Whether aliens are real remains one of humanity’s biggest questions. While it may not sound like a serious area of research, there are many teams of intelligent, senior academics around the world who continue to dedicate themselves to finding the answers.
But as little green humanoids aren’t exactly beaming onto our planet for us to study up close, what evidence of life are we looking for in 2026? Here are five ways that scientists are working to discover if we are, and have always been, alone out here.
Breakthrough Listen searches for technosignatures
Breakthrough Listen is a $100 million research programme that is due to finish this year after a decade of searching for evidence of aliens. Based at the University of Oxford in the UK, the scientists involved in the project have been looking for so-called “technosignatures,” evidence of technology used by extraterrestrial life. These might include lasers, artificial satellites, or unnatural signals, and the team uses telescopes based around the world to search for them.
In recent years, Breakthrough Listen has been looking into something called the ‘Wow! signal’, an unexplained, 72-second radio burst from the Sagittarius constellation in 1977. But, in December, the group changed tack and used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to observe the comet 3I/ATLAS as it passed Earth. Sadly (or not), no technosignatures were found. Now, they are investigating Fast Radio Bursts, a type of technosignature, with a new artificial intelligence system that can detect them 600 times faster than previous methods.
LaserSETI continuously expands its range of telescopes
LaserSETI, a research group based at the University of California, Berkeley, operates a global network of optical instruments designed to observe “all the sky, all the time.” Like Breakthrough Listen, they are also searching for strange, extraterrestrial pulses that could indicate the presence of an otherworldly iPhone or microwave oven.
The project has built stations in California, Hawaii, Arizona, and, most recently, Puerto Rico, but six more are under construction. Each LaserSETI observatory has two cameras that convert incoming light into a spectrum, allowing the system to detect whether it consists of a single, narrow wavelength — such as a laser — which would indicate an unnatural, potentially artificial source. As of September, the team had not detected any, but their search continues.
Perseverance Rover rumbles on, searching for evidence of life on Mars
Everyone’s favourite car-sized robot, the Perseverance rover, will continue bumbling around the surface of Mars, drilling and analysing samples for signs of life, in 2026. In fact, NASA recently confirmed it should remain in operable conditions for another five years.
Since landing in 2021, Perseverance has mainly been exploring the Jezero Crater and Margin Unit, and is now being directed toward Lac de Charmes. It has been collecting rock and atmospheric samples, snapping photographs, and testing instruments that could help sustain humans on the planet in the future.
It wasn’t until 2024 that it made its first exciting discovery relating to past life; a piece of reddish rock the rover picked up had some curious “leopard spots” on it. Similar patterns are known to form in iron-rich sediments on Earth when microbes transfer electrons between minerals and organic compounds to gain energy. However, NASA says that further Earth-based research is needed on Perseverance’s sample to truly determine whether it indicates the presence of Martians.
German scientists are looking up for UFOs
It’s not all strange signals and bits of dirt in the search for aliens, as a team from the University of Würzburg in Germany is specifically seeking out “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” in the sky. UAPs could be objects that move strangely, such as hovering or making sudden stops, or strange glows or flashes.
The university’s Interdisciplinary Research Center for Extraterrestrial Studies (IFEX) was established to investigate these happenings and has installed its SkyCAM observatories in several global locations. Initial results from a 2021 California-based study found that most phenomena were explainable, bar one mysterious dark spot that appeared in visible and near-infrared imagery and coincided with a brief spike in ionizing radiation.
Nevertheless, IFEX has a number of ongoing projects in 2026, one of which is elegantly named VaMEx3-MarsSymphony. The team is building a communication system for future Mars rovers, and a part of it is a SkyCAM for UAPs, which was tested on Germany’s alpine Zugspitze mountain in September. IFEX is also continuing to look into how small satellites could be used to explore the Apophis asteroid that will fly close to Earth in 2029.
James Webb Space Telescope seeks out habitable planets
Avid readers of Orbital Today will no doubt be familiar with the James Webb Space Telescope, the massive, golden-eyed observatory that orbits the Sun about a million miles away from Earth. It has many ongoing projects, but it is primarily studying exoplanets (those that orbit stars outside our Solar System) and their atmospheres, picking out the ones that might have the right ingredients for life.
The JWST isn’t due to finish its mission for at least another five years, so there’s still plenty of time for it to stumble across ET. The closest we’ve got so far is Exoplanet K2‑18 b, which the telescope found had methane and carbon dioxide in its atmosphere in 2023, indicating potential habitability. It also found hints of dimethyl sulfoxide, which is almost exclusively produced by marine phytoplankton on Earth, but the scientific community does caution that there could be a non-biological explanation for it.