The crew participating in the STS-123 mission, on board NASA's space shuttle Endeavor - which had the role of carrying the first section of JAXA's space laboratory Kibo along with the Canadian maintenance robot Dextre to the International Space Station - have recently participated in a news conference in Tokyo where they expressed their opinions regarding the possibility of life existing elsewhere except for Earth.

"If we push back boundaries far enough, I'm sure eventually we'll find something out there. Maybe not as evolved as we are, but it's hard to believe that there is not life somewhere else in this great universe", said STS-123 mission specialist Mike Foreman. The latest visit to the International Space Station also involved the Japanese astronaut Takao Doi who was flown into space on behalf of JAXA.

"I personally believe that we are going to find something that we can't explain. There is probably something out there but I've never seen it", said astronaut Gregory Johnson.

Crew commander Dominic Gorie believes that space travel will inevitably reveal something that we do not understand, albeit this is in fact the whole point of space exploration. Nevertheless, these things don't just happen, they require time. It could take centuries before humans make first contact according to STS-123 mission specialist Richard Linnehan. "Unfortunately we are taking only baby steps in outer space efforts and we left our planet barely a few hundred miles above the atmosphere", he said.

Takao Doi agrees. Life must exist in other places of the universe. Practically, the news conference couldn't have come at a 'better' time, since it was held soon after a high-level debate about UFOs in Japan. Some Japanese officials, such as Nobutake Machimura, the second man in the government, said some months ago that he believed that alien life existed, although the Japanese government appears to have no knowledge of the existence of any UFOs.

Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba, for example, said he was studying the legal outcomes of responding to a possible alien attack on Japan, especially while considering the fact that Japan has been a pacifist nation in the wake of the Second World War.