There can be little doubt that alien life exists, but anyone who thinks extraterrestrials have visited Earth in UFOs has been seriously “misled”, according to a veteran Nasa engineer.
Since he started working on the Viking mission to Mars in 1968, Gentry Lee has spent more than half a century at Nasa designing probes to land on distant worlds. He has dismissed the idea, however, that any alien civilisation has paid us a return visit.
Two US presidents have sparked excitement with comments about the possible existence of aliens in recent weeks.
President Trump said last week that he would start “identifying and releasing” secret US government files regarding aliens and UFO sightings because of the “tremendous interest shown” in the subject.
His pledge came after Barack Obama, the former US president, said of aliens: “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in Area 51.
“There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
Presidents Trump and Obama have made comments about aliens in the past few weeks
MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Obama later clarified that his comments had been made during a quick-fire section of a podcast and that he had seen no proof of alien life, simply explaining: “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.”
Days before Obama’s remarks, Lee, 83, was in Phoenix, Arizona, for one of the world’s largest science conferences, run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“There exists nothing today that says any alien or any alien machine has ever landed on the planet Earth,” he told the audience. “If you believe otherwise, you are being misled.”
The search for signs of extraterrestrial life is a central part of Nasa and the European Space Agency’s missions, including voyages to Mars and the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.
If we received a communication from an intelligent alien civilisation, it would render “all preceding human history insignificant” by comparison, said Lee, who is chief engineer for the Solar System Exploration Directorate at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He oversaw the engineering of the Curiosity rover for Mars, the Dawn mission to two asteroids, the Juno mission to Jupiter and the Grail mission to the moon.
The search to answer the question of whether Earth was alone in hosting life in the universe was “among the most profound of anything human beings have ever done”, he said.
Speaking to promote a new documentary, called Spaceman, Lee said that space telescopes such as Kepler had studied a significant “slice” of the galaxy in our neighbourhood of the Milky Way and found huge numbers of planets orbiting other stars, with the confirmed number topping 6,000.
“If the slice of the heavens that Kepler looked at is representative [of the whole Milky Way], and we have no reason to believe it’s not, then there are close to a trillion planets in our galaxy alone,” he said.
“So you can go through all the probabilities of life forming [on some of them] and sooner or later you say, it’s just gotta be there somewhere.”