THE debate still rages whether alien life exists.

Recent claims from independent professional sources suggest that the likelihood of us finding other life forms in the universe is extremely remote.

Yesterday it was reported that Dr Howard Smith, a senior astrophysicist at Harvard University said there was ‘very little hope’ of discovering aliens, and even if we did, it would be almost impossible to make contact.

Astronomers have already discovered a total of 500 planets in distant solar systems and think billions of others could exist.

Yet while many are similar to earth, their conditions are too hostile to support alien life forms – such as little green men or ET.

Their proximity or, indeed, distance from the sun would make the planets uninhabitable, either due to extreme temperatures or lack of water.

“We have found that most other planets and solar systems are wildly different from our own,” said Dr Smith. “They are very hostile to life as we know it, which suggests we could effectively be alone in the universe.”

Evolution expert Professor Simon Conway Morris, from Cambridge University, also doubts the existence of aliens, “because it is unthinkable that advanced space travellers should not have reached the Earth by now”.

Solar systems capable of hosting life-bearing planets would have begun to form billions of years before ours, Prof Conway Morris pointed out.

He added: “We never had any visitors, nor is it worth setting up a reception committee in the hope that one day they might turn up. They are not there, and we are alone.”

However, surveys suggest half of us believe extra-terrestrials do exist and a ‘substantial proportion’ are convinced alien spacecraft have already visited the earth. Even world-renowned scientist Professor Stephen Hawking argued that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” his said in his TV series Stephen Hawking’s Universe.

He believes trying to make contact with other beings is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

Dorset has been a UFO hotspot in recent years, with dozens of sightings of strange things in the sky. These include mysterious lights, cigar shaped objects and even a ‘circular flying saucer flying over the sea, emitting beams of light’ seen in Bournemouth by Slade frontman Noddy Holder.

Often there is a natural explanation for such sightings, including Chinese lanterns, weather phenomena, meteor showers, flares and space debris.

Psychic researcher David Haith from Bournemouth has studied the subject for a number of years. He said: “The world is riddled with anomalies, and while 95 per cent of sightings have a rational explanation, it is arrogant to suggest that the other five per cent can also be explained.

“We don’t know that such phenomena is alien intelligence but we do know that there is strong evidence that something is interacting with this planet.

“Over the years physics and science have been turned on their heads. Many years ago, scientists believed that the world was flat. Time, therefore, is knowledge. If you look at our scientific discoveries in the last 100 years, just think of what we will learn in the next 100 or 1000.

“For now, a good proportion of the public has an intuition that we are not alone.”

• A creature was captured on CCTV leaping over the central reservation on the northbound Wessex Way, Bournemouth. Was it a dog, a deer, or an alien? Judge for yourself at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0ErgCiQkD4