Forget Mars. The Aliens Are In Denver

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While NASA is spending millions of dollars going to Mars and doing dull stuff like digging down through Martian permafrost looking for signs of microscopic life, a guy in Denver is doing the heavy lifting of proving that some really interesting aliens are walking around right here on Earth.

A video that purportedly shows a living, breathing space alien will be shown to the news media Friday in Denver.

Jeff Peckman, who is pushing a ballot initiative to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission in Denver to prepare the city for close encounters of the alien kind, said the video is authentic and convinced him that aliens exist.

"As impressive as it is, it's still one tiny portion in the context of a vast amount of peripheral evidence," he said Wednesday. "It's really the final visual confirmation of what you already know to be true having seen all the other evidence."

When Peckman went before city officials this month to discuss his proposed ET initiative, he promised to show the video.

Peckman said the general public will have to wait to see it because it's being included in a documentary by Stan Romanek.

"No one will be allowed to film the segment with the extraterrestrial because there is an agreement in place limiting that kind of exposure during negotiations for the documentary," he said.

But people won't have to wait too long to see it for themselves.

"There is an open, public meeting in about a month in Colorado Springs," Peckman said. "We'll hope to do one in Denver at some point, and then in a few months, there will be the documentary that anybody can have, and it'll have the footage."

An instructor at the Colorado Film School in Denver scrutinized the video "very carefully" and determined it was authentic, Peckman said.

That's right; an "instructor at the Colorado Film School" checked it out "very carefully" and gave it a thumbs up. So I guess NASA can pretty much turn out the lights on that boring old hunk of metal on Mars. You don't have to go to Mars to find aliens. Turns out they're in Denver, instead.

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UPDATE:



If you look really, really closely at the 22 seconds that have been released of this reportedly three minute video you can see your first, real live alien. And for those of you out there who remain snarky cynics just remember that "an instructor at the Colorado Film School in Denver scrutinized the video "very carefully" and determined it was authentic." So shut up, you.

Is This A Rock Or A Martian? Conspiracy Theorists Welcome

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This is certainly the kind of event that kooks and nutbags of all varieties have been waiting for. The object discussed in the video is reminiscent of the shadow that launched a million maniacs (aka: the Martian face)

At the time the "face" was first photographed it was taken by the gullible and those who like to make money off them as being an artifact of some Martian civilization right of out of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series. Sadly, it turned out to be a very unromantic collection of rocks, which is what the white speck in the video will probably turn out to be as well.

The good thing about the kind of silliness this sort of thing engenders is that it helps keep interest high in the space program and paves the way for the day when something really alien shows up.

Of course if that white dot in the video turns out to be some crashed starship from a galaxy far, far away, this post is going to make me look very bad...I think I'll take my chances.

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To Seek Out New Life...

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The search for life on other worlds ramped up again yesterday when...

The Mars Phoenix lander touched down in the far north of the Red Planet, after a 680 million-km (423 million-mile) journey from Earth.

The probe is equipped with a robotic arm to dig for water-ice thought to be buried beneath the surface.

It will begin examining the site for evidence of the building blocks of life in the next few days.

Phoenix is just the latest in a wide ranging group of programs, at least part of whose goal it is to detect life elsewhere in the universe.

SETI continues to scan the skies looking for intelligent signals of non-terrestrial origin. Enlisting the public in the search, SETI allows thousands of non-scientists to participate by having standard pc's analyze the data SETI collects. You can download the software do just that here.

To date astronomers have detected over 230 extraterrestrial planets orbiting other stars:

The scores of newly identified exoplanets are the result of the numerous techniques now available to planet-hunting scientists. Peg 51 b was discovered using the radial velocity technique whereby astronomers look for slight wiggles in a star's motion caused by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets. This so-called wobble technique was also used to spot Gliese 581 C.

The transit method, another tool used by planet hunters, requires that a planet pass directly in front of its star as seen from Earth. The planet blocks some of the star's light that would reach Earth, and this slight dip in starlight can be used to calculate the planet's size.

Scientists can also spot alien worlds by observing the way a planet-harboring foreground star bends and brightens light from a background star. This technique is called gravitational microlensing. The presence of an extrasolar planet can also be inferred from the dusty debris disks that shroud some stars.

Raising the stakes

Stakes in the search for extrasolar planets have risen even higher with the recent launch of the European Space Agency's planet-hunting spacecraft, COROT, which will use the transit technique to monitor thousands of stars simultaneously. Over the course of its two-and-a-half year mission, it is expected to find up to 40 new rocky worlds, along with tens of new gas giants.

The NASA Kepler mission, scheduled to launch next year, is even more ambitious. The spacecraft would be the first capable of detecting Earth-sized planets in our galaxy. NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder mission is currently on the backburner indefinitely, but it would have the same capability as Kepler. If launched, the satellites will mark an important step in the quest to answer one of humanity's oldest questions: Are we alone in the universe?

That's if Earth-bound astronomers don't make the discovery first. The discovery of Gliese 581 C showed the radial velocity technique could spot planets much smaller than scientists had predicted only a few years ago.

Here's an interesting video on the topic:



The Phoenix lander is an important contribution to what is becoming a crowded field of study.

Hot Air also reports on the landing