Do you believe that alien life exists beyond our planet? Better yet, do you believe the government knows something about life in outer space that they are not telling us?  This week, the White House responded to two official petitions demanding the acknowledgment that 1) aliens actually exist, with evidence that they have engaged the human race and 2) the US government has communicated with alien beings.

While the government denied any knowledge of extra terrestrial aliens, they did offer the names of special programs that are looking into the possibility. They are:

1. SETI—the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence—originally started with help from NASA, it is now privately funded. Their project is to point special telescopes toward space to listen for signals from alien worlds.
2. Kepler is a NASA spacecraft in orbit that’s main goal is to search for Earth-like planets. Its mission is to the Milky Way galaxy for similar sized plants to ours tht are within an inhabitable distance from the sun.
3. The Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity, is an automobile-sized rover that NASA is launching soon. The rover’s onboard laboratory will study rocks, soils, and other geology in an effort to detect the chemical building blocks of life (e.g., forms of carbon) on Mars and will assess what the Martian environment was like in the past to see if it could have harbored life.

You’ll have to decide for yourself. I can tell you aliens exist all over my company in the form of alien costumes, and questionably, some of our employees (just kidding….or am I?)

Just day prior to this news release from the White House,  I saw the IMAX movie Hubble and after seeing the amazing images of our endless outer space it is hard to believe that we are alone in a universe of billions of galaxies. Yet when you say it out loud, it sounds really silly. I’ll live a long, happy life if the closest I ever come to an ET is meeting Katy Perry.