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For decades, scientists have been searching for

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incontrovertible proof that extraterrestrials exist.

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But just where does alien life exist?

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And what does it look like?

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A possibility of life out there and what it will look like is vast.

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You have a lot of options and possibilities when talking about what an extraterrestrial really is.

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If we find a civilization that is more advanced,

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or perhaps even less advanced than our own,

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how should we act?

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And how would an alien civilization react?

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Join us as we investigate just how close we are to first contact.

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A global effort has begun.

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Secret files hidden from the public for decades,

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detailing every UFO account, are now available to the public.

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We are about to uncover the truth behind these classified documents.

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Find out what the government doesn't want you to know.

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Unsealed.

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Alien files.

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Exposing the biggest secret on planet Earth.

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The impact of finding advanced extraterrestrial life in the universe would be earth shattering.

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Incontrovertible proof that alien life exists would be the greatest scientific discovery of all time.

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Implications would be profound and would straddle so many different parts of human culture.

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Scientists have only recently found clues to the existence of microbial life in our solar system.

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But many believe where there are microbes, there could be higher evolved life forms.

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Within our own solar system, there are a number of other planets and mainly moons

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that are thought of as likely places to look for life.

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At least very basic microbial life.

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One possible location that scientists are now honing in on is Jupiter's moon Europa.

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Europa is thought to be an ice world, but it's also believed that beneath that ice,

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you could actually have a heated core.

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Jupiter's gravitational pull is so strong that some believe it may be heating the center of Europa.

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Some scientists speculate that if we could ever send a probe there, drill down through the ice,

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if we do find an ocean, it's possible we can find life forms like dolphins and fish

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that have been surviving and thriving there for possibly thousands of years.

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And we had no idea that it was there.

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So we're making these discoveries in our own backyard and on a cosmic scale, that's absolutely nothing.

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We've pretty much just went to our front porch and looked, we haven't really gone off the steps yet.

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But scientists are also looking for life on distant planets similar to Earth.

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Unsealed case file, Apsilon, Andromedaea.

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1996, San Francisco State University.

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A team of astronomers, including renowned astrobiologist Jeff Marcy,

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detect an exoplanet the size of Jupiter orbiting Apsilon Andromedaea, a star system 44 light years away.

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By 2010, they find two more exoplanets and the Apsilon Andromedaea star system becomes the first ever

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multiple planetary system discovered beyond our own.

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Dr. Jeffrey Marcy, a professor at Berkeley, is the scientist that really has been labeled as the scientist that has discovered

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more exoplanets than anyone else.

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That he started searching for these Earth-like planets or exoplanets many years ago

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and actually discovered 70% of the first exoplanets that have ever been found.

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Marcy is credited with finding the first multiple planet system, the first Saturn mass planet and Neptune mass planet.

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And is now on the hunt for Earth-like planets.

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He has studied thousands of stars using missions such as Kepler and the data that's coming from there.

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And he's looked for evidence of stellar dimming.

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And as we discover more about these stars, we uncover that most of them that we've looked at,

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that we've been lucky enough to zero in on and see, most of them have these exoplanets.

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A lot of them even have Earth-like planets.

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Scientists have come to the conclusion that nearly every star has exoplanets.

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And when you look at that math and you look at the realization that those planets are out there to look at,

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I think the likelihood of alien life and intelligent life just went up by an exponential number.

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So the possibility for life forms are never ending when dealing with space.

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And the reason is it's because the environments that are out there, the environments that life can flourish in, is never ending.

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Before we can go beyond our solar system to find life, we must first look to our closest neighbor, Mars.

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And some question what we should do if and when we arrive on the red planet.

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If we terraform the planet, we destroy an entire ecosystem.

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Do we not perhaps have a responsibility to preserve that life, to nurture it,

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and maybe one day that life will evolve into something intelligent?

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It doesn't matter if they're intelligent or not. They could become intelligent one day, even though they're single-celled now.

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And many experts believe that if we do contact intelligent life, we must proceed with restraint.

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We should behave not as conquerors and exploiters, but as scientists and explorers.

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We should behave morally and ethically.

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That's one of the biggest things that we should do in our responsibility factor, is going out there and being more observational versus interacting with any life forms that we discover.

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We can't just necessarily go out into space and assume that everything belongs to us.

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Evidence suggests that scientists are on the verge of finding alien microbial life.

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And many in the UFO community believe that contact with advanced alien civilizations may not be far behind.

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An interstellar archaeologist is looking for signs of intelligent civilizations, but not in the respect that it's looking for a signal or a radio wave.

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They're looking for actual artifacts that could be out there.

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Signs that a civilization started on a planet may or may not be there now, but started on a planet and left behind either structures or artifacts that we can discover,

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and then finally answer the question, are we alone in the universe?

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Interstellar archaeology operates on the premise that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are detectable.

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They might, for example, mine asteroids and planets.

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They might construct vast space stations.

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And it might be that with the right tools, with sufficiently powerful telescopes, we could find evidence of their activity.

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In 1964, Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed a theoretical method for measuring a civilization's technological advancement.

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The Kardashev scale defines the level of advance of a civilization by virtue of its energy consumption.

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So a Type 1 civilization would be a civilization around about our own level, but perhaps maybe two or three hundred years in the future, that harnesses its entire planet.

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There is a planet-wide effort to generate power through whatever means.

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Kardashev predicts alien energy consumption will be on a cosmic scale.

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A Type 2 civilization then harnesses not only its planet, but also the star, which gives it its life.

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And so essentially, here on Earth, we would have to harness all the energy on our planet and then essentially figure out how to harness our star.

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Then we have to gather all of that energy and use it for whatever it is that we're going to decide to do in the future.

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That would essentially be a Type 2 civilization.

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But a Type 3 civilization must harness the power of the galaxy in which it exists.

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I think with the vastness of space, it's absolutely safe to say there are Type 3 civilizations out there, just simply by the sheer number of galaxies and stars and planets and just the sheer size.

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If one was dealing with advanced civilizations that had harnessed the power of their parent stars or indeed of their entire galaxy, the structures involved would be sufficiently immense that they might be detectable to us here on Earth.

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This is the idea that a series of almost mirrors or probes would be constructed so close to the star that all the energy of that star would be something that could be harvested.

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Now, this might almost be encasing the star.

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We know that we can harness the power of the sun with solar energy and so when you conquer trying to harness all of that energy of a star, how are you going to get all of that energy that is just radiating from that ball of gas in every which direction?

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We might be dealing when it comes to things like Dyson spheres and other similar constructs of particularly Type 2 and Type 3 Kardashev civilizations.

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We might be dealing with structures so immense that they are literally on stellar or galactic scales.

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It's a theory that famed astrobiologist and exoplanet pioneer Jeff Marcy takes a step further.

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Now, conventional thinking is that stellar dimming occurs when an exoplanet passes in front of the face of the star.

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But Marcy's theory is that exactly the same thing would happen if a vast alien structure, a space station, a Dyson sphere passed in front of the face of the star.

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So effectively, Marcy is looking not just for alien planets but alien space stations.

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But mounting evidence suggests the existence and variety of alien lifeforms may be almost unfathomable.

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We know that there are hundreds and hundreds of millions of galaxies out there and each of those galaxies has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of stars.

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And so when you talk about billions and billions and billions of stars out there and each of those stars has maybe five, six, eight, ten, twelve planets by themselves, you're talking about an astronomical sum of possible locations for intelligent life.

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Researchers in the UFO community have long been amazed at sheer variation of aliens that eyewitnesses have described.

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Sure, the most common will be a biological lifeform, two legs, two arms, whether it be a bigger head than humans or smaller head, bigger eyes, that's what we see.

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But it can go much deeper than that.

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You can have biological lifeforms, but you can also have mechanical lifeforms, artificial intelligence, thinking machines that are so far more advanced than biological lifeforms.

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And we can't even fathom how intelligent they can truly become.

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Unsealed case file, Soviet 7, Space Station.

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July 12th, 1984, Earth's orbit.

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In 1984, Soviet cosmonauts on board the Salyut 7 mission encountered what they could only really describe as immense entities out in space that they liken to angels.

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Salyut 7 is a Russian space station that is in operation between the years 1982 and 1991.

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They witnessed a strange orange glow.

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And of course the nightmare scenario was that this was a fire of some sort.

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And when they looked out, they found not a fire, but a strange plasma mist.

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And as this became more easily discernible, they picked out what they believed were seven immense figures,

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literally the size of a 747 aircraft.

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But many in the scientific community believe that cosmonaut experiments, low oxygen, and other psychological factors may have contributed to a group hallucination.

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We know that they were conducting medical experiments of some kind.

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We don't know the details.

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So it may be that that was a factor.

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Also, of course, we know that fluctuations in pressure and in oxygen might affect the brain.

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Russian mission control is optimistic that when a second crew arrives, the situation will resolve and they will get some answers.

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What was particularly intriguing about this incident was the fact that a few days later, three further cosmonauts arrived at the space station

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and they witnessed exactly the same thing.

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This strange orange glow recurred and again these entities, whatever these things were, reappeared.

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Now in terms of witnesses and reliability, cosmonauts are just about as far up the scale as you could get.

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These people are highly trained professionals with absolutely nothing to gain and probably an awful lot to lose by coming out with a story like this.

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So when these people say that this is what they saw, I mean this really is, to the best of their recollection, what happened?

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Russian space authorities dismiss the cosmonauts' reports, but many in the UFO community see their story as yet another form of an alien encounter.

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Looking at the Salyut 7 sighting really shows us, I think, the huge variety of things that people see.

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But I think when you look at the whole range of witness statements, it's readily apparent that there's such diversity.

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Robot entities, AI probes, aliens, angels, huge structures, it poses the question, what might be out there?

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And I think the answer to that question is not just one other life form, but a whole range of them.

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There's a whole cosmos out there and likely it's pretty crowded with a huge variety of life.

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And it's only a matter of time before we discover them. But how should humanity react if we are the ones being contacted by a more advanced life form?

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If we discover we're being watched and extraterrestrials are truly here and they are looking at the human race, I think we have to be very careful on how we respond, if at all.

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Clearly we'd be dealing with the civilization capable of possessing the technology to wipe us out in an instant, so we should not antagonize these people.

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So we have to make sure we make the right decisions when we are ever encountered by some type of alien race.

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Despite hundreds of thousands of alleged extraterrestrial sightings, there is no evidence that aliens have made open contact with humanity.

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But still, many wonder what first contact will be like.

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Will we detect a signal from another civilization? Will there be huge alien motherships hovering above the world's cities?

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Will there be a landing on the White House lawn? Might there be an alien invasion?

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I don't know how any of this will unfold, but however it goes down, it will be a defining moment in human history.

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If and when it does happen, first contact is bound to fundamentally shatter the world as we know it.

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How this will unfold will be in a way totally different to any of the ways in which science fiction writers or scientists have considered it.

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First contact may involve something so different, so bizarre, so unexpected that it's nothing we've even remotely thought about.

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This is Unsealed. Alien Files, exposing the biggest secret on planet Earth.