Might UFOs be Earthly Aircraft?

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The most popular explanations of UFOs include theories that they are technological artifacts from other planets, alien civilizations.

However, there are also people who believe that they might be some secret technology developed and produced right here on earth.

There are some reasons to accept that theory, but much stronger reasons to reject it.

The reasons to accept it include the fact that, indeed, there are secret aircraft being produced and tested right here on earth.  The stealth aircraft used by the United States Air Force are no longer secret.  At least, their existence is well publicized.  They are seen relatively often in the skies, and have been deployed overseas in combat.

However, during the in-flight testing phases, such aircraft were sometimes seen by members of the public, who reported them as Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).  Some people speculated that they were from other planets.  Of course, they were wrong.

We can plausibly assume that there is more secret research going on, well concealed, to test advanced technologies, including aircraft.  Therefore, it seems possible that some of these aircraft will on occasion be seen, and will be misidentified as alien spacecraft.

However, the sightings of UFOs include reports of aircraft performing high velocity changes in acceleration and / or in direction that no human pilot could survive.  Even if they were unmanned drones, the performance of many UFOs exceeds anything that earthly technology can produce.  If an earthly government could produce them, that government would be in possession of technology with which they could rule the planet.  The spin-off technology would be dramatically advanced.  The scientific principles they evidence would be Nobel Prize developments.

In short, the long-term concealment of such things would seem to be both impossible and counter-productive.

There is a hybrid theory.  Some people speculate that alien spacecraft have crashed on earth, and have been recovered by the government.  Such wrecks, the rumor goes, have been taken to secret government laboratories and studied.  The studies have produced limited results, but perhaps enough has been learned to enable the development of primitive prototype aircraft that can perform a few of the aerial acrobatic feats described by witness reports.

An even more dramatic speculation is that, not only have alien space-craft come into the possession of our government, but also, even nonhuman crewmembers of those space-craft.  Some say that crashed space-craft recoveries have rescued downed space-men.  Others propose that alien space travelers did not crash, but are interacting with our government voluntarily in some kind of diplomatic capacity.

All of the foregoing theories have problems with them, but that is not to say that we in the general public can rule them out.  We can, however, be very skeptical of them, and with good reason.  Governments can be very good at keeping secrets for a long time; but if those secrets are valuable and exploitable for advantage, those exploits eventually become evident, and the secrets spill out.

Some people claim that there has been such spillage.  They have attributed earthly advances in science and technology to captured alien spacecraft; but none of those advances violate known natural law, as many UFO sightings describe them.

Once again, without having access to government secrets, we can only make estimations, but the evidence for the extraordinary claims of copied alien technology is vague and unconvincing.

Ironically, the most extraordinary claim is the most plausible, which is that the UFOs are spacecraft from alien civilizations on faraway planets.

Even there, however, one encounters some paradoxes, such as, why can we detect UFOs at all?  If they are so advanced, they should have foolproof stealth.  Or, if they do not wish to hide, why can’t we see them all over the place, all the time?  What makes the least sense is that they seem to try to hide, but get seen anyway.

In the end, we are left with the unsatisfying theory that UFOs are phenomena that we cannot begin to understand in terms of our present paradigm.

That, however, seems to be the case.

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