Written by Abha Deo
Some say it’s obvious we’re not alone, others scorn the very idea, and still others report their own haunting experiences of alien probings following their casual night-time stroll.
In April 2020, the Pentagon declassified and released three grainy videos depicting “unexplained aerial phenomena”, showing US Navy pilots encountering what appeared to be UFOs.
While the videos had been around for a long time, it was only recently that the US Navy admitted that they were real. In a statement by the Department of Defense, it was said that the footage was released “to clear up any misconceptions by the public”.
It is easy enough to write off many recent phenomena, quoting anything from wayward weather balloons to the perpetuation of the legend and UFO sightings in pop culture.
What’s harder to dismiss is ancient sightings like ‘The Madonna with Saint Giovannino’, otherwise known as the UFO painting. Created in the 15th century, the painting depicts the Virgin Mary with infant Jesus and St John the Baptist. Meanwhile, in the backdrop of the painting, a man and his dog stare up at a hovering disk-like object that is suspiciously familiar.
This painting isn’t alone, with everything from ancient cave paintings to Sanskrit Scrolls all depicting alien life. Moreover, there have been thousands and thousands of reported UFO sightings. Some of the most famous ones have been discussed below.
Roswell incident:
The town of Roswell in New Mexico became shorthand for alien encounters in 1947 after reports that a flying object had crash-landed in a field.
Roswell Army Air Field initially stated that a ‘flying disk’ had been recovered, but a second press release clarified that the object was from a weather balloon. Since then, several supposed witnesses have said they saw the military take away the flying disc — and bodies of aliens.
“We had in our possession a flying saucer,” said former Army Public Affairs Officer Walter Haut in 1997.
Roswell, now home to the Roswell UFO Museum, remains a major destination for alien enthusiasts looking for more evidence of their beliefs.
Area 51:
Long thought to be the location where the US government stores and hides alien bodies and UFOs, the mysteriously named location in Nevada has been the focus of alien conspiracies for decades. Area 51 became associated with aliens in 1989 after a man claiming to have worked there, Robert Lazar, gave an anonymous interview with a Las Vegas news station.
According to documents, instead of hosting flying saucers or alien life, Area 51 was used to test the U-2 and OXCART aerial surveillance programs. The need for secrecy was to keep information from the Soviets, rather than to cover-up an alien encounter, the government claimed. A recent interview with Lazar on a popular podcast inspired the ‘Storm Area 51’ event, which would involve raiding the site in a search for extraterrestrial life. More than 2 million people responded ‘going’ and 1.5 million with ‘interested’ on the event’s page, which subsequently attracted widespread media reaction and caused the event to become an Internet meme.
On the day of the event, only about 150 people were reported to have shown up at the entrance to Area 51, with none succeeding in entering the site.
The Belgium Wave:
At the end of November 1989, citizens of Belgium reported seeing a large, triangular UFO hovering in the sky. But beyond the visual sightings, no evidence was found of any UFOs’ existence.
A few months later, in March 1990, new sightings of multiple objects were reported, confirmed by two military ground radar stations. Two F-16 fighter jets were sent out to investigate the anomalies, and though the pilots could not see anything visually, they were able to lock onto their targets with radar. But the UFOs moved so fast that the pilots ended up losing them.
Tehran incident:
In 1976 Tehran, residents started seeing a bright light in the sky, prompting the Iranian Air Force to take to the skies to investigate.
According to reports, two F-4 jets were sent to investigate, and both complained of malfunctions in their aircraft. The second pilot said that the UFO released a glowing object aimed at him, which is when his fighter jet, too, began to malfunction, prompting him to return to base.
But this particular incident has explanations for everything “strange” reported, including a history of defective aircraft, meteor showers, and the bright light being Jupiter.
Apart from the above, sightings even crop up in the Bible in The Book of Ezekiel. Either this is compelling evidence, or humanity has a rich tradition of conspiracy theorists.
This gives rise to the age-old question — Are we actually alone?
An observable universe is a huge place that’s been around for more than 13 billion years. Up to two trillion galaxies made up of something like 20,000 billion billion stars surround our home galaxy.
In the Milky Way alone, scientists assume there are some 40 billion earth-like planets in the habitable zone of their stars.
When we look at these numbers, it’s hard to imagine that there is nobody else out there.
Hence, we turn to Science, where the Fermi Paradox seeks to answer the question of where the aliens are.
Given that our star and Earth are part of a young planetary system compared to the rest of the universe — and that interstellar travel might be fairly easy to achieve — the paradox says that Earth should have been visited by aliens already.
SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is an organization dedicated to listening for signals from other intelligent life. If it’s true that there are 100,000 or more intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, and even a fraction of them are sending out radio waves or laser beams or other modes of attempting to contact others, SETI’s satellite dish array should have already picked up all kinds of signals.
But it hasn’t. Not one. Ever.
Then, where is everybody, and how is the Fermi Paradox justified?
Some attempts to explain the Paradox are:
Rare Earth Hypothesis:
Those who think that intelligent extraterrestrial life is (nearly) impossible argue that the conditions needed for the evolution of life — or at least the evolution of biological complexity — are rare or even unique to Earth. Under this assumption, called the Rare Earth hypothesis, complex multicellular life is regarded as exceedingly unusual and unlikely in the universe.
No other intelligent species have arisen:
It is possible that even if complex life is common, intelligence (and consequently civilization) is not. While there are remote sensing techniques that could perhaps detect life-bearing planets without relying on the signs of technology, none of them have the ability to confirm if any detected life is intelligent. A civilization that is not actively transmitting radio signals into space might be as close as our nearest stellar neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system, and we would have no way of realizing they exist.
Periodic extinction by natural events:
New life might commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets. On Earth, there have been numerous major extinction events that destroyed the majority of complex species alive at the time; the extinction of the dinosaurs being the best-known example. These are thought to have been caused by events such as large meteorite impacts, massive volcanic eruptions, or astronomical events such as gamma-ray bursts. It may be the case that such extinction events are common throughout the universe and periodically destroy intelligent life, or at least its civilizations before they are able to develop the technology to communicate with other intelligent species.
Intelligent civilizations are too far apart in space or time:
Technologically capable alien civilizations may exist, but they are simply too far apart for meaningful two-way communication. If two civilizations are separated by several thousand light-years, it is possible that one or both cultures may become extinct before meaningful dialogue can be established. Our signals may extend over an impressive 200 light-years, but this is only a tiny fraction of the Milky Way. Even if someone were listening, after a few light-years our signals decay into noise, impossible to identify as the source of an intelligent species.
Nevertheless, if, somehow, we were to find evidence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI), how would we classify their level of development, relative to our own? The metrics that we would use to determine whether or not they are more advanced than we are (or vice versa) remain a question.
According to a Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, it’s all about how much energy you can harness.
The Kardashev scale has been refined and expanded on over the decades, but in general, it puts civilizations into four different categories:
- A Type 1 civilization is able to use the available energy of their home planet and stores and uses only a percentage of the energy delivered by its host star. That’s the category our civilization falls into. We use some of the energy the Sun delivers to the Earth, be it directly in the form of solar light, or indirectly by burning fossil fuels or harvesting wind energy.
- A Type 2 civilization can use the available energy of its star and planetary system. For the earth to be considered Type II, we would have to consume all quadrillion joules, the sun provides. The most likely way this can be achieved is with a Dyson sphere, a hollow sphere that encompasses the host star’s surface and transmits all emitted energy to civilization.
- A Type 3 civilization is able to use the available energy of their galaxy. They might discover new physics, may understand and control dark matter and energy, or be able to travel faster than light.
Today, humanity ranks at about level 0.75.
A high Type 2 civilization might already consider humanity too primitive to even talk to.
A Type 3 civilization might feel about how we feel about ants living on the anthill.
Maybe they wouldn’t even consider us conscious, or our survival relevant.
This means that we, as a civilization, have harnessed a certain percentage of our home planet’s energy, but not to its full potential. For now, humans are ants, trying to understand the galactic metropolitan area.
Being able to harness all Earth’s energy would mean that we could have control over all natural forces. Human beings could control volcanoes, the weather, and even earthquakes! Provided that progress continues and we don’t make earth uninhabitable, we’ll reach the status of a Type 3 civilization in a few hundred years.
Some scientists suggest there might be Type 4 and Type 5 civilizations, whose influence stretches over galaxy clusters or superclusters, structures comprising thousands of galaxies and trillions of stars.
Ultimately, there might be a Type Omega civilization, able to manipulate the entire universe, and possibly others. Type omega civilizations might be the actual creators of our universe, for reasons beyond our comprehension.
For now, all we know is that we haven’t seen anybody yet.
But we’ve only just started looking.
On earth, there has been life for 3.6 billion years. Intelligent human life for about 250,000 years. But only for about a century have we had the technology to communicate over large distances.
Intelligent life may develop, spread over a few systems, and die off, over and over again. But galactic civilizations may never meet. So maybe it’s a unifying experience for life in the universe to look at the stars and wonder, where is everyone?
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