While I have become a UFO skeptic, I retain an open
mind. My skepticism is a product of the
persistent lack of hard evidence. My
open-mindedness stems from government obstinacy, refusing to open the “unclassified” reports
to the public. Time will tell, one way
or the other.
There is another facet of this. Nobody likes paradigm shifts, at least not at
first. We feel secure and comfortable
when our most cherished beliefs are upheld by observation. We feel the opposite when we have to confront
uncertainty, a new and scary reality that imposes itself in our minds, when we
have to get up off the couch, so to speak, and venture hot and itchy, into unmapped
terrain.
Every once in a while, we hear reports from “whistleblowers,”
people who work in secret research laboratories, who tell fantastic stories
that defy belief—at first. For a brief
time, they are in the news, but then they fade from public consciousness,
without their claim ever having been decisively substantiated or refuted.
To understand this phenomenon, we must begin with less
spectacular stories that involve scientific research that is not secret, but
still represent a massive change in the way scientists view physics. One of these is “dark matter.” Dark matter is an unresolved mystery of
science. It is a theory which is used to
explain the way that gravity behaves weirdly, in outer space. It proposes that more than five sixths of all
matter in the universe is invisible, but exerts a gravitational force. There is an alternate theory that also
explains the same thing, but is also paradigm-shifting. It simply says that the accepted mathematics
governing gravity is wrong, and that a different formula (MoND) must be used
instead.
The point is that both of these theories, whichever one is
correct, tells us that the entire way physics has modeled the universe is
wrong. To some scientists, that is an unnerving
reality.
Getting back to UFOs, let us quote from the famous
science-fiction author, Arthur C. Clarke:
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the
Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
He was referring, of course, to the hypothesized existence of
space aliens, more specifically, advanced technological civilizations on other
planets. Either way, we are confronting
an unnerving reality.
The mainstream scientific opinion on the matter is that we
have no hard evidence that any such aliens exist. No radio signals, no unimpeachable photographs or videos,
no physical objects that we can hold in our hands, and verify as being manufactured
by intelligent beings “not of this earth.”
That is my opinion also.
There are, however, claims that we do, indeed, have hard
evidence, that we have in our possession, not merely objects, but actual
space-craft, and even dead alien corpses, and finally, live aliens themselves.
Those are astounding claims, and as such, require
extraordinary evidence, which has not been made publicly available, perhaps
because no such evidence exists.
That is not, however, the end of the story. Most of the scientists who demand hard
evidence of any extraordinary claim, also admit that, based on statistics alone,
there “must be” alien civilizations somewhere in the universe. I liken this to someone discovering a large
pond in a field, and feeling quite certain that there “must be” fish there.
In other words, the specific claims seem outlandish, and
yet, the general possibility is accepted as a matter of course. This seems to leave somewhat of a gap between
observation and theory, a gap known as Fermi's Paradox.
Let us retreat to the least spectacular claims, which is
that the government has, in its possession, some form of physical evidence, for
example some kind of material that cannot have been made on earth, and does not
occur in nature. Somebody, or some-thing,
made it.
Even if that is some golf-ball size component, something which
has properties or characteristics that defy anything known to our scientists
and engineers—even that would be incontrovertible hard evidence that intelligent
alien creatures have arrived on earth.
We would have to get off the sofa.
-
