White House: Sorry, no aliens in space

Is there life on Mars?

If there is, the White House isn’t admitting it. The White House has released an official statement saying that there is “no evidence that any life exists outside our planet.”

The statement was a response to two different petitions on We The People, which Mashable described as “the White House’s experiment in crowdsourced petitioning and public opinion.”

The petitions urged President Barack Obama to “immediately release” all files relating to life outside Earth because, "The people can handle the truth."

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According to Mashable, petitions that receive more than 25,000 signatures will receive a formal response from a top policymaker at the White House. The combined total for the two petitions demanding the government to respond to an extraterrestrial presence did not receive that suggested number of signatures. However, it did attract enough interest for Phil Larson from the Office of Science and Technology Policy to write a response.

Larson wrote:

The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public's eye.

He did note, however, three examples in the US of ongoing studies into outerspace: the Search for ExtraTerrestial Intelligence's ground-based telescopes, the Kepler spacecraft and the Mars Science Laboratory.