Neil deGrasse Tyson reveals what he ‘loses sleep’ over
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One of the world’s most renowned and vocal astrophysicists thinks it would be foolish to assume we are alone in the Universe. But Neil deGrasse Tyson is much less enthusiastic about alien life when people claim to have filmed or photographed ETs visiting our planet. A recently published report penned by US intelligence agencies has sparked a renewed interest in UFO phenomena.
The so-called Pentagon report has highlighted more than 100 UFO sightings made since 2004, including a number of high-profile cases that have leaked onto the internet in recent years.
The report was not the ET disclosure many UFO enthusiasts were hoping for – but it did not discount an alien origin for these sightings either.
After the unclassified report was published on January 25 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Dr Tyson took to Twitter to share his thoughts.
At first, he shared a spate of jokes and quips about aliens visiting Earth, after which he took a swipe at the supposed evidence of ET activity here on Earth.
The astrophysicist, who has been the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City since 1996, criticised the lack of any clear images or videos of these unidentified flying objects.
He shared a very grainy still from a declassified video the Pentagon released to the public.
The video was originally leaked online in 2017 and purported to show a “strange craft” zipping around in American airspace.
Dr Tyson, however, was not convinced by the quality of the sighting to consider it evidence of ET activity.
He tweeted: “The search for aliens on Earth has been crowdsourced to three-billion internet-connected smartphones around the world.
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“If our best evidence for visitors from another planet is monochromatic low-resolution, fuzzy video taken by US Navy, then there’s more work to be done here.”
And yet, the astrophysicist does believe alien life likely exists somewhere out there among the stars.
Dr Tyson has previously said the odds of life not existing outside of our planet are tiny.
After all, the Universe is vast and the elements needed to create life should be found virtually everywhere.
In 2017, for instance, the astrophysicist appeared on the C-SPAN programme, In Depth, where he claimed life may have very well evolved on some alien world.
He said: “It is not likely we are alone in the universe. If you look at how common the ingredients of life are.
“Hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon – we are made of this stuff, it is the foundation of organic chemistry.
“We are carbon-based life – this stuff is everywhere we look in the universe.”
The Universe has been around for about 14 billion years by this point, allowing life plenty of time to evolve.
Here on Earth, life emerged in the last four million years – an inconsequential blip in the grand scheme of things.
But this does not mean aliens have ever visited our planet and there is good reason to think they haven’t.
The rules of physics prevent us from travelling at speeds of or faster than light – the fastest speed in the whole Universe.
And that means travelling between star systems is going to be virtually impossible for us and for aliens alike.
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