Tom Cruise Aliens: Actor To Fly To Space To Find Them

Tom Cruise has met aliens before, but he's never flown to space to seek them out. Of course the aliens Tom Cruise has witnessed are all fictional. He watched in cinematic horror as spaceships filled with alien troops descended on New Jersey and destroyed the Pulaski Skyway ... which explains New York's rush hour.

This time, Tom Cruise will be venturing far away from Newark in search of extraterrestrial life. "Who wouldn't want to do something like that?" Tom Cruise said of his likely decision to pay Richard Branson $200,000 for a ticket on his "Virgin Galactic" space-bound airline. Branson, one of the world's wealthiest people, is the founder of the popular Virgin Mobile telephone service.

Cruise said there's no proof either way whether aliens exist or do not exist. This is not Tom Cruise's first departure from mainstream thought. He was raised in a Catholic household in upstate New York, but in the last decade converted to scientology, a school of thought created by L. Ron Hubbard in 1952. One of the pillars of the theology is that a person's soul is actually reincarnated: it is known as a "thetan," a spiritual existence that allegedly passes from one being to the next, on Earth and elsewhere in the universe. So, Tom Cruise's belief in life outside our atmosphere is not too far-fetched.

Tom Cruise, if he decides to pay up, will join a number of other wealthy folks who have reserved a seat on Branson's intergalactic flight, scheduled for December. After nearly fictitiously ending up at the bottom of the North Atlantic, actress Kate Winslet is said to be on the manifest, as well as Ashton Kutcher, Tom Hanks and a number of others. Cruise said it would be a childhood dream to travel to space, ever since he participated in a flight simulation on a trip to the Lyndon B. Johnson NASA Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas.