Meteor Shower Thoughts
…Who *Is* That Up There, Though?
Are we seeing life forms or technological entities from somewhere else? Probably not…but maybe. No, wait. Definitely not. Unless…?
A little while ago, US military intelligence operatives caused a stir when they released some declassified videos of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAP. These show what — if you squint really hard — could be craft of unknown origin that have supposedly swarmed Navy warships and engaged fighter jets in what some would call aerial dogfights.
Russia, China and other earthly powers are said to be incapable of producing the kind of hyper advanced tech described by pilots who tangled with a giant Tic Tac in the sky and lived to tell the tale. So whose was it?
Some of the colourful characters who’ve analysed such incidents for the Pentagon suggest that — among other esoteric possibilities — they could be evidence of extraterrestrial aggression. On the whole, though, the public is not buying that E.T.s are here to tear us a new one just yet, and that’s hardly surprising.
Known Knowns? Known Unknowns? Or Unknown Unknowns? …Who Knows?
Many will have rolled their eyes at the notion that the amorphous blobs seen in those grainy cockpit instrument videos could have travelled here from another star system to check us out. The consensus view is that they’re probably some combination of drones, birds, spoofed radar data or equipment failures compounded by human error.
That cautious scepticism is healthy. Remember, the vast majority of UFO reports are revealed to have humdrum explanations once examined more closely. Most sightings are honest misidentifications of clouds, balloons, satellites and the like. Then unfortunately there is also a crowded field of deluded, mentally unstable attention-seekers and grifters peddling tall tales, some of whom don’t even work for the US government.
If you dig into this subject a little deeper, though, things get weird. An intriguing picture emerges of a stubborn minority of cases that seem to defy prosaic explanation. Separate from the recently revealed DoD material there is a large body of data, amassed over decades, that chronicles the existence of often brightly lit, solid bodies performing gobsmacking aerobatic feats in the sky.
In addition to routine run-ins with military pilots and alleged overflights of nuclear weapons facilities, there are thousands of well documented, often radar-tracked cases of interactions with commercial airliners, private planes and observers on the ground. Hmm, you start to think as you read the air traffic control transcripts, some of this stuff really is a bit spooky. What’s going on?
Secret Tech? Flights of Fancy? Or The Other Thing?
At this point, you‘ll perhaps muse that for several decades now military technology has remained at least 30 years more advanced than commercially available hardware. Top secret experimental planes and airships could therefore account for the many mysterious sightings. Case closed?
Not so fast. Inconveniently, the wheels start to come off this potential explanation when you look further back in time.
Solid objects with extraordinarily advanced flight characteristics were reported by reliable witnesses and tracked on radar doing 90 degree turns at thousands of miles per hour in the mid-to-late 1940s. That’s an aviation era when jet engines were still brand new. Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1 had only just broken the sound barrier and the SR-71 Blackbird — which would reach a top speed of around Mach 3 — was barely a twinkle in Uncle Sam’s eye.
Of ourse, radar is not infallible and eyewitness testimony should be treated with caution. Optical illusions can fool the best of us, while memory is a slippery, malleable thing that can be shaped by a vivid imagination. Many witnesses will be prone to embellishing sightings and talking themselves into remembering something that didn’t in fact look or behave quite the way they eventually come to recall.
Some observers of unusual events may be unconsciously influenced by popular culture. They could end up describing something that with each retelling gradually morphs into a spaceship they once saw on The Outer Limits or in a pulp sci-fi comic they read as a child.
Eventually, however, it’s hard not to notice there are unusual corroborating patterns and characteristics described again and again, despite the recorded incidents being separated by many years and vast distances. There are accounts from all over the world in which peculiar details match up, despite the witnesses never having been exposed to the same cultural conditioning.
Heads in the sand
What’s behind the strangest sightings and radar data? Could intelligent, technologically advanced beings from Somewhere Else — whether that’s outer space or a parallel dimension closer to home — be routinely popping up to give us a fright?
Both those scenarios are sometimes alluded to as among the least unsatisfactory hypotheses by dogged researchers who’ve done the legwork and ostensibly ruled out more ordinary explanations.
Generally, though, such suggestions are quickly dismissed. Most of the world continues to look the other way, refusing to engage seriously with the issue. Why grapple with such a ‘fringe’ topic in earnest when it will only invite mockery and disdain?
The stigma around UFOs means that near misses and even collisions with commercial airliners go under-reported. Pilots, air traffic controllers, law enforcement and military personnel who attempt to raise the alarm can expect to be given a hard time.
Some such witnesses are just teased by their peers until they retire. Others are told they didn’t see what they saw and face demotion, dismissal or worse if they don’t let it go. As a rule, nobody wants the hassle.
This is particularly true of astrophysicists, rocket scientists and other space-focused professionals, who have historically given this topic a very wide berth. With the exception of a handful of chirpy, increasingly unserious mavericks like Michio Kaku, those with a platform tend to avoid sticking their necks out to promote unorthodox hypotheses.
Pooh-poohing flying saucers to thwart the Reds
Where did the knee-jerk instinct to laugh off the subject of UAP and belittle those who explore the extraterrestrial hypothesis originate? Interestingly, it is in large part the product of a CIA operation that was conceived in the 1950s, in response to a surge in flying saucer sightings.
To tamp down UFO fever so the Soviets couldn’t weaponise it somehow, America’s fledgling intelligence service devised a wide-ranging “education” campaign. While the military was fretting in private that it might be faced with spacecraft from another planet, media organisations were encouraged to discredit the notion of aliens coming here as bogus to the point of absurdity.
Once trusted TV news anchors like Walter Cronkite had spent a few years debunking flying saucers at every opportunity, ufology’s fate was sealed.
The campaign of ridicule worked so well it had an enduring effect that rippled outward across the globe, seeping into the public consciousness and filtering down through generations. What would happen when someone said they saw something weird through an airplane window? People would whistle the Twilight Zone theme tune, pat them on the arm and walk away, chuckling.
This drive to delegitimise the subject of UFOs resulted in some unfortunate casualties. Among those bearing the brunt were buttoned-down academics who attempted to challenge the taboo and solve the mystery through rigorous scientific study.
Take the University of Arizona‘s’ Professor James E. McDonald, for example. His meticulous UFO research was compelling enough that it caught the attention of the UN secretary general in the 1960s, but he was ultimately driven to suicide by his critics.
Such outcomes illustrate only too well why many researchers have been reluctant to put their heads above the parapet. They also explain why those who do have struggled to muster support for a concerted, international effort to formally study unidentified aerial phenomena in search of answers.
Could it really be aliens?
Sure, that fast-moving light in the night sky is much more likely to be a meteorite or Starlink satellite than an alien spaceship. Yet those who dismiss the notion of interstellar travel as magical thinking might want to consider some of the technologies we now take for granted that were once inconceivable.
Passenger jets. Smartphones. Self-driving cars. These would have been denounced as witchcraft by the 17th century Pilgrims who set sail for the New World to colonise First Nations land. Are we similarly underestimating our cosmic cousins’ ingenuity?
The possibility of visitors making their way here from another world may not be as far-fetched as is widely assumed. Hardly a year goes by without a stark reminder that our understanding of physics is still incomplete. We can’t even agree on how many planets there are in our own backyard.
This relative ignorance notwithstanding, humanity has managed to make astonishing progress in a relatively short period of time.
It’s been barely more than 100 years since the Wright brothers first flew a couple of metres off the ground in a rickety wooden plane. Within just a few decades of achieving stable flight, we had already remotely explored much of our solar system and even walked on the moon.
Bright sparks at NASA and beyond are now working to build warp drives that could one day power manned spacecraft. Others in academia have continued to refine warp drive theory and proposed further theoretical ways of circumventing the need to travel faster than light in order to reach distant points in the galaxy.
Whether by harnessing traversable wormholes or by manipulating gravity and spacetime, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that we might crack viable interstellar travel within a couple of hundred years, if not much sooner. For an intelligent species with a million years’ head start on us, zipping between star systems might not pose much of a challenge at all.
Probing Questions
When considering this topic it’s worth bearing in mind just how old the universe is. Its 13.8 billion-year history means the presence of extraterrestrial technology on Earth wouldn’t necessarily require the laws of physics as we presently understand them to have been ‘broken’ by faster-than-light travel. Any spacecraft of unknown origin that might be peeping at us could just have taken its sweet time getting here, relying on relativistic sub-light speed.
Our own Voyager probes that launched in the 1970s are still sailing through deep space and have left our solar system. There are robots exploring Mars right now, taking lonely, pathos-laden selfies as they dig up evidence of organic matter and subsurface water. It’s conceivable that a more advanced civilisation than ours could have built artificially intelligent probes that are able to recharge and repair themselves, then sent them out to explore and map neighbouring systems.
Who’s to say such hardy, AI-controlled spacecraft couldn’t keep running for millennia, perhaps even outlasting the beings who manufactured them? The possibility that UAP could be flying relics dispatched by a long-dead race of galactic cartographers can’t be ruled out. We could be observing the interstellar equivalent of Google Street View camera cars on autopilot.
Explaining the Unexplainable
What are we to make of recent Pentagon-supplied UFO videos and related leaks? Well, if they’re not just part of a bizarre information operation (which they totally are) these carefully released tidbits could charitably be construed as a cry for help.
Some might argue the defence establishment is genuinely stumped and lacks the ability to comprehend what’s happening, much less articulate what it means to the rest of us. It might have no idea what some of these phenomena are or where they originate.
When pressed in a recent interview, tongue-tied former CIA director John Brennan had little of substance to contribute to UAP discourse. All he could suggest was that we may co-exist with sentient life that is so far removed from our familiar frames of reference that we’ve been incapable of recognising it as such. If that were so, any ‘nuts and bolts’ attempt to capture it and figure out what makes it tick might be hopelessly inadequate.
Governments legislate and militaries defend or attack. Let’s posit for a moment that some UAP occupy a space well outside of either wheelhouse. It’s not difficult to imagine that the authorities would find the situation uncomfortable, to say the least.
The US government might have dissembled and held back what little it does know for decades out of sheer embarrassment. Better that than admit the humiliating truth that the USAF can’t even maintain air supremacy over its own skies, much less anyone else’s. Being incapable of countering any potential threat such mysterious visitors might theoretically pose would alarm the top brass — civilian and military alike.
Ongoing UFO encounters and associated Fortean weirdness like crop circles, cattle mutilations or other so-called ‘woo’ phenomena likely present quite a challenge for those in the armed forces and intelligence agencies tasked with assessing them.
From glowing orbs and “things that go bump in the night” at alleged paranormal hotspots to unidentified objects emerging from the ocean and speeding into orbit, there’s a lot to unpack here. How is your average military analyst with a tiny budget supposed to sort fact from fiction and make sense of such high strangeness? It seems unlikely that a real life Major Briggs will ever step up to deliver an official briefing on behalf of the Pentagon that describes a situation straight out of the Twin Peaks universe.
The Final Curtain
Enough wild conjecture. Let’s cut to the chase. Is there a chance we could be sharing the planet with more intelligent, otherworldly life forms and technological entities we had no hand in creating? Of course there is, even if it’s a remote one. Some people just aren’t ready to admit that possibility.
There’s a high bar for accepting that something totally nutso is going down. As the more grounded stargazing community’s Mr Sensible, the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan once put it, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” It’s going to take a captured alien spaceship placed on display in a Smithsonian museum to convince the most jaded sceptics that E.T. has visited.
Unfortunately, the kind of physical proof that would settle things once and for all seems to be perpetually just beyond the grasp of UFO hunters. Where does that leave an increasingly bewildered public?
For as long as unequivocal hard data continues to elude us, feverish speculation will rumble on and enduring suspicions based on hearsay will harden. Sometimes when a preponderance of circumstantial evidence piles up it’s hard for people to shake the perception that something shocking did happen, even if it can’t be definitively proved. Just ask O.J. “The Juice” Simpson, former sports star and author of the ghostwritten true crime bestseller “IF I DID IT.”
In the meantime, those of us who remain curious and confused will just have to do our best not to get sucked into acrimonious #ufotwitter drama and chicanery. The most joyless debunkers and flying saucer cultists locked in battle in the polarised Low Information Zone will have made up their minds long ago, but for many it’s all about the journey. Perhaps we’ll discover that the real extraterrestrials were the X-37B pilots we ignored along the way.
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