A veteran NASA engineer with more than five decades of experience building spacecraft has declared that aliens are real, but have yet to visit our planet.
Gentry Lee, 83, joined the US space agency in 1968 on the Viking Mars mission and has since spent his career designing probes capable of reaching distant worlds.
"There exists nothing today that says any alien or any alien machine has ever landed on the planet Earth," Mr Lee told attendees at a major science conference in Phoenix, Arizona.
"If you believe otherwise, you are being misled," he added.
His remarks come amid renewed public interest in UFOs following comments from two US presidents on the possibility of alien life.
President Donald Trump said last week he intends to begin “identifying and releasing” classified government documents related to UFOs and extra-terrestrials, citing the “tremendous interest shown” in the subject.
The move came just days after President Barack Obama said aliens were real on political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen's podcast.
Mr Obama said: "They’re real but I haven’t seen them and they’re not being kept in... What is it called... Area 51."
A veteran NASA engineer with more than five decades of experience building spacecraft has declared that aliens are real
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He added: "There’s no underground facility. Unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the President of the United States."
The former President later clarified the remarks were made during a rapid-fire podcast segment and that he has no evidence of alien life.
Mr Lee’s belief that life likely exists elsewhere is rooted in statistical probability, drawing on findings from the Kepler space telescope, which surveyed part of our galactic neighbourhood.
Kepler has identified more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets orbiting stars beyond our solar system.
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Gentry Lee, 83, joined the US space agency in 1968 on the Viking Mars mission
|GETTY
The Nasa veteran engineer said that if the surveyed region is representative of the wider Milky Way, the galaxy could contain close to a trillion planets.
"So you can go through all the probabilities of life forming [on some of them] and sooner or later you say, it's just gotta be there somewhere," he said.
Mr Lee has previously played a leading role in some of the agency’s most ambitious missions, including the Curiosity Mars rover, the Dawn asteroid mission, the Juno Jupiter probe and the Grail lunar mission.
The search for extra-terrestrial life remains central to missions led by both Nasa and the European Space Agency, with exploration efforts focused on Mars and the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.
Donald Trump ordered the release of classified government documents related to UFOs last week
| REUTERSSpeaking while promoting a new documentary, Spaceman, Mr Lee said the quest to discover life beyond Earth ranks "among the most profound of anything human beings have ever done".
He added that if humanity were ever to receive a signal from an intelligent alien civilisation, it would make "all preceding human history insignificant" by comparison.
Mr Trump has previously hinted that he possesses deeper knowledge about UFOs and the possible existence of alien life.
During his first term, he told his son Don Trump Jr in an interview that he had heard “very interesting things” about the Roswell incident, but declined to elaborate.
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