The world has been abuzz with talk of otherworldly beings (aka space aliens) since David Grush’s testimony before Congress. More recently, Louis Elizondo wrote Imminent about the last part of his career where he also claims that UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly known as UFOs) are the spacecraft of space aliens.
Is there any truth to their claims? Indeed, is there any truth to the claim that the Earth has been visited by non-human intelligences?
I think not.
Imagine for a moment there exists another Earth like our Earth with aliens like us except that their 2024 occurred dozens of millions of years ago. Back then, they’d be venturing to their nearest planetary neighbor. Eventually, they would use their powerful telescopes and discover our Earth and that it exists in the Goldilocks zone with an atmosphere containing oxygen and a surface of mostly water. They’d send miniature — unmanned — probes to it. Say, it took several million years to reach us. The probes would be very similar — though more advanced — to the Viking landers we sent to Mars in 1976. The aliens of this Earth wouldn’t know what they would find, but there is no reason they would attempt to conceal their presence, just as we did not with our Viking landers. These probes would remain on Earth indefinitely as the Viking landers on Mars have done. Ultimately, scientists of our early historical days would discover and examine them though they would be baffled by them yet document their findings. The world would know about them. We would have known for hundreds of years that advanced aliens exist and that they have visited the Earth.
Consider, too, that there wasn’t just one such advanced alien Earth but several thousand, each of which had sent similar probes all in the ancient past. Our Earth should be littered with tens of thousands of these probes.
But no such probes have ever been discovered at all. Perhaps there is a simple reason.
Incidentally, the reason we wouldn’t see any manned craft is simply because traveling from wherever these alien worlds exist would take hundreds of generations to say the least. (I’m discounting the possibility of creating and traveling across a wormhole.)
But imagine for a moment, they managed some sort of suspended animation for their astronauts, and they were able to send manned craft. To what end? Imagine that their equivalent of NASA as it works to launch “crop circles mission #200”, “cattle mutilation mission #60”, “human alien abduction mission #500” and the most amusing of all, “acrobatic show for the humans’ mission #4000”.
Does this sound like the rationale of an advanced race of beings?
This is not at all how I’d expect alien visitors to behave. They would want to observe the wonders of the Earth, the flora and the fauna and probably very intentionally and openly contact their fellow intelligent beings, namely, us, to learn about our arts, our music, our culture.
Let’s say they do come here in person to engage in rather bizarre mission objectives. Would we expect them to ever crash their UAP? Consider how many major airline flights we have every day — it’s over 100,000 — and how many years go by before there is a crash. Are we then expected to believe that a race of super advanced beings can’t keep their UAP in the sky?
Another point to consider is that UAPs didn’t seem to enter the human psyche until 1947 when Kenneth Arnold saw some flying discs and the term flying saucer was coined. The first reported alien abduction wasn’t until 1961. How come we don’t have a rich historical record of such events going back to prehistory? Remember that humans are a very recent appearance in terms of geological time.
Another claim made by believers in space aliens is that the government, specifically the US government, is hiding something. But UAPs can make their presence known anywhere on the globe at any time. Presumably, other countries, too, would have knowledge of UAPs in their territory, and they all would have to be in on the secret and keeping it that way across decades of time, across different leaderships.
Additionally, these space aliens must want to keep themselves secret. For what is to prevent their exposing themselves to us at a mass scale whenever and wherever they want? How exactly would the US government convince them to keep themselves secret from the public?
One more thing, what draws us to the conclusion that UAPs are alien spacecraft? They defy the known laws of physics, of course. Do you ever wonder why the US patent office doesn’t accept inventions of perpetual motion machines? Because it’s impossible. That’s why. We have never actually observed a law of the universe being broken or circumvented somehow. The laws forever constrain what is and what isn’t possible. There never will be faster light travel or travel across dimension like we see in science fiction films. There has never been an alien space vehicle performing gravity-defying maneuvers because the universe doesn’t allow for anything gravity-defying. There is no such thing as Bob Lazar’s antigravity.
The real reason people believe in physics-defying aliens is not because they are real, but because they aren’t. They’re bummed we live in a universe of laws where the supernatural is not possible. In a way, however, many of us are. That’s why we have science fiction in books, TV shows and movies. We love this stuff. But some of us crave more. They so want it to be real, they’re inclined to believe that extraterrestrial beings would travel vast distances just to taunt humans by flying physics-defying craft in the sky.
Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe? Possibly. Have they visited the Earth or in some other way contacted us? No, if they had rationally visited us, we would have found probes that landed here many eons ago. None of the purported behaviors of UAPs, such as putting on acrobatic shows defying the laws of physics or engaging in acts like cattle mutilations, make any rational sense. Ultimately, belief in extraterrestrial phenomena may reflect a deeper human desire for a universe where the supernatural is possible.
