After David Grusch’s testimony to the US Congress last week, is it OK to talk about aliens? Henry Mance looks at the evidence.
On Wednesday, a respected former US intelligence official told a congressional committee that, in effect, aliens exist.
He spoke under oath and with no trace of doubt. He claimed that the US government had operated a secret programme for retrieving non-human spacecraft since the 1930s. It had even retrieved bodies. He knew of “multiple colleagues” who had been “physically injured” both by non-human actors and by people in government looking to cover up their existence.
Not many people could make such claims and be taken seriously. But the official, David Grusch, is an Air Force veteran who worked with the Pentagon team charged with investigating unexplained flying objects. He had not seen any such objects himself, let alone any alien bodies, but said that he had spoken to 40 individuals in the know. Although Grusch declined to answer many of the congressmen’s questions, citing classified information, he said he could reveal more in private.
On Grusch’s left sat a retired Navy commander called David Fravor, who said that in 2004 he and three others had encountered an object shaped like a “40ft flying Tic Tac”, moving quickly with no visible propulsion. This object defied the laws of physics “the way we understand them”, said Fravor.
Grusch and Fravor found a willing audience of representatives inclined to distrust the Pentagon. “We made history today,” said Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, at the end of their testimony. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, emphasised the committee’s commitment to protecting whistleblowers.
For those who think we may have been visited, Grusch’s emergence has been the best news in years. He seemed credible. “I thought at first I was being deceived,” he told Australian journalist Ross Coulthart in an earlier interview. “[But] we’re definitely not alone.” Attendees at the annual UFO Festival in Roswell, New Mexico — where activities include an alien bar crawl — were jubilant. Coulthart says that unidentified anomalous phenomena (as UFOs are now politely called) are “the subject that can no longer be ridiculed or stigmatised”.
Grusch left open the possibility that the visitors were not strictly aliens, but intra-terrestrial beings — who had always lived with us on Earth — or inter-dimensional beings from another physical dimension. Even so, evidence of non-human intelligence (technically non-animal intelligence) would be a massive story, larger even than climate change or the banking arrangements of a former Brexit campaigner. Coulthart says that other sources have confirmed the existence of a crash retrieval and reverse-engineering programme: “This is either the biggest story in history or there are a cluster of senior intelligence operatives who have all developed a serious mental illness.”
Focusing on possible alien visitors has been the pursuit of a conspiracy-minded fringe. But last week’s congressional hearing is a sign of its increased respectability. Since the 1990s, well-known politicians — including the late Democratic senator Harry Reid, Democratic presidential adviser John Podesta and Republican senator Marco Rubio — have pushed for more disclosure. In 2020, the Pentagon released video footage of unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomena (UAPs), including the “Tic Tac” object seen by Fravor. The previous year, 33 per cent of Americans had said that some UFOs had been alien spacecraft; by 2021, the figure had risen to 41 per cent. In May this year, a Nasa panel of experts reported that while most UAPs could be explained, some could not yet be. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, this month proposed a commission to declassify more documents.
Fringe to mainstream
There has long been a distinction between the scientists who look for life in space and the enthusiasts who detect visitors on Earth. Even that distinction is becoming blurred. A theory of alien visitors has been taken up by one of the most respected cosmologists, Avi Loeb, a Harvard science professor who was chair of the university’s astronomy department for nine years. Loeb does not attach weight to Grusch’s testimony: “He didn’t provide any evidence, and he didn’t witness the evidence,” he says. “It’s all hearsay. That’s not the way science is done.” Nor does Loeb believe that the Pentagon is withholding secrets: “If you ask me, on scientific matters, the government is incompetent.”
What Loeb suggests is that aliens have visited our solar system — notably in the form of an object, ‘Oumuamua, whose path through our solar system in 2017 did not seem explicable by the sun’s gravity. Loeb also argues that a meteor which fell into the sea near Papua New Guinea in 2014 may have been a non-natural creation from another solar system. This month he retrieved tiny remnants of the meteor from the ocean floor. “During the expedition, I got a few emails from the Pentagon saying ‘great work’,” he says.
Within academia, Loeb is an outlier, but not a fantasist: “I don’t like science fiction. I hate it — because it violates the laws of physics.” His credentials are unimpeachable. Most of his critics “couldn’t tie his scientific bootlaces”, says Michael Garrett, a professor of astrophysics at Manchester University.
Once asking the question “Are we alone?” was a quick way to end up alone. But if credible figures such as Grusch and Loeb are willing to stake their reputations on this issue, is it now OK to think seriously about aliens?
Seventy years of searching
Scientific thought about extraterrestrial life is captured by the Fermi paradox. In 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi, a key figure in the development of the nuclear bomb, supposedly asked: “But where is everybody?” If life is so likely elsewhere in the universe, why don’t we see any evidence of it? (The year 1950 is also the one chosen by some scientists as the dawn of the Anthropocene era. Perhaps there is a logical link between our destruction of Earth and our desire to find meaning beyond it.)
Searches for radio signals from outer space were set up in the 1950s and ‘60s, fuelled by cold war competition. In 1976, Nasa landed two spacecraft on Mars, but neither picked up signs of life. In 1992, the agency began a 10-year, US$100 million programme to search for radio signals, but Congress cancelled the funding the following year.
Prospects for life picked up in 1995, when two Swiss scientists discovered a planet orbiting a star like our sun. Better telescopes mean that more than 5000 exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — have now been confirmed. Scientists have also discovered that life on Earth can survive in much more extreme conditions than previously thought. The number of environments that might host simple or intelligent life suddenly multiplied. There are, on some estimates, 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. Can ours really be unique?
In 2015, the tech billionaire Yuri Milner pledged US$100m for Breakthrough Listen, including an effort to scan the 100 closest galaxies to our own. Today’s search for alien life is not simply a search for radio signals. It is a search for biosignatures, such as gases produced by living organisms. This is right at the edge of what our most powerful telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), can achieve. The search is also for technosignatures — signs of alien technology, including large structures. Technosignatures are why, although intelligent life should logically be rarer than primitive life in the universe, it may also be easier to detect.
“Maybe the aliens are broadcasting something we can pick up, or maybe not,” says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, a California non-profit founded in 1984, which last year spent US$24m on the search for life. “But you can assume with greater certainty that if there are societies out there, they do something that changes the environment.”
After 70 years of searching, the results remain underwhelming. No one has found evidence of alien life on Mars or anywhere else. The JWST has revealed that one of the rocky planets orbiting the nearby dwarf star TRAPPIST-1c does not have “a thick, CO₂-rich atmosphere” conducive to life.
None of the astrobiologists I spoke to expressed certainty about finding alien life. (Astrobiology is the catch-all field of scientists interested in the search for life elsewhere.) “Sometimes I’m sceptical. Sometimes I’m optimistic,” says Garrett. Mostly he is curious. “By training, I’m an astronomer. But to be quite honest, I don’t think there’s anything I’ve seen — even from the JWST — that completely transforms what I was thinking about the universe and our place in it... I find astronomy slightly boring. But I find this question of whether we are alone in the universe absolutely compelling.”
Ian Crawford, a professor at Birkbeck, University of London, is sceptical. “The absence of evidence is actually telling us something: technological civilisations are probably rare,” he says. There may be many hospitable planets, but the process for atoms to organise themselves into molecules and then into self-replicating cells is “a really, really, really complicated process”.
Harvard’s Loeb is an exception. He is confident enough to speculate on the existence of life out there. On his ocean expedition this year, he collected at least 50 spherules: “beautiful metallic marbles”. His preliminary analysis suggests these may be much older than the solar system, indicative of an interstellar object. He will move on to seeing whether the object is non-natural: “Suppose you check the composition and it looks like molten electric circuits or semiconductors.”
Already he is author of a bestselling book (Extraterrestrial), with a follow-up to be published next month. He has a documentary crew following him, and is the subject of a forthcoming play, which will compare him to Galileo Galilei.
Fellow astrobiologists see him as extrapolating too far. “He’s become an embarrassment to his Harvard colleagues and annoyed the rest of us,” says one. They suggest that ‘Oumuamua, which is now too far away to analyse further, could be a comet with a tail of melted ice.
“Experts want to maintain their stature. And the way to maintain your stature as an expert is by arguing that everything can be explained by past knowledge,” replies Loeb. There is little direct evidence of dark matter either, he points out, yet that concept is readily accepted.
“I’m trying to put my body on the barbed wire, so that the next generation will be able to pass through,” Loeb says. He insists that his rivals’ explanations for ‘Oumuamua don’t add up. “I feel like the kid in Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes, I say I don’t see any clothes on this emperor.”
Sceptics think he may in fact be inhabiting another Hans Christian Andersen story: The Little Mermaid. “Do mermaids exist?” asks Crawford. “So why, in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, did so many sailors report that they’d seen mermaids?”
Lack of evidence
On the evening of April 20 2021, five lights appeared in the sky near a US Marine Corps base in Twentynine Palms, California. Jeremy Corbell, a film-maker and self-described “UFO guy”, said that the lights hovered unlike flares and that he had heard reports from many Marines who witnessed not just lights, but a spacecraft linking them.
Subsequent images suggest the lights were in fact flares, with smoke trails. “The mundane explanations for UFOs, while fun to investigate, are not as interesting to the general audience,” says Mick West, a UFO sceptic. Some UAPs may be Chinese surveillance balloons.
Corbell has said that he met David Grusch a year ago; he sat behind the ex-official during last week’s committee hearing. This connection places a question mark next to Grusch’s credibility. “I think he’s been influenced by UFO culture in a variety of ways,” says West.
The lack of direct evidence has always been a problem for those interested in alien life. What everyone in the field — including UAP investigators and sceptics, and astrobiologists — agrees on is the merit of more research. “UAPs need to be taken far more seriously by science,” says Coulthart, the journalist who interviewed Grusch. Coulthart adds that he isn’t sure these objects represent extraterrestrial intelligence. “I’m not there yet, for sure. In fact, I doubt it’s the best explanation.”
But at some point, will the absence of evidence begin to count? Crawford says that if life is common in the universe, then we should start finding it. “If the UAPs really were visiting spaceships, then we ought to find life on Mars, we ought to find life on all the nearby exoplanets.” (Maybe. Or maybe, if in a decade or so a rover brings back rocks from Mars that have no trace of life, optimists will simply say the rover chose the wrong rock.)
‘We will not be able to fathom their motives’
For now, without evidence, we are left to use logic. Why would UFO sightings be concentrated in the US? Could the US government really have kept regular alien visitations secret for decades? If it had, why would the Pentagon now allow Grusch to testify? Has Grusch mistaken a programme to reverse-engineer secret foreign technology for something more exotic?
If aliens have visited Earth, they will be more technically advanced than we are. Is it plausible, as Grusch alleges, that the US government would have been able to reverse-engineer their technology? “You could give an electric typewriter to a caveman and I don’t think he could reverse-engineer it,” says Shostak.
Martin Rees, the UK’s Astronomer Royal, argues that the gap between humans and aliens is likely to be large. Many stars are billions of years older than ours. With this head start, alien life is likely to have passed through flesh and blood into an electronic form of life. “We will not be able to fathom their motives or intentions,” Rees and the astrophysicist Mario Livio have written.
Lord Rees supports searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. But for me, his is already the most plausible and deflating hypothesis about aliens. What awaits us is not a world of beings we can engage with, or new technologies we can use to solve our problems. What awaits us, if anything, is just further bafflement.
Perhaps it’s irresistible to ask seriously if aliens exist. But if aliens were to visit Earth, they might wonder why we’re not doing things that could actually help our civilisation instead.
- Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer
Written by: Henry Mance
© Financial Times