While Steven Spielberg has created some of the best aliens in cinema, the 79–year–old director now claims he also knows a thing or two about real–life extraterrestrials.
In an interview promoting his latest sci–fi blockbuster, Disclosure Day, Mr Spielberg says he is certain that aliens have already visited our planet.
Speaking to CBS News, he said: ‘I absolutely think that they have been here, and they are here. And who knows, maybe they’ve always been here.’
The director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind added that this view is ‘based on the circumstantial evidence of everything that I’ve gathered throughout my whole life, everybody I’ve listened to and every documentary I’ve ever watched and all the testimonies in Congress that I’ve heard.’
Now, some scientists say there could be a kernel of truth behind Mr Spielberg’s wacky claims.
Dr Jacco van Loon, an astrophysicist from Keele University, told the Daily Mail: ‘It is a possibility.’
He added: ‘If they visited a billion years ago, they would have encountered seas with microbial life, and bare land.
‘While they may not have left artefacts on Earth, one interesting possibility that has been considered is that they may have left artefacts on the Moon or elsewhere in the Solar System, to monitor Earth or simply as waste.’
In an interview promoting his latest sci–fi blockbuster, Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg says he is certain that aliens have already visited our planet
While it is widely considered likely that life exists somewhere in the universe, the biggest barrier to any advanced civilisation visiting Earth is the enormous distances between stars.
For many scientists, this is an insurmountable barrier to any chance of an alien civilisation travelling to Earth.
Dr Thomas Haworth, an astrophysicist from Queen Mary University, told the Daily Mail: ‘We have a feeling that the term “astronomical” means large, but it’s quite hard to convey just how large distances are in space.
‘To get to the nearest known star with planets, Proxima Centauri, would take the Parker Solar Probe – the fastest spacecraft humans have launched – 6,500 years.
‘Although I am sure that life is out there, the odds of life being on the planets next door are low. When we look to other planets, the distances and timescales just get larger and larger, making it harder and harder to travel.’
In science fiction, writers have found a way around this problem by introducing the concept of ‘faster than light’ travel through wormholes or other exotic technologies.
By jumping faster than the speed of light, alien civilisations would theoretically be able to reduce the vast distances between habitable worlds to manageable trips.
However, in the real world, these modes of transportation remain a total fantasy.
Scientists dispute Mr Spielberg’s claims, pointing out that it would take over 6,500 years to reach Earth from Proxima Centauri (pictured), the nearest star with planets
Dr William Alston, an astronomer from University of Hertfordshire, told the Daily Mail: ‘The speed of light appears to be the ultimate speed limit in the Universe.
‘Nothing with mass can accelerate up to or beyond it, so even the most advanced spacecraft would take a long time to cross interstellar distances. This means that visiting other worlds is not just an engineering challenge, but limited by fundamental physics.’
The only way for an alien civilisation to visit our planet would be for extraterrestrials to settle in for a journey that could take thousands of years to complete.
Even for a civilisation with abundant resources, this would take colossal amounts of energy and resources while achieving very little.
Dr van Loon points out that this massive journey could be made a little easier by the relativistic effects which kick in as a spacecraft approaches near–light–speed.
‘Time for the traveller then slows down, which means that they can get to their destination much quicker than someone left behind would see them move,’ he says.
‘The problem is that the traveller would lose connection with their home, since those left behind would age a lot more than they would.’
However, assuming that a civilisation didn’t care about these consequences and had some way of extending their lives for the journey, that means it is at least somewhat theoretically plausible for an alien civilisation to travel to Earth.
The director of Disclosure Day (pictured) says that his UFO claims are ‘based on the circumstantial evidence of everything that I’ve gathered throughout my whole life’
The big problem for Spielberg is that there is no reason that they would, or any evidence to suggest that they have.
Professor Michael Garrett, a leading expert on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) from the University of Manchester, told the Daily Mail: ‘Spielberg makes wonderful films, and Disclosure Day is a brilliant slice of cinema, but it’s storytelling, not science.
‘Earth is a beautiful little blue dot. But in cosmic terms, we are just one of hundreds of billions of planets in our own Milky Way Galaxy.
‘The notion that aliens would single us out, cross trillions of miles of space, and then mostly buzz around airbases and farmers’ fields rather than introducing themselves to a head of state is a bit far–fetched.’
Despite decades of investigation, scientists have yet to come up with any convincing proof for the existence of alien life.
Radio telescopes have failed to find ‘technosignatures’ of advanced civilisations, and the ‘evidence’ for the alien origins of UFO sightings is poor at best.
‘If aliens had genuinely visited Earth, we’d have more than blurry video clips and bar–room anecdotes to work with,’ says Professor Garrett.
Likewise, Professor Carol Oliver, of UNSW Sydney, told the Daily Mail: ‘Steven Spielberg and other people have a need to not be alone.
Scientists point out that there is ‘not a shred of credible evidence’ for the existence of aliens, and that the world’s radio telescopes have not managed to pick up a signal from another civilisation. Pictured: The Green Bank Observatory, West Virginia, USA
Scientists question why aliens would travel for thousands of years just to ‘buzz around airbases and farmers’ fields’. Pictured: A still from Disclosure Day
‘But there is not a single shred of credible evidence that they [aliens] are visiting us now or have visited us in the past.’
Professor Oliver says that people are ‘undoubtedly’ seeing lights in the sky and that UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) do need to be investigated.
However, she says that people should ‘apply a little bit of critical thinking’ when considering the possibility of aliens visiting Earth.
Even if a light in the sky is hard to explain right away, the impossible distances between the stars simply make almost any other non–alien explanation more likely.
Professor Oliver adds: ‘You can’t just simply give it an alien explanation, because you don’t understand it.’
