Aliens and flying objects. Are there any competitors in the universe?

A few days ago, a Mexican press show inside his country's parliament sparked what he claimed were the mortuary corpses of aliens more than a thousand years old, the old-new debate about the fact that there are aliens competing with humans in the universe, or at least alien objects watching and waiting for him.

Over the past decade, these kinds of allegations of alien existence have come to prominence, most recently a week ago when Mexican journalist Jaime Musán displayed mummified bodies in small wooden and glass cans during a hearing on aliens in the Mexican Congress in the presence of experts and politicians from Japan, Argentina, France, Brazil and Peru, to discuss "unspecified alien phenomena" (UAP).

The journalist, who is famous for believing in the presence of unidentified flying objects, said that these creatures were found in Peru, and are estimated to be a thousand years old. He testified under the oath that 30% of the DNA of these organisms is unknown, and that they are not related to humans near or far, referring to the fact that they are aliens, but all these claims have not been based on scientific research.

But others did not stop there, going on to say that they received messages and signals from outer space, and say they believe they may have been sent by extraterrestrials living on other planets trying to communicate with humans.

The British newspaper "Daily Mirror" published last June that "an impossible object sent whistles to the ground." Astronomers said the mysterious instrument was sending repeated radio signals every 18 minutes, unlike anything seen before in space.

New old belief in the existence of aliens

The most prominent reason why some believe that there are extraterrestrials is that we humans inhabit a small planet orbiting a sun that is considered medium in size compared to other stars, and our solar system is only a small part of the Milky Way galaxy, which contains 200 billion stars and 11 billion Earth-like planets that we have not yet been able to discover.

Therefore, some firmly believe that there is life, and perhaps even life, parallel to ours due to the vastness of the universe.

But this belief is very old, and was first put forward by the Italian monk Giordano Bruno in the 16th century, in ideas that contradicted the teachings of Catholicism, and paid for by death by burning.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, scientists assumed the existence of life on other planets, especially Mars and Venus, which science later proved to be incorrect.

In 1960, astronomer Frank Drake tried to pick up any space signals, pointing the radio signal receiver at two near-Earth stars, Epsilon Eridani, and Tau City, to detect any strange signals coming from space that suggested the existence of rational life.

People will remember this shot as the silliest, silliest and cheapest pranks that have ever passed on the topic of aliens. Unfortunately, it did not escape before passing the Mexican Congress, and it will one day be one of the most ridiculous material ever. pic.twitter.com/n346LOcYwj

— Dr. Mohamed Qasem Dr. Mohammad Qasim (@mqasem) September 13, 2023

In 1971, astronomer Carl Sagan persuaded NASA to design a message and send it to potential aliens in outer space aboard the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft, which launched in 1972 and 1973, respectively.

Scientists chose the letter to be in the form of drawings like those left to us by the ancient pharaohs and Greeks, but we did not receive an answer.

Later, NASA decided to repeat the ball, but with a more comprehensive audio and visual message to introduce space civilizations to the planet, and included musical pieces from different eras and civilizations, including Bach and Beethoven, and a set of natural sounds such as the sound of thunder, water purr and animals, in addition to the human greeting voice in 55 languages, including Arabic. But it seems that the "supposed aliens" did not understand "our music".

Most recently, Russian millionaire Yuri Milner invested $100 million over 10 years to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. The study targets nearby stars, the nearest 100 galaxies and the center of the Milky Way, and we are still waiting for the result.

Most recently, on July 26, former US intelligence officer David Grouch asserted at a congressional hearing that "authorities are hiding evidence they have about a spacecraft and the remains of non-human beings."

The congressional hearing also saw two former U.S. Navy officers testify that they witnessed unknown alien phenomena. Rep. Tim Birchett also backed those who say the government is hiding information about "unexplained anomalies."

In 2021, the Pentagon issued a report on anomalous space phenomena, which talked about the existence of more than 140 cases of these phenomena that did not find an explanation.

Ironically, a 2015 poll showed that 56% of Germans believe there are intelligent aliens, but don't want to communicate with us.

From an Islamic point of view, scientists say that there is nothing to prevent the existence of aliens, nor is there anything in the Qur'an or Sunnah that prevents the existence of life on other planets, so there is no certainty that such aliens exist or prevent their existence.

Flying Objects

But it's not just what some believe to be aliens; some point to "unidentified flying objects" observed by U.S. military pilots, while the Pentagon fears they are linked to espionage.

The Pentagon released videos taken by U.S. Navy pilots of what they considered unidentified space objects dating back to 2004 and 2015.

But U.S. intelligence doesn't view this as extraterrestrial objects, so it fears that China or Russia could test hypersonic technologies that move ten times or 20 times faster than the speed of sound and can be easily moved.

The term "unidentified flying objects" (UFOs) has been replaced by the term "unspecified anomalies" (UAP) in order to destigmatize the subject, which is widely associated with speculation about extraterrestrial visits to our planet.

NASA defines these phenomena as "the observation of events in the sky that cannot be scientifically identified as aircraft or a known natural phenomenon."

NASA settles controversy

But NASA has settled the controversy — at least for now — asserting that there is no conclusive evidence of UFOs.

With multiple space agencies, including the European Space Agency and their counterparts in China, India and Russia, none of them has yet reported any trace of any form of life in or outside the solar system.

Days earlier, on Sept. 14, NASA released a report by an independent study team of 16 experts that highlighted the challenges in interpreting observations of unidentified alien phenomena (UAP), citing a lack of baseline data including evidence or witness reports.

NASA has previously defined a seven-step scale, called the Life Confidence Discovery (COLD) scale, to confirm the existence of other life in the universe:

The first two steps to identify aliens or aliens are based on small pieces of evidence, such as the detection of chemical or biological agents.

The third and fourth steps analyze whether the environment around this guide is truly habitable.

The final crucial steps involve sending samples back to Earth to check if there is life elsewhere on the planet.

US scientists have also designed a sophisticated observatory that conducts round-the-clock astronomical scans to detect whether there are aliens approaching the Milky Way.

Does artificial intelligence play a role in the discovery of aliens?

To try to answer this question, the City Institute in California has launched the "Search for Intelligent Life Beyond Earth" (SETI) project, which uses the algorithms of a machine learning system — a form of artificial intelligence system — to alert indications of intelligent aliens that humans may overlook, and distinguish them from Earth jamming.

According to the journal "Nature" (Nature) that the research team examined data collected from the observations of 820 stars using the telescope "Robert C. Bird" with a diameter of 100 meters at the "Green Bank" observatory, where the research team designed a machine learning system for data analysis, resulting in the discovery of nearly 3 million interesting signals, but excluded the majority of them and considered ground jamming, to limit their number to 8 signals that seem more important.

But the research team eventually came away empty-handed from these observations, and all eight signals disappeared when the team's tools overwhelmed the hearing again in search of them.

The promise, however, is that this approach could be used to analyse other data, such as the flood of data generated from the 64 observations of the Karo Array Telescopes in South Africa.

A few days ago, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson confirmed that the agency uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to search the sky for unknown cases, noting that the matter is done transparently. Will the near future really reveal aliens to us?