Is There Anybody Up There ? [- 2nd instalment]

Is There Anybody Up There ? [- 2nd instalment]

Recurring Motifs in the UFO Narrative

Men In Black [secretive government agents, or conversely, alien operatives, allegedly despatched to investigate UFO witnesses and intimidate them into silence]

Mutilation of livestock [possibly for purposes of tissue sampling and examination of internal organs]

Crop circles [mysterious, intricate patterns impressed into fields of crops, sometimes suggestive of advanced mathematical theorems or scientific truths, supposedly left by passing UFOs, or somehow created remotely by aliens across the gulf of interstellar space, in an attempt at communication; more likely to be the result of atmospheric vortices or elaborate hoaxes]

Military black ops activity surrounding UFO incidents [attempted interception of UFOs by sometimes unmarked aircraft and retrieval of debris, etc., from UFO crash sites by unidentified military personnel in vehicles devoid of military markings]

Role of Area 51 [high security facility in Nevada long said to harbour recovered alien technology] 

Reverse-engineering of alien technology [idea that many advances made by mankind over the last seventy years in the fields of electronics and aerospace engineering, particularly those with military applications, have come from the study and adaptation of acquired alien technology (see Role of Area 51)]

Majestic 12 (MJ-12) [above top secret committee supposedly embedded in the highest levels of US national security since the 1940s, tasked with taking charge of the recovery of downed UFOs and all materials and any "extraterrestrial biological entities" from same; said to have total control over all information regarding such craft, materials and entities and responsibility for its suppression]

Ancient astronaut theory [school of thought within ufology that routinely underestimates the ingenuity of our ancestors by attributing a wide range of historical human achievements to past alien intervention, often on the flimsiest evidence]

Certain ancient earthworks, pyramidal and other monumental structures, as well as geometrical configurations and images etched into landscapes that only make sense when seen from high above, allegedly intended as signposts or landing sites for UFOs or to convey messages to or from extraterrestrials (see ancient astronaut theory)

Face on Mars [chance alignment of geological features on the surface of Mars which, when photographed from a certain angle and elevation, seem to resemble a gigantic humanoid face]

USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects) [supposedly craft of unknown origin, often seemingly capable of transmedium travel, seen entering, or emerging from, bodies of water, and/or detected moving beneath the waves; sometimes linked in theory to secret undersea bases, and even to Atlantis]

Nazi UFOs [contentious claim that the Nazis developed highly advanced flying machines, possibly equipped with anti-gravity drives; some think this was achieved by adapting technology recovered from the Black Forest UFO crash (see above) or donated by sympathetic aliens; said to be behind such episodes as foo fighter encounters and the Kecksburg incident (see above), at least some of these craft allegedly survived the war, with their pilots, and are still taking off from secret bases, flown by the descendants of those pilots]      

 

Alleged Government UFO Conspiracies

Cover-up of truth regarding UFOs to avoid widespread panic, possibly culminating in serious social disorder or even societal collapse; secret programme(s) for recovering and reverse-engineering UFO technology primarily for military purposes (e.g. at Area 51); complicity in sinister alien agendas; disinformation campaign to secretly manipulate the media, etc., in order to promote belief in flying saucers as a smokescreen for test flights of secret airborne technology such as cutting-edge jet fighters, drones and other more exotic designs.

 

(Civilian) UFO Groups

APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organization); MUFON (Mutual UFO Network); NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena); BUFORA (British UFO Research Association); To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA); Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS)

 

Well Known Contactees and Abductees

George Adamski; Antônio Villas Boas; Betty and Barney Hill; Eduard Albert "Billy" Meier; Raël (Claude Vorilhon); Travis Walton; Whitley Strieber; President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov of Kalmykia

 

Possible Non-anomalistic Explanations

Misidentified conventional aircraft, artificial satellites, etc.; poorly observed known natural phenomena such as certain atmospheric conditions (eg. cloud formations) or celestial bodies, swarms, ie. multitudes of birds or insects flying in formation, etc.; miscellaneous aerial objects such as weather balloons, sky lanterns; secret and/or experimental aerial vehicles, possibly belonging to hostile foreign powers; unknown or poorly understood natural phenomena such as ball lightning; optical illusions such as mirages; mysterious geophysical forces; equipment failure, instrument malfunction, e.g. photographic or radar glitches; hoaxes, pranks, staged incidents; imagination; fabricated accounts by extreme attention seekers, fantasists, pathological liars; individual and mass hallucinations possibly linked to hysteria; manifestations of the subconscious mind, mental aberrations such as grandiose or bizarre delusions, false memory syndrome; episodes of sleep paralysis, temporal lobe seizures *; "psycho-social" phenomena somehow emanating from inner space or the collective unconscious

* accompanied by hallucinations of different kinds, these may explain a number of alien abduction experiences

Note: some of these explanations may overlap

 

Counterarguments to the Alien Visitation Hypothesis

i) Fermi Paradox (see above)

ii) Vast distances involved in interstellar travel and the speed limit imposed by general relativity, ie. Einstein's contention that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light

iii) Paucity of anything that might be construed as incontrovertible evidence of alien visitors

iv) Appearance of increasingly sophisticated hoax images and footage with the advent of advanced CGI

v) Multiplicity of alternative explanations (see above)

 

Conclusion

Although it was not originally my intention, it has been suggested that I should give an opinion as to the reality or otherwise of UFO phenomena. Instead I offer the following observations:

i) The degree of official interest shown over the years behind the scenes is confirmation that UFOs should be and are being taken seriously.

ii) There is a wealth of hard-to-dismiss evidence for UFOs including credible witness testimony and film footage that has stood up to scientific scrutiny; taken together, this shows that unexplained aerial phenomena are real, without necessarily providing a clear indication as to their true nature - they remain largely unidentified.

iii) It seems likely that these are diverse phenomena having more than one explanation.

iv) When asked the wider question "are we alone in the universe?", serious scientists point to, among other things, the fact that we live in a fairly typical galaxy, the Milky Way, which consists of between 100 and 400 billion stars and a similar number of planets, while the observable universe as a whole contains in the region of 200 trillion galaxies; we can all "do the maths" - in such an impossibly vast universe, the conditions that give rise to simple, complex, and even intelligent life must have occurred many times over...

 

Afterword

While writing this, I have tried to keep an open mind about the nature and origin of UFOs throughout, even though it is hard not to be slightly dismissive of some of the wilder theories in circulation. To redress any such bias, it should be noted that we inhabit one small corner of a universe of up to eleven physical dimensions * which may be just one among an unlimited number of parallel universes, many with differing natural laws. If so, then the multi-dimensional multiverse arising from this proliferation may, it would seem, accommodate infinite possibilities, and multiple planes of existence that could, perhaps, connect with our own on some level. For myself, I have long believed that, to paraphrase Hamlet, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy...

* according to string theory, a leading contender for the universal "theory of everything"; seven of these dimensions are "compactified" beyond our power to perceive them

 

Acknowledgement

My thanks to Tom Brown whose questions and remarks in part inspired me to greatly expand the piece I first set out to write.