Tim Peake on aliens

Ask an astronauts with Tim Peake for Living Paintings. This question is from Finn aged three and a half. Did you see any aliens in space?

Did I see any aliens in space no I wish I had, uh, but uh, I didn't see any aliens in space. Um, uh, we spend a lot of time looking out of the coupla windows and we're always interested in anything unusual that we might see. And, um, of course, a lot of these have explanations, just, just looking at the weather systems on earth, the thunderstorms, the Aurora Borealis, Aurora Australis and things like red sprites, which are these unusual streaks of red light that you get near thunderstorms. And so we quite often see some unusual things. One day I looked out and it was daylight and I saw three bright lights flying in formation. Now in the daytime, we normally don't see any bright lights outside, uh, because the, the light from the sun and the reflected off the earth is so bright that you don't see any stars.

You just see complete blackness of space. So if you see a light in space in the daytime, it's normally another spacecraft coming towards you. And we certainly didn't have any cargo vehicles coming towards us that day. So I called one of my crew mates over and said, Hey, Jeff, you know, take a look at this. What do you make of that? And he was as bemused as I was about these three lights in formation, there's suddenly a fourth light, joined them as well information. Uh, and then I realized that the lights, which I thought were a long, long way away, we're actually very, very close and they were tiny, tiny lights, and it was droplets of liquid. And the light was reflecting off the liquid and it was actually leaking out of a progress resupply vehicle. So, uh, what we first thought might be a, you know, sort of alien ships coming towards us actually ended up being leaking liquid out of a progress vehicle.