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Under fire for its sluggish processing of files from President Clinton's White House, the National Archives released files and photographs yesterday responding to 14 Freedom of Information Act requests from members of the public. The records appear unlikely to contain any political bombshells, though there could be fodder for the tabloids. Many of the requests sought information about the Clinton White House's records on unidentified flying objects or UFOs. The files detail the predilection of one of Mr. Clinton's chiefs of staff, John Podesta, for the extraterrestrial-laden television series, "the X-Files." A listing of the newly-released files is available on...

Less than a week after a senior U.N. official confirmed that the U.N. Secretariat would hold a meeting on extraterrestrial policy if it were requested by a U.N. member nation, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Dept. and U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice’s offices will not even discuss the matter on the record. On March 18, 2009, Juan Carlos Brandt, U.N. Chief of Advocacy and Special Events stated to this reporter, “If there is one (1) U.N. member state that would ask for a meeting on extraterrestrials, it would take place.” The office of the President of the 63rd U.N....

NASA has agreed to turn over documents relating to the alleged crash of a UFO in Kecksburg, Pa., in 1965, the SCI FI Channel announced. The news comes a day after SCI FI said it would pursue legal action against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to release its records on the incident. NASA informed Lee Helfrich, attorney for the Channel-sponsored Coalition for Freedom of Information, that it is releasing 36 pages of documents, the Channel said. The release comes after 10 months of pursuing the records through the Freedom of Information Act. The Department of Defense and the U.S....

There are many weighty issues in this year’s presidential campaign, from tax policy to how to deal with the threat from ISIS. But Hillary Clinton and her staff have repeatedly made time to address another apparently pressing concern: the possibility that aliens have visited Earth, and the U.S. government has covered it up. On Thursday, Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, told CNN that federal agencies  “could do a much better job in answering the quite legitimate questions that people have about what's going on with unidentified aerial phenomena." He said Clinton would push for answers if she gets to occupy...

Hillary Clinton's expected campaign chairman has an eclectic record that includes UFO advocacy and having to apologize for comparing Republicans to killer cultists. John Podesta, a senior White House aide, will leave his government job in February for Clinton's campaign, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. "The precise role Mr. Podesta would play in a Clinton campaign is unclear. People familiar with discussions said he likely would be campaign chairman, should she decide to run," The Journal reported. Despite the ambiguity, it is clear from additional reports that Podesta is expected to at least hold a "senior title" in Clinton's...

Outgoing senior Obama adviser John Podesta reflected on his latest White House stint Friday, listing his favorite moments and biggest regrets from the past year. Chief among them: depriving the American people of the truth about UFOs.

"I think the American people can handle the truth about this," Clinton's campaign manager said. John Podesta, campaign manager for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and a longtime advocate for government disclosure of UFO files, said Clinton is ready to look into the issue. "I've talked to Hillary about that," Podesta told KLAS-TV Politics NOW co-host Steve Sebelius during a campaign stop in Las Vegas. "There are still classified files that could be declassified." He continued: "I think I've convinced her that we need an effort to kind of go look at that and declassify as much as we can,...

Call Mulder and Scully, Hillary has a job opening The United States is facing a lot of problems these days. We’ve got Islamic terrorism, mass shootings, hundreds of thousands of illegals flooding across our southern border, and an out-of-control federal government drowning in debt. We also, apparently, have concerns about aliens. No, we’re not talking about families wandering in from Tijuana, we’re talking about little green men who come to Earth to slaughter our cattle and probe us in our sleep. Don’t worry, though. Hillary Clinton is aware of your concerns and - if elected president - she’s going to...

While Hawking fears that giving aliens our cosmic address could potentially bring death and ruin — much like what happened to many groups of Native Americans when Europeans invaded North America — Tarter thinks that aliens advanced enough to skip across star systems and reach Earth will be friendly, not aggressive.  

Two big ideas often come up in discussions about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. One is the Drake Equation, which estimates the number of civilizations in our Galaxy whose signals we might be able to detect--potentially thousands, according to plausible estimates. The other is the so-called Fermi paradox, which claims that we should see intelligent aliens here if they exist anywhere, because they would inevitably colonize the Galaxy by star travel--and since we don't see any obvious signs of aliens here, searching for their signals is pointless. The Drake Equation is perfectly genuine: it was created by astronomer...

"We either caught something shortly after an event like two planets crashing together or alien intelligence," said Dr. Gerald Harp, senior scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, referring to the baffling light variations seen in the Kepler star KIC 8462852. And he and a team from the Institute are working hard at this moment to determine which of the two it is. Beginning last Friday (Oct. 16), the Institute's Allen Telescope Array (ATA) was taken off its normal survey schedule and instead focused on KIC 8462852, one of the 150,000-plus stars studied by NASA's Kepler Mission to...

The Fermi Paradox By Tim Urban Facebook275k Twitter0 Google+0 Pinterest0 Everyone feels something when they’re in a really good starry place on a really good starry night and they look up and see this:Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old “existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour.” But everyone feels something.Physicist Enrico Fermi felt something too—”Where is everybody?”________________A really starry sky seems vast—but all we’re looking at is our very local neighborhood. On the very...

22 Articles on Whether Or Not To Search for Extraterrestrial Life. Full Title:Commentaries: Stephen Hawking's Aliens. The Search for Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life. Project Breakthrough Listen Abstract Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner have launched a $100m search for intelligent alien life beyond solar system; a program focused on listening for radio signals coming from advanced civilizations far beyond the solar system, which, presumably, rely on similar technologies as those of the present civilizations of Earth. The search will be 50 times more sensitive, and cover 10 times more sky, than previous hunts for alien life. According to Stephen Hawking the effort...

Whistle-blower Edward Snowden has some strong opinions on communications — even when those communications are coming from aliens. The former intelligence-agency contractor turned fugitive was an unexpected guest on famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk podcast on September 18. And, inevitably, the two got to talking about extraterrestrials. Snowden became an infamous household name in 2013 when he leaked classified documents divulging the government's top-secret mass-surveillance program, which involved collecting personal information on Americans via phone records without their knowledge. When the news broke, the US charged him with theft and espionage, and he's now living in Russia where he...

Professor Matthew Bailes said 'the history of weak civilisations contacting more advanced civilisations is not a happy one' "... he warned that making contact with aliens capable of transmitting powerful signals to Earth over tens of thousands of light years could lead humanity into disaster, because they're likely to be so much more advanced."

Is there anyone else out there in the universe? The endeavor to answer that eternal question got a serious shot in the arm this week thanks to Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner. At the Royal Society in London, the billionaire announced the launch of Breakthrough Listen, a 10-year, $100 million initiative to search for signs of extraterrestrial life. Related: The Power of Planning: NASA's Pluto Flyby Was Epic and Amazing Aided by the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in W. Va., the CSIRO Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia and the Lick Telescope in at the Lick Observatory in...

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announces most comprehensive hunt for alien life.You could say that the silence has been deafening. Since its beginnings more than half a century ago, the dedicated search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has failed to detect the presence of alien civilizations. But at London’s Royal Society today (20 July), Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced a shot in the arm for SETI: a US$100-million decadal project to provide the most comprehensive hunt for alien communications so far. The initiative, called Breakthrough Listen, will see radio telescopes at Green Bank in West Virginia, the Parkes Observatory in Australia, and...

A $100 Million Infusion for SETI Researchby Paul Gilster on July 20, 2015 SETI received a much needed boost this morning as Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, along with physicist Stephen Hawking and a panel including Frank Drake, Ann Druyan, Martin Rees and Geoff Marcy announced a $100 million pair of initiatives to reinvigorate the search. The first of these, Breakthrough Listen, dramatically upgrades existing search methods, while Breakthrough Message will fund an international competition to create the kind of messages we might one day send to other stars, although the intention is also to provoke the necessary discussion and debate...

On Monday, famed physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian tycoon Yuri Milner held a news conference in London to announce their new project: injecting $100 million and a whole lot of brain power into the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, an endeavor they're calling Breakthrough Listen. "We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth," Hawking said at Monday's news conference, "So in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life." Geoffrey Marcy, a University of California, Berkeley, astronomer who found most of our first exoplanets, also spoke at the event as part of the group's brain trust....