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.
-
No comments:
Post a Comment