The physicist Enrico Fermi died 70 years ago, but he certainly left a strong legacy. As well as being the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor, the Italian Nobel laureate also pointed out an apparent contradiction: the fact that life is predicted to exist elsewhere in the universe and yet there has been no scientific evidence of extraterrestrial life found so far. Dubbed the Fermi paradox, the discrepancy questions why aliens haven’t made contact with us. “Where is everybody?” Fermi asked, making a rather valid point. As we now know, there are billions of planets orbiting around stars in just our own galaxy, and there’s a high probability that a good number of them would be like Earth. The assumption is that an intelligent civilisation would have at least reached the levels of humans and maybe even surpassed us. But this doesn’t appear to be the case, at least based on hard evidence.
We say ‘appear’ because there have been no shortage of claims that Earth has indeed been visited by aliens. There is the well-known alleged alien spacecraft crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, as well as numerous UFO and ‘alien’ sightings in a quaint Welsh village in the 1970s that were recently the subject of a Netflix documentary called Then there are the general reports of
