The Gralien Report is a source for news about space, science, futurism, archaeology, and the mysteries of our universe. It also features the weekly podcast The Micah Hanks  Program, which covers science, news, culture, and features commentary and interviews with authors, researchers, and science educators.

A few of the topics we regularly feature include:

• Space Exploration
• Artificial Intelligence
• Futurology
• The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
• Mysteries of Physics and Astronomy
• Skepticism and Pseudoscience
• Science Fiction and Entertainment
• Unexplained Aerial Phenomena
• Unusual Phenomena in Nature
• History and Archaeology

The Gralien Report takes a critically minded approach to the study of our world. In our study of science and technology, we love to speculate about the future, while looking at the ways innovation has been influenced over time by the science fiction of luminaries like Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, and many other gifted thinkers.

Scientific anomalies are also a frequent area of interest of ours, and in discussing them, we attempt to look at lingering mysteries of the modern age with a reliance on scientific literature and academic research, rather than pure speculation. While our outlook is skeptical, we aim to avoid the dogmatic attitudes that exist at ideological extremes, which often can be likened to opposing forms of “belief.” 

There is still much to our universe that remains to be explored, and untold amounts that science can teach us. The Gralien Report explores the boundaries of human knowledge on a weekly basis. Visit our podcasts page to find out all the ways to subscribe to The Micah Hanks Program, and for more information about Micah Hanks, you can visit his website here.

What IS A “Gralien?”

The word Gralien is a portmanteau that combines “grail” and “alien.” In short, the mythical idea of a long-sought and prized “grail,” paired with our search for life elsewhere in the cosmos, are concepts that bridge the gap between humankind’s ancient past, and our aspirations for future scientific discovery.

Below are a few favorite quotes of ours, which further outline our interests and aims with the content featured on The Gralien Report:

“If all our common-sense notions about the universe were correct, then science would have solved the secrets of the universe thousands of years ago. The purpose of science is to peel back the layer of the appearance of objects to reveal their underlying nature. In fact, if appearance and essence were the same thing, there would be no need for science.”

-MICHIO KAKU, Hyperspace

“If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic–being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.”

-ELON MUSK

“Just as there are those who accept every UFO report at face value, there are also those who dismiss the idea of alien visitation out of hand and with great passion. It is, they say, unnecessary to examine the evidence, and ‘unscientific’ even to contemplate the issue…. a distinguished physicist, whose judgment in many other matters I respected, threatened to sic the Vice President of the United States on me if I persisted in this madness.” 

-CARL SAGAN, The Demon-Haunted World. 

“[H]ere, as briefly as possible, are the conclusions I’ve come to after more than fifty years of study: 1. There may be strange and surprising meteorological, electrical, or astronomical phenomena still unknown to science, which may account for the very few UFOs that are both genuine and unexplained. 2. There is no hard evidence that Earth has ever been visited from space. 3. If that does happen, there are at least three independent global radar networks that will know within a matter of minutes.” 

-ARTHUR C. CLARKE, Where are They?

“My view is that anomaly research, while not science per se, has the potential to destabilize paradigms and accelerate scientific change. Anomalies reveal nature as it really is: complex, chaotic, possibly even unplumbable.”

-WILLIAM R. CORLISS, Science Frontiers

“People won’t have time for you if you are always angry or complaining.”

-SIR STEPHEN HAWKING, “Return of the time lord,” The Guardian