June 14, 2021 6.07am AEST

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Deputy Editor, Multimedia, The Conversation Australia

Deputy Editor, Science and Technology

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Senior Instrument Scientist, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation

Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland

Professor and Head of School, UNSW

Swinburne Space Office Project Coordinator | Manager Swinburne Astronomy Productions, Swinburne University of Technology

John Curtin Distinguished Professor (Radio Astronomy), Curtin University

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Speculation has been rife about the contents of an unclassified report set to be released later this month from the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) task force.

The document, expected to drop on June 25, will supposedly provide a comprehensive summary of what the US government knows about UAPs — or, to use the more popular term, UFOs.

While the report is not yet public, the New York Times recently published what it claimed was a preview of the findings, provided by unnamed senior officials who were privy to the report’s contents.

According to the Times’s sources, the report does not provide any clear link or association between more than 120 incidents of UFO sightings from the past two decades, and a possibility of Earth having been visited by aliens.

If the Times’s sources are to be believed, there’s clearly still no good reason to interpret an unexplained object in the sky as evidence of aliens. But does that mean aliens aren’t out there, somewhere else in the universe? And if they are, could we ever find them? Or might they be so different to us that “finding” them is impossible in any meaningful sense?

We asked five experts.

Four out of five experts said aliens do exist

Here are their detailed responses:

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