2025 - The Year We Found Alien Life, Twice

In 2025, humanity found life twice.

Once, 124 light years away through the James Webb Space Telescope. The other, hovering somewhere above the sea, when a Hellfire missile allegedly hit a glowing orb and bounced off.

Both stories unfolded in the same calendar year. One was wrapped in scientific language and peer review. The other came wrapped in congressional testimony and disbelief. Each told us something about the world beyond our reach. Both revealed more about ourselves than they did about the universe.

The first story began with light. A soft, almost imperceptible flicker buried in the data of a distant world called K2-18 b, orbiting a red dwarf in Leo. Astronomers studying its atmosphere detected chemical traces of dimethyl sulphide, a compound that, on Earth, is only made by living organisms. Specifically, plankton. Microscopic life, invisible but relentless, breathing sulphur into the air as proof of its existence.

The discovery was presented cautiously. Scientists avoid words like “life” the way politicians avoid “truth.” They called it a “potential biosignature.” That was enough. Within hours, headlines around the world declared that NASA had found alien life. And maybe it had.

For a few brief days the news cycle floated on the intoxicating possibility that the great silence of space had finally answered back. Then the correction came. Other researchers pointed out that the signal could have been corrupted by something called red noise, a form of interference that makes random static look like data. A glitch, in simpler terms.

The story fractured exactly where you’d expect: scientists argued, journalists exaggerated, the public decided which version of the truth felt better to believe. For a civilisation allegedly driven by reason, belief still wins every time.

The irony, of course, is that both sides were right. The discovery of life 124 light years away is entirely plausible, and so is the discovery of human error. Science has always lived at that intersection, a negotiation between humility and hubris.

But something subtle shifted after K2-18 b. The question of “are we alone” no longer felt philosophical. It felt statistical. Even if that signal was false, another would follow. The odds have turned.

While the astronomers debated calibration settings, the other discovery of the year emerged from a very different kind of instrument, a drone camera aimed at an object it wasn’t supposed to find.

During a U.S. congressional hearing on so-called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Congressman Eric Burlison presented footage that allegedly showed a missile strike gone wrong. A drone had fired a Hellfire at a bright orb off the coast of Yemen. The missile hit, flared, and then appeared to ricochet away. The orb didn’t move. It didn’t explode. It simply remained.

The clip spread quickly, leaking across defence forums and Reddit threads like a modern campfire myth. The Pentagon’s official investigators, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, repeated their line that there was “no empirical evidence” of alien technology. It had the same effect denial always does: everyone assumed it meant the opposite.

The hearing followed months of tension fuelled by whistleblower David Grusch, who claimed under oath that the U.S. government has been running multi-decade retrieval and reverse-engineering programmes involving “non-human craft” and “biologics.” Once, such statements would have earned mockery. Now they earn applause. The boundaries of belief have shifted.

The alleged missile incident gave the movement something tangible, an object that defied destruction. It replaced the grainy ambiguity of past Navy videos with something theatrical: kinetic evidence, visible failure, the suggestion that whatever it was, it was not ours.

It doesn’t matter whether the footage was genuine. It worked because it felt true. It fed two hungers at once: the desire to believe and the desire to distrust. The story confirmed that something extraordinary might be in our skies, or that the government wanted us to think so. Either way, it sold.

Side by side, the telescope and the missile tell a single story about a species split between wonder and fear. We search the universe for microbes while firing weapons at mysteries in our own atmosphere. We send billion-dollar telescopes to sniff alien plankton and billion-dollar drones to obliterate glowing spheres we can’t identify. The methods differ; the instinct is the same. Curiosity followed by violence.

The comparison would be amusing if it weren’t so revealing. NASA peers into the void for signs of life. The Pentagon peers into the clouds for signs of threat. Both departments are exploring the unknown with budgets that dwarf the GDP of small nations, and both seem equally confused by what they find.

The absurdity becomes clearer when you consider scale. We can detect the chemical breath of a microbe 124 light years away, yet can’t decide what’s flying directly above us. We can read atmospheres through telescopes the size of tennis courts, but still interpret the unknown through the lens of fear and control.

Humanity’s illusions of mastery are starting to crack. The Artemis programme is still trying to return people to the Moon, delayed and over budget. Congressional hearings argue over evidence of advanced technology already operating here. If the whistleblowers are right, we’re children playing with rockets while the adults hover silently overhead. If they’re wrong, then our institutions have become so dysfunctional that even their fictions sound plausible.

Either way, the conclusion is the same: we are not in charge of the story we’re in.

The world no longer builds temples to its gods; it builds telescopes and warheads. The religions changed but the rituals stayed the same. We still look upward for validation and sideways for enemies. The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office issues statements like encyclicals, assuring the faithful that there is nothing to see, while scientists publish new gospels of molecules and light. Different vocabularies, same prayer: prove that we are special.

Maybe we did find life twice this year. Or maybe we just found two mirrors. One shows our longing for connection; the other our obsession with dominance. Between them lies a portrait of a species that has mistaken technology for progress.

If something out there is observing us, and let’s be honest, it probably is, we must seem like a remarkably primitive form of entertainment. An ancient tribe worshipping its chosen few, dressing them in gold and calling them visionaries. A civilisation that mistakes wealth for wisdom and noise for importance. We build shrines of metal and glass to display our success, and call it economics. We invent gods of peace and then slaughter each other in their names. We design weapons not to defend ourselves but to parade them, metallic feathers meant to frighten the other tribes.

They would watch us pollute our own nest while congratulating ourselves on our progress. They’d see a species that lies for profit, confuses greed with ambition, and justifies theft as efficiency. They’d see our endless cycles of outrage, our stories that reward division because balance doesn’t sell. And they’d wonder how a planet so rich in potential could waste so much energy pretending to be civilised.

What a sad, pitiful theatre we must be putting on for them. And still we ask: would they wish us harm? They probably wouldn’t bother. They’d just hope we’d stop doing so much of it to ourselves. Perhaps that’s why they’re watching, waiting to see if we ever grow out of it.

If they are there, they already know how this ends. The species that builds telescopes to find life and missiles to destroy it rarely survives its own story.

So yes, in 2025 we found life twice. One discovery too distant to touch, the other too close to accept. Between those two extremes lies everything we still refuse to learn.