‘Hey Bill Nye, Could the Government Be Hiding Extraterrestrials From Us?’ | Best of '16 | Big Think

Hey Bill. So there are many videos online claiming to be extraterrestrial sightings. It just seems that the government is aware of extraterrestrials, yet they reject the idea. Possibly they’re hiding the truth from us in fear of the knowledge greatly changing our daily lives. Do you believe these aliens exist and if so, would you tell us?

No, I don’t believe the aliens exist coming to visit you and the government knows about it and hasn’t told you. No. Start with that. Two more things. First of all, the whole alien thing really got revved up in 1947. There was a project called Sky Hook, and the U.S. Government had these very cool super high altitude balloons. They were going to have a constellation of them or an armada of these balloons off the East Coast of the former Soviet Union with microphones tuned to listen for nuclear weapons tests. This was going to be big fun.

And so they were testing the balloon in New Mexico, and it was complicated, and the winds blew the thing around, and it crashed, and it was impractical. The idea was kind of cool, but it was a cold war idea that just didn’t work. Now this project was secret, so yes, government people showed up. The U.S. Army swept up all the debris from the crash and took it away because it was secret. They also experimented with parachuting dummies from very high altitudes in the same area.

And this has led to all these fabulous myths about aliens and the government knows stuff you don’t. Now I look like nobody, and I am, but I had an engineering job, several of them over the years. During one of them, I had security clearance. I worked on a secret airplane for a little while. I never went myself, but I worked with several guys; they were all men, who went to Area 51 to Groom Lake, which is an Air Force base in Nevada where we fly around these secret airplanes.

And it’s a real place. These guys went there, and when I was doing it, it was called level five security clearance. I only had level four. I never went to Groom Lake. But the big thing they wouldn’t talk about was how fast these planes could go. That was a big secret. But anyway, these are people that worked on the F117, a stealth fighter. If you ever go to the Air Force Museum in Ohio, you can see the Have Blue secret planes—very cool.

As a kid, I always asked myself, why don’t they paint spy planes light blue to blend in with the blue sky? Well, sometimes they do. Anyway, you can see one of those there. So it’s a complete myth that the government knows. Just think how hard it is for the government to keep anything secret. With all due respect, the government kind of sucks at keeping secrets. So they couldn’t possibly keep the secret with 10,000 people in on it. So let’s just set that aside.

But with that said, you may very well be alive when we discover life or evidence of life, rather, on Mars. This would literally be alien life. If we find it—if we find some ancient microbes still alive in some icy layer under the Martian sand—it would change the world. It would change the way everybody thinks about being a living thing. Do these things on Mars, if they exist, do they have DNA, or did they have DNA if they have been fossilized? Or are they a whole other completely different type of life that we’ve never thought of? Did life start on Mars? Mars got hit with an impactor, and you and I are descendants of Martians? That is amazing. It’s not crazy. It’s extraordinary, but it’s not crazy.

Then furthermore, you may be alive when we send a mission to the moon of Jupiter called Europa, which has at least twice as much seawater as the Earth. When you have seawater for 4.5 billion years, is there something alive on Europa? Whoa, like dude, that’s out there. It would change the world. It would utterly change the world. This would be real alien life discovered with tax dollars by people who are intellectually curious who decide to devote some of our intellect and treasure to exploring our nearby planetary worlds.

And that’s the real stuff that I encourage you to support and follow. And for that, of course, I encourage you to join the Planetary Society. Think about that. You don’t have to; I’m just suggesting because we really do advocate for the real exploration of nearby worlds, really looking for alien life. Also, the James Webb Space Telescope is going to launch in 2018, and it may have the capability—it is hoped that it will have the capability of exploring atmospheres of extraordinarily distant planets by having sunlight from those stars that those planets orbit pass through the atmospheres.

If we detect water vapor and methane, it may mean someday that we’ve detected evidence of life on another world. Do, do, do, do—do, do, do, do. It’s all the real stuff is what I’m saying. The real exploration for alien life is more exciting than speculating about a nominally secret Air Force base in Nevada. Carry on.