Looking for inspiration recently I found Edge.org, a website that purports to “seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds” and put them to work on the world’s most difficult problems. A bit presumptuous, but I was intrigued enough to dig a bit deeper. This year in 2013, the contributors (which range from psychologists to futurologists...

A new book by authors Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel explores what might happen if UFOs turned out to really be from another world. There are some insightful ideas contained in this book, regrettably packaged with credulity-straining aspects of the ‘disclosure’ movement. The consequences of extraterrestrial contact are much more important and vital...

Riding on the train into Valencia the other day, I noticed that fresh graffiti tags had appeared on concrete barriers that are being put in as part of a high-speed rail expansion. The economy in Spain is not doing well at the moment, and there is a lot of youth unemployment, which probably explains the proliferation of graffiti art. A moral panic...

Google frequently runs hypothetical scenarios to test the robustness of its infrastructure, one of which has involved a surprise invasion from outer space, according to company executives. Head of security for Google Enterprise Eran Feigenbaum told journalists that last year the search engine provider considered what might happen to its operations...

One of the memes that help to constitute the modern UFO myth has it that craft piloted by extraterrestrials have crashed on Earth, the crash debris being secretly recovered by military authorities acting without democratic oversight. Indeed, the modern Roswell myth has been so thoroughly traveled that it now frequently stands in as a metonym for the...

Would an alien civilization that evolved within a perfect computer simulation be any less interesting to us than a ‘real’ alien civilization discovered in outer space? This is the fundamental question raised by John Smart’s STEM compression hypothesis, which suggests that humanity and indeed every intelligent species in the universe...

Enrico Fermi was a physicist working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950s. Following a discussion about extraterrestrial intelligence with colleagues, he apocryphally posed the question, ‘Where are they?’. By which he meant that it seemed impossible, if life existed elsewhere in the universe, that we had not yet seen evidence of it given...

An idea popularized in the Matrix trilogy of films suggests that humanity could be living in a giant computer simulation, blissfully unaware of some other, external reality. Of course, this idea did not begin with the Wachowski brothers – it has actually puzzled Western philosophers at least as far back as Descartes. The problem is that the proposition...

Nick Redfern is an alternative historian and author of a number of books on UFOs and government secrecy. Unlike a lot of conspiracy theorists, however, Redfern brings a thoughtful and critical eye to these questions and complements his speculation with methodical archival research. That’s why the title of his most recent book is likely misleading....