The official US denial of visits to Earth by extra-terrestrials is a crime against scientific reason, says a top physicist.
The US House Oversight and Accountability Committee national security subcommittee opened hearings into the origin of 'Unexplained Aerial Phenomena' sightings and the possibility that they come from another world.
Retired US Air Force Major David Grusch told the committee that authorities had indeed recovered crashed alien spacecraft and “biologics” or remains of their crews in the past. He also accused the government of selling alien technology to the highest bidder.
Avi Loeb, an Israeli-born professor of plasma physics at Harvard University, told Sputnik that those "alien artifacts", if they exist, have "nothing to do with national security, because it came from outside the solar system."
"It doesn't care about national borders, how we split the land on this rock that we live on," Loeb argued. "It should be scientific knowledge. It should be something that everyone knows.
"Why was it hidden if indeed it's there? The only reason I can see is commercial," he ventured. "There were companies that were paid by government to look into it, and they continue to get paid as long as the the topic is not exposed to outsiders."
The physicist rejected the arguments made at the hearing that extra-terrestrial species could not have visited the Earth because the distances from their homeworlds were too vast. He said that civilisations that grew up on planets orbiting more ancient stars had plenty of time to explore the galaxy.
"It takes half a billion years to use chemical rockets to traverse the Milky Way. That's much less than the time difference between the formation of stars, most of the stars in the in the Milky Way galaxy compared to the sun," Loeb explained. "So there was plenty of time to traverse and to arrive at our vicinity. And we sent five probes already to interstellar space."
He said the if the US government had material from alien encounters, it would be wrong to continue to keep it secret.
"Science is sharing information by all humans. Any information that has to do with the universe, with the physical world, has nothing to do with a particular nation," Loeb stressed. "This has to be distributed so that other people can look into it, figure it out."
He argued that secrecy was a barrier to understanding the secrets of otherwordly civilisations.
"The government is still it cannot figure out what to do with it because they don't have access to the best scientists," Loeb said. "They don't have access to an open environment where people can look into it and figure out what it means. And because of that, it was held sort of in the dark for so long."
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