For 60 years, astronomers have scoured the Universe for signs of extraterrestrial life, but found nothing. Dr Beatriz Villarroel suggests they are looking for the wrong signs. The pentagon's recent attention to unidentified flying objects inspires a new search for probes from extraterrestrial civilizations in our Solar System. The search has just begun.

Dr. Beatriz Villarroel is an astronomer at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) in Stockholm. She is the project leader of the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project (www.vascoproject.org) and the newly founded EXOPROBE project, aiming to find an extraterrestrial probe in the Solar System. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx