"Lots Of Stories": Astrophysicist Reacts To Congressional Testimony On Aliens

Astrophysicist Adam Frank weighed in on recent US congressional testimony about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) and alleged alien life, dismissing the claims as just “stories”.

Congressional leaders have been exploring the idea that unexplained objects are violating US airspace and that the military may have been secretly recovering these crafts to enhance its technology.

During a Wednesday hearing by the House Oversight Committee, witnesses discussed the evidence surrounding UAPs. One witness said, “What the American people need to know is that the US military and intelligence community are seeing a huge amount of visual and other information, still photos, video photos.” When asked about alien bodies, the witness confirmed, “Yes,” but gave no further details. They also mentioned, “Strong evidence that they are non-human, higher intelligence,” when discussing the nature of UAPs.

In response to these claims, Adam Frank, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Rochester, expressed his scepticism in an interview with CNN. He said, “As you heard one of the speakers saying, well, anecdotally, these are always stories about military or intelligence people who have heard from somebody else, who's heard from somebody else.”

Frank, whose work focuses on the search for life beyond Earth, added, “And I got to tell you, as an astronomer, whose job is all about finding life in the universe, it's very frustrating because these are spectacular claims. And listen, I kind of hope they're true because the most important question for me is, is there life in the universe, but there's never any actual data that a scientist could work with.”

He went on, “And it's been decades now that we've been hearing these stories, and there still is no actual data. So I still have the exact same scepticism. You know, show me the spaceship. Until then, it's a lot of stories.”

The astrophysicist continued to emphasise the need for solid evidence, saying, “My colleagues and I hope that soon we'll have data where we can make a claim that we found alien life. And we expect that, you know, our colleagues are going to come at us hard. If you make a claim that is extraordinary, you need to have pretty strong evidence because, you know, human beings are very easy at fooling themselves, especially about things they want to be true.”

Mr Frank stressed the role of scientific rigour in understanding the unknown. “And we invented science, so we'd have a way to know what was really true. And I am bothered by people making these incredible claims as if, well, that's enough, now we know, and we don't know. You know, this is just believing. I don't want to believe. I want to know. I'm a scientist.”