Astronaut Chris Hadfield calls alien UFO hype ‘foolishness’

It seems safe to say Chris Hadfield probably doesn’t have one of those X-Files “I want to believe” UFO posters on any of his walls.

On Sunday, the Canadian astronaut, who commanded the International Space Station and recorded the famous microgravity rendition of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, spit some fire at true believers who see a link between UFOs or UAPs (for “unidentified aerial phenomena” in the newish military parlance) and some sort of alien intelligence.

“Obviously, I’ve seen countless things in the sky that I don’t understand,” Hadfield, a former pilot for the Royal Canadian Air Force, said during a CBC Radio call-in show. “But to see something in the sky that you don’t understand and then to immediately conclude that it’s intelligent life from another solar system is the height of foolishness and lack of logic.”

The comments came a week after long-running news magazine 60 Minutes aired a widely discussed segment on UAPs. The release of military footage of such phenomena in recent years has led to a call for more transparency, and now an unclassified report from US intelligence agencies is due to be delivered to Congress next month.

Hadfield added that he does think it’s likely there’s life somewhere else in the universe.

“But definitively up to this point, we have found no evidence of life anywhere except Earth,” he said, “and we’re looking.”