UFOs – Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw

> > > Recent UFO siting in Las Vegas NV.

Reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are predictable offerings in the smorgasbord of sensational bullshit the mainstream and social media dish out ad nauseum. Sadly some of the publicly funded agencies of the US government have also been in that game for decades.

The government’s actions are understandable because most of the population is easily distracted, being stupid and gullible beyond belief. Couple that with the other fact that the US government has to distract the public from paying attention to all the terrorism that it engages in around the world (such as the recent war against Iran) to keep the military-industrial complex humming along.

There are lots of stories the US government uses to keep the people alarmed. The Epstein files were a good distraction. Then the war in the Persian Gulf is another distraction from the Epstein files. The show must go on.

In this post I claim that (1) UFOs are real, (2) reports of extraterrestrial objects are total hogwash, (3) reports of non-human intelligence (NHI) visitors are bullshit piled high and dry, and (4) alien abduction stories are made up by the severely mentally disturbed.

Reports of UFOs are real. It is not always possible to identify what one sees in the skies. By definition those are unidentifiable flying objects. Nothing earth-shattering about that. Hallucinations are real in that same sense. But that does not mean that they are objectively real.

I myself have definitely seen three objects that I could not identify. Therefore they are UFOs by definition. Here’s one I haven’t been able to identify. (Video below.)

UFOs are just a statement of fact. “I saw some flying object and I could not identify what it was.” Fine. But if one then leaps from that to the claim that “what I saw is proof of alien visitations,” then that is totally bonkers.

The universe that we are a part of is vast. It’s unimaginably, incomprehensibly big. The observable universe is 92 billion light-years in diameter. Light travels 9.46 trillion kms in a year. At the speed of light, it would take 92 billion years to travel across the present universe, if it were not expanding — which it certainly is.

Cosmologists believe that the universe is around 13.8 billion years old. It began in a Big Bang, and matter came into existence. How it grew to be 92 billion light-years across in that short period of time is interesting.

We know hardly anything about the universe we live in. It’s a very interesting universe. The mysteries of the universe are inexhaustible. We are sure to be entertained till the end of time investigating them and the heaps of conjectures such as the Everettian many-world’s interpretation of quantum mechanics.

But I digress. The universe is large and time is immense and evolution did not equip us with a brain that can even remotely comprehend it. We can’t even conceive of large numbers. Our brains evolved to deal with small numbers. We can deal with a few hundreds or even a couple of thousands. But we are incapable of grasping millions, let alone billions and trillions.

Sure, we can talk glibly about hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way and trillions of galaxies in the observable universe but those mean nothing to us. They are just words that signify magnitudes that are beyond our comprehension.

The good thing is that we still can reason using large numbers. There are around 400 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, which then implies that there are around a trillion planets in our galaxy alone. There are a couple of trillion galaxies. If we do the sums, there are umpteen trillion planets in the observable universe.

The earth is just one of them trillions of planets. Earth’s been around for about 5 billion years. Prokaryotic (single cell) life arose about 3 billion years on earth; then came eukaryotic (multicellular) life. Zoologically speaking you and I are classified in the species homo sapiens, in the genus homo, in the family hominidae, in the order primates. We are “Great Apes.”

(I always have to look that up. I wrote about that stuff in the post on Diversity.)

It is reasonable to conclude that the earth cannot be the only planet that intelligent, technologically sophisticated life evolved on. Two factors — the age of the universe and the number of planets — favor the possibility that there must be other technological sophisticated civilizations somewhere. Therefore it is possible that one or more of them have visited the earth, or are currently visiting the earth.

The two factors that negate the possibility of extraterrestrial visitations is the size of the universe. The universe is too large and the speed of light (the ultimate speed limit) is too low.

The star nearest to our sun — Proxima Centauri — is 4 light-years away. Even if we could travel at 10 percent of the speed of light, it would take nearly 500 years to do so. We perhaps won’t have the technology to travel at even fractions of the speed of light for millennia.

The nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light-years away.

Trillions of galaxies and trillions of planets don’t amount to a hill of beans when you realize that the universe is too large for anyone however technologically advanced to visit random planets.

Fermi’s question — where are they? — is easy to answer: they are at home because they just can’t be bothered to travel for thousands of years just for the heck of it.

There have never been any credible reports of alien visitors in the past nor at present. Many UFO reports are hard to debunk and some are hard to explain. Fine. But reports of alien abductions are fake or at best delusions. There are no “pro-bono proctologists from other galaxies” visiting the earth (as Terence Mckenna put it.)

And finally, the US government is not hiding evidence of NHI crafts or bodies, and it is definitely not “reverse-engineering” alien technologies. Reverse-engineering cannot be done. Bye.

Music time:

Third Coast Percussion | “Madeira River” by Philip Glass