The Astronomer Who Believes in ET But Not Flying Saucers

The Astronomer Who Believes in ET But Not Flying Saucers

Blog/DarkNews

The Astronomer Who Believes in ET But Not Flying Saucers

A leading astronomer is convinced extraterrestrial life exists throughout the universe – but thinks UFO sightings are nothing more than misidentified planets, meteors, and overactive imaginations.

Walk into a room full of astronomers and ask who believes in extraterrestrial life. Hands shoot up across the room. Ask those same scientists who thinks UFOs represent alien spacecraft visiting Earth, and those hands drop immediately. Most people assume these two beliefs go together. They don’t. Chris Impey illustrates this disconnect perfectly.

Impey will tell you, without hesitation, that alien civilizations almost certainly exist out there among the stars. He’ll explain, with the patience of a professor who’s taught over 300,000 students, why the mathematics practically guarantee intelligent life has evolved somewhere in the cosmos. Then he’ll tell you that UFO sightings are nothing more than misidentified planets, confused observations, and the powerful human tendency to see what we want to see. This sounds like a contradiction. To Impey, it’s following the evidence wherever it leads.

The Paradoxical Professor

Chris Impey’s credentials matter here, because they establish he’s not some fringe theorist working out of his garage or a conspiracy blogger spinning tales from a basement apartment. Impey holds the title of University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, which is astronomy-speak for “this person has done serious work.” And by serious, we’re talking over 210 peer-reviewed papers on observational cosmology, galaxies, and quasars. His research has attracted more than $20 million in NASA and National Science Foundation grants, the kind of money that doesn’t flow toward scientists who make things up or chase fantasies.

The teaching awards tell another story. Eleven of them. Not one or two, but eleven separate occasions where students and colleagues recognized his ability to explain the universe to people who don’t speak astronomy. His online classes have reached over 300,000 students worldwide, with learners watching 4 million minutes of his video lectures.

The American Astronomical Society, the professional organization representing astronomers across the country, selected him as a past Vice President. They later gave him their Education Prize for bringing the universe to the people. The National Science Foundation named him a Distinguished Teaching Scholar. The Carnegie Council chose him as Arizona Professor of the Year. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute made him one of their professors, a designation reserved for educators who excel at translating complex science for broader audiences.

His position on extraterrestrial life is equally clear and unwavering: he’s convinced it exists. Yet when the conversation turns to UFO sightings, when people start talking about flying saucers and alien abductions and mysterious lights in the sky, Impey becomes one of the phenomenon’s most articulate and systematic skeptics.

The contradiction isn’t lost on him. He knows how it sounds. In a widely-read article he wrote for The Conversation, which attracted 370,000 readers and generated over 400 comments, Impey laid out his reasoning with the kind of clarity that comes from years of explaining difficult concepts to eager students. The astronomical evidence, he explained, points overwhelmingly toward the existence of alien life somewhere in the cosmos. The same evidence, viewed through the same scientific lens, makes alien visitations to Earth extraordinarily unlikely. Not impossible. Just so unlikely that believing in them requires abandoning the very principles that led us to conclude aliens probably exist in the first place.

The Mathematics of Other Worlds

Impey’s confidence in extraterrestrial life doesn’t come from wishful thinking or childhood dreams of meeting aliens. It rests on discoveries that have fundamentally transformed astronomy over the past two decades, turning speculation into calculation and fantasy into mathematics. The revolution started quietly, with a handful of planets discovered around distant stars. Then the trickle became a flood.

Scientists have now identified over 4,000 exoplanets orbiting other stars, and that number doubles roughly every two years. Every two years, we double our catalog of known worlds beyond our solar system. We’ve gone from wondering if other planets exist to drowning in confirmed examples. Some of these worlds exist in what astronomers call the habitable zones of their stars. These are regions where temperatures could support liquid water on planetary surfaces, where conditions might be just right for chemistry to become biology.

The nearest of these habitable planets sit less than 20 light years away. In cosmic terms, that’s not just close – that’s practically neighbors. We’re talking about worlds where life might exist in what astronomers cheerfully call our cosmic “back yard.” When astronomers extrapolate from the current data, when they take what we’ve learned and project it across the galaxy, the numbers become staggering. The Milky Way galaxy alone likely harbors approximately 300 million potentially habitable worlds.

Three hundred million. That’s NASA’s analysis, and they warn this figure might be conservative. Some estimates reach as high as 40 billion Earth-sized planets in the galaxy’s habitable zones. Forty billion chances for life to start, to evolve, to look up at its own night sky and wonder if it’s alone.

These planets represent billions of years of potential biological experiments. Since time began, since these worlds formed from clouds of dust and gas around young stars, life could have emerged, evolved, and developed intelligence and technology on countless worlds across the galaxy. Some of these civilizations might be younger than ours, still working out fire and the wheel. Others might be millions of years older, as far beyond us as we are beyond bacteria.

Impey draws on something called the Drake Equation when he talks about this, a framework developed back in 1961 by astronomer Frank Drake. Drake wanted to estimate the number of technological alien civilizations in the galaxy, so he created an equation that breaks the big question down into smaller, more manageable pieces. How many stars are there? How many have planets? How many planets are habitable? How often does life arise? How often does it become intelligent? How often does intelligence develop technology we could detect?

When you plug modern exoplanet data into the Drake Equation, when you replace Drake’s educated guesses with actual observations, the results suggest thousands of detectable civilizations could exist in the Milky Way right now. Not might exist. Could exist, based on what we know about planetary systems and the prevalence of the chemical building blocks of life.

Astronomer Geoff Marcy, a participant in Stephen Hawking’s $100 million search for alien life, summarized the astronomical consensus with perfect simplicity: “The universe is apparently bulging at the seams with the ingredients of biology.” The carbon is there. The water is there. The energy is there. The planets are there. Everything life needs, scattered across the cosmos in almost incomprehensible abundance.

The Absence of Evidence

This abundance of potential life, this cosmic soup of ingredients, this galaxy supposedly bulging with biology makes the silence all the more deafening. If the Milky Way teems with intelligent civilizations, if thousands of them exist right now, building and broadcasting and looking outward, then where are they?

This puzzle has a name. Physicists call it the Fermi Paradox, after Enrico Fermi, who reportedly asked the question over lunch back in 1950. The reasoning seems airtight: the galaxy is very old, billions of years old, and very large, with hundreds of billions of stars. That means there should have been more than enough time for advanced civilizations to develop and flourish. Any civilization with modest rocket technology and immodest imperial incentives could theoretically colonize the galaxy using self-reproducing robotic probes. You build smart machines, send them to other star systems, they build copies of themselves using local materials, and those copies spread further. Even traveling slowly, much slower than light speed, such probes could explore the entire galaxy in a few million years. Which is nothing, cosmically speaking.

Yet despite decades of searching, despite listening to the stars with increasingly sophisticated equipment, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has detected nothing. No radio signals beaming across the cosmos. No optical beacons flashing in the darkness. No evidence of vast engineering projects, no Dyson spheres soaking up the energy of entire stars. No alien probes visiting Earth, at least not ones leaving any trace more substantial than grainy videos and excited testimony.

Or at least, Impey would say, no credible evidence. And that word “credible” carries a lot of weight when you’re talking about claims that would revolutionize our understanding of our place in the universe.

The Dog Walkers and the Smokers

Impey has noticed a curious pattern in UFO sightings that reveals far more about human behavior than it does about alien visitation. When you start looking at who reports seeing UFOs, a pattern emerges that’s almost funny if you think about it. Many of the people who report seeing mysterious objects in the sky are either dog walkers or smokers.

Why? The answer is almost embarrassingly simple. They’re outside the most. While everyone else is inside watching television or scrolling through their phones, the dog walkers are out there three or four times a day, rain or shine, looking up at the sky because there’s not much else to look at when your dog is doing its business. The smokers are standing on porches and patios, leaning against walls, spending a few minutes outside every hour or so, and naturally their eyes drift upward. They’re not more observant than other people. They’re just outside more often, giving them more opportunities to see things in the sky they can’t immediately identify.

The timing tells a similar story. Sightings concentrate in the evening hours, particularly on Fridays. Friday evenings also bring people relaxing with one or more drinks. This doesn’t mean everyone who reports a UFO is drunk, but it does mean they’re in a state of mind more conducive to excitement and less conducive to careful, critical observation.

Then there’s the geographic distribution of sightings, which raises questions that cut right to the heart of the phenomenon. The majority of UFO reports come from the United States. Not proportionally more – actually more, in absolute numbers, despite the fact that the United States contains less than five percent of the world’s population. Asia sees remarkably few sightings despite having billions of people. Africa, with its wide open spaces and dark skies far from light pollution, reports hardly any UFOs at all. The sightings stop almost completely at the Canadian and Mexican borders.

Impey asks the obvious question: if aliens wanted to reveal themselves to powerful nations, if they were studying Earth and making their presence known to the most technologically advanced civilizations, why don’t the Chinese see UFOs at the same rate as Americans? Why don’t Russians report them? Why don’t Brazilians? The aliens, apparently, have a strong preference for American airspace and an odd reluctance to cross international borders.

The answer lies not in selective alien tourism but in cultural factors that shape how people interpret what they see. Cartoons, movies, and books have embedded aliens and UFOs into American consciousness in ways they simply haven’t elsewhere in the world. From the time American children can understand stories, they’re exposed to tales of flying saucers and little green men. The imagery appears everywhere, from lunch boxes to cereal boxes to Saturday morning cartoons. Aliens exist in the popular culture and DNA of the United States in ways they just don’t in other parts of the world. So when an American sees something unusual in the sky, their brain immediately offers “alien spacecraft” as a possible explanation. Someone from a culture without that background makes different interpretations of the same observation.

Venus, the Great Deceiver

When astronomers start investigating UFO reports, when they dig into the details and track down what people actually saw, a pattern emerges. Over half of identified nocturnal UFO sightings can be attributed to astronomical causes. We’re talking about stars, planets, meteors, the Moon, artificial satellites, and occasionally satellites burning up as they re-enter the atmosphere. These are objects that astronomers see and identify every single night, objects so familiar to them that it seems impossible anyone could mistake them for alien spacecraft.

And yet they do. All the time. Constantly.

Venus, the brightest object in the night sky after the Moon, stands as the biggest UFO culprit of all. The planet has been fooling people for centuries, long before anyone started thinking about flying saucers. It appears in the evening sky, brilliant and steady, far brighter than any star. To someone unfamiliar with the night sky, someone who doesn’t know that planets can appear this bright, Venus looks wrong. It looks artificial. It looks like something that shouldn’t be there.

Back in 1967, two policemen in Devon, England, spotted something unusual in the sky. They described it as a UFO shaped like a flying cross, glowing with an eerie light. These weren’t random civilians. These were trained observers, men whose job required them to pay attention to details and file accurate reports. They were so convinced they were witnessing something extraordinary that they chased it in their patrol car, pushing speeds up to 90 miles per hour as they tried to get closer to the mysterious object.

They never did catch it. Venus, you see, doesn’t actually move when you drive toward it.

The errors in their report typify the mistakes witnesses make over and over again. They overestimated the object’s size and brightness, which happens because the human brain has no frame of reference for judging the apparent size and brightness of celestial objects. They underestimated its distance by a factor of millions – they thought it was maybe a mile away when it was actually tens of millions of miles distant. They attributed spurious motion to it, seeing it move and maneuver when in fact it remained perfectly stationary against the background stars, its apparent motion created entirely by their own movement and by natural atmospheric effects.

The planet never moved. Their perception of it did. And that distinction, Impey would say, makes all the difference.

Allan Hendry conducted what remains one of the most thorough analyses of UFO reports ever undertaken. He examined 1,300 reports made to the Center for UFO Studies, working through each one systematically, tracking down explanations, interviewing witnesses. His findings painted a clear picture: just over half of all identified nocturnal lights were accounted for by astronomical causes. Astronomical objects didn’t just explain lights in the night sky. They also featured prominently among daytime UFOs, among cases involving apparent radar corroboration, and among the various classes of close encounters, including the celebrated Third Kind in which occupants are supposedly sighted.

One of Hendry’s cases illustrates how powerful human perception and expectation can be. Three witnesses observed what they described, with complete conviction, as a saucer 25 feet in diameter. It was accompanied by two pulsating lights, one on each side. The object hovered over a car park for nearly an hour, and during that time, the car park lights seemed to dim, as though the UFO was somehow draining power from them. They heard sounds – first a humming noise, then a louder beeping. Then, suddenly, dramatically, the saucer shot straight up into the sky and vanished.

One of the witnesses owned a parakeet, which screeched during the incident. Her dogs barked. She felt strange, as though she was in a trance, hardly able to move. Here was electromagnetic interference, animal reactions, physical effects on the witnesses. Every element of a classic UFO encounter was present. If you read the initial report without knowing the explanation, you’d think this was exactly the kind of case that demands serious investigation.

Hendry determined, through careful analysis and astronomical calculation, that the witnesses were looking at the crescent Moon, with Mars and Jupiter positioned next to it. The “saucer” was the Moon. The “pulsating lights” were planets. The dimming of the car park lights came from intermittent mist rolling through the area, the same mist that eventually obscured the Moon and planets entirely, creating the impression that the object had shot upward and disappeared. The sounds? Unknown, but probably unrelated – a distant truck, a neighbor’s machinery, something mundane that the witnesses unconsciously linked to the lights in the sky. The animal reactions and the feeling of trance? Pure psychology, the brain creating connections and adding drama to an experience it had decided was extraordinary.

The rest of the report, everything that made it sound like an alien encounter, emerged entirely from human imagination adding details and connections to ambiguous observations.

The Manchester Incident

A case held up by UFO believers as particularly compelling happened on the evening of January 6, 1995. It involved a British Airways Boeing 737 with 60 passengers aboard, professional pilots at the controls, an incident reported to air traffic control and investigated by the Civil Aviation Authority.

The Boeing was making its approach to Manchester airport, descending through 4,000 feet of altitude about nine miles southeast of the field. The evening was clear, visibility exceeded 10 kilometers, and the aircraft was flying above a layer of cumulus clouds, heading north. Everything was routine, exactly the kind of approach these pilots had flown hundreds of times before.

Then something bright and fast-moving appeared, streaking past the right side of the aircraft. The first officer’s training took over before his brain had fully processed what he was seeing. He ducked, an instinctive reaction to an object that appeared to be on a collision course. The whole encounter lasted about two seconds. The object moved in the opposite direction from the Boeing, slightly above it. There was no sound, no wake, no turbulence in the aircraft.

The pilot immediately reported the incident to Manchester air traffic control. The controller checked his radar scope. Nothing. No other aircraft in the area, no radar returns at all. The pilot insisted something had just passed them, something with lights, something moving very fast down their starboard side, just slightly above their altitude.

Neither other pilots in the area nor ground observers saw anything, presumably because of the intervening cloud layer. But the incident struck the Civil Aviation Authority as unusual enough to warrant a full investigation by their Independent Joint Airmiss Working Group. These aren’t people who jump to conclusions or file reports on every strange thing a pilot sees. They investigate serious incidents that might represent hazards to aviation. Their findings were published in February 1996, months after the encounter.

In his report to the CAA, the pilot described the object as having a number of small white lights, like a Christmas tree. He was convinced that the object itself was illuminated, that it was giving off its own light. The co-pilot saw it differently. He described it as a dark wedge-shaped object with what could have been a black stripe down the side. He thought it was illuminated not by its own light but by the Boeing 737’s landing lights, though this interpretation seems unlikely given that the object was above and to the side of the aircraft, outside the direct beam of the landing lights.

Both pilots agreed on several key points. It wasn’t a meteorological phenomenon. It wasn’t a balloon. It wasn’t any craft they were familiar with, and between them they had decades of experience looking at aircraft of all types. The co-pilot specifically stated it wasn’t a Stealth aircraft, those angular military jets with radar-evading profiles.

The CAA investigators did their due diligence. They considered the possibility that the UFO could have been another aircraft, ranging from a hang glider or microlight to a military flight. They checked with military authorities, with other airports, with anyone who might have had aircraft in the area. They found no evidence to support any of these explanations. The investigators noted that they didn’t consider other possible causes because those fell outside their remit of air safety. Their job was to determine if this represented a hazard to aviation, not to solve the mystery of what the pilots actually saw. But they did remark, almost as an aside, that almost all unusual sightings can be attributed to a wide range of well-known natural phenomena.

They concluded that the incident remained unresolved. And that’s where they left it. Unsolved. Unexplained. In the annals of UFOlogy, the Manchester case has been recorded as a UFO officially endorsed by the Civil Aviation Authority, a golden example of credible witnesses reporting something that couldn’t be explained away.

Except it can be explained. Had the CAA chosen to consider astronomical explanations, the answer would not have been difficult to find. From the captain’s description of multiple small white lights on a bright, fast-moving object, it sounds exactly like a bright fireball – an exceptionally brilliant meteor burning up in the atmosphere. The lack of a radar return supports this interpretation. Meteors, being natural phenomena rather than solid objects that reflect radio waves, don’t show up on radar. The lack of wake or turbulence makes sense too. The object wasn’t close enough to create any atmospheric disturbance the Boeing could detect.

This wouldn’t even be the first time British Airways pilots mistook a spectacular atmospheric phenomenon for a structured craft. Just five years earlier, in 1990, another British Airways pilot and two RAF Tornado pilots had described a satellite re-entry in similar terms – bright lights, structured appearance, moving impossibly fast. The misidentification by experienced pilots isn’t unusual. It’s not a reflection on their competence as aviators. It’s simply a reminder that even trained observers can be fooled when they see something unexpected in an environment where judging distance, size, and speed becomes nearly impossible.

The Cognitive Failures

Human perception proves remarkably unreliable when confronting unfamiliar aerial phenomena. We like to think of ourselves as accurate observers, as people who see what’s really there. The evidence suggests otherwise.

Most people remain totally unfamiliar with the night sky. They couldn’t tell you which bright light is Venus and which is Jupiter. They don’t know that stars twinkle while planets shine steadily. They don’t realize that satellites move slowly across the sky, visible to the naked eye, or that meteors can be bright enough to cast shadows. They’ve never seen a fireball, don’t know what the International Space Station looks like passing overhead, couldn’t identify Sirius or Arcturus if their life depended on it. The sky remains, for most people, an undifferentiated dome of darkness with some bright spots they never really pay attention to.

So when something unusual appears up there, they have no context for it. No framework for interpretation. Their brain scrambles to make sense of the observation, and in that scrambling, errors creep in.

Highly credible witnesses make these mistakes. Teachers make them. Police officers make them. Pilots make them. Even astronomers, on rare occasions, can be momentarily surprised by the unexpected appearance of a bright star, planet, meteor, or satellite. That doesn’t make them bad at their jobs or stupid or gullible. It makes them human, subject to the same perceptual limitations that affect everyone.

There’s a phenomenon called the autokinetic effect that astronomers know well but most people have never heard of. Natural movements of the eye, tiny unconscious motions, make stationary objects appear to move irregularly. You’re staring at a bright star on a dark night, keeping your gaze fixed on it, and suddenly it seems to zoom up and down or swing from side to side in a movement sometimes described as like a falling leaf. It’s not moving. Your eye is moving, and your brain interprets the resulting change in position as motion of the object. The effect becomes particularly uncanny when watching artificial satellites, which often appear to zigzag or even make deviations around stars in their path, when in fact they’re moving in perfectly straight lines.

Distance judgments fail completely when looking at lights in the sky at night. There’s no reference point, no background, no way for the brain to calculate how far away something is. A planet millions of miles away, an aircraft several thousand feet away, or a torch bulb a few dozen yards away can all appear much the same size and brightness. The human visual system evolved to judge distances on the savanna, where you need to know if that lion is ten feet away or a hundred feet away. It did not evolve to judge distances to lights in a featureless void, and the results reflect that limitation.

Time estimation proves equally flawed. Ask someone who saw a meteor how long it was visible, and they’ll tell you five seconds, ten seconds, maybe longer. The actual time was probably less than two seconds. The brain, confronted with an intense, unexpected experience, stretches time. Memory corrupts observations in other ways too, adding details that weren’t there, removing inconsistencies, creating a more coherent narrative than the original experience warranted. By the time a witness files a report or tells the story to an investigator, they’re no longer reporting what they saw. They’re reporting what they remember seeing, and those two things can be very different.

In 1969, this all came together in a spectacular example of how even the most trained observers can be fooled. Pilots aboard a commercial jet were flying at 39,000 feet over the United States in broad daylight when they reported being buzzed at a distance of only 300 feet by a formation of four objects emitting blue-green flame. These weren’t civilian pilots on a sightseeing flight. These were professionals, flying a multi-million dollar aircraft with passengers aboard, trained to observe and report accurately. They were convinced something had nearly collided with their aircraft.

A military jet flying some miles behind the airliner reported the same thing – a squadron of UFOs approaching their position, then suddenly starting to climb as if to avoid collision. Two separate aircraft, professional military and civilian crews, all reporting the same phenomenon. The kind of corroboration that UFO researchers dream about.

At the same time as these UFO encounters, a brilliant daylight fireball broke up into several flaming pieces over the United States. There seems little doubt that this is what both sets of pilots saw, despite the fact that it was actually over 100 miles away from them. Not 300 feet. Not even 300 yards. Over 100 miles distant, a meteor burning up in the atmosphere, nowhere near their flight path, posing absolutely no threat to aviation.

So even experienced pilots can make major errors of identification and distance. That doesn’t make them bad airmen. It doesn’t cast doubt on their ability to fly aircraft safely. It simply makes them human, subject to the same perceptual limitations that affect everyone who looks up at the sky and sees something they can’t immediately explain.

The High Bar for Extraordinary Claims

Impey returns repeatedly to something Carl Sagan said, a phrase that’s become almost a mantra in scientific circles: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The implications run deep.

If someone claims they saw a robin in their backyard, you believe them without question. Robins exist. They’re common. The claim requires ordinary evidence – just the word of a reasonably reliable observer. If someone claims they saw a golden eagle in downtown Manhattan, you want more than just their word. Golden eagles are rare in cities, so the claim requires better evidence. Maybe a photograph. Maybe confirmation from other observers. If someone claims they saw a living pterodactyl circling the Empire State Building, you’re going to need extraordinary proof. Video from multiple angles. Physical evidence. Scientific analysis. The more extraordinary the claim, the higher the bar for evidence.

Alien visitation to Earth represents an extraordinarily extraordinary claim. It means an advanced civilization has overcome the incredible distances between stars, has developed technology far beyond our own, has chosen to come specifically to Earth, and has done so in a way that leaves no unambiguous evidence.

So what would constitute extraordinary evidence? Impey would tell you it’s not anecdotal testimony, no matter how many people tell similar stories. Humans are subject to the same perceptual errors, the same cognitive biases, the same tendency to see patterns and connections where none exist. Get a thousand people telling similar UFO stories, and you haven’t necessarily gotten evidence of aliens. You might have just documented the same perceptual and psychological phenomena playing out a thousand times.

It’s not video or images, because we all know how easy those are to fake, to misinterpret, to manipulate. Even genuine footage, even video from Air Force pilots using sophisticated targeting systems, remains ambiguous in interpretation. Those pilots saw something. Something was there. But what was it? An aircraft from another nation testing new technology? A natural phenomenon we don’t fully understand? An equipment malfunction creating false returns? A prosaic object appearing unusual due to viewing angle and atmospheric conditions? Or alien spacecraft? All of these explanations remain on the table until we have data that definitively rules out the mundane possibilities.

The absence of certain types of evidence tells its own story. The absence of strong radio beacons broadcasting across interstellar space. The absence of television broadcasts leaking from some alien civilization’s equivalent of I Love Lucy. The absence of robotic spacecraft in our solar system, quietly observing and reporting back to distant worlds. The absence of obelisks on the Moon, of artifacts in orbit, of anything physical we could touch and analyze and confirm beyond any doubt. All of these absences add up to suggest that our galaxy, whatever intelligent life it might harbor, is not teeming with technological civilizations actively visiting Earth.

Former NASA employee James Oberg has spent decades on a peculiar project: tracking down and finding conventional explanations for UFO sightings that others have declared inexplicable. He’s looked at hundreds of cases, maybe thousands by now. The ones that get held up as the best evidence, the ones that true believers point to as cases that can’t possibly be explained by mundane phenomena. And over and over again, with patience and careful investigation, he’s found explanations. Not for all of them – there are always residual cases that lack enough data for definitive conclusions. But for enough of them that a pattern emerges: the inexplicable becomes explicable once you have the right expertise and the willingness to dig deep enough.

Impey serves on the advisory council for an international group that strategizes how to communicate with an extraterrestrial civilization should the need ever arise. He’s written extensively on the search for life in the universe. He teaches free online classes on astrobiology to tens of thousands of students. His skepticism toward UFOs stems not from closed-mindedness or dismissiveness or some knee-jerk rejection of possibilities that make him uncomfortable. It stems from scientific rigor, from the understanding that belief without evidence is faith, and faith has no place in scientific investigation.

The New American Religion

Diana Pasulka teaches at the University of North Carolina, and she’s spent years studying something that fascinates her: the way belief in UFOs and extraterrestrials functions like a religion in modern American culture. It serves the same psychological and social functions that traditional religions have served throughout human history.

She uses a very old but functional definition of religion: belief in nonhuman and supernatural intelligent beings that often descend from the sky. Almost any traditional religion contains this pattern. Angels descending from heaven. Gods coming down from Mount Olympus. Beings from somewhere else, somewhere beyond normal human experience, making contact with humanity and changing the course of history. UFO belief fits this pattern almost perfectly. The only difference is the terminology. We say “spacecraft” instead of “chariots of fire.” We say “extraterrestrials” instead of “angels.” The fundamental structure of the belief remains unchanged.

More than half of American adults believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. Among young Americans, the percentage rises above 60 percent. These numbers track closely with belief in God, and Pasulka argues that’s not an accident. In a culture where traditional religion has lost some of its hold, where fewer people attend church regularly or subscribe to conventional religious frameworks, belief in aliens fills a similar space in the human psyche.

UFO belief diverges from traditional religions in one way, and this is what makes it uniquely powerful. Traditional religions rest on faith in things unseen and unprovable. You believe Jesus walked on water because you have faith, not because anyone can prove it happened. You believe in heaven because religious texts describe it, not because anyone has come back with photographs. Faith operates in the absence of proof, sometimes even in defiance of evidence.

UFO belief carries something traditional religions lack: the promise of proof. When Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist at NASA, appeared on television and announced that scientists will find extraterrestrial life, millions of people heard that as validation. Never mind that she was talking about microbial life, about finding evidence of bacteria or simple organisms on Mars or in the oceans beneath Europa’s ice. Never mind that she said nothing about intelligent beings or spacecraft or visitations to Earth. The public heard a credible scientist, someone at the highest levels of the world’s premier space agency, saying that life exists out there. And for many believers, that statement confirmed everything they’d been saying all along.

This promise of scientific validation lends UFO belief a cultural force that traditional religions struggle to match. When a religious leader tells you to have faith, you either believe or you don’t, and there’s no way to settle the question definitively. When a scientist tells you we’re going to find evidence of alien life, that sounds like a prediction that will eventually be proven right or wrong. The belief shifts from the realm of faith into the realm of something that can potentially be demonstrated, verified, tested.

Impey looks at UFOs and sees them as part of the landscape of conspiracy theories that includes accounts of alien abduction and crop circles created by extraterrestrial visitors. He remains deeply skeptical that intelligent beings with vastly superior technology, beings capable of crossing the incredible distances between stars, would travel trillions of miles just to press down patterns in wheat fields. The economics don’t make sense. The effort required to cross interstellar space dwarfs any conceivable benefit from flattening crops in Wiltshire.

But try telling that to a true believer, and you’ll run headfirst into the same wall that confronts anyone who questions deeply held religious convictions. The belief becomes part of identity, part of how people understand their place in the universe. Questioning the belief becomes an attack on the person who holds it.

The Cultural Phenomenon

Research into who believes in UFOs and why has turned up some correlations. A study of young adults found that UFO belief associates with something called schizotypal personality, a psychological pattern characterized by a tendency toward social anxiety, paranoid ideas, and transient psychosis. This doesn’t mean everyone who believes in UFOs has mental health issues. Correlation isn’t causation, and plenty of well-adjusted people look up at the night sky and wonder if those lights might be something more than planets and satellites.

But it does suggest something about the psychology of belief, about the kinds of thinking patterns that make people more susceptible to seeing connections that might not exist, to finding meaning in ambiguous observations, to accepting explanations that lack solid evidence.

Impey is careful to note that this doesn’t make UFO belief crazy in itself. Some flying objects are genuinely unidentified – people see things they can’t explain, things that might turn out to be weather balloons or secret military aircraft or unusual atmospheric phenomena. The existence of intelligent aliens is not just plausible but, given what we know about exoplanets and the abundance of the chemical building blocks of life, almost certainly true somewhere in the universe. Believing in the possibility of alien life represents good scientific thinking, not delusion.

The problem comes when belief hardens into certainty without evidence, when people become convinced that aliens are visiting Earth right now despite the lack of proof that meets basic scientific standards. That’s when belief crosses from healthy speculation into something else, something that shares more characteristics with religious faith than with scientific hypothesis.

Impey won’t sign on to what he calls the UFO religion. He describes himself as an agnostic on the question, keeping an open mind but not so open that his brains fall out, to borrow another one of Carl Sagan’s memorable phrases. The line between healthy skepticism and closed-mindedness can be difficult to navigate, but Impey has found his balance: follow the evidence, demand high standards of proof for extraordinary claims, and never mistake speculation for fact or possibility for probability.

The question of whether we’re alone in the universe carries profound implications that extend far beyond academic curiosity. If we are alone, if Earth represents the only place in the entire observable universe where chemistry became biology and biology became consciousness, we would bear tremendous responsibility as the universe’s only conscious observers, the only beings capable of understanding and appreciating the cosmos. Every species extinction, every environmental disaster, every threat to humanity’s survival would take on cosmic significance. We wouldn’t just be risking our own future. We’d be risking the universe’s only chance to know itself.

If we’re not alone, if life has emerged elsewhere and evolved into something we would recognize as intelligence, the discovery will rank among the most significant events in human history. It will fundamentally change our understanding of our place in the cosmos, our sense of uniqueness, our conception of what’s possible. The philosophical implications will ripple through every aspect of human culture, from religion to politics to art to how we think about our own future.

But that discovery, Impey believes with the confidence born of decades studying the sky and the ways astronomers search for life beyond Earth, will not come through crashed saucers in New Mexico or blurry videos of lights maneuvering over the ocean. It will come through spectroscopic detection of biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres, through the patient accumulation of data from telescopes analyzing the light filtering through alien skies light-years away.

The Search Continues

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope orbits the Sun a million miles from Earth, its massive mirror collecting light from the most distant reaches of the universe. Giant Earth-based telescopes are coming online over the next decade, each one representing billions of dollars and decades of planning, each one capable of observations that would have seemed like science fiction a generation ago. And together, these instruments could detect something that would change everything: the spectroscopic signature of biological activity in the atmosphere of a planet light-years away.

Here’s how it would work. When light from a distant star passes through the atmosphere of a planet, that atmosphere leaves fingerprints in the light, specific patterns of absorption and emission that reveal the chemicals present. Oxygen at certain levels. Methane in combination with oxygen, which doesn’t naturally occur together in large quantities without something continuously producing both. Water vapor. Carbon dioxide. Other organic compounds. By analyzing the spectrum of that light, by breaking it down into its component wavelengths and looking for those telltale patterns, astronomers can determine what an alien atmosphere contains.

If researchers find an exoplanet with oxygen levels higher than we would expect from purely geological processes, that could indicate biological activity. Plants producing oxygen through photosynthesis, or some alien equivalent we haven’t imagined yet. Elevated levels of chlorofluorocarbons, those compounds we banned on Earth because they were destroying our ozone layer, might signal an alien civilization facing environmental challenges similar to our own. Anomalous heat emissions in patterns that don’t match natural geological activity could point to technology, to energy use, to artificial structures on a scale large enough to be detected across the light-years.

Impey expects this spectroscopic data will provide the first evidence of extraterrestrial life within the next decade or two, maybe sooner if we get lucky and point our telescopes at the right star at the right time. The discovery won’t involve little green men stepping out of flying saucers. It won’t look like the movies, won’t give us anyone to talk to or shake hands with or sign treaties with. It will arrive as a set of spectral lines, as wavelengths of light absorbed or emitted in patterns that can’t be explained by chemistry alone, in stretched-out starlight reflecting off or filtering through the atmosphere of a distant world that we’ll never visit in any of our lifetimes.

The search also continues through more traditional SETI methods, through radio telescopes listening for signals that might be broadcasts from technological civilizations. Arrays of antennas scan the sky, processing enormous amounts of data, looking for patterns that would indicate an artificial source. Humans have been sending signals into space for decades now, our radio and television broadcasts leaking out into the cosmos at the speed of light. We launched the Golden Record aboard Voyager in 1977, a message in a bottle carrying music and images and greetings in dozens of languages, just in case someone out there might find it someday.

But some scientists worry this represents dangerous naivety, a child shouting into a dark forest without knowing what might be listening. Perhaps the cosmos harbors vicious predator civilizations that eagerly feed on species foolish enough to announce their presence. Perhaps one super-advanced civilization acts as a kind of cosmic police force, eliminating all competitors once they reach certain intelligence thresholds or develop technologies that might pose a threat. Perhaps, in the dark forest of the galaxy, the smart strategy is to stay quiet and listen, never revealing your position until you know what’s out there.

This possibility led 28 prominent scientists, including astronomer Geoff Marcy and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, to sign a petition warning against active SETI, against deliberately sending strong signals toward stars that might harbor intelligent life. The petition argues that intentionally signaling other civilizations in the Milky Way raises concerns from all the people of Earth about both the message we send and the consequences of contact. We don’t know what’s out there. We don’t know how alien intelligence might think, what its values might be, how it might react to discovering a young technological civilization in its neighborhood. A worldwide scientific, political, and humanitarian discussion must occur before any message gets sent, the petition argues, before we make a decision that could have consequences for all of humanity.

The question of whether to actively signal or quietly listen remains unresolved. The listening continues, night after night, telescopes pointed at the stars, receivers tuned to frequencies where signals might appear, artificial intelligence algorithms sifting through vast datasets looking for anything that doesn’t fit the patterns of natural astronomical phenomena.

The Paradox Remains

Chris Impey’s position epitomizes something crucial about scientific thinking, something that often gets lost when people talk about the conflict between science and belief. He follows the evidence wherever it leads, even when that path appears contradictory to casual observers. The mathematical probability of life existing elsewhere in the universe approaches certainty when you factor in the billions upon billions of potentially habitable worlds and the apparent ubiquity of the chemical building blocks of biology. The evidence for alien visitation to Earth, when examined with scientific rigor, when held up to the standard of proof that extraordinary claims require, remains essentially nonexistent.

These two positions aren’t contradictory. They’re complementary, two sides of the same coin of scientific reasoning. The universe is vast beyond human comprehension. The distances between stars are so enormous that even light, the fastest thing that exists, takes years to cross them. The nearest star system to our own is over four light-years away. The potentially habitable planets we’ve discovered sit tens or hundreds of light-years distant. Even traveling at a significant fraction of light speed, the journey between stars requires enormous resources and time.

Somewhere in that vast darkness between stars, on one of those 300 million potentially habitable worlds orbiting in the temperate zones of their suns, life may have emerged and evolved into something we would recognize as intelligence. The chemistry might be different. The biology might follow paths we’ve never imagined. The form intelligence takes might be so alien to our experience that we wouldn’t recognize it as thought at all. But given enough worlds and enough time, given the apparently universal nature of chemistry and physics, it seems impossible that Earth represents the only place where matter organized itself into consciousness.

They may have built civilizations, these hypothetical aliens. They may have developed technology, created art, asked questions about their place in the cosmos. They may have turned their attention skyward, looking up at their own night sky from whatever passes for eyes in their biology, wondering the same questions we wonder. They may be searching for us with the same tools we use to search for them, pointing radio telescopes at promising stars, analyzing the spectra of exoplanet atmospheres, hoping to find some sign that they’re not alone.

But they’re not, Impey insists with the quiet confidence of someone who has spent decades studying the evidence, buzzing Navy pilots off the coast of California. They’re not abducting farmers in rural America, leaving crop circles in English wheat fields, crashing their spacecraft in the New Mexico desert. The distances are too vast. The silence too complete. The evidence too absent. If aliens have visited Earth, if they visit regularly, if they’ve been here since ancient times as some claim, then where’s the physical evidence? Where’s the artifact we can analyze, the piece of technology we can reverse-engineer, the biological sample we can study? Where’s anything more substantial than stories and grainy videos and witness testimony that, however sincere, falls far short of the extraordinary evidence that extraordinary claims require?

When and if humanity makes contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, Impey believes it will happen through the patient, methodical work of scientists analyzing data from telescopes and radio receivers. It will be confirmed through multiple independent observations, the gold standard of scientific verification. It will be subjected to rigorous peer review, with skeptics examining every aspect of the data, looking for alternative explanations, testing the conclusions from every angle. It will be replicated by researchers worldwide, ensuring that the discovery isn’t the result of equipment malfunction or data analysis error or wishful thinking. It will meet the extraordinary standard of evidence that extraordinary claims require.

Until that day comes when we detect the unmistakable signature of life or intelligence in data from distant worlds, those lights in the sky remain exactly what they’ve always been. Planets reflecting sunlight. Meteors burning up in the atmosphere. Satellites orbiting overhead. The occasional misidentified aircraft or unusual atmospheric phenomenon. Venus shining bright in the evening sky, fooling the same kinds of witnesses it’s been fooling for centuries. The Moon and Mars and Jupiter, lined up in ways that create the impression of structure and purpose where none exists.

The aliens, if they exist, and the math suggests they probably do, are out there somewhere among the stars. Not hiding in Area 51, where conspiracy theorists imagine they’re being studied by shadowy government agencies. Not leaving cryptic messages in wheat fields, somehow traveling across light-years of space just to communicate through geometric patterns that could be and often are created by humans with ropes and boards. Not conducting genetic experiments on abductees or mutilating cattle or whatever other improbable activities get attributed to visitors from other worlds.

They’re out there in the vast darkness, maybe wondering the same things we wonder, maybe searching the way we search, maybe hoping the way we hope. The distance separates us for now, perhaps forever. The silence continues, profound and complete. Scientists like Chris Impey keep looking, keep listening, keep analyzing, because the search for answers matters more than the comfort of assuming we already know.

The truth is out there. But it’s going to take better evidence than grainy videos and second-hand testimony to prove it. It’s going to take the kind of proof that survives skeptical scrutiny, that meets the standards science has developed over centuries of careful observation and rigorous testing. It’s going to take evidence that would convince not just believers who want aliens to be real, but skeptics who demand proof before accepting claims that would revolutionize our understanding of the universe and our place in it.

When that evidence comes, if it comes, it will be worth the wait. Because we’ll know, finally and definitively, one of the most profound truths about existence: we’re not alone. Until then, we keep looking. We keep questioning. We keep demanding better evidence, higher standards, clearer proof. That’s science, doing what science does best: following the evidence wherever it leads, even when it leads to conclusions that challenge our beliefs and disappoint our hopes.

References

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

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