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In the mid-1970s, a pair of fifth-grade boys were inspired by a Weekly Reader article on UFOs. The gist of the brief item was how easy it was to demonstrate that all the supposed photos of alien visitors had been faked.

The pair were inspired. Inspired to prove the article wrong, that is.

They figured they could fake up UFO photos in a single afternoon after school was out. And that's what they set out to do.

One boy borrowed his parents' Polaroid instant camera. He then convinced his mother to fund this little experiment by paying for some black-and-white film. (The boys instinctively knew color would expose their trickery, while black-and-white would appear more sinister.)

Using just a few household items - a paper grocery bag, the plastic top to a garbage can, fishing line, a little brother's GI Joe figure, aluminum foil - the boys created a photo gallery of an alien invasion. While a few were over the top - a GI Joe wrapped in aluminum foil, for instance - the images of the flying saucers in the distant sky and one flying over the roof of a house seemed pretty dang real, at least to the boys' classmates who viewed the images the next day at school.

This episode had been long-forgotten until an article in last week's New York Times described a $22 million-a-year program known in the Defense Department as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

According to the article, "For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times."

That military program was officially closed in 2012, but reporting in The Times suggests that the work may still be ongoing.

One encounter - complete with video evidence captured by a U.S. military aircraft - happened on Nov. 14, 2004. U.S. Navy pilot David Fravor was flying over the Pacific Ocean when he and others in his squadron encountered "something not from the Earth."

Fravor, who has since retired from the Navy, explained what he saw to ABC News last week:

"We look down, we see a white disturbance in the water, like something's under the surface, and the waves are breaking over, but we see next to it, and it's flying around, and it's this little white Tic Tac, and it's moving around - left, right, forward, back, just random. ...

"When it started to near us, as we started to descend towards it coming up, it was flying in the elongated way, so it's [like] a Tic Tac, with the roundish end going in the forward direction ... I don't know what it is. I don't know what I saw. I just know it was really impressive, really fast, and I would like to fly it."

Also last week, the former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program told CNN that he had found evidence of aliens visiting earth.

"My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone," Luis Elizondo said on CNN.

Two takeaways: The video of the UFO captured by a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet seems well beyond the capabilities of the most precocious of fifth-graders. Secondly, it says something about the chaos we currently find ourselves in that news of unexplained aircraft isn't a bigger deal.

Bob Davis is editor and publisher of The Anniston Star. Contact him at 256-235-3540 or bdavis@annistonstar.com. Twitter: EditorBobDavis

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In the mid-1970s, a pair of fifth-grade boys were inspired by a Weekly Reader article on UFOs. The gist of the brief item was how easy it was to demonstrate that all the supposed photos of alien visitors had been faked. The pair were inspired. Inspired to prove the article wrong, that is.

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Are aliens real? While science may not say yes, nearly half of the people in a survey believe they do. And what's more, most of those respondents aren't afraid to make contact with these mysterious, extraterrestrial civilizations, according to a worldwide survey by the research and consulting firm, Glocalities.
Related: Alien Life: Europa Plate Tectonics Could Be Feeding Life on Icy Jupiter Moon
In the company's new study, 26,492 people from 24 countries shared their beliefs about life on other planets. It seems that most of the world, 61 percent, believe there is some sort of life on faraway planets. Only 17 percent of the world is skeptical and 22 percent say they don't know

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Nearly half of the respondents believed that intelligent alien life was out there somewhere, though science has not yet backed this apparently common belief. More people were skeptical of actual aliens with 26 percent disputing their existence. Another 28 percent said they weren't sure (or were secretly withholding their true feelings).

Interestingly, while there is no evidence of complex alien life, believers tended to be highly interested in science and technology. The data indicated they are actively interested in politics and hope for government transparency. Other characteristics include open-mindedness, tolerance, resistance to authority and highly cherishing freedom.

While movies often depict aliens as foreign invaders who could harm us, that hasn't seemed to penetrate our beliefs. Of the people who believe in advanced alien life, 60 percent believe we should contact these other worldly citizens, while 21 percent shied away from the idea and 19 percent offered no opinion.
See all of the best photos of the week in these slideshows
And this isn't the only evidence supporting the warm welcome aliens would receive here on planet Earth. In a series of studies, researchers at Arizona State University concluded that people would react fairly positively if (or when) man finally discovers ET.

In one survey, researchers asked people how they'd react if scientists hypothetically discovered microbial life on another planet, assessing how much risk and reward people viewed with the news. In a second study, the team studied the same responses, but this time participants believed scientists actually had discovered evidence of life outside of Earth. In both scenarios, people reacted more positively than negatively, according to the paper, though the team could not conclude why this was the case.

As the authors write, "Perhaps such news causes people to take comfort in the fact that we are not all alone in the universe. Perhaps it strengthens their worldviews, be they religious or scientific. Perhaps it speaks to our desire for novelty." They stress that further research should be done to determine why humans aren't more scared of foreign beings.

If the recent discovery that Jupiter is capable of supporting life unearths actual aliens, we might just get our answer.

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Many people believe aliens exist and aren't scared of making contact

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Are aliens real? While science may not say yes, nearly half of the people in a survey believe they do. And what's more, most of those respondents aren't afraid to make contact with these mysterious, extraterrestrial civilizations, according to a worldwide survey by the research and consulting firm, Glocalities.

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In 2040, Americans plan to vote in a U.S. presidential election. Japan promises to stop using nuclear power. Britain's Prince George will turn the ripe age of 27. And, as the interactive above demonstrates, the world is likely to find alien life. It could happen even sooner, depending how many civilizations are out there to be found. To understand why this is, it helps to know about someone name Frank Drake.

Drake is the least lonely man on Earth-if not in the entire galaxy. Most of us are reserving judgment on whether there is intelligent life on other planets; we haven't even found bacteria yet, much less a race of aliens with Internet service and takeout food. But Drake, an astrophysicist and chairman emeritus of the California-based SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, has no such doubts.

It was in 1961, when he was working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W. Va., that Drake developed the eponymous-and now famous-Drake Equation, which calculates how many advanced and detectable civilizations there should be in the Milky Way in any one year. The number turns out to be potentially huge, and while it's admittedly based on a number of Earth-centric suppositions-the collapse of any one of which calls much of the equation into question-all of those suppositions are based in increasingly solid science.

Start with the number of stars in our galaxy, which is conservatively estimated at 100 billion, though is often cited as three times that. Of those 100 billion, from 20% to 50% probably harbor planetary systems-an estimate that becomes more and more reliable as the Kepler Space Telescope and various ground-based observatories detect increasing numbers of exoplanets.

Not all of those exoplanets would be capable of sustaining Earth-like life, so the equation assumes from 1 to 5 in any system could. Of those bio-friendly worlds, from 0% to 100% would actually go on to develop life. And of those world, in turn, from 0% to 100% would develop life forms that we would consider intelligent.

The mere existence of intelligent life forms tells us nothing, however, unless they have the ability to make themselves known-which means to manipulate radio waves and other forms of electromagnetic signaling. Drake estimates that from 10% to 20% of the smart civilizations would clear that bar.

Finally, and perhaps most anthropocentrically, the equation considers how long any one of those semaphoring civilizations would be around to blink their signals our way. A sun like ours survives for about 10 billion years; life on Earth has been around for only about 3.5 billion years, and humans have been radio-capable for barely a century.

If we destroy ourselves in an environmental or nuclear holocaust tomorrow, our signal will go dark then. If we survive for tens of thousands of years, we will be announcing our presence to the cosmos for far longer-and the same is true of all of the other civilizations that live in the Milky Way.

Factor all of this together and stir in a little statistical seasoning concerning our increasing ability to study other star systems for signals, and, as the above interactive shows-the results can vary wildly. If you play the game conservatively-lowballing all of the variables-you might get about 1,000 detectable civilizations out there at any given time. Play it more liberally and you get hundreds of millions. The interactive let's you play that game yourself. Imagine there are 10,000 detectable civilizations and we are likely to find alien life by 2040. If there are a million, we'd discover alien life by 2028.

Nobody pretends the Drake Equation is the final word. Even its enthusiasts admit that it is, at best, a way to "organize our ignorance." But organized ignorance is a whole lot better than the disorganized kind; and it is, almost always, a starting point toward wisdom.
Methodology
Astronomers looking for alien signals have examined only a few thousand star systems so far. But as SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak has noted, the rate at which researchers are able to process the massive amounts of data that radio telescopes receive doubles approximately every 18 months to two years, meaning it grows by a factor of ten every six years or so.

The Milky Way has around 100 billion (10 ¹¹) star systems that could conceivably host intelligent life under our current assumptions. An estimate of 100,000 (10 ⁵) active civilizations in the galaxy would mean one per million star systems. At the exponential rate of growth in signal processing, researchers will have examined one million candidates by around 2034, bringing the odds of a discovery into the probable. Adding or removing a zero from the estimate of the number of civilizations out there merely adds or subtracts six years from the estimate, respectively, since that's how long it takes to expand our search proportionally. See you in 2040, aliens.

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In 2040, Americans plan to vote in a U.S. presidential election. Japan promises to stop using nuclear power. Britain's Prince George will turn the ripe age of 27. And, as the interactive above demonstrates, the world is likely to find alien life. It could happen even sooner, depending how many civilizations are out there to be found.

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Explore the evidence - from the scientifically plausible to the incredible - suggesting that we may not be alone in the universe.

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The UFO spottings that made headlines last month are most likely not alien spacecrafts, but there is a possibility that life exists on other planets in our galaxy, writes physicist Don Lincoln

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David Wallace-Wells, James D. Walsh, Neel Patel, Clint Rainey, Katie Heaney, Eric Benson, Tim Urban

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How seriously should you take those recent reports of UFOs? Ask the Pentagon. Or read this primer for the SETI-curious. Who knows? They may save us after all.

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Life Signs

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Exoplanet Exploration: Planets Beyond our Solar System

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Are we alone in the universe?

The big question - Is there life beyond Earth? - comes with an ironic asterisk: we don't really have a universally accepted definition of life itself. That said, we might not need one. We need only detect the telltale signs of life in an exoplanet atmosphere, and we have a better understanding of what those look like here on Earth.

An artist's concept of what Kepler-1649c could look like from its surface. Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter

Will we know life when we see it?

Will we know life when we see it?

The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, could get the first glimpses: the mix of gases in the atmospheres of Earth-sized exoplanets. Webb, or a similar spacecraft in the future, could pick up signs of an atmosphere like our own - oxygen, carbon dioxide, methane. A strong indication of possible life. Future telescopes might even pick up signs of photosynthesis - the transformation of light into chemical energy by plants - or even gases or molecules suggesting the presence of animal life. Intelligent, technological life might create atmospheric pollution, as it does on our planet, also detectable from afar. Of course, the best we might be able to manage is an estimate of probability. Still, an exoplanet with, say, a 95 percent probability of life would be a game changer of historic proportions.

Artist's rendering of the James Webb Space Telescope. Image credit: NASA

How will we find life?

How will we find life?

Life might turn up in our own neighborhood: beneath the Martian surface, perhaps, or in the dark, subsurface oceans of Jupiter's moon, Europa. Or maybe the dream of the ages will come true, and we'll eavesdrop on the communications of extraterrestrial civilizations. We might even capture evidence of "technosignatures," or traces of technology (think smog). Barring these strokes of luck, however, the job will be much harder. Light will be the key - light from the atmospheres of exoplanets, split up into a rainbow spectrum that we can read like a bar code. This method, called transit spectroscopy, would provide a menu of gases and chemicals in the skies of these worlds, including those linked to life.

Artist's rendering of the Europa Clipper. Image credit: NASA/JPL-CalTech

Life as we don't know it

Life as we don't know it

They dwell in the caustic chemical pools of Yellowstone National Park, in the dry valleys of Antarctica, in superheated vents on the ocean floor, and they belong to branches of life that split from our own billions of years ago. "Extremophiles" are life forms that love extreme environments, thriving in conditions that would kill anything else. They might also be analogs for strange life on distant worlds.

Where should we look?

Where should we look?

More than 4,900 exoplanets - planets around other stars - have been confirmed to exist in our galaxy, but likely number in the trillions. One of the best tools scientists have to begin narrowing the search for habitable worlds is a concept known as the "habitable zone." It's the orbital distance from a star where temperatures would potentially allow liquid water to form on a planet's surface. Many other conditions also would be required: a planet of suitable size with a suitable atmosphere, and a stable star not prone to erupting in sterilizing flares. The habitable zone is really just a way to make the first cut, and zero in on the planets with the best chance of possessing habitable conditions.
Next: All about the habitable zone More: How NASA's Astrobiology Program is looking for life in our solar system and beyond.

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national aeronautics and space administration

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Can We Find Life? | The Search For Life - Exoplanet Exploration: Planets Beyond our Solar System

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So far, the only life we know of is right here on planet Earth. But NASA is looking for signs of life in our solar system and on some of the the thousands of planets we've discovered beyond it, on exoplanets. We can probe alien atmospheres for biosignatures, which could indicate life below.