For decades, the US government has dismissed reports of
Unidentified Flying Objects, known more familiarly as “flying saucers.” Pilots learned that, reporting what they saw,
could end their careers. Their very
sanity could be called into question.
That policy actually created a threat to national
security. Military pilots who were
intimidated from reporting what they thought were extraordinary airborne
objects, could just as easily have been discouraged from reporting actual enemy
threats from communist or terrorist nations.
With the advent of advanced radar and optics, and with
millions of people carrying video-capable cell phones, the danger to national
security has given way to the far lesser danger of embarrassment to the
government. It may be only a matter of
time before coordinated sightings by radar, pilots, and civilian witnesses on
the ground, become so widespread that official denials will be seen as
ludicrous.
Moreover, when the government tells thousands of its
citizens that, “You did not see what you saw,” the trust in government will
erode dangerously.
Now that we have admitted that there is a problem—the first
step toward solving it—there arises the question, just what the heck is it that
so many of our friends are seeing?
The first answer that pops into the minds of many people
is—space aliens, intelligent life from technologically advanced planets far,
far away.
While this answer is not entirely implausible, there are
very good reasons to doubt it. I call
this answer the “Superman” theory. “Look
up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane,” it’s an intelligently piloted
spacecraft.
Birds and planes are so familiar to us that when we see strange
objects in the sky, we tend to classify those objects as something within our
experience: birds, planes, stars,
meteors, perhaps even “swamp gas.”
Flying saucers may not be in our actual daily experience, but most
people have some concept of what they might be.
If you ask them, they will likely answer, “manned” space vehicles.
More recently, drones are becoming ubiquitous. Because of them, we now can add to our list
of possibilities as to what UFOs are. If
they are unmanned drones, then we must ask, are they coming from Iran, or from
other planets?
Astronomers and other scientists have, for years now, been
searching for signs of technological civilizations on other planets. The discovery that exo-planets are a common
feature of the galaxy makes that search seem worthwhile. So far, however, the search has been
fruitless. We have made the same
mistake: to expect the unknown to
conform to our experience of the known.
Because our technology broadcasts (unintentionally) radio waves into
space, we somehow expect that alien technologies will do the same. If so, we should detect their transmissions. Why haven’t we? It is because, they might transmit, for three
or four hundred years, but that is a tiny slice of time, compared to the
estimated age of the galaxy. We are not
finding such signals. We may never. Any advanced aliens out there have likely
moved far beyond that stage.
Experiments in our own laboratories suggest that emerging
technologies may soon render electro-magnetic spectrum communications
inefficient and obsolete. Such topics as
quantum entanglement are at present considered “far-out” physics, but they are
in fact, based in solid science.
Even putting all that aside, there is one glaring
inconsistency in most UFO sighting reports:
we can see them. That should not
be possible. If the space aliens possess
technology so advanced that they can cross trillions of miles of interstellar
space, with all its hazards, then surely, they possess stealth technology that
can make them invisible to all our detection methods. Even here on earth, we are capable of amazing
stealth, not only in radar, but even in the visible light spectrum.
The inconsistency is that UFOs behave as if they wish to
avoid detection, and yet at the same time, they seem clumsy in those
efforts. We see them. They “run away.” None of that makes sense.
Finally, there is the question: if there are space aliens in our atmosphere,
are they hostile? If they are, then we
are helpless against them. Science
fiction movies glamorize heroic battles to defeat the aliens, but we cannot
even defend the planet against a potential swarm of giant meteors. Any advanced aliens could easily redirect a
few thousand asteroids to crash into our planet with devastating effect, while
keeping themselves at a safe distance.
By the way, what would the space aliens want from us? Surely, they can synthesize anything they
could wish for, and do so from the most common element in the universe: hydrogen.
Who knows what they could manufacture from dark matter, the unknown
material that comprises 80 percent of the matter in the universe? Who knows, they might even have
four-D-printers!
After all that, we must ask, what are the UFOs, and why are
they here? The bottom-line answer: they are something we cannot begin to
imagine. Their reasons, if any, are
hopelessly inscrutable.
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