Janez Volmajer/Alamy
SCIENTISTS and science journalists often share a weary refrain whenever a story with a whiff of the extraterrestrial raises its head: it isn’t aliens. It is never aliens.
While firm evidence of life beyond Earth would be the discovery of the century, we have been burned too many times before – most notably in 1996, when excitement about supposed fossils in a Martian meteorite inspired the-then US president Bill Clinton to make a statement from the White House lawn.
President Donald Trump hasn’t made any public pronouncements about the discovery of phosphine, a molecule that may have a biological origin, on…
