Alien Life Research Paper

Extraterrestrial Life
I am sure many of us have questioned ourselves, at one point in our lives, if we are really alone on this planet. Many of us have glanced upwards at the stars and wondered whether there is other life out there somewhere but till this day, nobody really knows the answer.
Extraterrestrial life is life that does not originate from planet Earth. This term is referred to as alien life, or simply “alien”, which is a word many of us, I am sure, have heard or learned about many of times before. The questioning of alien life dates back to the ancient Greeks who were the first to consider the possibility of life on other planets. Later in the 16th century, the discovery of the Copernican model, a model of the solar
system, opened the door to all sorts of extraterrestrial musings and brought about the discovery that earth was, in fact, not the center of the universe but the sun was.
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health reported studies that life in the universe may have begun “2.5 billion years ago", billions of years before the Earth was formed. Many scientists consider extraterrestrial life to be plausible, but, till this day, there is no direct evidence of its existence. The search for extraterrestrial life started back in the 1950’s when people actually began to act on their curiosity for aliens and therefore began exploring credible ways to look for them. During this time, the space age had dawned, and science was anxious to know what lay in wait beyond the boundaries of our atmosphere. Seven years later in 1957, the
Russians launched the first three Sputnik satellites into Earth’s orbit and following, two years later in 1960, the United States launched the successful Pioneer 5 interplanetary probe out toward Venus. Machines were equipped to travel farther than most of us could imagine; radios were created to detect possible extraterrestrial signals and telescopes were used to search for potentially habitable extra polar planets. But we still, today, have come no closer to unknown planetary systems than if we had never left Earth at
all.
Even though evidence of aliens have not been very successful, there are many people who believe in there existence because they have either come into contact with one or believe they have seen one with their own eyes. In 2009 in a small New England town, a pair of twin sisters named Audrey and Debbie Hewins told ABC News that they had come in to contact with aliens when they were five years old. At night when the twins were going to sleep, a foggy blue light would come into their room and would illuminate through the whole house and two figures would come in. “There would be a tall one”, Audrey said, “And they had black capes, were bald and had big eyes. Audrey and Debbie call their visitors "The Bald Men," but they 're better known in UFO circles, today, as "The Greys," which is a race of extraterrestrials, characterized by the grayish color of their skin and there long and skinny body. The twins ' first encountered the aliens in their childhood but there visits continued until adulthood. The sisters also believe they had been abducted together on the same spaceship and would compare stories afterwards. Audrey said, “We have been together on abductions and have been up in crafts and seen our house from above. So we realized they are not from here. They are very good at mind erasing or whatever you want to call it. They 'll leave you with bits and pieces of things you can remember. So we do remember certain things of being there together." When one of the reporters asked why the aliens would abduct you and your sister, Debbie replied, "That 's the question I always ask myself, a lot of times I 'll wake up in tears saying, 'Why me? Why me?
Why can 't this happen to somebody else. '"
Other alien sightings date back to 1492 when Christopher Columbus sailed across the sea on the Santa Maria in search of America.
It is recorded in his captains log book that he witnessed an unidentified flying object zooming around the night’s sky. As he stood on deck, he saw “a light glimmering at a great distance which vanished and reappeared throughout the night, flying up, down, east and west in sudden and passing gleams”. Another alien encounter took place in
New Hampshire in 1961, when a couple named Betty and Barney Hill were coming back from a holiday vacation in Canada. On their car ride home they noticed a UFO in the sky that eventually got so close to them that Barney stopped the car and got out. The UFO began to move erratically around the sky. Barney got scared and ran back to his car and the couple sped off away from the lights which seemed to vanish behind them. But as they were driving away they felt they had been teleported because, before they knew it, they travelled around 35 miles from where they were, in just two minutes. A few days later Betty began having bizarre nightmares of tall aliens performing horrible operations on her and her husband inside the craft. Eventually,
the
Hills sought out a professional psychiatrist and after six months of repressive hypnosis, Dr.
Benjamin Simon stated that he believed the Hills most definitely were abducted by aliens.
Those are just a few of many alien abduction stories that are out there. Even though there is no evidence of extraterrestrial life found today, the existence of aliens is still highly possible. As you see, the search for aliens have been going on for centuries and still continue today. You never know what could be out there so watch out and make sure those aliens don’t abduct you next!

Works Cited
Booth, BJ. "The Betty and Barney Hill Abduction." Ufocasebook.com. UFO Casebook,
n.d. Web. 20 Sept. 2013.
“Extraterrestrial Life and Space News, Articles, and Information from Scientific
American." Extraterrestrial Life and Space News, Articles, and Information from Scientific
American. Scientific American, n.d. Web. 20 Sept. 2013.
"Search For Life." Space.com. Tech Media Network, n.d. Web. 20 Sept. 2013.