Scientists Discover Biggest Hint We've Found Alien Life

Are we alone in the universe? Some of the smartest folks in the world aren’t convinced. While searching the stars for signs of intelligent life, we’ve discovered what could be actual proof of advanced megastructures out in space that defy human explanation. Could this be first contact, or is it possible alien life is hiding even closer than we ever expected? Let's investigate the six most exciting breakthroughs of recent evidence, which scientists say prove alien life exists.

Dyson Sphere & Project Hephaistos

Searching for intelligent beings out in the universe sounds like an impossibly daunting task. But back in 2015, one group of astronomers at Uppsala University in Sweden decided they were up to the challenge. With a team of just five people, they believed they had a way of finding proof of real-life aliens hiding out in our galaxy, and today their hypothesis seems more likely than ever. But how did they do go about doing it? Well, they decided to look for something called a Dyson Sphere.

Theorized by physicist Freeman Dyson in the 1960s, Freeman imagined an intelligent civilization somewhere out in space thousands of years more advanced than ours. Using our industrial development as a framework, he predicted that each technological innovation made by this civilization would require larger and larger amounts of energy.

With the growing demand, their need for resources would eventually force them to go off-world. After this, the final, and most insane, stage of their interplanetary expansion would be the construction of a massive biosphere that harnessed the raw energy of a star.

To put this into perspective, imagine all the energy currently produced by humans on earth in a single year. Now, how many times more energy do you think the sun produces every second? Ten times more? Try almost 600 million times more. If we could capture all the energy the sun outputs in a single second, we could power the entire world for almost 600 million years at our current energy usage!

But could an alien species really become so advanced that it could capture all this power? Some academics say yes. 3 years after Freeman Dyson published his paper on Dyson Spheres, astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev proposed a 3-tiered scale for ranking potential civilizations based on energy consumption levels.

A type 1 civilization would be advanced enough to harness and store all the potential power of their home planet. That means everything, including wind, solar, geothermal, even the starlight that falls on the planet! Right now, humanity is generally considered a 0.7, with some arguing that we’ll reach type 1 status around the 24th century.

A Type 2 civilization meanwhile would be one that’s developed to the point where it can harvest all the power of its solar system; and a Type 3 civilization an entire galaxy. The latter two civilizations would be capable of building a Dyson sphere.

Since the 1990s, plenty of groups have tried looking for the elusive megastructure, yet all have failed. Which brings us back to our Swedish scientists. Since 2015, using huge swathes of optical data, they’ve been conducting the largest Dyson Sphere hunt in history. They called the search Project Hephaistos, named after the Greek god of fire and blacksmithing, considering that the fire is the star, and it’s like aliens are smithing a sphere around it.

Now it just came down to knowing what signs to look for. Most popular depictions of Dyson Spheres show a massive globe encompassing every inch of the sun. Such an enormous structure, however, might well be mechanically impossible. For one, you’d need to collect a truly absurd amount of material to make something that massive.

If, for example, we decided to build a Dyson sphere around our sun, we’d probably need to break down and use every single planet in our solar system, and even that might not be enough. Plus, all it would take is some floating rock to smack a hole in it or for the sphere to drift a bit too close to the sun and suddenly, our interplanetary construction project would become the galaxy's most enormous scrap heap.

To remedy this, some people have theorized a series of rings moving around a star, which would both require less material and be less likely to drift or be hit. Still others have imagined it as a swarm of hundreds or even millions of solar panels or satellites, all collecting power at once and transmitting back to the host planet. This, of course, would come with its own set of difficulties. No matter their shape though, if they exist even in partial form it should be possible to see them from millions of light-years away.

Project Hephaistos started their search by looking for Kardashev’s proposed Type 3 civilization. Their hope was to find massive dark spots in other galaxies that could indicate a collection of hundreds or millions of Dyson Spheres. However, after analyzing the optical data of over 1,300 disk galaxies, they found that less than 1% showed any potential signs of extraterrestrial megastructures. Not exactly a great result, but the search was far from over.

Their next step was to go to the painstaking lengths of analyzing individual stars in our galaxy for signs of the structures. Project Hephaistos collected a ton of information from various satellites and the 2MASS optical survey, a vast and detailed infrared map of the entire sky. But, unlike images from more state-of-the-art satellites like the James Webb telescope, they weren’t going through beautiful murals showing the vast cosmos.

Instead, they were looking at long strings of data and blurry pictures of dots. And with data on roughly 5 million stars within a thousand light-years of Earth, the task must’ve seemed impossible. But how do you differentiate between a regular star and one with a Dyson Sphere?

Hephaistos narrowed their search by specifically looking for 2 kinds of phenomena; the first was stars with dark spots, potential shadows from a massive object. The second was signs of thermal waste. It’s a basic rule of thermodynamics that any object that absorbs heat will eventually need to convert or expel it. Imagine a car engine; when the fuel ignites, it generates thermal energy. Most of that is converted into power, but some of it escapes as excess heat.

So, just like the engine, if a Dyson megastructure collected all that solar radiation, so too might a small amount of waste heat trail off from the star. This excess trail of infrared radiation could potentially be visible from even millions of lightyears away. So, using these two criteria, they searched. And searched. And finally, in 2024, they found a candidate. In fact, they found a whopping seven candidates, the closest being 466 lightyears away.

So, is that it? Aliens are out there? Well, let’s not pop the champagne just yet. Despite the stars being partially obscured, some argue that rather than the fault of a megastructure, the obstruction is caused by a debris disk, which is a collection of dust and rock floating around a star. Think of it like the asteroid belt in our own solar system.

However, Hephaistos pushed back against this, arguing that all seven candidates are surrounding M-Dwarf stars, which are much smaller, older stars in comparison to our sun. With their weaker gravitational pull, M-dwarfs are far less likely to have a debris disk. But the cynics didn’t stop there.

The trailing heat signatures might not necessarily be from a Dyson Sphere and could actually signify a far more mundane phenomenon: hot dogs, which mean Hot Dust Obscured Galaxies. Three of the candidates were very close to strong radio sources, that is, objects emitting radio waves. This suggested the presence of quasars near them.

For those who aren’t space nerds, a quasar is the ultra-bright core of a distant galaxy, and they often toss up a whole lot of very hot dust. This means they radiate infrared, which could be giving Hephaistos a false positive.

But what about the other four? Well, they’re not guaranteed either. The wavelengths of light emitted by all seven stars are very similar, meaning if the first three really are obscured by hot DOGs, then it’s very likely the rest are too. That said, we don’t really know if hot DOGs are to blame or not, so the Dyson Sphere theory is still feasible. Besides, if there really are alien civilizations out there so advanced they can suck up the energy from stars, it’s not that far-fetched to think they could hide their tracks!

So, despite all the critics, Project Hephaistos have still dug up some pretty insane hints that we’re not alone in this universe. Plus, there’s one more Dyson Sphere candidate I haven’t discussed yet. Tabby’s Star first got attention back in 2016 for exhibiting strange fluctuations in brightness. Put it this way: if Jupiter were to pass in front of our Sun, it’d dim the light by about 0.5%. Tabby’s Star on the other hand has changed by as much as a staggering 22%.

Confused, scientists consulted old photographic plates of the night sky to see if the star had been chronicled. It had, and with shock they realized that over the course of the twentieth century, it’d reduced in brightness by some 20%! This is literally unheard of, leading some to speculate that the gradual construction of a dome-like structure around it was the answer. So, what’s the catch?

Well, in 2017, astronomers noticed that Tabby was starting to dim again and were determined not to miss the opportunity. So, they observed the star using multiple ground telescopes and found that whatever was there blocked different colors of light unevenly, with blue being blocked more than red.

This suggests that rather than some solid structure like a sphere or ring, the dimming is caused by something like a thick sheet of space dust. But if it really was just a bunch of hot space dust like last time, we’d expect the same thermal heat trail as before. And guess what, we don’t have it. So, what gives? Other theories range from a cloud of disintegrating comets to extreme magnetic activity, but the truth is we just don’t know.

Congress Hearing On UFOs

Ever since the infamous Roswell incident way back in 1947, people have suspected the US Government of hiding the existence of aliens. But most accusations were treated as the ramblings of conspiracy-brained crackpots. That is, until now.

On the 13th of November 2024, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing on the covert coverups of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs. It was the follow-up to a 2023 hearing where trusted former intelligence officials accused the US government of hiding evidence of extra-terrestrials. At this 2024 hearing, congressional leaders heard from 2 new whistleblowers, who revealed some truly unbelievable information. The first speaker was Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, who was involved in a supposed UAP sighting in 2015.

He mentioned an email that has a recently declassified footage showing an unknown object flying at truly unbelievable speeds during the training exercise. Initially, the Operations Officer assumed it must’ve been covert government technology. However, the next day Gallaudet said the emails had disappeared without any explanation. That’s pretty suspicious. And things only got weirder.

Unedited Navy Go Fastl video.mp4 by 8 News Now — Las Vegas

In the weeks that followed, Gallaudet attended meetings with high-ranking officials at Fleet Forces Command, where they totally ignored the incident, offering no support or explanation about the UAP sighting at all! Had Gallaudet’s team stumbled upon some classified military tech, or was something far weirder happening? My bet’s on the latter.

But if Gallaudet’s story sounded strange, then former intelligence official Luis Elizondo’s testimony was even more shocking. Elizondo has long claimed he worked with the Defense Department on a shadowy program to investigate UFO sightings. Apparently, he’s seen emails and documentation describing regular surveillance from extraterrestrials across the United States.

He said that not only do they have proof of UAPs moving in and out of US airspace for decades, but that they’ve collected and even started reverse-engineering crashed spacecrafts. Elizondo even accused the US government of secretly holding onto the remains of actual aliens!

The testimony is pretty wild. Only thing is, neither witness could provide any actual evidence for allegedly legal reasons, saying they could only give details in a more private setting. Still, with whistleblowers as high-ranking as Gallaudet and Elizondo, it’s hard not to be suspicious that something very real is happening here.

Life On Mars

No planet has captured the imagination quite like Mars, with countless movies and books imagining Martian civilizations that rival our own. Yet, early exploration has only revealed a dry, empty wasteland. Or has it?

In 2018, NASA's Mars Insight Lander successfully touched down on the red planet. Using a seismometer, the Lander recorded 4 years of strange vibrations from deep within the planet. These vibrations were converted into electrical signals that gave NASA an idea of what’s happening below the surface. And what they found was shocking.

It turns out there are thousands of tunnels with liquid water moving through the planet; in fact, there may be enough water to cover the entire planet's surface in a half-mile-deep ocean, which has some pretty huge implications. Who’s to say that some single-cell organisms aren’t moving through these tunnels as we speak? Or even something bigger?

After the success of the Insight Lander, NASA’s looking to find something even more shocking. How about the remains of actual Martians? While Mars might be a barren wasteland today, we now know that billions of years ago lakes and rivers littered its surface. It’s very possible that some kind of alien life started to develop before Mars gradually lost its atmosphere and dried up.

To find out, NASA sent a rover called the Perseverance to collect dirt samples to send to Earth for analysis. Specifically, from a giant hole known as the Jezero crater.

Made by the impact of a massive asteroid billions of years ago, it’s believed the huge chasm had filled with water, creating a lake roughly 22 miles wide and 100 feet deep. That’s a whole lotta lake, with a whole lotta opportunities for life. If tiny microbes had ever swum in those waters, there’s a chance their remains may be hidden below the crater's sandy floor.

So far, the Perseverance has collected 24 samples, any of which could hold the answer to one of the humanity’s biggest questions. But there’s one problem, actually getting all those samples back to Earth. You might think it's easy since we got the rover there. While it sounds simple to just send someone to Mars, grab it, and come back, there are a few major setbacks.

First off, it’s 30 million miles away, current estimates say a rocket equipped to send a person to Mars would take almost 500 days. Not exactly a short trip. Second, NASA would need to build a rocket weighing over a hundred tons to make the journey. And third, they’d need to find a way to slow down this blue whale-sized rocket enough that it doesn’t go careening straight into the planet. In other words, it’s not feasible.

What NASA has planned instead is a kind of interplanetary relay race, starting with sending another rocket around the year 2030. The Perseverance will place the sample in this rocket; from there, they plan to set off the first liftoff from Mars, carrying them into orbit. Then, a Return Orbiter is supposed to catch the rocket before flying back to Earth.

While this might all sound painfully far away, it’s still crazy to think we could be just a couple of decades away from having undeniable proof of Martian life.

Life On Enceladus

Cutting through our Earth-based biases, it’s worth remembering that life could start on all kinds of celestial bodies. In fact, one of the most likely contenders in our solar system isn’t on a planet at all but on one of Saturn’s ice-covered moons, Enceladus.

Until very recently, this rather small moon was considered relatively uninteresting of the 146 moons circling Saturn. Then, in the mid-2000s, the NASA spacecraft Cassini discovered huge geysers of water spewing from the icy moon’s crust and into space.

This made Enceladus the only other body in our solar system except for Earth with liquid water on its surface. Their findings also showed the water has incredible chemical diversity, containing both carbon dioxide and ammonia two essential pillars to creating life.

But perhaps the most important discovery wasn’t that; it’s the potentially warm water 19 miles below the surface! Because Enceladus is so close to Saturn, it causes something called Tidal Heating. This is when the gravitational forces from Saturn cause the moon to shift, bending and twisting its core and, in the case of Enceladus, breaking up all that deep ice.

This process is similar to how our own moon causes ocean tides but on a much stronger scale. It’s down in this warm water where life has the best chance of developing!

Ever since these major discoveries, Enceladus has had something of a glow-up in academic circles, sparking questions about whether it could offer a habitable environment for all kinds of aquatic critters. The easiest way to know for sure would involve sending another, more advanced craft not only to collect more ice grains shot up by the moon's geysers, but to actually land on the surface. But it’s not likely until at least the 2030s.

Enceladus is just 311 miles in diameter, which makes it a mere seventh of the size of our moon. This means it has a much weaker orbit, and considering Enceladus is right beside the second largest Planet circling our sun, any approaching rocket is gonna struggle to get the landing right. Plus, any mission with a chance of success would need to carry a lot of extra fuel, which is a lot of extra money.

The proposed Orbilander mission is currently expected to run up a cost of about $3 billion, launch in 2038 and not land until 2050.

Wow Signal

Whether from the sun, other planets, or objects from far outside our solar system; The Earth is constantly being bombarded with radio waves. But what if, through all that noise, alien life was trying to make contact? The idea is more realistic than you might imagine.

On the 15th of August 1977, the Big Ear radio observatory at Ohio State University received a shockingly powerful transmission from up above. It was 30 times more powerful than any other observed background noise. It lasted an astonishing 72 seconds, and on receiving the signal, astronomer Jerry R Ehman excitedly scrawled “Wow” next to the reading. Ever since, it became known as the Wow signal.

So, where did it come from? Was it some advanced civilization sending out a message across the stars? Many have tried to find out. Some cynical astronomers claim human made interference simply led to a false reading. Others argue a powerful radioactive flare from the sun shot through an interstellar cloud of hydrogen gas and was picked up by the observatory.

But some people disagree. The frequency was the same as the one neutral hydrogen emits, one of the simplest elements around. So, they argue that if there is intelligent life out there, they’d also know how common this frequency is. Therefore, they could’ve used it to send out a signal they knew we’d receive, maybe some kind of universal SOS. Although, at this stage, it feels like we’ve wrapped my tin foil hat a bit too tight.

It does raise a good question, though: if an alien was trying to contact us using radio waves, what would it even look like? For decades, Astronomers have focused on looking for something called a radio Techno Signature, a kind of radio wave that appears to be sent by some form of advanced technology.

To do so, they scour vast datasets looking for distinct, unusual patterns, which can be a slow, dull process. That’s where new Artificial Intelligence technology is coming in clutch. Peter Ma, an undergrad at the University of Toronto, has incorporated it into his work to help detect 8 new Techno Signatures, all emitted from 5 stars between 30 and 90 light years away. While these exciting finds might not be from E.T., it’s still a massive step towards us one day finding a real alien signal.

Crash Landing

Did you know that every year, close to 17,000 meteorites fall to Earth? While most simply turn to dust in the atmosphere, one meteor that fell just outside Papua New Guinea might’ve hidden something truly astonishing.

In 2014, an interstellar object entered our atmosphere before crashing into the ocean near Manus Island. Most simply assumed it was a common meteor. Except in 2019, it caught the eye of theoretical astrophysicist and Harvard professor Avi Loeb.

One detail that immediately got his attention was the incredible speed of the object. The very fastest meteorites rarely hit 90,000mph, but this one? It rocketed to Earth at a staggering 110,000mph. Avi was convinced this indicated that it was the first documented case of an object from outside our solar system falling to Earth, so convinced he gave his theory a confidence rating of 99.999%.

And just 3 years later, he’d be proven right, with the US Department of Defense putting out a letter backing up his claim. But Avi didn’t stop there, he also theorized that the crashed object might be of alien origin.

Determined not to rest on his laurels, in 2023, Avi led an expedition to the crash site. The crew boarded a ship with a sled of magnets attached to it, which they lowered to the ocean floor before combing 100 miles of the area. Once they took their findings back to the lab, they discovered they’d picked up more than 700 submillimeter-sized spherules of metal.

So tiny they had to be viewed under a microscope, these strange pearl-like objects were made of iron, magnesium and titanium. If they did come from the asteroid, they’d be the first metals ever discovered from beyond our solar system.

But how can we know for sure? Some have already pushed back against Avi’s findings, arguing that the spheres are nothing but human-produced coal ash. Others say they were made by a different asteroid thousands of years ago. Some scholars have even argued that the acoustic data Avi supposedly used to track the location of the meteor was off. They claim that the sound Avi believed to be the meteor was actually just the sound of a passing truck being picked up by the seismometer.

Fortunately, Avi’s not let the naysayers get him down, and intends to go back to the Pacific and seek out more of these spherules in the hopes of tracking even larger debris, maybe even the object's core. With that, he might just find out if this meteor shows signs of a far more sophisticated origin.

While Avi is scouring the ocean floor, others are still searching space, specifically a 1,300-foot-long cigar-shaped object that flew through our solar system in 2017. This weird rock is Oumuamua, and with its elongated shape, and the fact it was observed to significantly vary its speed as it moved through our system, some are theorizing the object may actually be some kind of alien probe.

However, several scientists suggested Oumuamua was a natural, albeit unusually-shaped space rock, and may have been accelerated as the sun melted ice from its side, creating a propulsive trail of force. Still, some scientists are holding out hope for Oumuamua.

Meanwhile, other folks believe proof of aliens won’t be found up in space or deep underwater, but walking among us. Whether it's strange sightings caught on home video cameras, supposed leaked government recordings or nightmarish firsthand encounters. Some of them have been debunked as a kid with pants on his head and a realistic-looking short film project.

However, this fella, or Skinny Bob as he’s often called, is trickier to place.

alien grey extraterrestrial zeta reticuli ufo leaked footage by ivan0135

This grainy footage is often touted as being leaked from Soviet Russia, and alongside other supposed leaked footage, appeared on the ivan0135 YouTube channel in 2011. The internet is awash with people arguing over its validity, although if this was real government footage, I somehow doubt they’d let this video stay up with over one million views. But maybe that’s exactly what they want me to think! The channel hasn’t uploaded since 2011, so we may never get the smoking proof that blows this story wide open.

But if you want something ground-shaking, in 2022, the world was stunned by the reported discovery of actual mummified aliens. Ufologist and journalist Jaime Maussan presented a pair of bizarre specimens to the Congress of Mexico, which he stated under oath that scientists had dated back 1,000 years and were recovered from Peru back in 2017. He stopped just short of calling them extraterrestrials, but with the three fingered hands and oversized heads; the press jumped to the obvious conclusion.

'Mummified aliens' unveiled to Mexico Congress by ABC7

Crazily, when shipped onto a cargo-flight to Mexico, these bodies were seized by Peruvian authorities. Passed over to forensics, investigators shockingly concluded that these bodies were in fact, nothing more than dolls made of paper, glue and metal, plus human and animal bones. Some argue this is an all-too-convenient cover-up, but let's leave those decisions to you, humans!

If you were amazed at these biggest hints of alien life, you might want to read about the best evidence proving alien life exists. Thanks for reading!