American physicist James Benford has suggested that alien satellites could be disguised in near Earth objects (NEOs) which are monitoring our planet. NEOs, referred to in Dr Benford’s paper as co-orbital objects, typically orbit the Sun and take the form of comets and asteroids. NASA said of NEOs: “Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighbourhood.”
Dr Benford believes these would be the ideal hiding spot for an extraterrestrial civilisation which has been monitoring our planet, waiting for humanity to become advanced enough to contact.
In the paper published in The Astronomical Journal, Dr Benford urged alien hunting groups to take a closer look at the NEOs.
Dr Benford wrote: “A recently discovered group of nearby co-orbital objects is an attractive location for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) to locate a probe to observe Earth while not being easily seen.
“These near-Earth objects provide an ideal way to watch our world from a secure natural object.
“That provides resources an ETI might need: materials, a firm anchor, and concealment. These have been little studied by astronomy and not at all by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) or planetary radar observations.
“A probe located nearby could bide its time while our civilisation developed technology that could find it, and, once contacted, could undertake a conversation in real time.
“Meanwhile, it could have been routinely reporting back on our biosphere and civilisation for long eras.
“We should move forthrightly toward observing them, both by observing them in the electromagnetic spectrum and planetary radar, as well as visiting them with probes.”
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Dr Benford’s theory is similar to the zoo hypothesis which suggests aliens are watching us and it is an attempt at explaining the Fermi Paradox.
In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi – the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor – came up with a paradox which says due to the age and size of the universe there is bound to be a civilisation much more advanced than ours, but why haven’t they contacted us?
The solution, many scientists argue, is once a civilisation reaches a certain size, it eventually kills itself off as it becomes impossible to sustain, either through war with advanced weapons or natural disaster.
Another possible solution is that there simply is no other life out there.
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However, John Ball, a radio astronomer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claimed we are being studied by an advanced alien civilisation, and that is why we have not heard from them and we are not advanced enough to be contacted.
With the universe being 13.8 billion years old, man’s oldest ancestors have only been around for about 0.36 per cent of this time, and modern humans considerably less.
This implies that a civilisation is likely a head start of at least millions of years on us, meaning that we still probably seem like chimps in comparison.
Mr Ball argued that if there are aliens out there and they have not decided to destroy us, then there are two possible implications.
He said in 2017: “Either that we’re more valuable to him alive than squashed, or at least we’re not interfering much with whatever he’s doing.
“How could we interfere? We can’t even get out of our solar system — yet.”
