According to NASA, one of the best ways to find alien life on other planets is to look for pollution in their atmosphere – specifically nitrogen dioxide gas (NO2).

Ravi Kopparapu, who works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and is the lead author of the study, explained this further, “On Earth, most of the nitrogen dioxide is emitted from human activity — combustion processes such as vehicle emissions and fossil-fueled power plants,” adding, “In the lower atmosphere (about 10 to 15 kilometers or around 6.2 to 9.3 miles), NO2 from human activities dominate compared to non-human sources. Therefore, observing NO2 on a habitable planet could potentially indicate the presence of an industrialized civilization.”

With more than 4,000 exoplanets found so far, experts are eager to find out if any of them host other civilizations but since they are so far away from us, the only way we can search for signs of life is with powerful telescopes that can find out what’s in their atmospheres.

One sign of life would be the presence of combined gases in their atmosphere, such as oxygen and methane. Additionally, a gas such as NO2 may indicate that there is some type of technology on the planet that is creating it (this is called a technosignature).

Jacob Haqq-Misra, who works at the Blue Marble Institute of Science in Seattle, Washington, and is a co-author of the study, noted that previous research focused on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as potential technosignatures since biology can’t produce it. “…However, CFCs are very specific manufactured chemicals that might not be prevalent elsewhere; NO2, by comparison, is a general byproduct of any combustion process,” he explained.

Their research focused in part on how much NO2 pollution could be detected with our telescopes and after extensive studies, they were able to determine that if an intelligent civilization living on an Earth-like exoplanet that orbits a sun-like star were to produce as much NO2 as Earth, it could be detected as far as 30 light-year away with approximately 400 hours of data focused solely on that planet.

That’s a good start, but considering our closest star relatives are located in the Alpha Centauri system which is a bit more than 4 light-years away from us and our entire galaxy is approximately 100,000 light-years across, we will definitely need more powerful telescopes.

There are a few complications with this new information, such as figuring out if the NO2 on other planets are produced naturally or created by another civilization. “If we observe NO2 on another planet, we will have to run models to estimate the maximum possible NO2 emissions one could have just from non-industrial sources. If we observe more NO2 than our models suggest is plausible from non-industrial sources, then the rest of the NO2 might be attributed to industrial activity. Yet there is always a possibility of a false positive in the search for life beyond Earth…,” explained Giada Arney from NASA Goddard and who is another co-author of the study.

Furthermore, if there are clouds or aerosols in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, the wavelengths may falsely appear as NO2. While much more work needs to be done, this is a very interesting step in possibly finding alien civilizations on other planets.

• The study was published in arXiv where it can be read in full.

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The world of alien abductions and UFOs has many of what are called “contactees.” These are the rare individuals who, for whatever reasons, seem to have been singled out by these inscrutable alien entities for sustained contact. Such contact can range from the benign to the downright terrifying, and can forever change these people’s lives in many ways. On such contactee has chosen to reach out to me personally to tell her story, and it is a tale that will be unveiled here in full for the first time. Here we will go down the path of a lifetime of very weird experiences that alternate between the weird, the horrific, the fascinating, and the awe-inspiring.

Laura Clarke, now 62 years old, was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and during her childhood didn’t stay in one place for long. Her father Al was in the Army and her, her sister Barb, and her mom Jo moved often from base to base, going from Fort Benning, Georgia, then Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and finally to Fairbanks, Alaska. It in Alaska where she would begin down the road into her bizarre odyssey into the world of UFOs, alien abductions, and high strangeness. It first began the summer after a big earthquake had hit Anchorage in 1963, and Alaska was in the midst of one of its periods of perpetual daylight. One this evening it was bright as day outside, and her mother put her and Barb to bed, closing the think blinds of the room to keep the never-ending sunlight out. It was as the two young girls were lying in the gloom that the night would take a turn into the outlandish, and she would experience her first abduction. Laura says of what happened:

One night my sister, Barbara, was already asleep in the bed next to me. My parents had gone to bed too, and all was quiet. As I lay there trying to sleep I suddenly noticed a figure out in the hall move past my door towards the window. I assumed it was Mom. But then someone pulled back the curtain and light flooded the hallway. When this happened I saw several small, thin, light grey “people” with large black, slanted eyes, staring into my room. I was surprised and just stared back at them. I had never seen anything like them before. The most we were allowed to watch on TV was Romper Room and cartoons. I looked at Barb and she was sound asleep. Our twin beds were pushed together and I was closest to the window. Then I watched as an invisible force pulled the covers off her and she floated out of bed and into a standing position. Her eyes were still closed. Then I felt myself being floated off my bed and into a standing position. Barb was floated, upright, hovering a few inches above the floor out of the room and towards the stairs. I was also moved this way towards the stairs.

The thin grey “people” moved around us, and one accompanied each of us. As I was positioned at the top of the stairs I knew I had to move my legs to step down and I found myself making bicycle motions with my legs as I tried to go downstairs. Suddenly the first voice I heard was coming from the one next to me. His mouth did not move, but I heard his thoughts. He said “You don’t have to do that, we will do it for you.” So I stopped moving my legs and felt that I was being floated downstairs without ever touching the steps. As we floated slowly through the living room my sister and a grey disappeared around the corner into the kitchen. I realized that these “people” were shorter than my Mom, who was 5’2″ tall. My Dad was 6’2″ tall, so I knew what a difference in height was. I then asked him “Are you people like us?” He answered “No. We are Non Human Living Beings.” After that I do not remember anything more about that experience, except that from that day on Barbara was never the same again. She became an angry, defensive, stubborn, brat to put it bluntly.

Laura would keep this experience to herself for many years, feeling as if she was “not supposed to tell anyone,” and it would not be until decades later that she would learn from her sister that she had indeed been awake during the incident. Unfortunately for her, this was not to be the last strange experience the family would endure. After her father left the military, he got a job in Corrections as a Personnel Director, and the family would move from place to place every year or two. At one point they found themselves living in Davenport, Iowa, and it was here where Laura would have her second abduction experience. She explains of what happened:

When we first moved to Iowa I had my second abduction experience. I was about 7. We lived in a brand new housing development in Davenport, Iowa. Our house butted up against a deep ravine. On the other side was the elementary school. Our small backyard had a swing set between the house and ravine. One night I was suddenly aware that I was outside floating through the air in the dark. I was coming down towards the back yard. I could see the roof and swing set below me next to the ravine. I was moved in the direction of our back sliding glass door. Next thing I knew, I was rudely woken up by a very hard painful slap on my behind. My parents NEVER spanked me so I tensed up in fear and layed there holding as still as I could. I became aware that I was on top of my blankets, on my stomach, with my nightgown pulled up above my waist. I was thankful my underwear was still on, but I felt very exposed and vulnerable in the glow of the nightlight. Then I heard a strange sound. I knew my Mom’s normal footsteps in her leather loafers, but this was not her. What I heard was as if someone was holding her tiny size 5 shoes in their hands and slapping them on the floor in a fake walking sound.

I listened as it moved out of my room, into the short hall, and into my parent’s room. I heard their closet door slide open and the shoes were dropped loudly and the door slid shut. A few seconds later I became really scared when I heard 2 robotic mechanical sounding “voices” having a conversation in the hall between the bedrooms. You have to remember this was before home computers, before push button phones and all of that! 1965…this was nothing I had ever heard before. It was all kinds of beeps and tones. One would beep, boop, ding…there’d be a pause…and the other would boop, ding, beep, click and whirring sound…like a weird mechanical conversation. I was terrified. After that stopped I still lay there for a long time until I saw the sun coming up. I got up some nerve and scrambled up under my covers and turned on my back so I could see if anything was coming at me. I saw my sister sound asleep in her bed across the room.

This is very terrifying stuff for a 7-year-old girl, and for weeks afterward she was jumpy, nervous, constantly looking behind her and peeking out the sliding glass door. Her mother noticed her odd behavior, but Laura refused to tell of what had happened due to that nagging feeling that she was somehow not allowed to. She explained to me that she had this unshakable sense that if she were to tell anyone, something bad would happen to her or her family. This had not been directly said to her by the entities, but it nevertheless stuck in her mind and kept her from saying a word about her experiences. It is an interesting detail, as many contactees describe a similar sensation of not being able to tell anyone what has happened to them. After that things seemed to go back to normal, and the family moved to Anamosa and then McGregor, Iowa, before finally settling in Delavan, Wisconsin. It was here where she would have her most intense and terrifying experience yet. It happened in 1967 when she was 9 years old, on an otherwise warm and pleasant evening at her quaint rural home. She says of the otherworldly series of events that would unfold:

This is where my most intense abduction happened up to that point. Our lives were very simple, boring almost, except for these random abductions. It was about 1967, when I was 9. We lived in a 2 story house with a one car garage and narrow driveway close to the house next door. All of the abductions seem to happen in the warmer months. One night I was woken up by an extremely bright white light. I thought at first they installed a new street light, because it was not at all like sunshine. But then I heard a voice. It sounded like an almost “electronic” little girls voice. It was high pitched and horribly echoed in my room. It said “Isn’t the light pretty? Do you want to come and play in the light?” I thought, “No I have school tomorrow”, but I got out of bed to see where the light was coming from. I went to my window which was facing the driveway. It was cracked open a couple inches for fresh air. When I looked out I realized the light was not on the street side, but coming from above our garage. I could see a very bright white beam of light coming from something above the garage roof. It was very distinct in it’s beginning and sides. I could see that the stars were blocked out in the shape of a wide circle around the beam. Maybe 25 to 30 feet across. The light came down from the very center of it.

As I was trying to figure out what this was I felt my body start to kind of tingle and then I realized that my whole body was vibrating apart. It literally felt as if every cell in my body was being vibrated apart from each other and I felt myself slowly being moved from inside my room, literally through the glass window, wood frame and all…and put together on the other side. I was outside hanging above my driveway in mid air. Then I was pulled upward towards the bottom of the black circle, to the left of the beam of light. I remember being raised up into a sort of hatch over to the left side of the beam of light. I could see the side wall to my left. I was turned to the right and moved down a long curving hallway. The entire place was made of some kind of silver metal. The hallway had a flat floor, but the wall to my right curved like an arch so that if you went too far to the right you would hit your head. The hall curved around towards the left too, as if you were walking in a large circle. As I was floated alone down this long hall, I passed by several doorways. No doors were visible, but I could see each room was pie shaped, like a slice of pie. Narrow on the opposite side from the doorway, but flat like a bite was taken off the end. So as I came to about the 3rd doorway I saw ahead of me a bigger room that opened up into what looked like a control room with small seats and some sort of dials and gauges and small screens or something. Before I could take it all in, I was turned into the last of the small rooms to my left. It was pie shaped like the others but had a small metal looking exam table like in a doctors office. I was laid on this table. Then I realized that several of the same grey beings I had seen at 5 years old were moving into the room and surrounding me. I got a little scared by then, but somehow felt like “it’s THEM”…somehow familiar.

As if this wasn’t all eerie and frightening enough as it was, Laura explains that she then became suddenly aware of a presence in the room there with them that she describes as “completely evil,” and although her body was completely paralyzed, she was able to move her head enough to look around to some degree and try to pinpoint where this feeling of utter dread was coming from. She then saw two of the grey beings flanking a completely different type of entity, this one being decidedly non-humanoid, standing about 6 feet tall and which looked like a praying mantis, only completely black in color. She felt it was somehow their leader, and this abomination utterly repelled her and filled her with a sharp dread unlike anything she had ever experienced before. Just as the wave of terror threatened to overwhelm her, panels on the walls at that moment filled with a soft blue light that reminded her of fish tanks stacked on top of each other and had an instantly calming effect on her. However, her ordeal was not over yet, and she says of what happened next:

Awhile later a figure appeared in the doorway. As I turned my head to the right, I was amazed to see a little girl grey being. She was smaller, maybe 3 1/2 feet tall, but had long, very thin and wispy black hair. Her eyes were slanted and all black but a little smaller than the others. I was not afraid of her and somehow felt she was telling me she was my “sister”…and she even looked more “like me” than my real sister. Barbara had short light dirty blonde hair with blue eyes, a turned-up nose and round face. I had long black hair and olive-green eyes. Somehow, I felt this grey being was in fact genetically my sister. I wondered if my parents had also been taken by the greys in the past? Later I was brought back into my bedroom, again by moving right through the window itself. I was floated onto my bed, stomach down. My body was then pulled by the invisible force into a certain position. I was then told that I WOULD have trouble sleeping from now on, and I should put myself in this position from then on to help me fall asleep. I have had to do this ever since, and have been plagued by severe insomnia for the rest of my life.

Indeed, Laura has told me that this incident in particular has caused her myriad health issues that plague her to this day, such as the insomnia, as well as her eyes suddenly shaking from left to write and her left foot occasionally dragging as if not responding to her. At the time she also became morose and had anxiety about the praying mantis, and her mind constantly raced trying to make sense of it all. She found herself fascinated by these beings and daydreamed constantly at school about them, to the detriment of her grades and homework. After this third abduction incident, Laura felt like she wanted to tell her parents about it more than ever, but had that nagging feeling that she shouldn’t, that unspoken command that to do so would mean bad things. However, this time she overrode that irresistible urge to keep it to herself and told them, but they told her it was just bad dreams. Yet even as they told her it was all in her head, she suspected somehow that her mother knew more than she was letting on, and this would turn out to not be the last of her strange journey. Laura’s next abduction happened some years later, when she was 14 years old. At the time her parents were now divorced, and she was living at her father’s house in Wheeling, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, along with her sister Barb. On this evening things had started very normally, with Laura getting ready to go to bed and listen to a radio program she had been looking forward to. She got up to go to the bathroom to brush her teeth and that was when she noticed something odd. She explains:

I was wide awake and went into the bathroom to get ready. But as I opened my bedroom door to go back in my room, I noticed my light was off, which was strange. I knew I’d left it on. As I stepped into my room and closed the door, I suddenly became very weak and tired. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I stumbled over to my bed and fell into it. I thought, what is going on? I laid on my back and noticed that my closet light was on but the folding doors were shut. I knew that was not right. Then I watched as one of the doors to the closet slid open. I thought my sister must be trying to scare me, but why was I so weak and tired? Then I saw who was in the closet and my heart sank. It was a grey. “They” had found me again. I passed out, and the next thing I remember was floating over the condo buildings in the dark and down towards our front door.

I don’t remember what happened the rest of the night until they brought me back. That’s what pisses me off about these experiences. I hate not remembering things. So they brought me back into the trailer as the sun was just coming up. They had come at 10 pm when Lance walked to bed and now it was sunrise. I was aware of floating back through the door, and down the hall towards the bedroom. I noticed my clothes were all stuck to me like I was vacuum sealed, and I felt very cold and clammy. When I was brought to the bedroom, they set me down on the floor and I could feel the invisible force leave me and my clothes fell away from my body again like the vacuum suction had left. I was standing there realizing that the trees were suddenly blowing around the trailer like a huge wind came up. Then I heard helicopters coming from a distance. I remember thinking “I need a witness. Someone who can confirm this.” Then the light beam shut off from above the roof and the craft moved off swiftly and the trees stopped blowing. Immediately I heard 3 low flying Helicopters follow it directly over my trailer. I did not see them, but I heard them clearly. 1,2,3…then silence. I tore my clothes off and crawled in bed exhausted. Slept hard for a good 12 hours.

Once again, she told no one of any of this, and it hung over her into her later years. It seemed for a while that the whole ordeal was over, and for years no further incidents happened. When Laura was 23 years old, she was living in a heavily wooded rural area of Ulster County, New York with her new husband, Lance, and a 2-year-old son named Morgan. Although health issues still bothered her from her experiences, she was under the impression that the worst was behind her, and that she could now live a somewhat normal life, but it seems that this was not meant to be. It happened out of nowhere one night as her and her husband were watching TV. He suddenly got up to go to bed without saying a word and proceeded to walk in a stiff, disjointed way back towards the bedroom, which was highly unusual behavior for him. Just at that moment, she was hit by the intense feeling of being watched, and with shock became convinced that the aliens were there.

Laura frantically went through the house checking that all of the doors and windows were locked, and in the meantime her husband continued in his trance-like state, lying down on the bed and falling into a deep slumber he could not be woken from. Indeed, he could not even be moved, and seemed to be in a state she describes as being as if he had been “frozen in time.” When she went to check on her son, she found him to be in the same immobile state of suspended animation. She now had no doubts that the entities had come for her once again, further corroborated by the swirling of the trees outside and a bright piercing light that lit up their entire trailer. The only sound was a low hum or drone coming from above, and then she heard a sound within the trailer itself. In a panic she made sure that the doors were locked but then she turned and explains of her next bizarre encounter:

I checked the front door and it was locked, so I turned around and was stopped in my tracks when I saw a very short being standing in my kitchen. I stared at it trying to figure out what it was. I had apparently walked right past it. This was something new I’d never seen before. It was shorter than my son and I thought that was odd. It had a very round basketball sized head with tiny black eyes. I could see no other features except that it was wearing a long sleeved white robe that covered everything else. I could see no hands or feet. I thought “My God! He’s shorter than my son!” The damn thing replied telepathically “HUH! YES, BUT WE ARE VEEERY, VEEERY OOOOOOLLLLD!” It was creepy the way he dragged out the words and sarcastically said HUH…My mouth dropped. I was shocked. I’m thinking “What? Hundreds? Thousands of years old???” I rushed over to the window near the hall and stood there staring at him. Then I heard the front door jiggle. Suddenly it opened and about 4-5 of the greys came floating into the room. They were just like the others I’d seen as a child. They all look like clones, but have very different “personalities” you could say. The way they propel themselves is strange. They are floating above the floor a few inches. They are slowly pushing their arms and legs forward as if pushing through jello. Then they stop and their arms hang down at their sides.

One of them went in front of me and headed down the hall…I thought! But suddenly he moved right in front of my face, scaring the hell out of me. The light was flooding in the window from behind me, so I was staring into this large ugly face. He was only 4 inches from me. I noticed a strong nasty smell. It was a combination of Urine and sweet spices and vomit. It made me want to throw up. Then he started playing mind games. He was trying to make me feel as if I was a worthless dog who should cower on the floor at his feet. I wanted to cry, but I thought “I am not a dog.” I looked him right in the eyes. I suddenly realized that inside the huge slanted black eyes were very large pupils! I could literally see that he had a darker centered pupil inside the blackness. Then I looked at his skin. The light grey skin looked just like rough Cowhide!!! It was not smooth. Up close it looked like you sometimes see cowhide that has been left with the wavy odd lines all through it. Then he flooded my mind with memories. It was every single abduction experience I had ever had before. Then he told me they were all connected…and all connected to THEM. I knew it already, but he made sure I knew. I knew there was no escaping so I started praying in my mind “Please God! Help me Jesus!” The grey replied “Yes. We know God too.” That scared me even more. There was no help coming. They moved me outside the trailer and I saw the light beaming down. I don’t remember what happened.

When she woke up, she found a red spot with a scab just below her belly button, and when she pulled at it popped off and seemed to be attached to a long, thin sheath of tissue that had been burrowed down into her belly. It ended up being about 5 inches long, much to her horror, and it seemed that something that had been perhaps implanted within her. She says of it:

It was as if something like a giant fat needle had been shoved deep into my belly and left a long hole. It didn’t even bleed or anything. I wrapped it in a tissue and wanted to save it as proof. Then I went to wipe myself after peeing and could not believe what I saw on the toilet paper. There was a large circle of a thick oily substance, but it was divided in half. Like a half circle of bright yellow and a half circle of bright amber orange thick oily liquid. It was as if the two could not mix. They were touching but not mixing together. I must have sat there for 10 minutes in shock, not knowing what to think or do about this. I set the tissue aside with the intention of saving it too. But then I couldn’t figure out who to take it to or who I could tell, so I just threw it all away, and went to take care of my son.

Weird incidents would continue into later years as well. Laura ended up divorcing Lance and she was married once again. At the time Morgan was 5 years old and Laura had a new child, named Rachel. One evening as she was watching TV, she says she heard a voice in her head that said “Wake up. Go to your son. He needs you.” There was an urgency to it, and a sense that something was deeply wrong, so she rushed to her son’s aid. She says of what she found there:

I couldn’t believe what I saw. Morgan was lying in bed with his head AND shoulders all the way up on his pillow. His blankets were neatly folded down covering his body from the chest down as though he had been placed that way. He was covered in blood all over his face and neck. Blood was pouring out of his nose and I could not wake him up. There was no blood on his pillow or blankets, just on him and his pajama shirt. I ran downstairs and pounded on my neighbors door. I asked her to call an ambulance because I had no phone then. Instead she followed me upstairs and acted very strange. As I ran to the bathroom to get cold wet washcloths and towels, she brought a dining chair in from the kitchen and parked herself at the head of his bed and didn’t do or say a damn thing! I was frantic and pissed off. It was almost like she was in a trance. She eventually left after I asked her again to call for help. She never did. I finally got the bleeding stopped but he didn’t wake up until morning. He seemed fine that morning and wanted to go to school. But when he got home, I asked if he remembered anything about last night? He said that he woke up and saw a “skeleton man” standing in his room so he hid under his bed, but then he was taken out of the house, along with our other neighbors’ son who was the same age. I realized it was “Them…the greys” who took the boys. I was so angry. I looked up towards the sky and thought “It’s bad enough you have taken me against my will all my life, but STAY AWAY FROM MY CHILDREN!!!!” I was so pissed. I took him to a local clinic but they couldn’t find anything in his nose or on x-ray that would cause such severe bleeding.

What was going on here? Was this another instance of these inscrutable entities haunting this poor woman and her family? The activity would cease once again, and in the meantime, Laura would fall out with her husband and move to near Albany, New York, where she lived with a friend named Jim, who would tragically pass away some years later. Laura would then meet another man, Steve, who lived with them for 10 years and is the father of her 3rd child, Ashley, and she would go on to have a 4^th child, Ricky, who would sadly develop Cerebral Palsy and be bedridden at home. She still felt that the Greys were watching over her, and occasionally had UFO sightings and suspected abductions. Her kids got married and had their own kids, she became a grandmother, and yet she would have one more strange experience. She says of this:

I heard a strange humming as I was falling asleep. I was very tired so I didn’t think anything of it and never got up to look outside. But last night my daughter, Rachel, sent me a message to call her right away. She said my granddaughter, Claire, was the last one eating at the table last night and she noticed a humming sound and saw a black ball hovering outside their house. She told them about it, and then my son in law said he’d seen it the night before! He’s like me, he’s been through so much he just keeps things to himself sometimes. They said it was all black and round, about 4-6 feet across. It had no lights visible. They saw it hovering over the stump of a giant pine tree they’d just had cut down, which is only 25 feet away from the window Claire was sitting at! And it also went over to their neighbors’ yard behind that house and came back to their yard. I am guessing it may have been outside my house two nights ago when I heard the humming…which was the same night Tim saw it. We live 2 doors away from each other. Rachel said it reminded her of the much larger black ball that she and the kids saw facing off with a helicopter about a year ago. They said that one was about as big as the helicopter. I told you guys about that event already. Also, Tim just told me that the night he saw it, he was napping on the couch and woke up when the smallest of their 3 dogs was staring out the window and growling a low growl. Usually, she barks loudly at everything. So, he turned to see what she was looking at, and saw the black ball above the tree stump. Then it hovered very slowly towards him and as soon as it got a few feet away from his window it triggered the outside flood lights to come on. So he got a good look at it, but when their shepperd/rotty mix came in the room the thing took off fast…these sightings with the black metallic ball happened in March 2020.

For now that seems to be where things stand with Laura. She is now a stay at home mother of four grown children, and is expecting her 4th grandchild. In all of my interactions with her I have found her to be a very level-headed, articulate individual who seems very convinced of what has happened to her over the course of her fascinating life. And what a life it has been. We are left to ask what is going on here. Why were these forces drawn to this poor woman? What did they want and what did they see in her? Will they be back once again? For what it’s worth, she has proven to me to be a very eloquent, level-headed witness who does not seek any fame and just merely wants to get her story out there. Whatever you may think of her tale, it is a compelling odyssey over a lifetime of alien encounters, and I am honored that she shared this with me for me to bring it out into the light.