HOW CONVINCING IS THE EVIDENCE THAT EXTRA-TERRESTRIALS HAVE VISITED EARTH?

WRITTEN BY LEO P

Along with many people, I believe that there is extra-terrestrial life somewhere in the Universe. However, despite all the effort put into searching for it, we seem not to be able to find any signs of it But what if it was the aliens who found us?

In my essay, I am going to find evidence and evaluate the evidence to suggest that aliens have visited Earth so that I can reach a conclusion

To start with, what is an alien? Typically, when someone mentions ‘alien’ we think of a little green man, or an animal-like creature with human intelligence The reality is that they could be anything from a single celled organism to a massive moon-sized intelligent life form. The dictionary definition is ‘of or from outside the earth or its atmosphere.’ This means that an alien could be anything, so long as it is alive Furthermore, aliens would not necessarily be carbon-based; some people think that they could be silicon-based.

There is also the question of why do we look for aliens? One simple answer is curiosity Humans have always wanted to find new things, and what would be better than finding a whole new life-form? Scientists would be able to learn even more about life and what it needs to exist, and if the extraterrestrials were sentient, we might even learn from them

Chapter One – Do aliens exist?

Rationally, how likely is it that extraterrestrials exist in the Universe? There are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, at least 5000 confirmed exoplanets, and many more undiscovered ones just in our galaxy; with 100-200 billion galaxies out there, the chances are that there will be at least one with life on it. Furthermore, the nearest Earth-sized planet is located just 4 22 light years away which is very close when compared to the vastness of the known universe: 93 billion light years in diameter Rationally, the universe is so large, it is highly likely that other life exists

On the other hand, there are some theories which suggest that it is incredibly unlikely that intelligent life exists elsewhere. For example, the Fermi Paradox argues that: since there are so many planets, lots older than Earth, intelligent life should have already developed on some of them Given the billions of years they could have existed before humans evolved, it would be likely that some civilisations would have developed space travel and have reached us already Since this has not happened, alien civilisations must not exist.

However, one explanation for the Fermi paradox is that any alien civilisations that exist are purposefully ignoring us This could be because they are letting us evolve naturally, and do not want to skew humans' current development, for example by giving us technology to easily evade problems which would have benefited us in some way if we passed without aid. Another explanation for why aliens might have ignored us is that they want to minimise the risk of us being a threat to them, and the easiest way to prevent that is by us just not knowing about them

Another theory against the possibility of aliens visiting Earth is the fact that eventually all civilisations self-destruct

At the point that humans have developed space travel, we have also created the means to destroy ourselves Assuming aliens are like humans, they would want to annihilate any threat to them, which could start a war that would end with them destroyed or with their technology vastly reduced Therefore, they wouldn’t be able to reach Earth.

However, if they are not like humans and don’t have the same violent instincts, this might not be the case and they might be able to perfectly coexist with another race carried on now with much more powerful radios by SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)

The fact that SETI is monitoring for unusual radio frequencies, suggest that scientists generally believe that any intelligent lifeform out there will have access to that kind of technology, and is also interested in finding other life.

Scientists are not just sending and monitoring for radio signals, they have also sent out a few unmanned space probes carrying information about humans There are currently five probes which have the solar system, and the furthest is about 23,874,000,000 kilometres away These interstellar probes are still functioning and sending data about what it is like outside our solar system However, both voyagers one and two also carry copies of the golden record, which is a record storing information about Earth such as images, sounds and some people speaking in different languages While it is unlikely that the record will ever fall into alien possession, if it does, it also tells how to find Earth so that they could visit us if they wanted to.

Chapter Two – How are people looking for aliens?

What have scientists done to try to find evidence of aliens and how successful have they been?

One of the first ways people looked for aliens started in 1896 when Nicola Tesla suggested that he could use a more powerful version of his wireless electrical transmission system to communicate with aliens from Mars, but despite one false alarm, there were no results This is still

However, the search for aliens is not just happening in space Astrobiologists are studying creatures living in the extremes of Earth, like volcanoes and the bottom of oceans This research is useful because it tells the scientists how life could be adapted to extreme environments, and therefore other planets However, one bad thing they discovered is that even with access to state-of-the-art laboratories, it is incredibly difficult to find signs of life, and the probes sent out have worse equipment This means that to get the best chance of success, samples would need to be returned to Earth for much more thorough examination

Chapter Three – What can UFO sightings tell us about aliens?

So far, I have not talked about aliens on Earth, but this chapter is about UFO sightings I am going to look at some famous sightings and try to find some explanations for UFO sightings which does not involve actual UFOs.

One of the most famous UFO sightings of all time is probably the Roswell incident from the summer of 1947 where a farmer found the wreckage of what looked like an alien spaceship on his ranch near Roswell He then took it to the nearby air force base, and the next day, they released a statement to the public where they announced that they had found the remains of a UFO However, the day after, they published another article saying that it was actually a weather balloon which had crashed This was further amended in 1994, when the US air force said that it had been a spy balloon meant for monitoring the USSR during the cold war, but they had not said so when it was found because they did not want anyone finding out about it.

Because of all these changes, the Roswell incident is a very controversial alien encounter Lots of people have said that they

think the US government was trying to cover up an actual alien crash site

While the Roswell incident is most likely the most famous sighting, a few weeks before it happened, a pilot called Kenneth Arnold claimed to have spotted nine UFOs flying in formation at what he estimated to be 1,200 mph. When he was questioned later, he said that the way they moved looked like saucers skipping on water, except they were crescent shaped and moved much faster Lots of people were excited because this was the first proper sighting, and most people thought that it was either some new military technology or aliens

However, there are some other explanations for these sightings which do not involve seeing actual aliens Sometimes, our brain can mess with what we thought happened, so we think that a completely different thing happened to what actually happened For example, someone could be looking through their photos, when they see something flying in the sky and say it must have been a UFO The reality might be that it was a bird or plane which they would have noticed if they had not been focussed on what they were taking a picture of This can cause the most normal plane or bird to be recognised as something completely different.

Chapter Four – Have aliens had any role in the history of Earth?

Have aliens ever come into contact with humans in the past?

You have probably heard of the theory that aliens helped to make the pyramids, but most likely you dismissed it because of how unrealistic it sounds Imagine, however, even with the technology we have now, it would still be a massive undertaking to build a pyramid of that scale Now imagine what it would have been like for the Egyptians with primitive tools and technology.

Furthermore, the coordinates for the pyramid of Giza are 29 9792° N, 31 1342° E and the speed of light in a vacuum is 299 792 458 m/s The latitude co-ordinate is the same as the first six digits of the speed of light Some people say that this is very unlikely to be a coincidence. But in reality, the chances of it being because of aliens is small

In addition, people say that the Nazca lines (see figure 1), which are lots of large shapes resembling animals and plants in the Nazca desert in southern Peru, were made by aliens This is because it would have been extremely hard to make them without being able to see them from the sky, they were only even discovered when someone flew a plane over them.

There are also a few old paintings in which it seems like UFOs are in the background One of them is called the Madonna with Saint Giovannino (see figure 2) and pictures what looks like an alien spaceship The painting was painted in the 15th century by Domenico Ghirlandaio and shows Mary with a UFO above her shoulder.

However, the problem with all of these arguments is that there is no way of proving that it was aliens who made them because we don’t even know for sure how the natives made them, so until scientists can find out how they were made, we can’t assume that it was aliens

Chapter five – What do our views tell us about aliens?

Now, I am going to look at what we believe aliens to be like, and where these beliefs come from The idea that aliens might exist comes from back in the Greek times when they thought that these other worlds would be impossible to get to. The belief that aliens exist became much more widespread in the 18th century and there were the first reports of UFO sightings It was not until around the 1950s that the governments started looking for evidence of extra-terrestrial existence and the threat they could pose, and at the same time, people started to get obsessed by aliens and what they were

This leads me onto my next point that lots of films have aliens in them Most sci-fi films have aliens, and quite a few horror films do as well Often these films portray aliens as being much more advanced than us, which might have contributed to the general belief that they are more intelligent than humans Furthermore, they are often shown as being evil. This could influence the belief that they could be a threat if they came to earth It is highly likely that aliens are not like anything we have seen in films, and they almost definitely do not look like they do in films

However, none of these arguments actually tell us that aliens exist, because the are fiction, and while they represent an obsession with extra-terrestrials, they don’t prove anything.

Conclusion

I think that the evidence that suggests that extra-terrestrials have ever visited Earth is not very convincing This is because most of the evidence to suggest that they have is very vague and circumstantial Furthermore, no solid proof has ever been found to suggest that aliens exist, and there are only theories saying that aliens must exist

I think that the belief in aliens is a bit like the belief in God, because although no evidence has ever been found to prove their existence, people still believe that they exist and are willing to spend money to try to prove themselves right.

However, despite what I have found out and what my views are, I think that just because aliens might not be relevant here on Earth, does not mean that scientists should stop searching for life on other planets because it would still be a massive achievement to for both science and technology to find non-human life

According to a survey I did among 78 people, 46 (59%) of them believe that aliens exist, 27 (34 6%) of them are not sure, and 5 (6 4%) people think they do not exist Another poll among 10,000 American adults showed that 65% of them believed in the existence of aliens. In this poll, they found that 76% of under 30s believed aliens existed, but only 57% of above 50s thought that they existed This might be because the younger generations are more exposed to aliens, whether it is through films or at school, than the older generation