Aliens and photonics--the truth is out there

The recent return to television of The X-Files spurred me to revisit some news stories that I had compiled over the past year related to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Whether or not you like the show or believe in aliens, you may be surprised at just how much legitimate research on the alien/UFO phenomenon is being undertaken using photonics-related technology.

Earlier this month, Laser Focus World placed several caveats on a news story entitled "Laser cloak could hide Earth from extraterrestrial beings"; that is, while we found many potential scientific flaws with the methods that were being used to potentially cloak the Earth, the very fact that a scientist would even consider undertaking such a monumental task is downright fascinating to me. His idea is to use a powerful laser to compensate for the intensity "dip" that we observe when a planet traverses the sun. Sadly, the desire to cloak the Earth is in response to a widely shared societal fear that aliens may want to use our Earth for unsavory purposes (as fictionalized in the movie Mars Attacks!--see clip below) and extinguish our species just as generations of colonists extinguished native peoples.