LOS ANGELES (AP) - In "Disclosure Day," out Friday, Steven Spielberg is once again inviting audiences to ponder the existence of extraterrestrial life - and the implications it would have for religion on Earth.

As I found while working on my own novel, writing about aliens can be strangely helpful in this pursuit. Just as astronomers use telescopes to examine celestial objects light-years away, novelists can invoke imagined civilizations to reveal truths closer to home,

The United States government’s recent release of hundreds of previously classified Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) cases spanning the 1940s to the present, along with the new Steven Spielberg movie,

It may seem like we are on the verge of discovering alien life. In 2025, a press release stated that we have the "strongest hints yet" of extraterrestrial life on the exoplanet K2-18b. And when talking about a collected sample from a rock named "Cheyava Falls" on Mars,

Scientists are listening in on sperm whale conversations and studying Earth's strangest microbes to prepare humanity for first contact with extraterrestrial life.

To travel between solar systems, a spacecraft would need extremely sophisticated – if not impossible – technology.

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Over the past decade, scientists have come up with a variety of frameworks to guide their search for life in the universe. While it’s most ...

We have no idea what kind of life may exist on other planets, so it’s hard to know what to look for. Proxima Kósmos imagines a very different kind of solar system that could harbor life-forms we haven’t yet thought of. If life exists elsewhere in the ...

The object, called 3I/ATLAS, is only the third interstellar visitor ever detected passing through our Solar System.