Alien life could exist on hot, rocky planets, sustained not by water but by a type of salty fluid, new research suggests. Reading time 3 minutes The search for alien life usually hinges on finding the ...

But the real truth is that alien life on other planets could be even stranger than floating balloons or amorphous organisms ...

Are aliens real? The question has animated conspiracy theories for decades and enthralled at least one former president of ...

Documents might help scientists shed light on unexplained phenomena and government secrets, experts said.

A new paper suggests that BARSOOM may have been alive on the planet, and was killed in the Viking experiments.

There might be many more planets that could be home to aliens than we thought, according to a new study. For years, scientists have searched for life in the “habitable” or “goldilocks” zone – where it ...

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) focuses on finding technosignatures—potential signs of alien technology. If we look carefully, we might have a chance at detecting their ...

We’re celebrating 180 years of Scientific American. Explore our legacy of discovery and look ahead to the future. In the late 1800s Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli pointed a telescope at Mars ...

The search for alien life often sparks the imagination with images of extraterrestrial beings and strange worlds. However, a new theory is shifting the focus—what if life elsewhere in the universe ...

To support alien life, a planet doesn’t have to be exactly like Earth, but it does need a few key ingredients. First, it ...

Science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” And perhaps that fear is what ...

High-energy particles zipping through the cosmos are harmful to life on Earth, but scientists think it could be food for potential alien life elsewhere. Saturn's moon Enceladus (shown here in a 2006 ...