Are we truly alone? 5 UFO documentaries that answer burning questions about alien life

“If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans,” Stephen Hawking said in 2010 during an episode of the Discovery Channel’s Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking. 

What do you visualise when you think of extraterrestrial life? Is it the sweet E.T. from Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film, the supremely intelligent, gift-bearing Heptapods in Arrival (2016) or the cold-blooded monstrosities invading Earth through a mysterious mutation in Annihilation (2018)? For as long as we have lived, humans have wondered whether we’re all alone in this immeasurably vast universe or if we share it with other forms of life. “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying,” sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke famously said. 

In June this year, the United States government via Pentagon, officially, albeit indirectly, acknowledged the presence of UFOs in a report. The unclassified report was demanded by Congress after numerous reports from the US military emerged about vehicles seen moving across the sky. While this information would have been lapped up hungrily in a normal year, the news came when the pandemic was at its peak and people had more pressing things to deal with—which even a public acknowledgement of alien life couldn’t change.

In Ryan Murphy’s latest and tenth offering of American Horror Story (currently streaming on Disney+ Hotstar), we see erstwhile US President Dwight Eisenhower make a beneficial, yet alarming deal with aliens in a 1954 treaty that would allow them to experiment on 5,000 U.S. citizens every year in exchange for not wreaking havoc on the planet. “This is an opportunity to save an entire planet,” a hooded figure tells Kaia Gerber, who is abducted and inseminated with an alien foetus in the second episode. “Save Earth by populating it with four-armed freaks?” she desperately shoots back. “Who said anything about saving Earth?” the figure ominously retorts before turning away.

If the show has so far managed to reinvigorate your evergreen curiosity about what lies beyond our exosphere, we have compiled a list of seven must-watch documentaries that might have a few answers:

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