Suddenly, everyone is talking about aliens. After decades on the cultural margins, the question of life in the universe beyond Earth is having its day in the Sun. The next proposed flagship space telescope, the Habitable Worlds Explorer, will be tuned to search for signatures of alien life on alien planets, and NASA has a robust, well-funded program in astrobiology. Meanwhile, from breathless newspaper articles about unexplained navy pilot sightings to U.S. congressional testimony with wild claims of government programs hiding crashed saucers, UFOs (unidentified flying objects) and UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) seem to be making their own journey from the fringes.
What are we to make of these twin movements, the scientific search for life on one hand, and the endlessly murky waters of UFO and UAP claims on the other? Looking at history shows that these two very different approaches to the question of extraterrestrial life are, in fact, linked, but not in a good way. For decades, scientists wanting to think seriously about life in the universe faced what’s been called the “giggle factor,” which was directly related to UFOs and their association with fringe culture. More than once, the giggle factor came close to killing off the field known as SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). Now, with new discoveries and technologies making astrobiology a mainstream frontier of astrophysics, understanding this history has become important for anyone trying to understand what comes next. But for me, as a researcher in technosignatures—a new approach to SETI, seeking signs of advanced alien technology—getting past the giggle factor poses an existential challenge.
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