UFO

Have you ever seen an UFO? I have. I have experienced several “anomalous” phenomena that I cannot explain in terms of what I understand to be the basic principles of physics. A relatively recent example of an UFO is this.

That is a genuine UFO because it is, by definition, an unidentified flying object. UFO doesn’t imply extraterrestrial or alien origin things. It merely means that the observer is unable to identify what the flying object in an image or video is. I have not been able, to the best of my abilities, to figure out what that is. Nor has anyone else identified that. So therefore it’s an UFO.

Recently there’s been much discussion of UFOs not just on social media but also in US government agencies such as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Why and why now are interesting questions. I think that Mick West has some answers. As a researcher and debunker of claims of alien origin of UFO/UAP, I think he’s credible. Link to a video of his at the end of this post.

The beginning of the UFO craze in the US can probably be dated to the Roswell incident of July, 1947.  The first newspaper reports claimed that the Roswell Army Air Field “captured” a “flying saucer” from a ranch near Roswell. Then it quickly changed that to a crashed “weather balloon.”

As it happens, last month I drove by pretty close to Roswell in New Mexico but didn’t visit the UFO capital of the US. That’s another story.

Back to UFOs. Many people sincerely believe that UFO are alien crafts. Not just that, that the US government has in its possession crashed alien crafts and bodies of non-terrestrial beings. But wait there’s more. The most incredible of the nutty claims is that the US government is keeping all this a secret because it is reverse-engineering alien crafts for military purposes. Wow!

I think this sort of talk is worse than silly. Let me explain. Does non-human life exist somewhere in the universe. I bet they do. After all, the universe is vast. According to that great scientist Douglas Adams, “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Seriously, the cosmos has billions and billions of galaxies (with apologies to Carl Sagan) and each of those have billions of stars, and those gazillion stars have even greater gazillion planets. So even if only a very tiny percentage of those planets are suitable for some kind of life (not necessarily carbon-based), and if only a tiny fraction evolve to be technologically sophisticated, then the universe must be teeming with intelligent life forms. The Drake equation provides a framework to put in one’s fancied parameters into it and get an estimate.

Just BTW, I have met Frank Drake a couple of decades ago. But that’s another story.

I grew up consuming a lot of science fiction by the likes of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of my favorite movies. Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker series — though not sci-fi — was, and continues to be, great fun. Stories about aliens fascinate me even today. I must confess that the recent crop of sci-fi movies like Arrival and Interstellar are mediocre at best. B-grade stuff.

So then, there must be aliens in the galaxies around the Milky Way. But given the vast distances and the speed of light limit (if indeed that is an insurmountable limit but we can’t be sure that Einstein was right), it is unlikely that aliens have ever visited or are currently visiting our little corner of the universe. But for argument’s sake, let’s imagine that they are indeed visiting the earth for some unfathomable reason, flying around and sometimes being seen by people, and sometimes crashing their alien crafts.

Here’s another mystery. Practically everyone and his mother has a smart phone capable of shooting high quality images and videos in his pocket today. But somehow when they see a UFO, they never think of using their phone camera. There isn’t one — not a measly one — image or video of an alien craft. How is that?

How is it that aliens are technologically capable of crossing thousands of light-years of interstellar and intergalactic space but somehow clumsily crash on earth? But again for argument’s sake, let’s say that they somehow crash.

It is unlikely that the aliens are just a little bit more advanced than humans in technology. They must be at least a few thousands years ahead, if not millions, of human technology. How on earth can humans ever come close to “reverse engineering” technology that is so far advanced? That’s impossible.

Can you reverse-engineer this thing? Do you even know what the darn thing is?

It’s a CT scanner with its cover removed. There are tens of thousands of those CT scanners in use around the world. Can you imagine anyone in the world a hundred years ago — say in 1924 — have any idea of how those work? Not a chance. If an alien spaceship had dropped one of them on earth, would anyone on earth even a hundred years ago have any way of “reverse-engineering” them to produce CT scanners or even come close to comprehending what the machine is meant to do?

Alright, CT scanners are not as common as smart phones are. Imagine the greatest tech company of a 100 years ago finding a smart phone. They couldn’t reverse-engineer that any more than a caveman could reverse-engineer a supersonic jet. Sufficiently advanced technology is beyond any reverse engineering.

Perhaps aliens exist out there. We cannot know for sure. Perhaps aliens have visited the earth. We cannot know for sure. Perhaps aliens are currently visiting the earth. But there’s simply no evidence of that. So the best we can do for now is to be skeptical of all claims of UFOs.

As promised, here’s Mick West.

Thank you, good night and may your god go with you.

Image at the top of the post: San Jose, CA. View of the east bay hills yesterday. The clouds looked magnificent.