Most experts now believe aliens exist. Here’s what convinced them - BBC Science Focus Magazine

“[It] was such a special thing to witness” 💖Published on Oct 16, 2026 at 5:38 PMBree and Eric Inglis were celebrating their wedding in Queensland, Australia, last week, when an uninvited guest suddenly crashed the party. To their surprise, a wild kookaburra swooped in just as the wedding was getting started and watched over the event for hours, refusing to leave until the very end. Instagram/glasshousecountryweddingsIt all started moments after the couple exchanged vows in front of their family and friends. Everyone in attendance had been formally invited, except for the kookaburra, who saw the event while flying by and decided he couldn’t miss it. “[The kookaburra] came down and landed on the festoon lighting just as cocktail hour commenced,” Alicia Evans, of Glass House Country Weddings, told The Dodo. “He stayed for the duration of the whole wedding.”Instagram/glasshousecountryweddingsThe couple and their guests were delighted by the kookaburra’s presence, admiring him as much as they could before he inevitably flew away. But they were shocked when he stayed for the entire cocktail hour and showed no signs of leaving as the reception started.

There is an old adage that we ‘make our own luck’. There is, in fact, plenty of scientific evidence to back this up. Experiments have shown that ‘lucky’ people are less anxious, more intuitive and more resilient than those who regard themselves as ‘unlucky’.

I am a huge fan of the Alien franchise…mostly. Alien and Aliens were ground-breaking movies and instant classics. Alien 3 had good parts (mostly the great British actors shining up a quickly knocked out script). Alien Resurrection was … not great.  Alien: Romulus was pretty good, despite a dodgy CGI android and a practical effect monster that looked like it was dodgy CGI. But the recent Alien: Earth series was fantastic. However, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant were absolutely dreadful. The bad science in these films made them almost unwatchable. Sadly, the next Alien movie (which was to be helmed by the showrunner of Alien: Romulus and to continue that story) has been taken over by Ridley Scott, and will follow on from his awful Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017).

The Dyson sphere was first proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960. There are many ways to scour the stars for intelligent life. You can search for radio signatures whose repetitions suggest intentional design, or examine a planet that orbits its star in a so-called Goldilocks Zone conducive for habitation. One of the wildest (but still hypothetically plausible) scenarios involves what’s known as a Dyson sphere.