extraterrestrial life

During the Cold War, American and Soviet scientists embarked on an unprecedented quest to contact extraterrestrials.

The Viking missions set the gold standard for landing on Mars, but they couldn't resolve the big question — are we alone?

The controversial career of John E. Mack, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard psychiatrist who wrote best-selling books on UFO abduction.

Or, why families under siege make for great movies.

No, aliens haven’t visited the Earth. Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?

Betty and Barney Hill lost three hours on a New Hampshire highway in 1961. They spent years trying to understand it.

An excerpt from the new anthology, “American Cult.”

Observing the visible features of Martian landscapes, Giovanni Schiaparelli began seeing things almost immediately.

For decades, flying saucers were a punch line. Then the U.S. government got over the taboo.

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, Geronimo, Robert Oppenheimer, Steven Spielberg, and the mysteries of New Mexico's desert.

What explains the apparently sudden spike in intergalactic traffic after WWII? If Cold War anxieties are to blame, why have sightings persisted?

In the late 1970s, mysterious circular patterns started showing up in farm fields.

The uncanny realism of Orson Welles’s radio play crystallised a fear of communication technology that haunts us today.

Pre-Columbian bodies are once again being used as evidence for extraterrestrial life.

Despite its persistence in popular culture, extraterrestrial life owes more to the imagination than reality.

A critique of colonialism from Martian science fiction.

How a 1960s interspecies communication experiment went haywire.

Once Peter Parker received his miraculous spider powers, the last thing he wanted to do was go out and get a colorful costume and fight crime.

Conspiracy theories like QAnon are ultimately a social problem rather than a cognitive one. We should blame politics, not the faulty reasoning of individuals.