Could life evolve in the vacuum of outer space?

I will let others with more background answer you in more detail, but it seems to me that it is extremely unlikely that life would evolve "in space." As far as we know, there needs to be a dense enough admixture of chemicals and proteins for a self-sustaining chemical reaction to take place.As for life being made of pure energy, that seems very far fetched as we have no reason to believe that energy alone can become anything more than energy. What we call life is a physical process.As for the "UFO video", I can't view it at work (for some reason, they think YouTube would detract from productive work time...) but the probability of NASA knowing about UFOs and not having that knowledge leak out within the last few decades of space exploration is extremely hard to believe. It is more likely that any weird things in space are merely things behaving in zero gravity, frozen droplets of moisture/gases we brought up there, or cosmic rays impacting the film/digital media.

Your job wouldn't seem to place restrictions on much of anything, except perhaps being unfunny too often...As for the video, I didn't really need to see it to have a good guess at what it was. If you watch "The Right Stuff" you see an instance where one of the first astronauts thinks there are fireflies in space with him. It turned out to be frozen bits of water or exhaust from his ship.

That depends on the relative motions of everything. If you watch the planets move in the night sky over a period of weeks, you'll notice that the planets, as we catch up to them and pass them (for the outer planets) they do in fact seem to reverse direction, not once, but twice.

It's not the distance so much as the effects of two things moving in circles of different diameters. If the difference between them is very small, the changes will take place very quickly, if the distances are large, they'll take longer.