Daniel Lavelle went “alien-chasing” in the US and wrote a book about it. The late Nick Pope called it a “hugely entertaining, gonzo-style examination of UFOs, ufology and ufologists”. In his Guardian article (The Pentagon released its UFO videos – so I went to the US to chase aliens. This is what I found, 22 April), Lavelle concludes: “Of course, there isn’t a shred of evidence that aliens have visited our planet – and it’s highly unlikely that there ever will be”.
After that, he trots out the old story about interstellar distances and propulsion technology – as if the extraterrestrial hypothesis were the only play in town.
While I have some degree of sympathy for his views on the disclosure circus in the US and the fact that the talking heads there always seem to be the same people with the same rather vague statements lacking solid first-hand rather than hearsay evidence, I cannot but wonder whether a look at serious research and real-life policy developments across the world might have led to a different view.
One year ago, a symposium on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Seti) and unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) research at Durham Law School – a top-50 institution in the QS World University Rankings by subject of 2026 – brought together researchers from several countries and led to the adoption of the Declaration on Seti and UAP Research, now available in 21 languages and endorsed by over 460 people from all walks of life across the globe.
Politics and academia take the subject very seriously now. Maybe the time for gonzo-style approaches should be over. If the story about non-human intelligence on Earth is real, it is no laughing matter.
Why would it have ever been scoffedf at in the first place?
To read more, click here.