explanation for “the great silence”
Calculations using the Drake Equation—a formula that estimates the number of civilizations in the Milky Way that are capable of transmitting radio signals—suggest a fair few should exist. Our civilization has been bleeding radio signals for decades, so we know the answer to the Drake Equation must be at least one. More radically, astrophysicists have proposed that it would take a relatively short amount of time, on astronomical timescales, for advanced civilizations to spread across the entire galaxy.
If aliens accomplished this feat, humanity should be able to detect their presence through a number of different technosignatures. These might include an artificial electromagnetic beacon, signs of astro-engineering such as heat emanating from Dyson spheres (hypothetical energy-harvesting megastructures built around stars), or extraterrestrial artifacts on Earth. So far, however, we haven’t found any of these.
Astrophysicists have come up with many different hypotheses to explain this lack of evidence, also known as “the great silence.” Maybe intelligent extraterrestrials are just too advanced for humanity to detect them, or perhaps they choose to stay away from Earth? Maybe we really are alone in the galaxy after all? Or more pessimistically, maybe all sufficiently advanced civilizations end up destroying themselves.
To Corbet, these possibilities seemed extreme, so he decided to ask a different question: What if civilizations have a natural technological limit that stops them from becoming advanced enough to create detectable technosignatures or to detect us?
The galaxy may be more boring than we think
According to Corbet’s hypothesis, humanity may be near the upper limit of technological progress. Alien civilizations could hit a similar plateau, never advancing far enough to easily detect or contact others.
This idea, known as the radical mundanity principle, suggests that alien societies aren’t building massive space structures or traveling at light speed. Instead, they’re probably a lot like us—and just as limited in their ability to find others in the galaxy. And they stay that way, eventually losing interest in cosmic exploration over time.
Even if this hypothesis is correct, that doesn’t mean we’ll never find evidence of an alien civilization. In his paper, Corbet explains that a technologically mundane world may still be detectable via leakage radiation, and such a discovery “may not be too far off” if radio telescopes continue to advance.
But don’t get too excited. “Although this would have profound implications in many ways, it may not lead to a huge gain in our technology level, and could leave us somewhat disappointed,” Corbet concludes.
In June, 2024, Perseverance, a NASA rover sent to collect samples on the surface of Mars, came upon a cluster of rocks in what is thought to be a former riverbed. Most of the rocks were identified as mudstones—they likely formed from the sediment in slow-moving water—meaning they would be perfect vessels for any traces of aquatic life in the area. After a monthlong, systematic geological survey, scientists took a special interest in an arrowhead-shaped stone slab dubbed Cheyava Falls. The rover drilled a sample of it, which researchers called Sapphire Canyon, for an eventual return to Earth. (Confusingly, the names are borrowed from Grand Canyon National Park and do not reflect the geography or the scale of the Martian specimens; the red planet’s Cheyava Falls is two feet across, and its Sapphire Canyon could fit in a tube of lipstick.)
The discovery may go down in history. Perseverance determined that the whole area around Cheyava Falls is rich in oxidized iron, phosphorus, sulfur, and organic carbon—a combination that microbes could potentially feed on. Colorful spots on Cheyava Falls contain the mineral greigite, which some microbes on Earth excrete, and vivianite, which is often found around decaying organic matter. Producing such minerals in a lifeless place would probably require acidic conditions or high temperatures—and the area showed signs of neither. Together, these findings are a “potential biosignature,” Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s project scientist, said at a press conference on Wednesday. This means that they are more likely to be the result of biology than the result of something else. Scientists published their findings this week in the journal Nature. Sean Duffy, the interim administrator of NASA, called them “the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars.”
Billions of years ago, as life was emerging on Earth, Mars is thought to have fostered a wide, shimmering ocean, as well as rivers and deltas that might have flooded when it rained. If biology was possible on Earth, then it was possible on the ancient surface of Mars. The red planet eventually lost most of its atmosphere, presumably wiping out whatever might have flourished on it, but there could still be traces, even fossils.
Life on other planets has been “discovered” before. At the turn of the twentieth century, Percival Lowell, an American astronomer, spent years mapping artificial canals that he believed had been built on Mars. Other astronomers spent decades challenging his interpretation. The issue wasn’t settled until 1965, when NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft flew past Mars and saw no canals. Even after that, many scientists thought that Mars harbored life. The Martian surface darkened during certain parts of the year, giving rise to theories that plants grew there. Carl Sagan, who said that extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence, hypothesized that the dark patches were caused by windstorms, not flora, but even he hadn’t abandoned the possibility that Martian life forms existed. In the planning stages of the two-part Viking mission, which landed spacecraft on Mars in the mid-seventies, Sagan argued that the probes should include lights and cameras, in case creatures scurried past.
In the end, the Viking landers found no creatures, and biological experiments proved inconclusive. Then, in the nineties, NASA scientists studied a Martian meteorite discovered in the Allan Hills of Antarctica. It contained strange blobs and wormlike structures, which the scientists interpreted as evidence of fossilized bacteria. President Bill Clinton gave a speech to mark what was potentially “one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered.” But when other scientists reëvaluated the meteorite, they came up with several explanations that did not require the existence of aliens. Inorganic crystals could have caused the wormy features; the types of chemical reactions that produce limestone could have caused the blobs.
There was potential evidence for extraterrestrial life in our solar system, but it didn’t reach the threshold of proof. “We have a bunch of bridges built halfway, from various lines of evidence,” Kirby Runyon, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, headquartered in Tucson, told me. In 2020, astronomers asserted that they’d found phosphine gas in Venus’s atmosphere, and that life could have produced it. (On Earth, bacteria produce phosphine, but so do chemical reactions involving phosphorus.) Some scholars countered that Venusian volcanoes could have produced phosphine; others said that the measurements were dubious, and the mystery gas wasn’t phosphine.
Runyon described the authors of the recent Nature paper as appropriately cautious: they offered many caveats and didn’t jump to conclusions. If an identical rock were found on Earth, he said, we would assume it had a biological origin. “The geochemistry is very reminiscent of life,” he told me. But claims of life on Mars are extraordinary, and verifying them requires extraordinary evidence. “The skeptical posture says we’re just running up against how far rocks and geochemistry can go to look like life—but not be life. And that reveals the extent to which we must be cautious in interpreting our scientific results.”
There could be a way to prove that the Cheyava Falls rock contains signs of life: by studying it more closely than Perseverance is able to do. “If this is the most compelling potential biosignature on Mars, and it seems to be, logic dictates that NASA should go back with more missions, or bring that sample home for analysis,” Runyon said. Unfortunately, NASA is currently facing its own extinction-level event: the Trump Administration has recommended a budget that cuts the agency’s over-all federal funding by nearly a quarter, and essentially halves its spending on its science program. The proposal would also cancel the mission to return the samples to Earth. Duffy, a Trump appointee, seemed pleased during Wednesday’s announcement, but he is part of an Administration that would leave the bridge half built.
The authors of the Cheyava Falls paper spent a year in the peer-review process, and during that time their discovery was publicly known. Did NASA headquarters seize this moment to publicize its findings in hopes of resurrecting the sample-return mission? “The announcement was more earnest than calculated, I believe,” Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a space-exploration-advocacy group that is headed by Bill Nye, told me. “But it only raises the issues of the President’s self-contradictory and self-sabotaging budget.” Trump’s proposed budget would cancel forty-one science missions and slash Perseverance funding by twenty-three per cent. There’s no money to be saved on the building, launching, and landing of Perseverance—these things have already happened—so “the only dial you can turn to achieve that is by doing less science,” Dreier said. The budget, which could take effect on October 1st if Congress does not pass an appropriations bill, would also effectively disable two healthy spacecraft that are orbiting Mars: MAVEN and Mars Odyssey, both of which Perseverance uses to send communications back to Earth. (Early this year, Trump vowed to land humans on Mars, but his proposed budget invests very little in that effort.)
Methodical science could perhaps be accused of constraining our collective imagination. We no longer dream of discovering moon bats, Venusian dinosaurs, and Martian beavers, as scientists and sci-fi writers of old once did. Yet NASA is arguably within reach of something even more wondrous: the truth about life on another planet. In Dreier’s view, that would seem to call for more science, not less. “NASA just found potential signatures of life, and the official plan is to walk away from it,” Dreier said. Still, he seemed hopeful that Duffy and the rest of the Trump Administration might change course. “This is the exciting part of NASA,” he told me. “Discoveries like this are why we do this, and highlight what we could be giving up. I hope some people get inspired.” ♦
People have one of two thoughts about life on other planets: Obviously there are aliens out there or it is just us. Which feels like a drastic divide and…well, it is. But it is interesting to see where certain people fall.
Wherever you fall on the spectrum is your own purgative but I personally think it is more fun to think that there is other life out there and they’re all watching us like “these fools!” You know who also thinks life exists elsewhere? Emma Stone. The star of Poor Things is at the Venice Film Festival. She is promoting her new film from Yorgos Lanthimos and during the press conference revealed where she lands on this topic.
“Yes, I’m coming out and saying it,” Stone told reporters at the press conference for her film Bugonia. “I believe in aliens!” And the reason behind this belief isn’t really that surprising. She started to listen to astronomer Carl Sagan and the rest is kind of history.
“One of my favorite people who has ever lived is [astronomer] Carl Sagan and I fell madly in love with his philosophy, science and how brilliant he is,” Stone told the room. “He very deeply believed the idea that we’re alone in this vast expansive universe, not that we’re being watched, is a pretty narcissistic thing.”
In the midst of Stone talking about the reality that aliens are out there, we also got a trailer for her new film. And look, the idea that she is an alien in the movie makes me believe that she really DOES know something about what is out in those stars. Ma’am, who have you met? What in the Fox Mulder is going on?
You can see a fellow believer that the truth is out there in Bugonia later this year.
Rachel Leishman (She/Her) is an Assistant Editor at the Mary Sue. She’s been a writer professionally since 2016 but was always obsessed with movies and television and writing about them growing up. A lover of Spider-Man and Wanda Maximoff’s biggest defender, she has interests in all things nerdy and a cat named Benjamin Wyatt the cat. If you want to talk classic rock music or all things Harrison Ford, she’s your girl but her interests span far and wide. Yes, she knows she looks like Florence Pugh. She has multiple podcasts, normally has opinions on any bit of pop culture, and can tell you can actors entire filmography off the top of her head. Her current obsession is Glen Powell’s dog, Brisket.
Her work at the Mary Sue often includes Star Wars, Marvel, DC, movie reviews, and interviews.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has yet to detect alien technosignatures like radio waves, but the cosmos is vast, and there are plenty of places left to look. New research suggests refining our search parameters by using our own broadcasts into deep space as a helpful guide.
Research published earlier this week in Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests we search for alien signals by studying how we beam strong, directed transmissions during two-way communication with our deep space missions.
The research team, which included scientists from Penn State and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), studied how alien observers might detect our deep space radio transmissions. They reasoned that if extraterrestrials engage in similar space-faring activities, their signals are most likely to appear under the same conditions, thereby narrowing where and when we should look.
SETI has been sniffing around for extraterrestrial radio signals since the 1960s but has so far come up empty. Part of the challenge is that we’re not entirely sure what we’re looking for, aside from something discernibly artificial in origin.
That could mean a deliberate, focused signal beamed out to grab our attention, or it might be unintentional: residual transmissions bleeding out from a civilization just going about its business. In fact, our own civilization has been leaking radio signals for over a century. We haven’t exactly been quiet—our airports, for example, are particularly leaky when it comes to radio waves.
Finding patterns in our own habits
In an effort to improve our chances of detecting extraterrestrial radio signals, the researchers, including astronomer Pinchen Fan from Penn State, investigated NASA’s deep space transmissions as a way to predict how alien civilizations might use radio themselves.
“Humans are predominantly communicating with the spacecraft and probes we have sent to study other planets like Mars,” Fan explained in astatement. “But a planet like Mars does not block the entire transmission, so a distant spacecraft or planet positioned along the path of these interplanetary communications could potentially detect the spillover; that would occur when Earth and another solar system planet align from their perspective.”
We should therefore focus on these types of key moments, when exoplanets in distant star systems fall into alignment—that’s when SETI should be on the lookout for possible radio signals, Fan said.
For the study, the researchers analyzed logs from NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), a system of ground-based facilities that track and communicate with human-made objects in space—from satellites in low Earth orbit to far-flung missions like the Voyager probes and the New Horizons spacecraft. As Joseph Lazio, a JPL project scientist and co-author of the study, explained, the DSN “sends some of humanity’s strongest and most persistent radio signals into space.” By matching DSN radio broadcasts with data on spacecraft locations, the team was able to determine both the timing and direction of Earth’s deep space transmissions.
“Using our own deep space communications as a baseline, we quantified how future searchers for extraterrestrial intelligence could be improved by focusing on systems with particular orientations and planet alignments,” said Jason Wright, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State.
Look for the alignments
The researchers found that deep space radio signals are predominantly aimed toward Mars but are also directed at other solar system planets and at telescopes positioned at the Sun-Earth Lagrange points (the James Webb Space Telescope being a good example). Two decades’ worth of DSN data showed that, if aliens were in a position to observe an Earth-Mars alignment, there’s a 77% chance they’d be in the path of our transmissions, as compared to a 12% chance for other planetary alignments. “When not observing a planet alignment, however, these chances are minuscule,” Fan said.
The research team says we should apply these insights to SETI, as that’ll likely improve our chances of finding wayward radio signals. Specifically, we should focus on moments when exoplanets fall into alignment with each other or with their host star, as seen from our perspective on Earth.
Our solar system is relatively flat, with most planets orbiting on the same plane, so most human transmissions travel along that same plane. Aliens are likely to use similar communication strategies, so it makes sense for SETI to target the same kinds of alignments.
Given the strength of DSN transmissions and assuming aliens use similar communications technology, the study’s co-authors recommend searching within 23 light-years. Importantly, they say we should also focus on nearby systems with orbital planes edge-on to Earth. They also note that these patterns could aid in the search for laser signals, which spill less than radio waves and may be preferred by alien civilizations; and in fact,we are moving in that exact direction.
This new proposal makes a lot of sense. Hopefully SETI scientists will take note and launch campaigns with these insights in mind. The cosmos has the potential to be a very noisy place—we just have to know when and where to look.
Just when you thought there couldn’t possibly be another installment in the Alien franchise, “20th Century Studios” goes and releases Alien: Romulus. In fact, it was among the only “blockbusters” of Summer 2024 apart from Twisters and Deadpool & Wolverine (and no, Alien: Romulus still couldn’t even manage to topple the latter movie from its number one spot at the box office—such is the power of Marvel). So, in some sense, Earth was “clamoring” for a movie of this nature…being that Hollywood refuses to make anything new when it comes big-budget fare. Though they were at least “adventurous” enough to tap Fede Álvarez (known for another “quiet” movie: Don’t Breathe) as the director and Cailee Spaeny as the lead, Rain Carradine. The “Ellen Ripley replacement,” if you will.
Unlike Sigourney Weaver stepping right into Ripley’s shoes after a bit part in Annie Hall and the lesser known Madman, Spaeny actually had a few films under her belt before taking on such a weighty role—having already done so with the back-to-back release of Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla and Alex Garland’s Civil War. And yes, she’s been in a blockbuster before, even if it was one that landed with a thud: Pacific Rim Uprising. Later, she took a wrong turn with The Craft: Legacy in 2020 before correcting things with How It Ends the following year. In short, Spaeny has run the gamut of roles before Rain in Alien: Romulus. Which takes place two decades after the destruction the USCSS Nostromo that audiences witnessed in 1979’s Alien. The alpha and the omega of Alien movies. Which is, in part, why Álvarez is so committed to paying homage to it—in addition to remaking Ripley through Rain (another “R” name—and one that Ross Geller famously mocked when Rachel Green suggested it for their baby, replying to her with his imitation of a person with such a name: “Hi my name is Rain. I have my own kiln and my dress is made out of wheat”). Of course, everybody knows that no one can (or will) ever hold a candle to what Weaver did for the part of “leading lady” in Alien, and yet, they can try to present a new-fangled “badass” version of her. Only Rain doesn’t quite come across that way, instead exhibiting the sort of vulnerability and reluctance specific to the current generation. A generation that could never convincingly say, as Ripley does in Aliens, “I can handle myself.”
Rain’s intrinsic fear of, well, everything is revealed from the outset, when her ex-boyfriend, Tyler (Archie Renaux), has to vehemently convince her to join him and the “crew” he’s assembled to enter an abandoned ship with cryostasis chambers that will allow them to defect from the godforsaken planet they’re stuck working on in favor of Yvaga—a planet where the sun actually shines (side note: the planet they’re on has plenty of dystopian Blade Runner flair). The crew consists of Tyler’s sister, Kay (Isabel Merced), his cousin, Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Bjorn’s adopted sister, Navarro (Aileen Wu). Of course, it isn’t that they really need Rain to come along, so much as her adopted brother, Andy (David Jonsson)—who just so happens to be an android old enough to know how to interface with an abandoned spacecraft that’s of “Andy’s generation.” Or close enough for him to understand it.
Still, Tyler does a good job of sweet-talking her into getting some balls by reminding her that Weyland-Yutani is never going to let her leave no matter how much she works, having just fulfilled her contract only to be told that she’s being sent to the mines now (essentially a death warrant), informed she must remain on the planet to work for another “five to six years” before she can again be given the consideration to leave due to a shortage of workers. Thus, as usual, this installment of Alien continues to serve as an undercutting commentary about the callous exploitation of the working class by their oppressive employers. And while Rain might be “Gen Z enough” to lack the same amount of grit as Ripley in the face of adversity, she’s not Gen Z enough to demand a “flexible work schedule” and a “work-life balance” if she’s to be expected to continue working for Weyland-Yutani.
After all, one of Alien: Romulus’ key goals appears to be to maintain as much of the status quo as it can from the previous films, including pronounced “homages” (even to the less beloved Alien Resurrection, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant). Obviously favoring Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens, what with everyone still thrusting so much undue hate upon David Fincher’s Alien 3—even though it yielded one of the most iconic images from the franchise: a xenomorph up close and personal with Ripley, who turns her face away from its dripping, drooling open maw. In fact, that’s the image Álvarez borrows from for his “nod” to Alien 3—even though, in this case, it doesn’t really work because Rain isn’t pregnant with an alien queen and, thus, there’s no way the alien would take its sweet time about appraising her instead of just snapping her up in its jaws.
Elsewhere, some of the exact same lines from previous Alien movies are used as “callbacks” designed to provide “fan service,” though it often feels a bit too heavy-handed. Take, for example, Rook: the same (or a similar) model as Ash (Ian Holm, regenerated from beyond the grave) saying, “I can’t lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies.” Or Andy echoing Bishop’s (Lance Henriksen) aphorism, “I prefer the term artificial person myself.”
Indeed, Andy gets far more venomous discrimination for being a “synthetic” than Bishop ever did—mainly from Bjorn, whose prejudice stems from an android not saving his mother from death in the mines, instructed to help twelve other miners instead by its supervisor, sacrificing the lives of two for the greater good of the dozen. It hardly makes Bjorn’s level of contempt justifiable, with the supervisor being the one to place his rage toward, if anyone.
And, speaking of rage, the perfect opportunity for it to arise (though it never quite does) within Rain comes after another cheesy callback to Aliens, when Tyler teaches her how to use a prototype of the M41A Pulse Rifle the same way Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn) taught Ripley to use an actual M41A Pulse Rifle. The latter reacts with far more titillation and gusto to learning than Rain, who still comes off as an overly cautious, scared little girl about the whole thing. In part, that “little girl” vibe compared to Ripley is likely because Spaeny is twenty-six to Weaver’s thirty-seven (when filming the indelible gun scenes for 1986’s Aliens). Granted, Weaver wasn’t much older than Spaeny in Alien, filming it when she was twenty-nine. Even so, she looks older in her twenties than Spaeny does in hers—in that way that all people who were in their twenties “back then” look older than people do now (chalk it up to “healthier lifestyles.” Though mental health has ostensibly been sacrificed as a trade for physical health…).
What’s more, because of the generational divide between the first two Alien movies and the present Alien: Romulus, it’s inherent that Weaver, a product of the time when the films were made (no matter how far into the future it was intended to be), would come across as, let’s say, more tenacious and less fazed by the proverbial horrors—including the ones specific to a human-killing race of aliens. Her coolness under pressure intermingled with unflinching badassery that also exudes an impenetrable “don’t fuck with me” air is something that no Gen Zer (whether on the “geriatric” side of that age group or not) ever stood a chance at emulating, let alone recreating.
Which is why, ultimately, the hardness of Ripley (even in name alone) can’t be usurped by Rain, a moniker that radiates the kind of hippie-dippy aura the aforementioned Ross Geller was talking about. Some might argue that this is a good thing, that it’s long been time for a heroine with “softness” and delicacy anyway. That women don’t always need to imitate the roughness of men in order for their strength to be taken seriously. Sure, that might be true—but it’s not true for an Alien movie.
James Cameron and Alex Trebek must be two apples from the same tree. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Cameron clearly does not care about what dorks are saying about the quality of the remasters for Aliens andTrue Lies. When asked about the losers nerds who thought the image quality should’ve been a lot better, Cameron reminds them that touching grass would probably give better quality to just about anything. “When people start reviewing your grain structure, they need to move out of mom’s basement and meet somebody. Right? I’m serious. I mean, are you fucking kidding me?” replied Cameron before giving praise to his crew. “I’ve got a great team that does the transfers. I do all the color and density work. I look at every shot, every frame, and then the final transfer is done by a guy who has been with me [for years]. All the Avatar films are done that way. Everything is done that way. Get a life, people, seriously.” For anyone who’s still worried about the color grading for Avatar: Fire and Ash or just recovering from that burn, Cameron at least offers some comfort, even if he can’t go into specifics: “It’s really fucking cool. You’re going to love it.”
Thanks to online gaming, you can bet on anything from the debate, a coin toss or marijuana’s legalization process.
Betting is very popular, almost 37% of people placed a bet last year in the US and Canada. And thanks to online betting people are wagering on weight loss, political campaigns, sports coin toss, and cannabis. Today, you can bet on anything from the debate to marijuana rescheduling.
In ancient Egypt, 4000 to 3000 BC, people bet on dice, board games, and feats of skill, such as chariot racing and fencing. It has been popular ever since. There are crazy things you can bet on, but today there is a big audience betting on the first presidential debate. Regarding the debate, you can bet on who the polls say won (odds favor Trump) and who has the first question (odds favor Biden).
You can also bet on the times Putin is mentioned (even at above or below 6.5 times) and also if Taylor Swift is mentioned in the debate. Niche bets are also on fire. Will Biden freeze for 5 seconds and lose his footing, or will Trump say “bing bong” and hit 5 sniffs in one response?
Marijuana being scheduled this year is another key bet…and has a whole industry anxious for the outcome. One site had a high of 80+% chance to now 46% to being completed in 2024. It is almost even currently with one regarding the Florida recreational amendment whether it passes or not.
“Today, betting is socially accepted and wildly popular. In addition to mainstream sports type stuff, if you know where to look, you can bet on all kinds of wacky things.” say Rep Porter, national Poker Playing champion and CEO of Hi On Nature.
One of the craziest things people are betting about online is alien life and UFOs. This type of wagers has exploded in popularity over the last few years. The following alien bets have seen plenty of action:
Who will Win the Alien vs Human War?
Which Celebrity or Public Figure will be Abducted by Aliens First?
But what, then, were those programs? Herein lies the most intriguing—and potentially ground-breaking—question that the Pentagon study leaves us wondering: What exactly are the secret compartmentalized programs that the whistleblowers and government witnesses misidentified as being related to UAP technology? What, exactly, are the Pentagon, intelligence community, or defense contractors working on that, from a concentric circle or two away inside the shadowy world of SAPs, looks and sounds like reverse-engineering out-of-this-world technology or even studying so-called “non-human biologics”?
There are at least four clear possibilities.
Secret Tech From Foreign Nations
First, what exotic technological possibilities have been recovered from unknown terrestrial sources? For example, if the government is working on reverse-engineering technologies, those technologies are likely from advanced adversary nation-states like China, Russia, and Iran, and perhaps even quasi-allies like Israel that may be more limited in their technology-sharing with the US. What have other countries mastered that we haven’t?
A Question of ‘Peculiar Characteristics’
Second, what technologies has the US mastered that the public doesn’t know about? One of the common threads of UFO sightings across decades have been secret military aircraft and spacecraft in development or not yet publicly acknowledged. For example, the CIA estimated that the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s accounted for as much as half of reported UFO sightings. And the AARO report spends a half-dozen pages documenting how confusion over subsequent generations of secret US government aircraft appear to have also contributed to the great intergalactic game of telephone of UFO programs inside the government, including modern Predator, Reaper, and Global Hawk drones. AARO investigated one claim where a witness reported hearing a former US military service member had touched an extraterrestrial spacecraft, but when they tracked down the service member, he said that the conversation was likely a garbled version of the time he touched an F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter at a secret facility.
There are surely other secret craft still in testing and development now, including the B-21 stealth bomber, which had its first test flight in November and is now in testing at Edwards Air Force Base in California, as well as others we don’t know about. The government can still surprise us with unknown craft—like the until-then-unknown modified stealthy helicopter left behind on the Pakistan raid to kill Osama bin Laden. And some of these still-classified efforts are likely causing UFO confusion too: AARO untangled one witness’s claim of spotting a UAP with “peculiar characteristics” at a specific time and place and were able to determine, “at the time the interviewee said he observed the event, the DOD was conducting tests of a platform protected by a SAP. The seemingly strange characteristics reported by the interviewee match closely with the platform’s characteristics, which was being tested at a military facility in the time frame the interviewee was there.” So what was that craft—and what were its “peculiar characteristics?”
Relatedly, the US military has a classified spaceship, the X-37B, that has regularly orbited around the Earth since its first mission in 2010—it just blasted off on its seventh and most recent mission in December—and its previous, sixth, mission lasted a record-breaking 908 days in orbit. The Pentagon has said remarkably little about what it does up there for years at a time. What secret space-related or aviation-related programs is the government running that outsiders confuse as alien spacecraft?
A Material Matter
The third likely area of tech development that might appear to outsiders to be UFO-related is more speculative basic research and development: What propulsion systems or material-science breakthroughs are defense contractors at work on right now that could transform our collective future? Again, AARO found such confusion taking place: After one witness reported hearing that “aliens” had observed one secret government test, AARO traced the allegation back to find “the conversation likely referenced a test and evaluation unit that had a nickname with ‘alien’ connotations at the specific installation mentioned. The nature of the test described by the interviewee closely matched the description of a specific materials test conveyed to AARO investigators.” So what materials were being tested there?
There are some puzzling materials-science breadcrumbs wrapped throughout the AARO report. It found one instance where “a private sector organization claimed to have in its possession material from an extraterrestrial craft recovered from a crash at an unknown location from the 1940s or 1950s. The organization claimed that the material had the potential to act as a THz frequency waveguide, and therefore, could exhibit ‘anti-gravity’ and ‘mass reduction’ properties under the appropriate conditions.” Ultimately, though, the new report concluded, “AARO and a leading science laboratory concluded that the material is a metallic alloy, terrestrial in nature, and possibly of USAF [US Air Force] origin, based on its materials characterization.”
A Knowledge Limit
Fourth and lastly is the category of the truly weird: Scientists at the forefront of physics point out that we should be humble about how little of the universe we truly understand; as Harvard astronomy chair Avi Loeb explains, effectively all that we’ve learned about relativity and quantum physics has unfolded in the span of a single human lifespan, and astounding new discoveries continue to amaze scientists. Just last summer, scientists announced they’d detected for the first time gravitational waves criss-crossing the universe that rippled through space-time, and astrophysicists continue to suspect that the universe is far weirder than we think. (Italian astrophysicist Carlo Rovelli last year posited the existence of “white holes” that would be related to black holes, which, he pointed out, were still a mystery just 25 years ago when he was starting his career.)
Answers here could be almost unfathomably weird—think parallel dimensions or the ability to travel at a fraction of the speed of light. And one of the most intriguing questions left by the UAP “game of telephone” is whether there are truly astounding advances in physics that government scientists, defense contractors, or research laboratories or centers could be feeling around that could also appear from the outside to be UFO-related.
Scientists may have just had their first conversation with whales while testing software that could one day help them communicate with aliens.
The team of scientists—from the SETI Institute, the University of California, Davis, and the Alaska Whale Foundation—were studying humpback whale communication off the coast of Alaska when they detected the underwater “greeting signal” from a whale called Twain.
Whales make underwater noises to communicate with each other. Although we do not know what the sounds mean exactly, scientists believe they use them to socialize with each other, as well as to navigate, find food and avoid predators
A stock photo shows a humpback whale swimming underwater. A team of researchers recently had a conversation with the species while practicing technology for possibly communicating with extraterrestrial life. Craig Lambert/Getty
The scientists played a previously recorded humpback whale contact call through an underwater speaker, which resulted in Twain approaching the boat. He circled the boat for a while before responding. The conversation lasted for 20 minutes, and during this time the whale made noises in response to each record.
The team members had been studying these whales to practice the software and develop intelligence filters that may one day be used to communicate with extraterrestrials. The SETI Institute is a nonprofit organization that has a strong focus on the search for extraterrestrial life. The team is focusing on developing the filter to decipher the meaning behind any signals received. Similarly, scientists have studied Antarctica as a way to better understand Mars.
The scientists believe this is the first exchange between humans and humpback whales, in the “humpback language,” lead author Brenda McCowan of U.C. Davis said in a press release detailing the findings.
“Humpback whales are extremely intelligent, have complex social systems, make tools—nets out of bubbles to catch fish—and communicate extensively with both songs and social calls,” said study co-author Fred Sharpe of the Alaska Whale Foundation.
Their findings following the conversation were published in the journal Peer J.
Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute, a co-author of the paper, said in a press release: “Because of current limitations on technology, an important assumption of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that extraterrestrials will be interested in making contact and so target human receivers. This important assumption is certainly supported by the behavior of humpback whales.”
The team of researchers, which also included such experts as Josie Hubbard, Lisa Walker, and Jodi Frediani, are looking to publish a second paper shortly.
This paper will focus on the nonaudio communicative behavior of humpback whales, the press release said. This includes indicators such as bubble rings, which the whales appear to make when near humans.
Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about humpback whales? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Being that Madison Beer’s entire “shtick” is essentially paying homage to Lana Del Rey paying homage to the 60s, it’s only to be expected that said decade would have a tendency to creep into her work. Even if by way of other pop culture zeitgeists’ interpretation of it. In the case of the video for “Home to Another One” that pop culture zeitgeist is Mad Men.
Co-directed by Beer and Aerin Moreno (who also helped Beer out with the video for “Spinnin”), it all commences with an image of the back of Beer’s head…topped by the same “alien antennae” we soon see her paramour, of sorts, sporting. Looking into the TV screen in front of her, the viewer is then permitted to see the same picturesque, snow globe-ready house she’s looking at before we find ourselves inside that very house. The one that looks like Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) apartment circa his “married to Megan Calvet (Jessica Paré)” era. Which is fitting, considering that, for most of their marriage, Megan intensely felt the cold remoteness of Don’s personality, constantly wondering if he still loved her or, worse still, if he was cheating on her (which, yes, of course he was). For the “character” Beer is playing in “Home to Another One,” that same motif can apply. Though the song itself is meant to be about a failed relationship (the ultimate “muse” for most female singer-songwriters). Which also works when applying the Don and Megan comparison to the video.
With a ribbon in her hair (again, the Del Rey influence) and a short black dress on, Beer stands alone in her apartment as a silhouetted male figure (with those alien antennae) approaches the door, placing his hand on it longingly while Beer sings, “Could’ve sworn I saw your face/Was it you?/Was it you?” All at once, a gust of wind blows her hair back, and he walks in with a suitcase. Perhaps trying to pretend as though he was never really gone at all (such is the Don Draper way). As he sits down calmly next to Beer (in front of the image of a solar system), they both seem to easily accept that he’s back as she then croons, “Say you hate me/It’s okay, boy, you’re not the only one.” This line serving as both a personal nod to what Beer has been through over the course of her career, as well as a nod to how women are generally hated by men (not to mention other women). Yet still seek their affection and love despite knowing better.
The scene then shifts to show us a montage of the two holed up in their 60s-influenced abode together, Beer now wearing the same white dress from her album cover paired with white go-go boots. The distance between them remains apparent despite being in the same enclosed space together—a reality made ironic by the realization that they’re also suspended in space together. If this wasn’t already showcased well enough by the backdrop outside the windows, a shot of Beer in another 60s-inspired ensemble posing suggestively atop a flying saucer ought to confirm it.
More Don and Megan cosplay with an alien twist occurs in the next scene, as the two sit across from one another eating ice cream out of crystal stemware. The emotional chasm between them increasingly palpable, it seems as though the further apart that they grow, the more Beer wants to try to keep the relationship together. Ergo, her progressively more bombastic sartorial choices.
As the video comes to a close, Beer proceeds to dance in front of the control center (the one presumably operating the spaceship/house). Perhaps heavy-handed symbolism to connote that she’s finally the one in control. Flashing to more scenes of their claustrophobic relationship, Moreno then cuts to Beer picking up the same white telephone viewers saw at the beginning of the video and seemingly calling to her “replica” alien self (in this regard, the video reeks slightly of the premise for the Black Mirror episode entitled “Beyond the Sea”). Answering it, the viewer is finally able to see a frontal shot of Alien Madison answering, staring back at the TV screen where she’s now looking at Human Madison half-heartedly embracing her Alien Don Draper.
Appropriately, toward the end of the song, Beer remarks, “Now you hold her gently/Don’t you wish you saw us through?/‘Cause I do, I do.” Something about that echoing the lament-rage of Olivia Rodrigo’s “deja vu.” Alien Madison seems to inuit that Alien Don is still caught somewhere back down on Earth, so to speak, with Human Madison. Perhaps this is the reason why she flashes him a knowing, jaded glance as he walks into her parallel universe apartment now with a suitcase. Then again, it could just be a metaphor for how they’ve both become alien presences to one another as their love faded out.
Regardless, Don and Megan Draper vibes abound in the Mad Men-esque narrative featuring an intergalactic spin. With Don’s emotional stuntedness being all over this alien man…who isn’t so alien to most women thanks to his familiar behavior.
Being that Madison Beer’s entire “shtick” is essentially paying homage to Lana Del Rey paying homage to the 60s, it’s only to be expected that said decade would have a tendency to creep into her work. Even if by way of other pop culture zeitgeists’ interpretation of it. In the case of the video for “Home to Another One” that pop culture zeitgeist is Mad Men.
Co-directed by Beer and Aerin Moreno (who also helped Beer out with the video for “Spinnin”), it all commences with an image of the back of Beer’s head…topped by the same “alien antennae” we soon see her paramour, of sorts, sporting. Looking into the TV screen in front of her, the viewer is then permitted to see the same picturesque, snow globe-ready house she’s looking at before we find ourselves inside that very house. The one that looks like Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) apartment circa his “married to Megan Calvet (Jessica Paré)” era. Which is fitting, considering that, for most of their marriage, Megan intensely felt the cold remoteness of Don’s personality, constantly wondering if he still loved her or, worse still, if he was cheating on her (which, yes, of course he was). For the “character” Beer is playing in “Home to Another One,” that same motif can apply. Though the song itself is meant to be about a failed relationship (the ultimate “muse” for most female singer-songwriters). Which also works when applying the Don and Megan comparison to the video.
With a ribbon in her hair (again, the Del Rey influence) and a short black dress on, Beer stands alone in her apartment as a silhouetted male figure (with those alien antennae) approaches the door, placing his hand on it longingly while Beer sings, “Could’ve sworn I saw your face/Was it you?/Was it you?” All at once, a gust of wind blows her hair back, and he walks in with a suitcase. Perhaps trying to pretend as though he was never really gone at all (such is the Don Draper way). As he sits down calmly next to Beer (in front of the image of a solar system), they both seem to easily accept that he’s back as she then croons, “Say you hate me/It’s okay, boy, you’re not the only one.” This line serving as both a personal nod to what Beer has been through over the course of her career, as well as a nod to how women are generally hated by men (not to mention other women). Yet still seek their affection and love despite knowing better.
The scene then shifts to show us a montage of the two holed up in their 60s-influenced abode together, Beer now wearing the same white dress from her album cover paired with white go-go boots. The distance between them remains apparent despite being in the same enclosed space together—a reality made ironic by the realization that they’re also suspended in space together. If this wasn’t already showcased well enough by the backdrop outside the windows, a shot of Beer in another 60s-inspired ensemble posing suggestively atop a flying saucer ought to confirm it.
More Don and Megan cosplay with an alien twist occurs in the next scene, as the two sit across from one another eating ice cream out of crystal stemware. The emotional chasm between them increasingly palpable, it seems as though the further apart that they grow, the more Beer wants to try to keep the relationship together. Ergo, her progressively more bombastic sartorial choices.
As the video comes to a close, Beer proceeds to dance in front of the control center (the one presumably operating the spaceship/house). Perhaps heavy-handed symbolism to connote that she’s finally the one in control. Flashing to more scenes of their claustrophobic relationship, Moreno then cuts to Beer picking up the same white telephone viewers saw at the beginning of the video and seemingly calling to her “replica” alien self (in this regard, the video reeks slightly of the premise for the Black Mirror episode entitled “Beyond the Sea”). Answering it, the viewer is finally able to see a frontal shot of Alien Madison answering, staring back at the TV screen where she’s now looking at Human Madison half-heartedly embracing her Alien Don Draper.
Appropriately, toward the end of the song, Beer remarks, “Now you hold her gently/Don’t you wish you saw us through?/‘Cause I do, I do.” Something about that echoing the lament-rage of Olivia Rodrigo’s “deja vu.” Alien Madison seems to inuit that Alien Don is still caught somewhere back down on Earth, so to speak, with Human Madison. Perhaps this is the reason why she flashes him a knowing, jaded glance as he walks into her parallel universe apartment now with a suitcase. Then again, it could just be a metaphor for how they’ve both become alien presences to one another as their love faded out.
Regardless, Don and Megan Draper vibes abound in the Mad Men-esque narrative featuring an intergalactic spin. With Don’s emotional stuntedness being all over this alien man…who isn’t so alien to most women thanks to his familiar behavior.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The University of Florida has just released new research demonstrating that one-third of planets in the Milky Way could be hosting some form of life.
Sarah Ballard, an astronomy professor from the University of Florida, and Sheila Sagear, a doctoral student at the university, released their findings last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Based on data collected from NASA‘s Kepler and Gaia telescopes, one in three planets in the galaxy could be in the “Goldilocks” zone, where liquid water could exist, and life could potentially exist.
Out of the millions of dwarf planets to host life, the researchers found that it all came down to the number of planets a star has in its orbit.
“Sagear and Ballard found that stars with multiple planets were the most likely to have the kind of circular orbits that allow them to retain liquid water. Stars with only one planet were the most likely to see tidal extremes that would sterilize the surface,” explains Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Since one-third of the planets in this small sample had gentle enough orbits to potentially host liquid water, that likely means that the Milky Way has hundreds of millions of promising targets to probe for signs of life outside our solar system.”
What were those three “aerial objects” downed following the Chinese spy balloon?
The Atlantic
The question is not whether aliens exist—I’m firmly in the “Hell yeah, they do!” camp—but rather when we’ll have enough hard evidence to end the decades-long debate over said existence.
Nevertheless, it’s not just you; the events of the past week have felt different. Our military’s targeted takedown of multiple aerial objects over North America brought UFOs back to the forefront of our national conversation—enough to elicit a presidential address on the matter this afternoon.
Hollywood has primed us for what to expect from our commander in chief ahead of an interstellar crisis. (Think Bill Pullman’s predawn megaphone pump-up speech before the Independence Day climax, or Morgan Freeman somberly telling his Deep Impact constituents that, yes, the comet is coming, and millions of you are screwed.) Today, sadly, President Joe Biden did not unveil the grand truth about UFOs with clasped hands on the Resolute desk, nor did he march down the dramatic carpeted corridor leading to the East Room for an Osama-bin-Laden-is-dead-style surprise. Like much of the Biden presidency, today’s event had a decidedly un-Hollywood feel to it. In fact, the speech wasn’t in the White House at all but next door, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s sterile and cacophonous South Court Auditorium. It felt less like a triumphant milestone in our shared knowledge of the universe and more like an inoffensive midday presentation at an auto show.
Biden began by explaining that the U.S. and Canadian militaries were still working to recover the debris from the three recently downed somethings. “We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were,” he said, tantalizingly. “But nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy-balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country.”
This is when the aliens-are-real crowd’s ears momentarily perked up. A sentence later, they perked back down.
“The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research,” Biden said. He rejected the idea that there has been a “sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky” and instead offered that sightings have increased because our radar capabilities have increased. To be sure, he did not say the word aliens.
Indeed, Biden seemed less interested in rallying us for alien warfare and more intent on calming U.S.-China relations. As the speech ended, a reporter asked Biden whether his family’s business relationships overseas have compromised his ability to deal with China. Another yelled that the recent shootdowns have been criticized as an “overreaction.” For a moment, Biden appeared ready to respond, but he decided otherwise.
The raison d’être of his speech today—government transparency—ended up dominating online chatter in the hours that followed, for what conservatives (and some UFO enthusiasts) saw as a glaring lack of it.
And so, the question remains: What were those three “aerial objects” intentionally downed following the Chinese surveillance balloon? If movies have taught us anything, it’s that the government is currently building a massive underground ark where a small percentage of the population can stave off an impending large-scale intergalactic attack, meaning today’s press conference was merely a way of buying more time. If logic has taught us anything, it’s that the truth is more prosaic, and one of the objects in question may belong to a midwestern club of balloon enthusiasts currently missing a balloon.
Truth Seekers, Billy Carson and Thomas Mikey Scrøder Jensen have combined forces with the top anomaly hunters in the world to form the United Family Of Anomaly Hunters(UFAH). Their mission is to provide enough evidence of past and present life on Earth other celestial bodies inside our own solar system.
Press Release –
Jun 24, 2016
Coral Springs, FL, June 24, 2016 (Newswire.com)
– The United Family Of Anomaly Hunters (UFAH) is a non profit organization with active members around the world. Their sole purpose is to help bring disclosure to the world about past and current civilizations on planets and moons in our solar system. Their primary focus is on Mars, only because Mars has the most available raw data to work with, but the UFAH team scour the massive public domain image databases of various space agencies to bring the general public the highest quality anomalous discoveries in our entire solar system.
Billy Carson is a well known activist and truth seeker in the conscious community. He is also the founder of 4biddenknowledge, which is one of the largest conscious networks online. Mr Carson is also the CEO of First Class Space Agency based in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Billy Carson’s space agency is involved in research and development of alternative propulsion systems and zero point energy devices. Thomas Mikey Scrøder Jensen is one of the worlds top anomaly hunters. Some of his discoveries have been published in the media all over the world. Thomas is also a producer and has produced many documentaries on the discoveries of the UFAH team as well as many other interviews with highly qualified individuals. His most current work is a 2 hour documentary entitled: “Baltic Sea Anomaly: The Unsolved Mystery.” The documentary features the Ocean X team that discovered the Baltic Sea Anomaly in 2011 along with some of the worlds top researchers in this field.
Billy Carson calculates that collectively the group has cataloged close to 50,000 anomalies in our solar system. These anomalies are all 100% referenced back to official images from NASA, Cal-tech, European Space Agency(ESA) and the Indian Space Research Organization(ISRO). The team is very strict on what they put out and all anomalies can be researched and vetted by the general population.
Jim Barnes, Director of Media Relations
Billy Carson calculates that collectively the group has cataloged close to 50,000 anomalies in our solar system. These anomalies are all 100% referenced back to official images from NASA, Caltech, European Space Agency(ESA) and the Indian Space Research Organization(ISRO). The team is very strict on what they put out and all anomalies can be researched and vetted by the general population.
The group claims to have pioneered two new fields of science. Astro-archeology and Astro-anthropology. Billy Carson feels that these will be actual college courses in the not so distant future.
Most of the members have dedicated almost all of their free time and resources to the task of bringing disclosure to the world about what they have discovered. Team member, Joe White of Art Alien Magazine was recently featured as a researcher on two episodes of the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series. Many of the teams findings have been used as research material in actual movies and documentaries. Most recently, Hollywood producer, Jose Escamilla used their research in his critically acclaimed documentary entitled “UFO: The Greatest Story Ever Denied III – UFOs from Outer Space”.
The organization has even put out a mobile app named UFAH, and it is available on the app store for Apple and on GooglePlay for Android devices. If you want to learn more about the United Family Of Anomaly Hunters(UFAH), you can look up and join their groups on Facebook or visit them online at http://UFAH.Space
UFAH Facebook groups and their founders: Mars Discoveries And Solar System Anomalies – Founder Billy Carson Mars Moon Space Photo Zoom Club – Founder Thomas Mickey Scroder Jensen Space, Technology & Anomalies Research (S.T.A.R.) – Founder MišaDrezgić Martian Archaeologist – Founder Brian Hopjins Exclusive Mars Images – Founder Rami Bar Ilan WhatsUpInTheSky.com – Will Farrar Lunar Anomaly Research Society – Founder Bret Colin Sheppard Earth Anomaly Research Society – Founder Karen Christine Patrick Annunaki History – Founder Billy Carson Martian Genesis – Founder MartineGrainey Alien Life Group – Founder Neville Thompson Mars Anomalies – Founder Chris Moroney ArtAlien Magazine – Founder Joe White Mars – A Civilization Lost – James Tracy
