Universe could contain as many as 200 billion alien civilisations, says Brian Cox

Space expert Brian Cox reckons there could be 200 billion alien civilisations in the universe.

The British rock star turned physicist said we might not be the only ones in the Milky Way.

He told the Sunday Mirror: “There have to be other civilisations in the universe. I can’t imagine we are the only one.

“Knowing what we know, it’s conceivable there are one or two civilisations in a galaxy at any one time.”

“There’s certainly one in our galaxy. It’s us.”

Studies suggest there could be anywhere between 200 billion and two trillion galaxies along with our own Milky Way in the vast universe.

Professor Cox, who played keyboard for 90s band D:Ream before becoming a professor, has warned it is possible the alien visitors may not come in peace.

In a BBC documentary, he said: “We’d all like ET to be real. We’d like ET to arrive. But we don’t want Darth Vader coming down.”

On aliens using robots to visit our Earth, he added: “Why send Battlestar Galactica when you could send something the size of an iPhone?.”

It comes ahead of a bombshell report by the Pentagon into UFOs.

US officials can’t explain what dozens of recent UFO sightings are but they do not show evidence of alien spacecraft, the files are expected to say.

The Pentagon papers will detail 120 close encounters by US military pilots investigated by its Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI.

They include testimony from US Navy fighter pilot Alex Dietrich who spoke of her own UFO encounter for the first time last month.

It happened on November 14, 2004, when the lieutenant commander, now teaching at the US Navy Academy, was stationed on aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off California.

The ship’s radar detected flying objects dropping through the sky at an unbelievable 80,000 feet in less than a second.

Dietrich and Commander David Fravor were scrambled in their F/A-18 jets and saw what they describe as something like a 40-foot white Tic Tac.

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Meanwhile even the IL Government is getting all cosmic in these troubled times on Earth.

Sources told the Mirror that our own MoD is set to restart its UFO unit which was set up by Winston Churchill in 1953 and closed by defence cuts in 2009 after investigating 12,000 sightings.

But in response to a question from Tory peer Lord Black, defence minister Baroness Goldie said the British Government “would not comment ahead of the official release by the US Government”.