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In an era captivated by unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and government conspiracies, one former NASA official is cutting through the noise and casting doubt on aliens coming to Earth.
Joseph Gutheinz, a retired senior special agent with NASA’s Office of Inspector General and current criminal defense attorney, said it’s time to apply science, not speculation, to the debate.
“Prove it. Honestly, prove it,” he said to those who believe in the presence of UFOs on Earth.
“They’ve been claiming that there have been UFOs since the 1940s. And, you know, Area 51 supposedly houses UFOs,” he told Fox News Digital. “Have someone go in, look at Area 51.”
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The Pentagon has released videos showing “unidentified aerial phenomena.” (iStock)
Gutheinz said that during his work with the NASA Office of Inspector General, he would regularly get calls from individuals who believed they were abducted, or had a chip in their brain from aliens.
“What I used to tell my students was the possibility of anybody coming from another world to visit us was beyond unlikely,” he said. “And what I would tell the people that would call me up with these tales about being visited by aliens, see a psychiatrist.”
Citing astronomical distances and scientific understanding of the solar system, Gutheinz explained the improbability of any extraterrestrial visitors reaching Earth.
“There are up to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. There are maybe one to two trillion galaxies in the universe. But the reality is this, the closest solar system is Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri A, B, and Proxima Centauri are the closest stars,” he said.
“The bottom line is that it’s 4.4 light years away, or 25 trillion miles away. And if somebody started flying to Proxima and Satori, or the other way around, it would take them over 70,000 years to get there,” he said. “Nobody is visiting us from another world, likely.”
North America, USA, Nevada, Crystal Springs, Basin And Range National Monument, Area 51 Sign. (Bernard Friel/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
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He pointed to moons like Europa, Ganymede, Titan, and Triton as the only plausible places for primitive life in our solar system.
“If there is life on any of those moons, it’s possible. Again, it is primitive, it is microorganisms, it’s nothing that’s going to visit us in a flying saucer.”
When asked whether such sightings could be explained as natural or spiritual phenomena, he suggested that it could be government testing.
“If you’re seeing something up there, and it’s real, it’s coming from the Chinese or the Russians or your next-door neighbor flying around with their drone,” he said.
A NASA logo is displayed at the entrance to the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters building on June 2, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Kevin Carter/Getty Images)
Historical military secrecy, Gutheinz suggested, may have played a major role in fostering the UFO myths.
“I believe early on in the 1940s when all these UFO stories started coming up, it was because the military was probably testing some aircraft, and they didn’t want the Russians to know about it,” he said.
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“And so, if the UFO cover worked, and I would not be surprised if there are some people in the military and the government that played along with that in order to conceal our stealth technology, that is really remarkable, and they just don’t want to share that with other countries.”
“The bottom line is, I think that we use the UFO cover to hide a lot of things.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to NASA for comment.