I just read a slightly surreal article on the BBC about how the White House has had to officially deny that there has been any contact with aliens. It seems strange that people genuinely think that something as big as alien contact could be hidden for any length of time, but apparently a lot of people do.

The reason they had to do this was because there is a new system in the US which forces a statement from the White House whenever a petition reaches 5000 signatures. This seems like a very low number to me – for something similar in the UK you need 100,000 signatures to get the subject debated in parliament – and the US government must have felt the same because they’ve now raised it to 25000 signatures which appears more reasonable.

There is a lot of money being spent on finding signs of aliens, but the problem is that the distances involved are much too large to comprehend. Who knows if there are aliens at all, but if they do exist then it’s highly likely that they live a long way away. As we all know, no information can travel faster than light, so if a star with a planet orbiting containing aliens was 25,000 light years away then it would take 25,000 years for light to reach use from there.

This is much too far to even contemplate communicating with anything there, let alone travelling there. It’s crazy that people think that aliens are all around use and are even in communication with the US government – there is no evidence for this at all.