Extraterrestrial

SETI Institute chief offers his views on UFOs and alien visitors

By T.K. Randall
April 23, 2024

Image: The 64-M Parkes Radio Telescope
Credit: Stewart Duff, CSIRO / CC BY 3.0 (adapted) If there's one organization that you would expect to be pretty open about the possibilities of extraterrestrials visiting the Earth, it's SETI - the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

While the institute has spent decades scouring the heavens for signs of alien signals, its current president and chief executive officer Bill Diamond seems less than enthusiastic about the idea that members of an advanced alien civilization have ever visited our planet.

"We don't have any evidence of any credible source that would indicate the presence of alien technology in our skies," he told Space.com. "And we never have."

"The idea that the government is keeping something like this secret is just totally absurd."

"There's no motivation to do so."Diamond explained that perhaps the strongest argument against the idea that aliens are visiting us is the vast distances between worlds.

"If you sent that spacecraft to our closest neighbor star, Alpha Centauri, it would take 80,000 years to get there," he said.

"Any civilization that has mastered the ability to traverse the incomprehensibly vast distances of interstellar space would have technology so far advanced from our own as to be beyond our comprehension."

Of course, this doesn't rule out the possibility, since any given extraterrestrial civilization may be thousands of years more advanced than us and may have discovered technologies and concepts enabling them to travel much greater distances through space at much greater speeds.

"Why do people have these beliefs? It is because they want to believe," Diamond added.

"Nobody really wants to think that this Earth is the only place in the vastness of space where life has emerged. Even that idea is also kind of absurd."

Source: Space.com

Tags: UFO, Alien