The truth is out there: Japan searches for aliens
Sydney Morning Herald March 2, 2005

I picked this article because at first I thought that the title sounded a little ridiculous, and also because it sounded interesting. The title was probably meant to grab the audience’s attention as the term “the truth is out there” is the slogan for The X-Files, a popular TV series that was all about investigating the paranormal and conspiracy theory type stuff. I thought that this was a good journalistic technique for capturing the audience’s attention.

I agree with the comment made by Mitsumi Fujishita that it would be no wonder if life like us exists somewhere out there. Comments like this that the reader can relate too or agree with are useful for keeping the reader interested in the article. For example, I also, believe that in all of the (probably) millions of planets out there it is highly improbable that earth is the only planet with life similar to our own.

I found it strange though, that they would only observe for 5 days and then if nothing is detected, would conduct their scientific analysis. I personally don’t think that 5 days is a long enough time frame to say, for example, that there is nothing out there if they get a null result. There are several reasons, even if there are radio waves from aliens out there, why we might not be able to detect anything. (One being the large distances involved and the finite speed of radio waves). The researchers admitted that it would be very difficult to detect signs because they don’t know exactly where to look.

I did learn something from this article that I didn’t know previously and that was that a US researcher had detected radio waves in 1988. I found this interesting and thought that it might be worth looking up, as it made me wonder where the radio waves had come from.

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