CHRISTON RIEN

Have you ever thought about life outside our planet? I’m sure you did. This concept has fascinated millions of people over the past few decades and still to this day does. When we think of the word ‘Alien’ we quickly resemble it to words like UFO, extra-terrestrial and so on. UFO is merely the acronym the Air Force uses for any unidentified flying object, but it becomes synonymous with alien spacecraft. There are tons of UFO sightings on record dating all the way back to Rome in 214 B.C.E. When there reports of phantom ships gleaming in the sky. The most famous UFO sighting is the Roswell UFO incident in 1947, when an airborne object crashed on a ranch in New Mexico. Even though there are tons of theories about that object being extra-terrestrial, the armed forces say that it was debris from a crashed weather balloon. Most UFO’s turn out to be something along those lines: weather balloons, airplane lights, meteors, and so on. About 5-10% of them never get identified, so are they alien spacecrafts? The universe is a big place with around 900 exoplanets. Some people around the world find it quite hard to believe that there isn’t something else out there. Now this doesn’t mean that they have to look like the typical alien we all envision it to be but they might probably look a different way. By no means do I believe in science but that doesn’t mean I completely disregard it as a whole. Science is fun and lets you in on some pretty cool stuff. However the question of Whether ‘Aliens’ exist or not is something beyond science. It is a matter of whether humans and all creatures on earth were created alone. There are so many more planets in the universe which means that there is a possibility that other beings exist. Out of those 900 exoplanets, I mentioned earlier, 12 of those are potentially habitable. But what are the odds that one of those planets not only has life on it, but also advanced civilization capable of space travel? The government in the United States go back and forth on the subject about extra-terrestrial life as well. In 1948 a division of the Air Material Command called Project Sign was tasked with figuring out how likely it was that all these UFO sightings were alien spacecraft. Their conclusion was the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious. They even filed a detailed report of a UFO flying past an eastern airlines flight in view of the pilot and co-pilot as well as the ground crew. The Air Force chief of the staff at the time rejected the report for not having enough proof and later the Air Force shut down Project Sign and spent the next decade debunking UFOS’s entirely. So, what’s the answer? Are we alone in the universe? The honest answer is that we don’t know for sure. We know that planets that could support liquid water are common. But we don’t know much about the origin of life and the probability that it will evolve as it did on Earth. From what we have seen on Earth, it seems that the creation of life is relatively easy, but the evolution of intelligence is hard. Taken into aggregate, extra-terrestrial life should exist and there may be planets where our cosmic friends also look into the sky and dream. Nobody can tell you for sure what those Navy pilots saw. But it’s a big universe and it seems that life could very well be larger than what we know. There may come a day when Aliens and humans meet just like in a movie then we would know once and for all, that we are not alone.

The writer is a mass media students