Is the truth really out there?

Serious questions about the existence of ET are being asked everywhere from Harvard to boardrooms. Alex Hannaford finds out why so many are convinced aliens are among us

In the twilight hours one August morning, a sheriff’s deputy on night patrol in the US state of Minnesota was driving along a country road when he spotted something strange: a bright ball of white light, about a foot in diameter, hovering three or four feet from the ground. Val Johnson drove towards the object in his squad car but after that he’s not sure what happened.

Thirty minutes later he woke to find himself in a ditch. The skin around his eyes had been singed, and his car had suffered a shattered windshield and dented bonnet. What’s more, both his watch and the car’s clock were 14 minutes slow.

In the aftermath, Johnson became somewhat of a local celebrity, his car was preserved in the county museum, and the incident, which happened more than 40 years ago, remains one of the most famous “UFO encounters” in history. But Johnson himself never thought what he saw was “extraterrestrial”; just inexplicable. And he was content with that.

But belief in UFOs, once the preserve of eccentrics and conspiracy theorists, has been gaining a surprising number of adherents lately − and from some equally surprising quarters. As New York Magazine noted: “Thoughtful, sensible-seeming, noncrankish people at Harvard, The New Yorker, at The New York Times, and at the Pentagon, seem to be drifting ever closer to the conclusion that alien spaceships had visited Earth.” But why?