Extraterrestrial

Shostak dismisses claims of alien visitation

By T.K. Randall
May 26, 2014 ·  140 comments

The Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 2.0 John Fowler Despite passionately pursuing the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe, SETI's Seth Shostak is not convinced by the thousands of UFO sightings, alien abduction accounts and other reports that seemingly indicate that we may not be alone.

During this week's House Science and Technology Committee hearing, Shostak and fellow SETI scientist Dan Werthimer were asked for their views on the TV series 'Ancient Aliens' and whether they believed that extraterrestrials had already visited the Earth."The public is fascinated with the idea that we may be being visited now, or may have been visited in the past, the so-called UFO phenomenon," said Shostak. "I personally don't share the conviction that we are being visited. I don't think that that would be something that all the governments of the world had managed to obfuscate - to keep secret. I don't believe that."

"UFOs have nothing to do with extraterrestrials," Werthimer added. "I think some of these sightings are real phenomena. We get a lot of calls when the space station goes over, although some people embellish and they say it has windows and things."

"When Jules Verne wrote about flying saucers, everybody started seeing flying saucers. Before that people saw angels. When people watch movies then we get a lot of reports that are tied to what's in the movies."

Source: Discovery News | Comments (140)

Tags: SETI, Seth Shostak, Extraterrestrial