The everlearning scientist he is, Neil deGrasse Tyson says he needs to see more data before he’ll believe there’s alien life out there amongst the stars. After a blockbuster UFO hearing held on Capitol Hill late last month, Tyson says that while it’s dominated the news cycle, simply not enough data was shared to irrefutably prove the existence of both UFOs and extraterrestrial life.
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“In science, what people perhaps don’t know is that eyewitness testimony is some of the lowest form of evidence you can bring to a scientific conference,” Tyson recently said on NewsNation. “Which is odd, because in the court of law, it’s considered quite high.”
He added, “So here we are in these hearings, thinking that the pedigree of the person delivering the information adds truth value to what they’re saying. Whereas, in science, part of what modernized science was our ability to create methods, tools, and machines to replace human senses in the reporting of what we experience. I just need better data.”
It’s far from the first time Tyson has addressed the idea of alien life, saying earlier this year it would be “astonishing” if life wasn’t found elsewhere in the cosmos.
“I would say that if there weren’t life, it would be astonishing…given how common our ingredients are, and how quickly life took place here, and how many planets we know are orbiting host stars. And it would be astonishing if that were the case,” Tyson told Chris Wallace during an interview in February.
“Something that could land here in a spaceship? Could be out there. There’s no evidence that would convince an authentic skeptic that we’ve been visited,” he continued. “And I can tell you this, these fuzzy monochromatic tic tacs that show up around the Navy restricted airspace in our own atmosphere? By the way, you’ve seen the high resolution images from a telescope we parked a million miles from Earth called the James Webb Space Telescope. Looking at the edge of the universe. And the best you have a visiting aliens in our own atmosphere is a fuzzy tic tac? You got to do better than that if you’re going to convince an astrophysicist.”
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