Seth Shostak
Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute
You may not see massive UFO exhibits at your local science museum, but there’s no dearth of saucer stories infesting my email. Every day I receive several reports of alien sightings, extraterrestrial plans for Earth, and agitated screeds about the reluctance of scientists to take the whole subject seriously. Plenty of people think they have convincing evidence for other-worldly visitors, and they want me to know.
Allow me to first note that this is a phenomenon worthy of attention. If aliens are really hanging out in our ‘hood, it’s hard to imagine any other fact more worthy of study. If not, then why does such a large fraction of the populace insist on believing they’re here?
Note that few, if any, of these emails are penned by hoaxers. The correspondents are sincere, and many simply wish to help us in our search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Others are ticked off, usually at me.
It’s a fire hose of correspondence, but stepping back a bit from the massive electronic corpus, it strikes me that virtually all of it falls into one of four categories. For the curious and interested, I list these subject areas below, together with a modestly elaborated description of each.