Science has no problem with the concept of alien intelligent life. Quite the opposite in fact. Most scientists would accept that it is highly probable that we are not alone in the universe. The reason for thinking this is straightforward. Science believes that life arose on earth almost four billion years ago from lifeless chemicals and understands how it evolved from that original simple single form into the myriad forms of life, including human life, that presently populate the earth. There is no reason in principle therefore to think that equivalent events have not happened on earth-like planets elsewhere in the universe.

For the last 70 odd years, human civilisation has been broadcasting evidence of its existence to the universe at large in the form of radiowaves. These waves, emanating from our radio/television newscasts and entertainment programmes, shoot off into outer space at the speed of light. We have also deliberately sent radio messages into space, giving basic information about life on earth, hoping to contact alien civilisations. And, since we are doing this, we expect that alien civilisations elsewhere in the universe who are at least as technologically capable as ourselves, will be doing likewise. A widely known scientific enterprise has been established, called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti), that actively scans the skies for incoming radio messages from alien civilisations. No messages have been detected to date.

In 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 space probes were launched. They carry special golden records that bear recordings of life on Earth – pictures of people, scenery, plants, the song of a whale and greetings from Earth in 55 languages. They also locate Earth in our solar system, and our solar system in the galaxy. The records bear instructions for how they should be played.

The physicist Dr Frank Drake has estimated the likely number of alien civilisations in our own Milky Way galaxy that may be attempting to contact other civilisations and he has expressed his calculations in an equation called the Drake Equation. This takes into account the rate of formation of stars like our sun, the proportion that have orbiting earth-like planets, the proportion of these on which life arose, and so on. Drake estimates that our Milky Way contains 10,000 civilisations interested in making communications with others.

Scientists believe that by far the most likely way an alien civilisation on another planet might learn of our existence would be by detecting and deciphering our radio signals. Having detected our signals they might then be moved either to signal back to us or to physically come to visit us, or both. We have detected no intelligent radio signals yet and it also seems extremely unlikely that physical visitations could have occurred.

Intelligent radio signals have emanated from earth only for the past 70 years. Even if aliens made a beeline for earth, travelling at the speed of light, immediately on receipt of our signals, only aliens from the few nearest star systems to earth could be involved and the probability that these star systems harbour intelligent life is remote.

The best known “alien visitation” incident occurred in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, where members of the public witnessed something crashing to earth. Witnesses also saw “alien bodies” being removed from the wreckage. The US airforce was quickly on the scene and took away the debris. An army press officer first described the object as a flying saucer, but this was quickly denied and it was claimed that the object was an army weather balloon.

This confusion was seized on by unidentified flying object (UFO) supporters who claimed that the whole thing was a huge cover-up. The US airforce conducted a comprehensive investigation of the incidence in 1994 and confirmed that the object that crashed was a weather balloon and the “alien bodies” were test dummies on board the balloon.

UFO enthusiasts continue to believe that an alien craft crashed at Roswell in 1947 and that the US government covered the whole thing up. The Roswell incident inflamed interest in UFOs around the world and this interest persists. Belief in alien visits to earth is now widespread. A US National Science Foundation poll in 2001 found that 30 per cent of people believe that some of the many UFOs “sighted” every year come from alien civilisations. Sixty one per cent of British teenagers believe that aliens visit earth.

Why are people so willing to believe that aliens are visiting earth? It’s not that the evidence amounts to much. Despite the hundreds of thousands of UFOs that have been sighted over the years I don’t think there is even one clear photograph of a craft that cannot be clearly identified as an earthly creation. The weight of evidence that exists doesn’t seem to weigh more than the evidence for the existence of Big Foot, Nessie or The Abominable Snowman.

The reason so many are willing to believe in current visitations by aliens is probably psychological. We are social animals and fear solitude. Deep down we fear the idea that we may be alone in the universe and we would wish it otherwise. We don’t want to be alone.

Hello, My name is Katie Heaven and i’m 14 years old. I have always found UFO’s, Extraterrestrial life and especially the ‘out of bounds’ Area 51 very interesting. I’ve watched doccumentaries about these topics and peoples experiences with E.T life. You have Believers and Non-Believers, in these matters and I choose to believe. There is so much evidence out there that would prove to everyone that what we call ‘Aliens’ exist. The US goverment has more evidence than we do in Britain, but chooses to keep it from the public. I believe this is done to stop panic in the world and is done with best intentions at heart, but, this secrecy is kept in a very wrong way.

As for previous people working in Area 51, some were on a t.v doccumentary a while ago, they chose to keep their identity private as the goverment would apparently kill them if secrets got out. If these previous Area 51 workers were so afraid of losing their lives, they would not go on national television parading about the fact that they know what happens in there.

I personally think that there are some genuine people thoughtless enough to tell the world what they have experienced, but there is always going to be a way the goverment can cover this up, whether we like it or not. On youtube there was a video of an ‘alien autopsy’, which i’m almost one hundred percent certain is fake…The caption says that it was recorded by someone who had broken in, but the fact is almost anyone who tried to break in would be shot dead and all records of them would be erased from the goverments database. It would look as if they had just vanished from the face of the earth.

However, there was a group named Red Cell which was an organization created by the US government to help prevent terrorism, the reason was because then in the 1980′s-1990′s they were much more afraid of terrorism than we are today. The US goverment would hire Red Cell to try and infiltrate top secret goverment land to see if a small special forces unit could easily break in to US goverment property and to make sure that these areas were as well protected as they could ever be.

Red Cell could even take hostages on Air Force one with permission from the goverment. Their tactics are still top secret, obviously they worked and thats why they are kept hidden otherwise the public would know exactly how to get in. But many do believe they had gained access into aircraft hangers and underground facilities on area 51. The tactics that Red Cell used must have been very clever. Some say there is underground aircraft storage and secret tunnels leading to other top secret goverment facilities that still remain unknown to the citizens of the world. Again the US goverment have denied all knowledge of ‘underground tunnels and underground aircraft hangers’.

I will now move on to reverse-engineering, which is when you look at a piece of machinery and how it was built and build it from the outside to the inside. Basically copying a machine which has been created by someone/something else but building it backwards. Many scientists and researchers believe that reverse-engineering is exactly what happens in Area 51. There were speculations about an aircraft named Aurora but there has never been any physical evidence that this aircraft was ever built or flown.

People believe that Aurora was reverse-engineered by the US military to see how this plane works and to learn more about E.T technology. I personally believe that this is true because there are so many aircrafts that have been captured and recorded near or close to area 51, not all these videos can be fake. Aurora interested me as the technology i can see on an artist interpretation that was used to build it is so advanced from our technology today, that if the US military had built it, it would have not been one of our designs for certain.

We do not have all this advance technology and if we do it is certainly kept a secret from us. Well we have gadgets such as ipods, iphones, laptops, gaming systems and so on, but this speculation sometimes leads me to believe that maybe some of our greatest inventors originally had ideas from E.T technology which had been discovered and we continued from then improving these things that most people use in everyday life.

By: Joy Healey

When the first UFO story hit the headlines shortly after June 24, 1947, newspapers all over the United States were reporting the first sighting

The story told how nine very bright, disk-shaped objects were seen by Kenneth Arnold, a Boise, Idaho, businessman, while he was flying his private plane near Mount Rainier, in the state of Washington. With journalistic license, reporters converted Arnold’s description of the individual motion of each of the objects, “like a saucer skipping across water”, into “flying saucer,” a name for the objects themselves.

In the years that passed since Arnold’s memorable sighting, the term has became so common that it found a place in Webster’s Dictionary and is known today in most languages in the world.

For a while after the Arnold sighting, the term “flying saucer” was used to describe all disk-shaped objects that were seen flashing through the sky at fantastic speeds. Before long, reports were made of objects other than disks, and these were also called flying saucers. Today the words are popularly applied to anything seen in the sky that cannot be identified as a common, everyday object.

Thus a flying saucer can be a formation of lights, a single light, a sphere, or any other shape; and it can be any color. Performance wise, flying saucers can hover, go fast or slow, go high or low, turn 90-degree corners, or disappear almost instantaneously.

Clearly the term “flying saucer” is open to interpretation when objects of every imaginable shape and performance are labeled as such. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short.

Officially the military uses the term “flying saucer” on only two occasions. First in an explanatory sense, as when briefing people who are unacquainted with the term “UFO”: “UFO, you know, flying saucers.” And second in a derogatory sense, for purposes of ridicule, as when it is observed, “He says he saw a flying saucer.”

This second form of usage is the exclusive property of those persons who positively know that all UFOs are nonsense. Fortunately, if only as a matter of coutesy, those in this category are reducing in number. One by one these people drop out, starting with the instant they see their first UFO.

Some weeks after the first UFO was seen on June 24, 1947, the Air Force established a project to investigate and analyze all UFO reports. The attitude toward this task varied from a state of near panic, early in the life of the project, to that of complete contempt for anyone who even mentioned the words “flying saucer.”

This contemptuous attitude toward “flying saucer nuts” prevailed from mid-1949 to mid-1950. During that interval many of the people who were, or had been, associated with the project believed that the public was suffering from “war nerves.”

Early in 1950 the project, for all practical purposes, was closed out; at least it rated only minimum effort. Those in power now reasoned that if you didn’t mention the words “flying saucers” the people would forget them and the saucers would go away. But this reasoning was false, for instead of vanishing; the quality of the UFO reports improved.

Airline pilots, military pilots, generals, scientists, and dozens of other people were reporting UFO’s, and in greater detail than in reports of the past. Radars, which were being built for air defense, began to pick up some very unusual targets, thus lending technical corroboration to the unsubstantiated claims of human observers.

As a result of the continuing accumulation of more impressive UFO reports, official interest stirred. Early in 1951 verbal orders came down from Major General Charles P. Cabell, then Director of Intelligence for Headquarters, U.S. Air Force, to make a study reviewing the UFO situation for Air Force Headquarters.

The study was given the code name Project Blue Book. It was under the supervision of “EJR” of impeccable credentials until late in 1953. During the Second World War EJR was a B-29 bombardier and radar operator. He restarted college after the war, and before long, gained his aeronautical engineering degree. To keep his reserve status while in school, he flew as a navigator in an Air Force Reserve Troop Carrier Wing.

While compiling Project Blue Book, EJR and members of his staff traveled close to half a million miles. They investigated dozens of UFO reports, and read and analyzed several thousand more. These included every report ever received by the Air Force.

There were ten regular staff on Project Blue Book plus many paid consultants representing every field of science. Everyone involved had Top Secret security clearances so security was not an issue in the investigations. Behind this organization was a reporting network made up of every Air Force base intelligence officer and every Air Force radar station in the world, and the Air Defense Command’s Ground Observer Corps. This reporting net sent Project Blue Book reports on every conceivable type of UFO, by every conceivable type of person. What did these people actually see when they reported a UFO? Putting aside truly unidentifiable flying objects for the present, this question has several answers.

Often it has been positively proved that people have reported balloons, airplanes, stars, and many other common objects as UFOs. The people who make such reports don’t recognize these common objects because something in their surroundings temporarily assumes an unfamiliar appearance.

Unusual lighting conditions are a common cause of such illusions. A balloon will glow like a “ball of fire” just at sunset. Or an airplane that is not visible to the naked eye suddenly starts to reflect the sun’s rays and appears to be a “silver ball”. Pilots in F-94 jet interceptors chase Venus in the daytime and fight with balloons at night, and people in Los Angeles see weird lights.

In reality, did Project Blue Book ever prove the existence of UFOs? The hassle over the word “proof” boils down to one question: What constitutes proof? Is a UFO required to land at the River Entrance to the Pentagon, in front of the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Or is it proof when a ground radar station detects a UFO, sends a jet to intercept it, the jet pilot sees it, and locks on with his radar, only to have the UFO streak away at a phenomenal speed? Is it proof when a jet pilot fires at a UFO and sticks to his story even under the threat of court-martial? Does this constitute proof?

Project Blue Book recorded the facts; but you must decide for yourself.