00:00For our last story tonight, let's talk about aliens.
00:08They live among us and they have been doing so for years.
00:11They are an advanced species, they are highly intelligent and they hide in a secret base
00:17here on earth by disguising themselves as humans.
00:23Sounds like the plot of Men in Black.
00:26Maybe the movie was ahead of its time because a new study says that this could be true.
00:31You're not making this up.
00:32A study has been conducted by researchers at the Harvard University and they say aliens
00:36may be walking among humans as humans.
00:41Researchers have three hypotheses.
00:43First, aliens have come from a different time period or planet.
00:47Second, they have evolved on earth but separately from humans and third, they come from an ancient
00:54civilization that was not completely destroyed.
00:57The study also says that aliens possibly function out of a secret location.
01:02They could be living underground or in multiple regions on earth that Gen Z would probably
01:08call sus, meaning suspicious, like the Alaskan Triangle which has been dubbed Alaska's Bermuda
01:16Triangle.
01:17Some experts claim that it has been ground zero for unexplained events including more
01:21than 20,000 disappearances since the 1970s.
01:24Yes, it all sounds like a conspiracy theory at best so understandably the study is raising
01:29a lot of eyebrows and the researchers get it.
01:33They concede that these theories are hard to sell especially in the scientific community
01:39and the paper has yet to be peer reviewed so take it with a pinch of salt but the goal
01:44here is not to unsettle scientists.
01:46It is to ask questions because aliens are having a moment.
01:50Over the past few years, pilots say they have seen extraterrestrial beings.
01:55The Pentagon has a new office to look into sightings.
01:59Governments have held hearings, NASA has gotten involved and UFOs have been rebranded.
02:04They are no longer called Unidentified Flying Objects or UFOs, they are now Unidentified
02:11Anomalous Phenomena.
02:15So far so complicated.
02:17The thing is despite the shebang, we still do not know enough about aliens.
02:21So the study means to take the discussion forward.
02:24It wants to ask questions about unidentified observations made around the world every year.
02:32After all, just last year, a former Pentagon official went public.
02:35He made an explosive allegation in the US Congress.
02:38He said that the government had been keeping crashed UFOs and dead aliens.
02:44It was a wild accusation and this year the Pentagon quashed the claims, no surprise there.
02:49Now not to sound like a conspiracy theorist myself, but doesn't all of this stir doubts?
02:55Modern obsession with UFOs goes back to 1947 to the famous alleged UFO crash in the US.
03:02The government quickly claimed that it was a weather balloon.
03:06But in 1997, they admitted to lying to conceal that it was actually debris from a top secret
03:12Air Force project.
03:14It was called Mughal.
03:16And it was designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests.
03:20And the US is not alone here.
03:22Governments across the world have been accused of ridiculing the study of UFOs.
03:27And this is strange because these are legitimate questions.
03:30So decades later, trust has eroded.
03:32There are 10 to 50 billion potentially habitable worlds in our galaxy.
03:39The only good news is that people seem to be taking this topic more seriously now.
03:43Like on Mars, a rover has collected samples to study existence of life.
03:47There are probes on some moons in our solar system and scientists are actively using artificial
03:52intelligence for a little help.
03:54NASA recently assembled a team to study UFOs.
03:58They say a rigorous evidence-based data-driven scientific framework is essential and they're right.
04:06If we say, what is scientific framework without some questions?
04:11Tell us what you think about this.
04:15First Post reports from the world's second largest continent.
04:21Hello, I'm Alison McGrange, a very warm welcome from Durban, South Africa.
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04:32From elections, to climate change, to innovations and opportunities.
04:41As the world's attention shifts, we report from Africa, the heart of the global south.
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