When Mysterious Music Is Heard When Someone Dies

Many times someone near death may seem to get a glimpse of light from some mysterious world beyond. Some have claimed to see a glorious vision of a heavenly realm, maybe something like this:

Apparitions of the dead are often reported at a deathbed. A much less common type of report is a report of mysterious music occurring at the time of death. One such report appears on page 221 of Volume II of the classic two-volume Phantasms of the Living. We read this 1885 account by Sarah A. Sewell of events in 1863, near the deathbed of a sick girl Lilly who died on the Tuesday mentioned:

"Our attention was roused by sounds of the music of an Aeolian harp, which proceeded from a corner cupboard in one corner of the room. All was hushed, and I said, 'Lilly, do you hear that pretty music?' and she said, ' No,' at which I was much surprised, for she was a great lover of music. The sounds increased until the room was full of melody, when it gradually and slowly seemed to pass down the stairs and ceased. The servant, who was occupied in the kitchen, two stories below, heard the sounds, and our eldest daughter, who was going into the larder, stopped in the passage to listen and wonder where the music came from, and the servant called to her, ' Do you hear that music?' ...' The next day (Sunday) my old nurse and aunt came up to see how Lilly was, and were, with my husband, all in the room with the child. I had gone down into the kitchen to prepare some little dainty milk-food for her, when the same sounds of Aeolian music were heard by all three in the room, and I heard the same in the kitchen. Monday passed, but we had no repetition. On Tuesday, at the same hour, we [i.e., Mr. and Mrs. Sewell] once more heard the same wailing Aeolian music from the same part of the room ; again it increased in volume, until the room was full of wailing melody ; and again did the sounds appear to pass through the door, down the stairs, and out at the front door. Now, this music was heard three different days, at the same time each day, and not only by those in the room with the child, but by myself, my daughter, and the servant, two flights of stairs below the room the child was in ; and on the second day by my aunt and nurse and the children, who were in the dining-room." 

On the next page Matthew Sewell corroborates the account:

"I heard the sweet music identically with my wife. The music was heard on Saturday, 2nd of May, a little before 4 o'clock in the afternoon, also on the next day at about the same time, and also on the following Tuesday at about the same hour. Those who heard the music were my wife, myself, my wife's aunt, the nurse, our son Richard, aged 7 ; our son Thomas, aged 9 (the last four all dead), our eldest daughter, aged 11, and our servant, who shortly left us and went to Ireland to her husband, who was a soldier, and was soon lost sight of. Our eldest daughter is now in New York, and I have no doubt but that she will remember the circumstance. I am quite satisfied that the music heard was not produced by someone at a distance, for our house was then situated in a long garden, some 50 yards distant from the public road, and the adjoining house to ours was unoccupied at the time. The sound was not a muffled sound at all, but the soft, wild notes of an Aeolian harp, which rose and fell distinctly, and increased gradually, until the room was full of sound, as loud as the full swell of an organ, and it rolled slowly down the stairs, dying softly on the ear in weird cadences. I am certain it was not produced by human fingers."

The reported events occurred in 1863, before there were any machines capable of playing back prerecorded music, and decades before music could be transmitted by radio. The two witnesses were interviewed by one of the authors of Phantasms of the Living. 

On page 223 of the same volume, we read an 1884 account by Mrs. Yates, who states this:

"In 1870 I lost a dearly loved daughter, 21 years old ; she died at noonday, of aneurism. At night, my only other daughter was with me, when all at once we both assumed a listening attitude, and we both heard the sweetest of spiritual music, although it seemed so remote, my ears were hurt listening so intently. Till some hours after, my dear girl and I were afraid to inquire of each other had we heard it, for fear we were deluded, but we found both had been so privileged and blessed."

Giving her address, the daughter (A. Beilby) states the following:

" I can speak with certainty respecting the beautiful music my dear mother and I heard on the 26th November, 1870. I shall never forget it; we were both afraid to speak, it was so exquisite."

Camille Flammarion was the author of the monumental three-volume work Death and Its Mystery, a classic of parapsychology which you can read  here, here and here, as well as the massive tome The Unknown, which you can read here. On this page of The Unknown, we read an account by M. Alphonse Berget, involving a friend of his mother's (Amelie) who had become a nun:

"Amélie had been in religion about three years, when one day my mother went up to the garret to look for something she was anxious to find. All at once she ran back to the salon uttering loud cries, and fell down unconscious. They flew to her help, lifted her up, and she came to herself, crying with sobs :

' Oh, it is horrible ! Amélie is dying — she is dead, for I have just heard her singing as only a person who is dead could sing !'

And another nervous seizure again made her lose her senses.

Half an hour after this, Colonel M. rushed like a madman into my grandfather's house, holding a dispatch in his hand. The dispatch was from the Mother Superior of the convent at Strasbourg, and contained only these words : ' Come. Your granddaughter very ill.' The colonel took the first train, reached the convent, and heard that the Sister had died at three o'clock precisely, the hour of the nervous attack experienced by my mother. This fact has been often told me by my mother, my grandmother, and my father, who were present, as well as my uncle and aunt, all of whom bear testimony that they had witnessed this strange incident."

On page 314 of the May 14, 1921 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here, we read this account by F. H. Rooke:

" Some years ago my sister and I had a joint experience, which has been the greatest comfort to us.  Our mother lay dangerously ill , every nerve racked with rheumatoid arthritis, and both nurse and doctor seemed to think that her sufferings could not last much longer. 

 One night about 1 a.m. my sister was sitting up with the nurse ( I was sleeping on another landing ), when her attention was transfixed by the most beautiful majestic chords, as if every golden note of melody was being played on some heavenly instrument - music far exceeding anything she had ever heard . Turning to the nurse, she said , ' Did you hear that ? '  'I heard nothing,' was the answer. At that moment I entered the room saying 'Where does that beautiful music come from ?' The music had awakened me out of heavy slumber. 

As we spoke the sounds died away, and on looking at the bed, it was evident to me that the sweet spirit of our devoted mother had passed to other realms to these beautiful strains."

On page 92 of the April 24, 1885 edition of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (Volume 3), which you can read here, we have the following account involving mysterious music at the scene of someone's deathbed. It is an account supplied in 1885, of events in 1874. The writer apparently used "Julia X" where he meant to write "Julia Z." 

"Six or seven years passed away, and Mrs. --, who bad been long ill, was dying, in fact she did die the following day. I was sitting at the foot of her bed talking over some business matters that she was anxious to arrange, being perfectly composed and in thorough possession of her senses ; in fact she was right, and my solicitor, who advised that the step she wanted to be taken was not necessary, was wrong. She changed the subject and said: ' Do you hear those voices  singing?' I replied that I did not; and she said: 'I have heard them several times to-day, and I am sure they are the angels welcoming me to Heaven; but,' she added, 'it is strange, there is one voice amongst them I am sure I know, and cannot remember whose voice it is.'  Suddenly she stopped and said, pointing straight over my head, 'Why there she is in the comer of the room; it is Julia X. [Julia Z.]; she is coming on ; she is leaning over you ; she has her hands up ; she is praying; do look ; she is going.'  I turned but could see nothing. Mrs. -- then said, 'She is gone.'  All these things I imagined to be the phantasies of a dying person. Two days afterwards, taking up the Times newspaper, I saw recorded the death of Julia Z., wife of Mr. Z. I was so astounded that in a day or so after the funeral I went up to -- and asked Mr. X. if Mrs. Z., his daughter, was dead. He said, 'Yes, poor thing, she died of puerperal fever. On the day she died she began singing in the morning, and sang and sung until she died.' "

In a 1920 publication here, we read the account below:

"The most famous of all cases of ghostly music, however, is that of Samuel Foote. When staying a night at his father’s house, in Truro, he was awakened by the sweetest music he had ever heard. He got up, roused the household, and they all listened to it, but no one could tell who was responsible for it, or whence it originated. Shortly afterwards, Foote learned that, at the very hour he had listened to the mysterious music, his maternal uncle, Sir John Goodere, had been kidnapped, taken on board the ship of his brother, Captain Goodere, and deliberately strangled."

The eerie 1891 account below (which you can read here) claims that a periodical called the Pittsburgh Dispatch reported "ghostly sounds...the music of a violin" was  long heard after a murder, at a log cabin location.

We may wonder whether anything supernatural was going on, or whether it was just some natural sound that vivid imaginations interpreted as mysterious violin music (maybe a whistling of the wind through woods surrounding a log cabin). Nature can suddenly astound us with sounds that seem like the most wonderful or eerie music. Just yesterday, I heard some songbird outside my window, and its music was so stunning that I thought to myself: this is the Maria Callas of songbirds. The notes were ever-changing and always delightful.  Hearing that bird, I can understand the kind of natural music that inspired  Shelley to write his ode "To a Skylark." 

Thank You, Readers

It finally happened: after 13 years of writing on this site, this blog has  reached a page view count in the millions. I thank my readers for their repeated visits here. 

In the past decade I have not spent a cent to advertise or promote this blog, which I have never spent more than about 20 dollars to promote. And I have never done anything to artificially inflate my page view count. So I presume that some people must be helping me get increased readership, by means of word-of-mouth.  To such people I am particularly grateful. 

I can promise this much to readers who keep visiting this site: you will for sure be able to get my posts at roughly their current publication rate, for almost two more years, at least.  I have hundreds of my not-yet-published posts which I have auto-scheduled for future publication, which will be published on my blog sites even if I meet an untimely demise this year. And all of these posts were manually written by me, without any writing help from any AI tool. So if you want to keep reading up on the "weighty topics" mentioned in this blog's byline, without any ads or AI slop, keep coming here. 

Science News BS Heat Map, June 25, 2026

 

                         

Recent Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
"Did two physicists just upend decades of cosmology research?"		A long-standing dogma of cosmology is a "cosmological principle," the idea that the universe looks the same on a large scale, no matter which direction you look in. But in the article we read, "A new paper published Wednesday in Nature by two physicists calls the cosmological principle into question. They argue that the universe’s structures do look significantly different depending on the direction you look. 'In this survey, we find there are large-scale structures which define special directions,' says Francesco Sylos Labini, a physicist at the Enrico Fermi Research Center in Rome, Italy and one of the study’s authors." The paper's finding will be resisted because it conflicts with a long-held but groundless dogma of cosmology, the idea that there was an instant of "primordial cosmic inflation" during a fraction of the universe's first second. Uncertainty here causes me to give a rating suggesting a result something less than rock-solid.
"Mars life search gets boost as rover test distinguishes mirrored biosignature molecules"		That headline sure sounds like something encouraging came up in the search for life on Mars, does it not? But the article is reporting nothing of the sort. It's just a Mars rover doing some analysis of biologically irrelevant molecules.
"Nasa rover detects potential signatures of ancient microbial life on Mars."		The headline is not justified, because all that is being reported on is the lackluster paper here. That paper does not mention a discovery of any building component of life, and does not mention a detection of amino acids or nucleobases (which have never been found on Mars). All that's going on is that scientists are speculating that what they observed might have been "macromolecular carbon" or MMC. There are 1001 ways to get such carbon without life ever arising. The authors state, "We explored the possibility of instrument background, inorganic Raman peak contributions from minerals and hydration, and terrestrial organic contamination. Ultimately...We conclude that MMC is the most parsimonious explanation for this feature." So it's no actual detection of such "macromolecular carbon," but just a guess about such a thing. Later (in a section very misleadingly entitled "Astrobiologically compelling sample") the authors confess, "The presence of MMC reported in this work cannot be ascribed at this time to any specific formation mechanism; biological, geological, and meteoritic sources of the organics observed are all possible."
"Great apes (including us) have been giggling for 15 million years."		We have the false claim that humans are apes. We also have a repetition of this long-taught falsehood:  "We share 98.9 percent percent of our DNA with many of our primate cousins." The difference between human genomes and that of the animals with the closest similarity (chimpanzees) is actually more like 14% rather than just 1.1%. Of course, we cannot tell whether animals ever laughed millions of years ago.
"It’s very exciting." An astronomer has seen light from just after the birth of the Universe. Now he's sharing it with the world."		Wow, that sure sounds exciting, does it not? But nothing new has occurred. The "light" mentioned is not actually light, but microwave radiation. And it's not from "just after the birth of the universe" but from 380,000 years after the birth of the universe.  This radiation (called the cosmic background radiation) was discovered in the 1960's. So the "new discovery" sound of the title is very misleading.
"A Physicist Made a 'Mini Universe' in The Lab to Check Time Really Exists"		No, the scientist sure as hell did not do any such thing. All he did was concentrate a little matter in a lab. We have not just an article writer falsely mentioning a "mini-universe," but also a physicist groundlessly using that term.
"We've just found the Universe's darkest galaxy – and it could solve one of the last, great mysteries in science."		A claim is made that some galaxy was found with "99.9 percent dark matter." The claim is groundless. Dark matter has never been observed, and all claims about the abundance of this supposedly invisible substance in particular galaxies are very dubious examples of guesswork. The claimed "galaxy" is not even a galaxy, but a mere group of four globular clusters, objects about a thousandth as massive as a galaxy.  The claim of the article that some mystery involving dark matter is one of the "last great mysteries in science" could not be be more false. Almost everywhere nature and reality present the most gigantic mysteries which science has failed to solve. Scientists and science journalists who fail to perceive this are those who have deluded themselves that they understand great mysteries that are a thousand miles over their heads.
"Research Suggests the Older You Get, the More Weed You Should Smoke"		In this article at Futurism.com, we get no research results backing up this claim. We merely hear of a paper that involved only cells, one claiming some benefits to cells, without showing any relation between marijuana use and brain decline. Another paper reviewing 26 studies states, "Although variability in the cannabis products used, outcomes assessed, and study quality limits the conclusions that can be made, modest reductions in cognitive performance were generally detected with higher doses and heavier lifetime use." It's a conclusion the opposite of what is reported in the Futurism article.

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 10)

 Mysterious orbs have been in the news lately. For example, below is a screen shot showing a headline from one major newspaper:

Below are some posts I have published about people reporting they saw mysterious orbs with the naked eye:

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 1 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 2 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 3 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 4 of 4)

Naked Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 5)

Naked Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 6)

Naked Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 7)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 8)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 9)

Let us look at some more cases of this type, which you will never hear about when addressing questions to your latest-and-greatest AI chatbot query tool.  

Below is a newspaper account from 1952, describing a "spooky, glowing ball of light."

You can read the full account using the link below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1952-07-13/ed-1/seq-18/

We have four police witnesses of a spooky orb that moves from a road into the woods, and then changes color from yellow to red before disappearing. 

At the site of the National UFO Reporting Center (https://nuforc.org/) we have a post listing UFO/UAP sightings. They include these:

In February of 2024 someone reported seeing this:

"I observed 1 large pulsating orb red/orange about a mile away to the east. The orb would change colours gradually between more orange than red, then vice versa. I observed this from a vantage point of a canal bridge. The orb was still before slowly getting lower to the ground. I estimate the height in the sky to be about as high a a ten storey tower block as I could use the terrain and surrounding buildings for context. As it was getting lower, it split into 3 orbs, all the same size, and moved lower and south in perfect formation. They then rotated around each other two or three times before flying off at instant high speeds at an angle to the North. About a second later, they were out of sight. It certainly wasn't weather phenomenon. It was deliberately, controlled and clear with a blue sky backdrop making it easy to identify the details."

Another person claims that on September 14, 2023 he had a very detailed encounter with sky orbs, an encounter lasting hours. Below are some excerpts from a much longer account that uses the word "orb" very many times. 

 "All of these orbs would dance around, travel, then eventually disappear. Some would reappear as they had before, do nearly the same dance, travel the same direction, all to disappear again. This went on for hours! There was no rhythm, no order, no definite pattern to their behavior but just random antics, again and again and again....Another curious thing the orb would do is multiply. As you watched it, it would seem to clone itself and birth other orbs the same size and shine as the original. These orbs would trail off and disappear, leaving the main one to dance with its self. A time or two that night, other orbs would show up and the two or three or more would dance back and forth like they were interacting somehow. They would eventually disappear, leaving the original one to itself again."

Another person claims to have seen orbs coming from what looked like a spacecraft:

"Me and my father were driving home after leaving a family members house. We came to a stop sign, I looked up and said 'what in the hell is that!?' At that time my father saw it as well, he had no response. We were froze with awe. It was an egg shaped craft, about the size of bus, maybe bigger. It had a beam of light that came out from no source that I could tell, it simply emitted from the ship. The beam of light scanned the geography, we could see the light moving over the trees in the ground scanning everything. Then that beam of light disappeared, and two orbs came out of The Craft, almost like watching a lava lamp blob separate from another blob it just kind of stretched out from it and formed an orb and then another. One was red one was yellow. The two orbs then began circling the larger craft, they did this for about 1 minute maybe 30 seconds not sure, then they went back into the ship."

At another site we read this account:

"In Rothesay, New Brunswick, in August 2022 around 4 pm, two witnesses observed 8 glowing red orbs, approximately 750-1000 meters away, moving in a sine wave manner. After approximately 30 seconds, the orbs converged and vanished."

On another page of the same site we read this:

"In 1993, a couple in Lake County, Florida, experienced a UAP sighting on their cattle ranch. They were awakened by bright lights from three orbs, approximately 30 meters off the ground. One orb appeared suddenly at their window, causing a buzzing sensation on their bodies. The orbs quickly departed towards a neighboring ranch. Following this event, the couple reported strange experiences and paranormal activities in their lives."

Here is the beginning of a newspaper account from 1897:

We read in the account of a badly wounded prisoner (John Jordan) who is being transported by stage coach. We read this:

"There it was— a ghostly, phosphorescent spheroid of light, waving and swaying behind the horses and moving along the dashboard. At one instant it looked like a reflection and at another it seemed to be a small body emitting the pale light itself. The light shifted to one side and next appeared under the wagon, and as they followed it with their eves it rested over the body of the prostrate John Jordan, who was uneasily slumbering. In a moment the light waved up and down and vanished in the darkness to the rear. Nothing was said to the prisoner about the peculiar experience of the night. Later in the day, however, Jordan revived and began to talk. 

'Say, Sheriff,' he began, 'I've got something to tell you.' 

 'Yes?' 

 'I aint going to last long, Sheriff.' 

'Don't talk like that. You're badly wounded, but you'll pull through as soon as you set medical attention and an easy berth. ' 

' No, I'll not,' Jordan reiterated stubbornly. 'I've called the last turn, I feel it. Last night I saw my sister. My sister's dead you know. She's the only one that ever thought much about me. Maybe I ought to have been a better man. Sheriff, but let that pass. Well, Sis came to me last night. I saw her as plain as I see you now. She was all in white, Sheriff, all in white. She pitied me and pointed to mv eye, where I got them shots in my head.' 

Jordan was wounded in the head and a bullet or shot penetrated the eye. He is no better and is not expected to live."

You can read the full account here:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SFC18970612.2.77&srpos=30&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------

 In Episode 8 of Season 16 of the Ancient Aliens TV show, we have an account by astronaut Jerry Linenger, who at the 16:41 mark says that while on a Russian space station Mir he saw a "white globular-looking thing" that looked like a snowball while looking out the window. The object was never identified. 

Below is an excerpt from pages 184 to 185 of The Problems of Psychical Research by Hereward Carrington.

"Dr. Baraduc had prepared a camera beside the bed of his wife, and, at the moment of her death, photographed the body, and shortly after developed the plate. Upon it were found three luminous globes resting a few inches above the body. These gradually condensed and became more brilliant. Streaks of light, like fine threads, were also seen darting hither and thither. A quarter of an hour after the death of his wife, Dr. Baraduc took another photograph. Fluidic cords were seen to have developed, partly encircling these globes of light. At three o’clock in the afternoon, or an hour after her death, another photograph was taken. It will be seen from this photograph that the three globes of light have condensed and coalesced into one, obscuring the head of Madame Baraduc, and developing towards the right. Cords were formed in the shape of a figure eight, closed at the top, and opened at the point nearest the body. Thus, as the globe develops in one direction, the cords seem to become more tense, and pull in the opposite direction. The separation becomes more and more complete, until finally, three and a half hours after death, a well-formed globe rested above the body, apparently held together by the encircling, luminous cords, which seemed also to guide and control it. At this moment, the globe becomes separated from the body, and, guided by the cords, floats into Dr. Baraduc’s bedroom. He speaks to the globe intensely; the globe thereupon approaches him, and he feels an icy cold breeze, which seems to surround and issue from the ball of light. It then floats away and disappears.

Frequently, within the next few days after these experiments, Dr. Baraduc saw similar globes in various parts of the house. By means of automatic writing, obtained through the hand of a non-professional psychic, he succeeded at last in establishing communication with this luminous ball, and was informed that it was the encasement of Madame Baraduc’s soul, which was still active and alive within it!" 

The photos referred to can be seen here.

Baraduc may have been the first person to ever publish a photograph of a mysterious orb.  That photo is discussed in my post here. 

At the website "Stan Gordon's UFO Anomalies Zone," we have a headline of "Three Low Level Glowing Spheres Nearly Strike Car Near Smithfield, Pennsylvania-September 18, 2024."   We read this:

"During more recent years, reports of small, low level, balls of light and sometimes referred to as orbs, have increased and are continuing to be reported from widespread locations. Some of these cases have taken place during daylight, within feet of observers and in good weather conditions. There are other incidents that are more startling such as these “mini-UFOs” appearing inside of homes, and in some cases physiological effects have been reported. Over the years I have received daylight reports of these smaller objects pacing vehicles and even entering the vehicles at times."

We read this account from a witness. 

" She was driving northbound on 119 when suddenly the three objects appeared from the left side of the road and moved across her path of travel at about hood-height.  She said she would have likely hit them had she not slammed on her brakes.  She stated the three balls moved in a straight line with just a few feet between them across the road and into the field below on her right.  Each sphere was white, and about twelve inches in diameter.  "

On page 124 of Volume 10 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1894), which you can  read here, we read this account by a Miss Williams:

(191. 2.) From Miss Williams. 11, Cleveland-terrace, Coatham, Redcar, September 23rd, 1889.

 "I was living at home with my parents at Eston-in-Cleveland. There was a working man called Long living in the village, not far from our house, whose wife was taken ill. Dr. Fulton, who at that time was staying with us, came in one night between 9 and 10 o'clock and said Mrs. Long was dying. After that we sat talking over the fire a good while, and then my sister Isabella and I went off to bed. We slept in a back bedroom, and after we got to this bedroom I said, ' Oh, I've forgotten something in the large bedroom !' To this latter I proceeded by myself, and, as I approached the door, something seemed to say to me, ' You'll see something of Mrs. Long, living or dead ! ' But I thought no more of this, and entered the bedroom, which I had to cross to the opposite end for what I wanted. When I had got the things in my hand, I noticed a lovely light hanging over my head. It was a round light —perfectly round. I had taken no light with me, but went for the things I wanted in the dark. I looked to see if there was any light coming in from the windows, but there was none : in that direction there was total darkness. I grasped one hand with the other and stood looking at the strange light to be sure that I was not deceived and was not imagining it. I walked across the room to the door, and all the way the light was hanging between my head and the ceiling. It was akin to the electric light : something of a cloud, though every part of it was beaming and running over with light. It left me at the bedroom door. On first seeing it a strange impression seized me, and after it left me I was so impressed that I could not speak of it to anyone for a day or two. I wondered at the time whether it had anything to do with Mrs. Long, and on inquiry I found that she died just about the time when I saw the light. If there was any difference, I judged it would be a little before, but there would not be much in it. This would be about 11 p.m , and about four years ago. It left an impression on my mind which I have never forgotten, and never shall forget. Mrs. Long was not ill many days—about two or three ; she died rather suddenly. I was rather interested in her. I did not see her during her illness, but had often seen her and talked to her before.  I was perfectly well at the time. and was in no trouble or anxiety. My age at the time was 23. I have had no experience of the kind before or since. I saw no figure, only a lovely light. Before telling my sister I made her promise she would not ridicule me nor call me superstitious. To the best of my recollection this is a correct statement. "

-- Mary Helena Williams.

"' P.S. —-The light which I saw was a palish blue. It emitted no rays, so that all the rest of the room was in darkness. It was wider in circumference than my head, so that as I walked I could see it above me without raising my head. As I left the room it remained, and when I looked again was gone. It was in a corner, where the darkness of the room was deepest and the least chance of illumination from the windows on the right and left, that I first saw it above my head. I had no fear, but a kind of sacred awe. The light was unlike any other that I ever saw, and I should say brighter than any other, or, at least, purer. Looking at it did not affect the eyes. It was midway between my head and the ceiling."

On the next page Mary's sister corroborates the account. 

A recent news article is entitled "Surprise city earns title of 'new UFO capital' after series of strange floating lights."  Someone named Manoel Orro states this: "One of them was a man from the German embassy, who called me a while later saying that he was a very skeptical, very logical person, who didn’t have the courage to talk about this with anyone in his family, but that a ball of golden light had appeared inside the chalet and he asked me to explain it."

Goofs and Futile Rhetoric of an Evolutionary Biologist

In a previous post I quoted an evolutionary biologist who recently gushed, "But what I aspire to be, more than anything, is an intellectual child of Charles Darwin." Statements such as that may have given you the impression that evolutionary biologists are people fixated on the teachings of one idolized hero, people who fail to properly study many deep topics that should be studied before anyone boasts of understanding human origins -- kind of like the fellow schematically depicted below. 

The 2025 paper "Complexity myths and the misappropriation of evolutionary theory" by evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch is a paper that may tend to corroborate negative ideas you may have about evolutionary biologists. It is a paper full of hubris and crowing, combined with the clumsiest attempts to sweep under the rug or rhetorically minimize the ocean-sized reality of fine-tuned biological complexity. Along the way, the author makes some confessions that help discredit the central claims that dogmatists of his type like to make. 

After its abstract the paper starts out by stating, "Enormous strides have been made in the biological sciences over the past century, and no subdiscipline has experienced greater advancements on the theory side than evolutionary biology." To the contrary, evolutionary biology is still chained to the clueless armchair-reasoning ideas of the nineteenth century biologist Charles Darwin. Evolutionary biologists have made very little progress beyond such erring ideas, and we should not count it as progress when such biologists strayed into the giant deception of making the false claim that DNA or its genes are a recipe, blueprint or program for making an organism or its cells. 

Lynch takes the briefest of lame slaps at something called the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis or EES. The term is an umbrella term for a grab bag of ideas by not-very-contrarian scientists who have noticed how miserably bad today's evolutionary biologists are at explaining the vast complexity and organization in living organisms. Lynch's rebuttal consists only of the name calling of referring to the supporter of this EES as "a small but vocal group of proselytizers," combined with the claim that "virtually every point identified as ignored has been thoroughly evaluated in prior research."  This is almost as lame as saying "you can't say I fail to explain biological complexity, because I mentioned biological complexity." 

Lynch offers a criticism of a recent theory called assembly theory. Some of his points about the weaknesses of that theory are valid. I criticized the same theory in my post here. 

Along the way, Lynch makes some confessions damaging to his cherished dogmas. He states that "there is no evidence that natural selection is in relentless pursuit of more complex molecules, cells, or organisms." But has not so-called "natural selection" been offered for roughly 179 years as the primary explanation for biological complexity, by evolutionary biologists such as Lynch? It almost sounds like Lynch is now hinting that such an explanation was incorrect. 

In the very next sentence, Lynch offers what sounds like the lamest explanation ever for biological complexity, a "only one direction to go in" explanation. He states this: "Of course, today’s organisms are more complex than prior to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), but there was only one direction to go four-billion years ago at the first dawn of cells." Similar reasoning might claim that well-built tall moon rockets can be built by tornadoes passing through junk yards, and claim that we should not be surprised by this on the grounds that "there was only one direction to go," the direction leading up towards the sky.  

The claim of "only one direction to go" is false. Once organisms arise with a dependency on a huge library of chemical information in genes, there are two directions that can be traversed, one leading to greater functional complexity, greater organization and more impressive biological functionality, and the other leading to less functional complexity, less organization and worse biological functionality. Random mutations occur all the time, and a large fraction of such mutations tend to cause illness and dysfunction. 

We then have this paragraph by Lynch:

"Microbes have been around for this entire period [4 billion years], and yet have not expanded in complexity. Given their enormous population sizes and short generation times, there were clearly adequate opportunities for the emergence of genomic, molecular, and cellular complexity should it have been at a selective premium. Yet, the origin of morphologically complex cells leading to eukaryotes was a singular event, and the vast majority of the Tree of Life remains prokaryotic. There are roughly 10³⁰ prokaryotic individuals on Earth, three orders of magnitude more than unicellular eukaryotes, and ten orders of magnitude more than the total number of metazoan individuals (reviewed in ref. 19), hardly an observation in support of a determined march toward complexity."

The first statement is false, according to the standard account of biologists. According to their account, there first existed prokaryotic calls much more simple than the vastly more complex type of cells in human bodies, called eukaryotic cells. So, according to the standard account, there was an enormous leap in the complexity of microbes. So why is Lynch claiming "microbes...have not expanded in complexity"? Later in the same paragraph, he contradicts his earlier assertion by referring to the origin of eukaryotic cells. He has no Darwinian or gradualist explanation for this event, referring to it as "a singular event." The standard story among biologists is that this vast leap in organization occurred as a "once in the planet's history" event due to some fantastically improbable accident.  

Ponder how ridiculous the last sentence is in the italicized quote above. Lynch states, "There are roughly 10³⁰ prokaryotic individuals on Earth, three orders of magnitude more than unicellular eukaryotes, and ten orders of magnitude more than the total number of metazoan individuals (reviewed in ref. 19), hardly an observation in support of a determined march toward complexity." This is cover-up-the-complexity talk along the lines of "the microbes vastly outnumber the mammals, so we should not think life is so complex."  Similar nonsense would claim that failed writers vastly outnumber writers such as Shakespeare, so we should not be too impressed by the works of Shakespeare.

The next paragraph is more cover-up-the-complexity nonsense. In one sentence Lynch makes the lame suggestion that we should not be too impressed by bursts of gene innovation in large animals, on the grounds that microbes had bigger bursts of gene innovation. Lynch also makes the false claim that large organisms only required "one new gene per 100,000" years. The claim is utterly unbelievable. Animal life is divided into about 30 phyla. Almost all of these phyla arose around the same relatively short era, during the Cambrian Explosion about 540 million years ago. The origin of such phyla must have required the origin of new genes at a rate many times greater than "one new gene per 100,000" years. The graph below shows the narrative of today's biologists about the origin of phyla during the past billion years, and how many arose during each part of that time. It's a narrative that is inconsistent with Darwinian gradualist explanations.

There follows more "coverup-the-complexity" nonsense from Lynch, such as these sentences below:

"For example, despite their added complexity for DNA replication and repair pathways, metazoans and land plants have substantially higher deleterious mutation rates than do prokaryotes. Despite their substantially more complex ribosomes and mechanisms for assembling them, eukaryotes do not have elevated rates or improved accuracies of translation, and if anything, catalytic rates and degrees of enzyme accuracy are reduced relative to those in prokaryotes (with simpler homomeric enzymes). Eukaryotes have diminished bioenergetic capacities (i.e., growth rates) relative to prokaryotes (21, 22), and this reduction is particularly pronounced in multicellular species (23)."

What is the motive of an evolutionary biologist such as Lynch in making these kind of "mammals are not so impressive" statements? The motive is a complexity coverup. Evolutionary biologists are profoundly embarrassed by the endless stupendous wonders of fine-tuned biological innovation and staggering heights of organization everywhere in the biosphere, which Darwinism does such a very crappy job of explaining. The greater the organization and functional complexity of an organism, the less credible it is to claim that the organism arose from unguided processes like those imagined by evolutionary biologists. So we see in the writing of evolutionary biologists and Darwinists a continual failure to properly describe the vast levels of organization, component interdependence,  information richness and fine-tuned functional complexity of living organisms. And we may read evolutionary biologists writing a paragraph like the one quoted above, saying something that sounds like "mammals are not much better than  microbes" nonsense. 

A silly microbiologist

Lynch makes this claim: "The peculiar details of life’s structures and functions are legacies of historical contingencies, laid down prior to LUCA, which dictate all aspects of molecular assembly and breakdown." The LUCA he is referring to (Last Universal Common Ancestor) is something evolutionary biologists claim existed a billion years ago or earlier.  So the structures and functions of human beings were "laid down prior to LUCA,"  "laid down" a billion years ago?  That's baloney. You could write a very long book describing only human and mammalian functions and structures unlike anything that existed a billion years ago. 

Instead of understanding any such thing as something that dictates "all aspects of molecular assembly and breakdown," today's scientists have no explanation for how the most complex molecules perform the way they do. Scientists cannot explain how it is that a protein molecule is able to form into the folded three-dimensional shape required for its function (a shape not specified in DNA or its genes). And scientists have no explanation for how proteins form into the protein complexes (teams of proteins) so often required for a protein to be useful. Below are some relevant quotes:

• "In real time how the chaperones fold the newly synthesized polypeptide sequences into a particular three-dimensional shape within a fraction of second is still a mystery for biologists as well as mathematicians."   -- Arun Upadhyay, "Structure of proteins: Evolution with unsolved mysteries," 2019.
• "The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found." -- Two scientists, "On a generalized Levinthal's paradox," 2018. 
• "How proteins fold remains a central unsolved problem in biology. While the idea of a folding code embedded in the amino acid sequence was introduced more than 6 decades ago, this code remains undefined. While we now have powerful predictive tools to predict the final native structure of proteins, we still lack a predictive framework for how [amino acid] sequences dictate folding pathways....Almost seven decades of experimental and theoretical inquiry have not revealed a 'folding code' at the amino acid level, i.e., rules endowed with the generality and predictive power required to connect amino acid sequence to how the protein attains its structure....Machine learning made it possible to identify weak correlations to generate the structure most likely to correspond to a sequence. This tour-de-force effort has largely solved the problem of predicting protein structure from sequence...but with a key limitation: the algorithm that predicts the structure is a complex black box of pattern recognition that casts little light on the process of folding and that tells us nothing about why only some sequences fold, or how physics and evolution are coupled." -- Five scientists in the year 2025 (link). 
• "The real challenge—that remains unanswered after more than 50 years of research in the structural biology field—is understanding the mechanisms that lead proteins to fold into their native state. The reason for these difficulties is that the central question of the protein folding problem remains unresolved: specifically, how a sequence of amino acids encodes its folding pathways." -- Scientist Jorge A. Vila, 2025 (link). 
•  "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "Most proteins associate into multimeric complexes with specific architectures, which often have functional properties like cooperative ligand binding or allosteric regulation. No detailed knowledge is available about how any multimer and its functions arose during historical evolution." -- Ten scientists, 2020 (link). 
• "Protein assemblies are at the basis of numerous biological machines by performing actions that none of the individual proteins would be able to do. There are thousands, perhaps millions of different types and states of proteins in a living organism, and the number of possible interactions between them is enormous...The strong synergy within the protein complex makes it irreducible to an incremental process. They are rather to be acknowledged as fine-tuned initial conditions of the constituting protein sequences. These structures are biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have created. Such systems pose a serious challenge to a Darwinian account of evolution, since irreducibly complex systems have no direct series of selectable intermediates, and in addition, as we saw in Section 4.1, each module (protein) is of low probability by itself." -- Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjerm, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,"  Journal of Theoretical Biology

In his zeal to criticize "assembly theory," Lynch makes this damaging confession: "To sum up, all evidence suggests that expansions in genomic and molecular complexity, largely restricted to just a small number of lineages (one including us humans), are not responses to adaptive processes." What? So we don't get expansions in complexity as part of an adaption storyline? That contradicts endless thousands of previous claims by evolutionary biologists that evolution occurs as an adaption to the environment. As a scientific paper states, "The vast majority of biologists engaged in evolutionary studies

interpret virtually every aspect of biodiversity in adaptive terms." 

Lynch's next statement is pure hogwash: "Instead, the embellishments of cellular complexity that arise in certain lineages are unavoidable consequences of a reduction in the efficiency of selection in organisms experiencing high levels of random genetic drift." There is nothing "inevitable" about cells becoming more complex, and Darwinists don't have any credible explanation as to how cells could have increased so enormously in complexity. 

But it seems that Lynch at least has a tiny bit of insight about his own hubris, because he says, "Some readers, probably including the authors of the above-mentioned papers, will argue that there is excessive hubris in the preceding paragraphs," referring to his own claims. Yes, Lynch has indeed been guilty of very bad hubris, groundless boasting, and a very silly attempt to coverup the stratospheric heights of dazzling innovation and information-rich organization in mammals and humans. Such coverups are like a child at the edge of the seashore, trying to push back the ocean by thrusting his palms against  incoming waves.

Lynch's paper has some very bad hubris, particularly at the end when he makes the suggestion that evolutionary biologists may have little more left to do other than "stamp collecting." In an earlier paper he spoke as if the exact opposite was true, confessing that "the mechanisms by which complex cellular features evolve constitute one of the great unsolved problems of evolutionary biology." Two other biologists  in 2006 made a similar confession in the quote below, making a confession that is the exact opposite of the boasts we so often hear from evolutionary biologists:

"Evolutionary biologists assert that variations must be sufficient, though they lack a general explanation for the origin of complex novel structures." -- Biologists  Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, "The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma," 2006, page 4 (link).  

Science News BS Heat Map, June 19, 2026

 

  

Recent Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
"Experts now think ageing can be reversed. Here's what convinced them."		Very bad clickbait from the BBC Science Focus site that is now one of the Internet's worst purveyors of clickbait bunk. The only discussion of biology is a discussion of jelllyfish, and it has no relevance to human aging.
"NASA Study Challenges Theories on Where the Ingredients for Life Came From."		The title and most of the story are not objectionable. But the beginning is way off. The writer says, "The question of how life began here on Earth... remains a bit of a mystery." To the contrary, the origin of life is the most gigantic mystery, which scientists have made no progress on solving. The writer then makes the untrue claim that scientists have confirmed that life began near hydrothermal vents. The claim that life began in such a way is a mere speculation, without any evidence to support it.
"Why 'reprogramming' is the buzziest approach in reversing aging right now"		This MIT Technology Review article starts out with a good description of how some previous excitement about reversing aging approaches failed to live up to the hype. The article then tries to raise excitement about a "cell reprogramming" approach, by claiming,  "It seems to improve tissue healing, restore vision, and even improve learning and memory." The claim about improvements in memory and learning is groundless. When that claim is made, the article has a link to a very low-quality paper failing to show any such thing.  It's a junk paper guilty of the same old Questionable Research Practices so predominant in neuroscience memory research, such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes, the lack of any blinding protocol, and the use of the utterly unreliable "freezing behavior" method of trying to judge how well a rodent remembered (a worthless method for reasons discussed at length here). The paper also uses the Morris Water Maze test to try to measure memory in mice. While that test is fairly reliable when used on rats, it is not a reliable test when used on mice, for reasons explained in the appendix at the end of my post here.
"Metal-driven chemical reaction in deep sea may explain origin of life"		The title of this article in the journal Science is an example of very bad misleading clickbait, which we often get these days in even the most prestigious science publications. The idea that life (something of enormously high complexity even in its simplest form) could be explained by a mere chemical reaction is nonsensical. All that is mentioned is speculation about the origin of phosphorus in living things, and even the simplest living thing is vastly more than mere phosphorus. The main problem in explaining the origin of life is explaining the origin of hundreds of types of proteins required for even the simplest cell. Such proteins do not even use phosphorus.
"Newfound ‘Switchboard’ Helps the Brain Form New Memories Without Forgetting Older Ones."		We have here another example of the tendency of university press offices to produce hugely misleading press releases boasting grandly about low-quality work done at their university. The paper being promoted is the very low-quality paper here, which used way-too-small study group sizes such as only 2 mice, 4 mice and 6 mice. No study like this should be taken seriously unless it used 15 or 20 animals per study group.  The boasts of the press release are utterly groundless. Given the switchboard-resembling structure of the brain and the continuous firing of neurons, anyone can monitor some brain cells during some animal's learning, and say he found a "memory switchboard," even if the cells monitored have no relation to memory.
"How the brain builds sentences, neuron by neuron."		The article in Nature is promoting another low-quality study involving reckless endangerment of epilepsy patients, one in which very sick epilepsy patients have microelectrodes unnecessarily implanted in their brains. While larger electrodes are often implanted to help determine where in the brain to do epilepsy surgery, a scientific paper tells us, "Sixty-five years after single units were first recorded in the human brain, there remain no established clinical indications [i.e. medical justification] for microelectrode recordings in the presurgical evaluation of patients with epilepsy (Cash and Hochberg, 2015)." We read, "These micro-arrays (used for research) were placed within the cortex in tandem with the surface cortical grids (used for clinical monitoring)," which suggests the microarray or microelectrodes were not necessary for surgical evaluation. The implantation of microelectrodes into brains has health risks, and here very sick epilepsy patients were  unnecessarily endangered. Nothing of any real scientific value resulted from this experiment. All that is going on is pareidolia correlation-fishing noise-mining, in which scientists identify some neurons that fired more often before some word was spoken. Because neurons fire randomly between 1 and 200 times per second, you would always be able to identify such neurons, even if brains do nothing to produce speech, and even if you were tracking neurons that had no involvement in speech. The sample size was too low (only 8 humans) for any robust result to be claimed. Tragically such reckless endangerment of very sick epilepsy patients in poorly designed experiments is an ongoing scandal of neuroscience research. Typically in the "informed consent" documents of such studies, epilepsy patients are not even informed (in any language a suffering epileptic patient would be likely to understand) of the most basic fact of what will occur, that tiny wires will be planted deep in their brains. This study fails to publish any informed consent document the subjects agreed to. Why was that?
"Benzene reaction may explain how DNA and RNA building blocks formed on early Earth."		The press release starts out badly, by making the very untrue claim that DNA and RNA are "the molecules that encode all of life's functions." That is not true. Neither DNA nor RNA tells how to make a cell or any of its organelles; and neither molecule tells how to make a human body or any of its organs; and neither molecule does anything to explain the mental functions of humans. The press release discusses some mere speculation about how we might have got precursors of the first RNA or DNA molecules. There is no discussion of a lab experiment substantiating this speculation, as shown by the statement, "The team next plans to demonstrate that these reactions can occur in the laboratory."
"Ancient fire record rewritten: Researchers push earliest evidence of human fire use back to over a million years"		The article discusses claimed evidence of "fire use" in a cave in South Africa, "fire use" supposedly occurring between 1 and 1.7 million years ago. The claim is extremely dubious, being based on some "new method" by which scientists claim to analyze fossil bones and find evidence that some burning occurred, involving evidence "subtle and difficult to detect."  We read that this is evidence not of man-built fires but of the use of "naturally occurring fires." The evidence is extremely weak and doubtful, and the use of the term "human fire use" is inappropriate. No species existing a million years ago should ever be called human. A hallmark characteristic of humans is the use of symbols. When you are discussing creatures existing very long before any symbols were created, such creatures should not be referred to as "human."
"Decoding the Genetic Blueprint Behind Our Three-Dimensional Body."		Another telling of the "genes as body blueprint" deceit that materialists have been telling for decades, because it's a lie they need to tell. Genes actually specify only low-level chemical information, and do not specify how to make any anatomical structures and do not even specify how to make cells or any of the organelles that make up cells. Contrary to the title mentioning our bodies, the study discussed involved only comb jellies (looking like jellyfish).

1. On page 26 of the recent book The Developing Genome, Professor David S. Moore states, "The common belief that there are things inside of us that constitute a set of instructions for building bodies and minds -- things that are analogous to 'blueprints' or 'recipes' -- is undoubtedly false."
2. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake says this "DNA only codes for the materials from which the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins, and so forth," and "There is no evidence that it also codes for the plan, the form, the morphology of the body."
3. Developmental biologist C/H. Waddington stated, "The DNA is not a program or sequentially accessed control over the behavior of the cell."
4.  Scientists Walker and Davies state this in a scientific paper: "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism; no information is actively processed by DNA alone...DNA is a passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins."
5. Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox. 
6. "The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, noting "it doesn't encode some specific outcome."
7. "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, who says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  
8. Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ." 
9. Michael Levin (director of a large biology research lab) states that "genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy," and after referring to a "deep puzzle" of how biological forms arise, he gives this example: "Scientists really don’t know what determines the intricate shape and structure of the flatworm’s head."

The Faulty Figures in an Astrobiology Paper

 The 2022 science paper "Life beyond Earth: How will it first be detected?" by Chris Impey has some figures designed to cause us to be hopeful about the chances of detecting extraterrestrial life before the year 2035. But the figures are misleading, and the prospects of detecting such life before the year 2035 are dim. 

Let us look at some of these figures, and why they mislead us. Figure 1 in this paper is this cheerful visual:

Below are comments on some of the circles in the diagram.

• "Evidence that organic molecules form easily and readily." The trick of appealing to a supposed widespread existence of "organic molecules" is the oldest trick of astrobiologists. Saying there are  lots of "organic molecules" in outer space makes people think that outer space is life-friendly. But when scientists use the term "organic molecules" they merely mean molecules containing carbon. Most of these "organic molecules" are not components of life or any indicators of life. 
• "Evidence that planet and moon habitable locations are abundant." Before there was launched telescopes such as the Kepler telescope and the James Webb telescope, the hope was that many earth-sized planets would be found in the habitable zones around other stars. By now more than 5000 extrasolar planets have been discovered revolving around other stars. Only very few Earth-sized planets have been detected revolving around sun-like stars in habitable zones. When I ask Google how many, an AI overview lists only three (Kepler-452b, Kepler-1606b, and Kepler-1649b). So rather than using the phrase "abundant" here it might be better to use the term "rare." 
• "Evidence that Earth life can survive under a wide range of conditions." Such evidence does not tell us anything very important about the likelihood of an accidental appearance of life on another planet. 
• "Evidence that ingredients for life are widely available in time and space." It would be fallacious to argue that books can accidentally be printed in a book manufacturing plant,  on the grounds that "ingredients" for books (such as paper and ink) are widely available at such a spot. Similarly, even the simplest one-celled life is a state of very high organization, something requiring a very special engineering, not merely "ingredients." The amount of information and organization needed for even the simplest life is comparable to the amount of information and organization needed to produce a 100-page technical manual. 
• "Evidence that life appeared early in the history of the earth."  We do not know that life appeared very early in the history of the earth. Our planet is 4.6 billion years old, and claims are made that there are geological signs of life dating back to 3.5 billion years. But such claims are doubtful, as they rely on what are called stromatolites, unusual-looking geological features which some claim were formed by bacteria. We see no cells or biological structures in the oldest stromatolites. The claim that very old stromatolites (older than 3 billions years) are signs of ancient life relies on a rather complicated and debatable line of reasoning. It's quite possible that they are not signs of early life, and that there are alternate geological explanations. This scientific paper says the evidence for life older than 2.5 billion years is “meager and difficult to read.” If you were to prove that life arose on Earth in the first billion years that it could have arisen, that would not tell us anything about the unlikelihood of life accidentally arising. Extremely unlikely things that might happen in any of ten time periods often occur in the first of those time periods. For example, someone may be killed by lightning during the first of ten decades that he might have been killed by lightning. But that does not tell us anything about the likelihood of being killed by lightning. 

Later we have a Figure 5 which attempts to persuade us that there is a "basic foundation" for "biomarkers" on Enceladus and Titan, two moons of Saturn.  Biomarkers have not been detected on either of these moons. Later there is a Figure 9 which has a large title of "SETI Success." So far SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been a dismal failure. 

Later we have this as Figure 10:

The figure predicts that life would be detected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) using "IR Spectroscopy" (infrared spectroscopy) by the year 2024. This discovery is judged to be something that would occur with "high" probability. It is now the year 2026 and no such detection has occurred. There was a false alarm announcement by a glory-seeking astrobiologist in the year 2025, but other scientists said the announcement was groundless. 

There is also no reason to think that the GMT (Giant Magellan Telescope) or that the ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) will have a "high" chance of detecting extraterrestrial life, as Impey assumes in the figure above. These GMT and ELT telescopes will be observatories in Chile that will be subject to distortion caused by Earth's atmosphere, something that the James Webb Space Telescope avoids. 

It seems the underlying  assumptions of astrobiologist author Chris Impey are very wrong. Making an equally bad blunder, Impey predicted that a Mars sample return would have "high" odds of life detection. There is no basis for such optimism. Life requires many types of protein molecules, and most types of protein molecule require a very special special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids. Amino acids have never been detected on Mars, and the surface of Mars is extremely inhospitable to life. Given such facts, there is no basis for thinking that a Mars sample return mission would be likely to detect life. 

It seems that astrobiologists such as Impey are people who are very  overoptimistic. A central tendency of materialists has been a tendency to vastly underestimate the complexity of living things and the complexity of minds. This tendency has led materialists to make bad predictions about when the origin of life would be understood and when extraterrestrial life would be discovered. 

So in the year 2006 on the page here chemist Robert Shapiro predicted that the origin of life would be understood within five years, this being a prediction that the origin of life would be understood by the year 2011.  Twenty years later the problem of explaining the origin of life is still a problem 100 miles over the heads of scientists. Even the simplest self-reproducing one-celled organism is a state of organization so high that we should never expect it to arise by chance anywhere in the universe. 

In the year 2015 Ellen Stofan (a chief scientist at NASA) predicted, “I think we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years.” It's now the year 2026, and the prediction of finding "strong indications" of extraterrestrial life by the year 2025 failed. In 2025 NASA tried to get people excited about some rocks found on Mars, using the term "potential biosignatures"; but it was purely verbal trickery and groundless hype. Nothing like any decent evidence for life had been discovered. 

In a 1964 report of the Rand Corporation a large group of  experts (largely Darwinist materialists) were asked when there would occur "creation of a primitive form of artificial life (at least in the form of self-replicating molecules)." Many of these experts gave estimates between 1980 and the year 2000. It is now the year 2026, and no such thing has happened. 

The experts were blinded by their allegiance to materialism. A proper study of the mountainous degree of organization and fine-tuned complexity in even the simplest thing would have led you to estimate that scientists would never be able to create artificial life from chemicals. But the experts did not make such a study, because they wanted to believe that self-reproduction is relatively easy to achieve. 

It is quite possible that the universe has very many other forms of intelligent life, but the chance of that seems very slim if unguided material processes are all that's going on.