The mystery of extraterrestrial life and earthlings

If the hugely popular 1982 film E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, caught the world’s fancy, and the Men in Black science fiction comedy film series debuting in 1997 approached the topic in a lighter vein, any news about the possibility of finding extraterrestrial life continues to attract attention always. Two separate developments last week prove this.The first incident in Mexico City, saw the alleged bodies of two "non-human beings” presented during a congressional hearing, generating a mixture of surprise, disbelief and ridicule on social media on Wednesday, as reported by AFP.The purported mummified remains were exhibited on Tuesday – the first time the Mexican Congress has officially addressed the issue of possible extraterrestrial life.The alleged corpses, which had a grayish colour and facial features similar to humans, were brought by Jaime Maussan, a controversial Mexican journalist and researcher who reported finding them in Peru in 2017."They are non-human beings. We don’t want to call them extraterrestrials because we don’t know,” Maussan said during the session called by ruling party lawmaker Sergio Gutierrez, who defended the event as being in the "public interest.”Maussan cited carbon dating analysis by the National Autonomous University of Mexico that he said showed "these beings are around 1,000 years old.”During the hearing, Gutierrez said Maussan requested the session after a US congressional committee in July was told by a former intelligence official that humans were not alone in the universe and American authorities were covering up the evidence.In June, the US space agency Nasa held its first public meeting on the issue, and urged a more rigorous scientific approach to clarify the origin of so-called unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).The second development was on Thursday when a Nasa panel recommended in a report that the US space agency increase its efforts to gather information on UAP, by the government – and play a larger role in helping the Pentagon detect them, Reuters said. The panel, comprised experts in scientific fields ranging from physics to astrobiology."Nasa has a variety of existing and planned Earth- and space-observing assets, together with an extensive archive of historic and current data sets, which should be directly leveraged to understand UAP,” the report said."Although Nasa’s fleet of Earth-observing satellites typically lack the spatial resolution to detect relatively small objects such as UAP, their state-of-the-art sensors can be directly utilised to probe the state of the local earth, oceanic, and atmospheric conditions that are spatially and temporally coincident with UAPs initially detected via other methods. Thus, Nasa’s assets can play a vital role by directly determining whether specific environmental factors are associated with certain reported UAP behaviours or occurrences,” the report said.The US government in the past few years has made several disclosures of information it has gathered regarding a subject that once was met by virtual official silence. The new report called UAPs "one of our planet’s greatest mysteries.”"Despite numerous accounts and visuals, the absence of consistent, detailed, and curated observations means we do not presently have the body of data needed to make definitive, scientific conclusions about UAP,” it added.The US government issued a watershed report in 2021 compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in conjunction with a Navy-led task force encompassing numerous observations, mostly from military personnel of UAP.The report included some UAP cases that previously came to light in the Pentagon’s release of video from naval aviators showing enigmatic aircraft off the US East and West Coasts exhibiting speed and manoeuvrability exceeding known aviation technologies and lacking any visible means of propulsion or flight-control surfaces. The report said defence and intelligence analysts lacked sufficient data to determine the nature of some of the objects.