Has the U.S. already discovered alien spaceships? Inside the best space news of the week.

UFO conspiracy theories, China contributing to record off-world population, the argument for an all-female Mars crew and more space news from the Yahoo News partner network.

Welcome to “This Week in Outer Space,” where you’ll find a roundup of the best space coverage from Yahoo News and our partners. This week, we’ve got the space equivalent of the census, a pitch for who should be on the first mission to Mars, and a mystery about solar wind potentially solved. But first, everyone’s favorite topic: aliens.

Whistleblower claims the intelligence community is holding back information on UFOs

There’s been a lot of talk about UFOs lately: mysterious balloons popping up in February, congressional testimony from the Pentagon’s UFO chief in April, and last week NASA held a public meeting to discuss how it studies “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” or UAPs (the latest term for UFOs). While speculation and fantasies about alien visitors may have surged, nothing officially released during these events suggest that there’s genuine evidence of confirmed alien activity.

But this week, things took an unexpected turn.

On Monday, the Debrief reported that David Charles Grusch, an Air Force veteran who held positions in both the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, is alleging that the U.S. not only has evidence of alien activity but has recovered “intact and partially intact vehicles of non-human origin.” And with those credentials, Grusch doesn’t appear to be, as Jalopnik put it, “just some guy waving signs on a street corner in D.C.”

But the Pentagon is downplaying the allegation. Susan Gough, a spokesperson for the Defense Department, told Fox News this week that there is no "verifiable information to substantiate the claims."

Should the first crew to Mars be all women?

While NASA and a consortium of private and international partners are hard at work preparing to return to the moon in 2025, they’ve got an even more ambitious goal for 2040: putting the first humans on Mars. With eyes on a months-long flight to put boots on the red planet, some experts hold that the most logical choice to fill those boots is with women.

This idea isn’t altogether new. Studies dating back to the early days of the space race concluded that female astronauts make for more resource-efficient crews, requiring less food, water and oxygen to survive on long-haul missions — and the notion of an all-female Mars crew has resurfaced every few years.

However, NASA isn’t entirely on board with following studies from the 1950s. They say that, while there may be some variance in resource consumption, the thing that actually makes a crew more efficient and effective is diversity of any kind. And with crewed missions to Mars at least a decade away, we’ll just have to wait and see who they choose.

China is contributing to a space population boom (sort of)

The crews of Shenzhou-15 and Shenzhou-16 inside China's space station
The crews of Shenzhou-15 and Shenzhou-16 inside China's space station (Han Qiyang/Xinhua via AP)

At any given time, there really aren’t that many people in space. It’s expensive to get there and you need a really good reason — like a mission from NASA — to stay there for any length of time. For the last few decades, most of the space-faring population has been based on the International Space Station, typically about seven astronauts but as many as 13 during crew changeovers. However, the ISS is no longer the only game in permanent space installation, with China expanding the use of its own space station; last week the combined populations of the ISS and China’s Tiangong space station briefly hit a whopping 17 people.

Now, 17 people in space at the same time may not sound like a lot, but it is technically a record. Plus, as Russia eventually moves to its own separate space station and both NASA and China eye long-term lunar missions, it’s likely that we’ll see that record surpassed multiple times in the next few years.

NASA may have solved the mystery of what causes solar wind

On Earth, we experience solar winds through auroras, like the Northern and Southern Lights, when charged particles ejected from the sun collide with our planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field. It looks really cool — and occasionally wreaks havoc on communication systems — but the exact reason why the sun emits these particles has long eluded astronomers. But newly published analysis of data collected by a 2021 probe of the sun’s upper atmosphere may finally provide an answer.

The data reveals that solar wind generation is likely driven by a phenomenon known as magnetic reconnection, where opposing magnetic fields pass through each other on the sun's surface, violently intertwining then reconnecting, resulting in a reaction that propels charged particles outward and eventually toward Earth.

Until now, most solar research has relied solely on measuring light. However, the success of the solar probe is a promising sign that there’s lots more to discover about our nearest star using new technology.