They come in peace. Credit: Getty.
If you want to be dismissed as a nutter, in polite British society, you can’t do much better than say: “Hey, I think aliens are visiting the earth.” But I’m going to have a go. Here it is. Deep breath.
I think aliens might just be visiting earth — and I reckon there is an intriguing psychological link with Covid-19.
Before you click off this website, and permanently erase it from your memory, let me explain with some context, and some history.
First, the aliens. Next month, the Pentagon will deliver an eagerly awaited report, detailing all its observations of UFOs over decades. Excitement has been building for a while, but in recent days it has become feverish. Serious people are taking this seriously.
Could they really be right? I think: yes, it is just possible — and this is where you need the history.
In January 2020 I was writing a book in Bangkok, Thailand. The sun was hot, the beers were cold; life was pretty good. Then the first rumours began to swirl: of a fatal respiratory virus, running out of control in China. As I was spending much of my Bangkok time in air-conditioned bars, alongside happy Chinese tourists, I paid some attention.
I paid even more attention when I flew back to London, at the end of January, and developed an odd, persistent “flu”. It was nasty, yet it fluctuated. I then gave it to my wife, who coughed so badly on the Tube she nearly fainted (sorry, London). At this point I genuinely started to wonder, and so I called Public Health England to recount my symptoms, just in case.
To my surprise they went bananas. They ordered me to a hospital for isolation, and said I maybe had coronavirus or “Avian Flu”. I googled Avian Flu and found that it has a mortality rate of 50%. After drinking an entire bottle of wine in 15 minutes I rushed to the hospital, where there was much confusion: this was very early in the pandemic. The promised testing didn’t happen, and in time the “flu” abated.
My illness remains a mystery, but it did have one definite consequence: I immediately became obsessed with the new pestilence. Over the following week I read every scholarly article I could find; I watched the videos of Chinese people being welded into apartments. By mid-February my mental job was done. I knew we were headed for a global plague, because the exponential logic of pandemics is relentless. So I bought my first masks, and stocked up on tuna — and then I tried to warn my friends.
This, it turned out, was a hopeless task. No matter how many graphs, extrapolations, and gory Tweets I showed them, nothing worked. They laughed, they scoffed, they made bets against my maths. Some were kind of resentful.
It was an unexpected response, so I did more research. Pretty swiftly I discovered that I was butting up against a known mental block. It is called Normalcy Bias, and it describes the common human disposition to reject appalling information, and to presume that extraordinarily bizarre or terrible things never happen.
Normalcy Bias explains, it is thought, why the people of Pompeii simply stared at the eruption of Vesuvius, for hours, instead of fleeing. Normalcy Bias could also explain the workers who sat in the Twin Towers and carried on typing, even as the second plane crumpled into the glass.
And this is where the aliens come in. As happened with coronavirus, I have become modestly obsessed by the new alien story. I have watched all the videos: of the black blob hovering near to the USS Omaha, of the “Tic Tac” UFO disobeying the laws of physics. I’ve read the eye-witness reports from pilots, I’ve listened to baffled Pentagon experts. Most of all I’ve gazed on, boggle eyed, as much of the US journalistic and political Establishment, from Fox News to the New York Times, from Senator Mario Rubio to Former President Barack Obama, have all lined up behind the hypothesis that Yes, there might be aliens.
To give you a flavour of these mind-bending analyses, here’s one, from the foreign policy expert Tom Rogan on the conservative Washington Examiner.
First he examines the “less dramatic” explanations for the UAPs (ie: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, a new initialism invented to take away the “stigma” of “seeing UFOs”). He wonders if the UFOs are secret, advanced American tech, and the US is spooking itself or others. Or perhaps this is Chinese technology, and Beijing has developed aircraft that can fly at 15,000mph, without anyone really noticing.
Then Rogan addresses the other hypothesis — which he believes should be put to Congress. “The most compelling UFOs, those UFOs which lack conventional alternative explanation after exhaustive investigation, give credible indication of being highly advanced, intelligently controlled vehicles… beyond the understood technical capacity of any Earth nation.”
He goes on: “This sounds extraordinary, and it is. But even if not offered formally in writing, it is also the truth recognised by those who have worked intimately on this issue. After all, these most compelling UFOs evince means of non-jet propulsion-based hypersonic travel in the air and in space, and of 100 knots-plus speeds underwater. Some UFOs also show apparent anti-gravity capabilities, reflected by their instantaneous acceleration and deceleration…”
If you’re like me, you’ll have read these sentences, written by a mainstream US journalist, with mounting incredulity. Is he really saying alien craft are cruising our skies? Surely not. There are so many unanswered questions. How did the aliens get here? What’s their fascination with nukes? Why are all the photos and videos so grainy? If they can fly faster than light, why can’t they hide properly? I scoff at these ideas, I laugh at them and I kind of resent the stupidity.
And that’s the point, I am actively averse to this news story, in the same peculiar way my friends reacted to my prophesies of plague back in early 2020. To me this UFO flap feels like a religious spasm, a fearsome portent in the sky: not unknown during plagues. But is it? How do I know I am not exhibiting Normalcy Bias? How can I be sure I am not standing in the piazza in Pompeii, munching a panino, even as the volcano blows?
I don’t have an answer, but I remember Early Covid, and how I overcame Normalcy Bias back then. A pivotal moment came as I watched the mighty quarantine efforts in China, sealing off 60m people. It dawned on me that the Chinese authorities would only take these horrific steps, so damaging to their own economy, if they saw something deeply troubling. I began to sense the danger. I went to buy my tuna.
And now I am watching, once again: as half of the American elite, which is closer to this UAP narrative than everyone else, reacts with quite surreal alarm. What are they seeing that I can’t? What explains this crazy over-reaction? And so I go back to the UFO videos, and those gyrating blobs of grainy light, calmly looking back at us across the swaying Pacific waves.
Sean Thomas is a journalist and novelist, based in London. He writes thrillers under the name S K Tremayne
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SubscribeLet’s just hope they don’t decide to reimpose lockdown to “save the NHS” from aliens.
I have been expecting the Martian variant to arrive any day now!
By rubber boat?
They’ll let them have free health care.
Well, that’s 6 minutes of my life I’m never getting back.
Normalcy bias??
Yes, I expect so. Indeed my parents have been accusing me of normalcy bias ever since I told them at the age of six that there ain’t no santa claus, despite them swearing blind they had seen him delivering presents.
Do you scrape clean your plate before complaining to the waiter?
🙂 Cake.And.Eating.It.
I can understand the non-sequitur you wrote but let me ask you a question. If he only took a few bites of the article and then complained, would you criticize him for not reading the whole article?
It is advertised as a four minute read. If Prashant reports regretting investing six minutes in the article, it is reasonable to conclude he has read most, if not all, of it. Therefore the waiter-plate metaphor is a logical criticism, although not one that I would hold against the poster.
He read the article in 4 minutes, and then went on to waste 2 more on BTL postings.
Watch a channel called Blaze if you like this stuff. They have programmes where they link everything such as ancient history with aliens-its great fun.
Thank you. I will see if Blaze this available on my sky package.
We got it freeview-or we did until the aerial snapped.Its like an alternative world-people shooting ‘gaters & all sorts.
You are right of course. But still.
It was a remarkably stupid and self congratulating story. He calls everyone an idiot, then says since people are idiots who do not believe things, then that that means things must be true.
People did not believe because they are stupid = what they do not believe in then must be true as they are stupid. Naturally this makes the Easter Bunny, Faries at the bottom of the Garden, and Yetis be true (if a smirking jet-setter wishes it to be) as we are to stupid to understand. (although in my long and weird live I have run into yeties)
but would have not have had those minutes used being sneered at by some high flying big shot rubbing elbows with rich Chinese in Singapore bars. He could have been reading of people twerking on the hood of cop cars in St Louis as gun shots rang out, something interesting, and even watch a streaming of it too.
plus the 10 minutes it must’ve taken to come up with such a witty response
Well he is right about ‘normalcy bias – it is a ‘thing’ and we’ve all been affected by it, but I want to know exactly why all of the published stuff (as far as I know it) has been grainy photographs. We have very sophisticated radar systems near our land masses and these ought to be able to detect flying machines. They pick up large birds for God’s sake, why not UFOs? And where are the remains of their probes. We humans have littered Mars with probes, some crashed ones, some that landed and parachutes, and heat shields and we have satellites, several of them orbiting the planet. The same is true of the Moon. Where are the alien artefacts?
Our greatest protection from interference by aliens is the vast distance that lies between us and even the nearest stars. The better candidate stars that might have planets supporting life are even further away – dozens of light years at the very least. If we did have visitors, they would almost certainly be sophisticated probes – machines sent hundreds of years ago – maybe tens of thousands of years ago. Remember – the Space Shuttle would take 166,000 years to travel to our nearest neighbouring solar system, the Alpha Centauri group. If the aliens have really wonderful space craft that can travel at ten times the space shuttle speed, lest say 200,000 miles an hour, it would still take them 16 thousand years and that is the nearest star and a non starter for sophisticated life. Proxima Centauri has a planet that might be the right distance from it in normal circumstances, but the star flares up on a regular basis and would destroy any latent organism by baking it in highly energetic rays.
I think we are safe for now. Bask in normalcy bias. You won’t go wrong on this subject at least.
One point: if these things that we’re seeing are aliens, their capacities imply a level of tech way more than ten times better than the space shuttle. Acceleration at many hundreds (thousands?) of gees is off the charts compared to that already obselete item!
Yes – that may perhaps be true, but try working out how far in miles it is, to the nearest possible candidate star for life to exist at all, let alone to develop such a sophisticated society as to be able to send a probe here. Then take a guess as to how long it would take. It makes no sense at all to imagine new technologies, unless we find them on our planet and examine them. My guess is that we haven’t met these folks because they haven’t been, and that in reachable distance, they don’t exist, even given marvellous technology.
Nearest *possible* candidate star for life to exist *at all* would be Proxima Centauri. A mere 20 years’ flight using the technology that we currently have.
I suggest that you do some re calculation of that estimate of twenty years flight. You are WILDLY wrong.
One light year is 58790000000000000 miles. 4.5 light years is 26,450,000,000,000,000 miles. Now try dividing that by say even a hundred thousand miles an hour and your journey will take over 30 thousand years.
I think not, my friend. It is your estimate of attainable flight speed that is wildly off. Avi Loeb, chair of astronomy at Harvard, has designed a lightsail propulsion system that could accelerate a (very small, admittedly) interstellar craft to .2C. Such a system is as I say well within our current capacities; it will probably be built within our lifetimes. It would reach Proxima in about twenty years. Google “starshot initiative” or read his newly published book “Extraterrestrial” if this interests you.
“A mere 20 years’ flight using the technology that we currently have.”
We currently have? Ridiculous. The Light Sail does not exist and has not been tested.
You sir are a fantasist.
I don’t know about technology we already have, but ALL of our current technology is based around solid / liquid / gas based propulsion. The concept of a lightsail is that you can induce a small amount of acceleration from radiation. For traveling around our own solar system its useless, for travelling larger distances the constant acceleration would eventually push your craft to speeds approximating the speed of light (given long enough).
One thing I do know is that interstellar travel will almost certainty be impossible using fuels we currently have access to – and would essentially require speeds of a significant proportion of the speed of light before becoming viable. Once you achieve that, traveling between stars that is comprehensible to a single human lifetime is possible.
Right now we are still less than 120 years after the first powered flight (of a heavier than air craft) . Voyager 1 was launched only around 75 years later and is still operational at a distance of 22.8 billion Kms. Do you really think that given anouther 1000 years (for example) we wont be the ones buzzing Earth like planets, even if it does take 20 years to get there.
Our current understanding of physics tells us that it is (most probably) possible to travel interstellar distances, given that you should really work from a position that it is possible that others have done so and visited us.
Please go into the figures which explain the distances between even our local stars. The distances are almost unimaginable and so would be the speeds required to traverse those distances in anything shorter than tens of thousands of years. And what would be the point? Grotesquely enormous investment costs, for what?
By the way – Proxima Centauri although it has a planet that seems to be in what is known as the Goldilocks zone, is a variable flaring star which periodically (every few months) flares up to several times its normal brightness and would fry anything that was trying to become life there.
That’s why I emphasised “possible” and “at all”. I agree Proxima is a highly unlikely candidate.
it would still take them 16 thousand years and that is the nearest star
With all due respect, that’s a bit like saying it’s impossible to travel to the moon because hot-air balloons don’t work in space. Travelling between stars requires likewise some technology that we just don’t have and can’t yet imagine.
It is and always will be impossible to send a chemically-propelled manned vessel to any nearby star in a reasonable time. To get to Alpha Centauri and back in say 40 years, the vessel would have travel at 25% of the speed of light. Established physics shows that any vessel accelerating to the speed of light would acquire infinite mass, and hence would require infinite fuel. There is not the fuel on all of Earth to accelerate anything to even 25% of the speed of light.
So whatever is in these videos is either some extraordinary natural phenomenon, or if artificial, it’s using unknown technology. One of these objects was reported to have descended 80,000 feet in less than one second. That’s an average speed of 54,000mph in the atmosphere: three times what rockets travel at to escape Earth gravity. If something can be built that can do that, then frankly, all bets are off as to what else its builders can build.
“ There is not the fuel on all of Earth to accelerate anything to even 25% of the speed of light.”
Wrong. A very powerful laser could easily accelerate a very low-mass lightsail-powered craft to such a speed.
Sorry, I meant something capable of carrying a human. The laser idea is interesting but it wouldn’t be capable of returning.
That’s true. I’ve been thinking a lot about the impossibility of return (or even stopping!) You’d only need to get one multi-gigawatt laser to the target system to have your stopping/returning ability. Or — and forgive me if this displays a woeful scientific naivety — might it be possible to use the reflections off the lightsail on your first craft to provide some deceleration for a subsequent one?
I have a feeling this turns into one of those Xeno’s Paradox questions. You now need to accelerate a small probe plus a laser to the target system, where the onboard laser unpacks and sends it back – but presumably more slowly. The outgoing payload just got a lot bigger, so now you need a bigger laser back on earth…and as you say, you have to stop the thing too…
It’s certainly a head-scratcher. I’ll take the fact that Loeb thinks a fly-by is all we can hope for as indicating this isn’t something we’re going to crack today…
“You’d only need to get one multi-gigawatt laser to the target system”
Only? Such a thing would be pretty huge and heavy, then it’d need a multi-gigawatt power supply, technology to target the laser onto the lightsail-powered craft, and probably a whole lot more besides. So at this end, in order to get it all there in the first place, you might be needing a multi-yottawatt laser system! Maybe when we’ve learned how to harvest the energy of Sagittarius-A or something …
All of which discussion above suggests that trying to reach another star with technology we presently know about is like Columbus trying to reach the moon rather than America in 1492 with technology he knew about.
A really blinding flash of insight might have suggested to him that the physics that send a ship forward when its sails are edge-on to a sidewind could be adapted to lift things right off the ground – but you can’t fly a glider to the moon either. He might have intuited that a really big charge of gunpowder might send a rocket really high. But you can’t reach the moon in a black powder rocket any more than in a glider.
He would still have been many, many steps away from Apollo 11, as are we from AC.
Of course, Columbus could have simply claimed he’d reached the Lunar Isles!
As indeed a number of hoaxers did. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall is an example.
It’s more complex than that, and also negates using a laser to power a light sail. After your acceleration you need to slow down again so at the halfway point you would need to turn around and use your propulsion system as a brake otherwise you’d shoot past your target so quickly you’d blink and miss it.
The light sail powered by a laser wouldn’t be able to brake either as it would require a laser at the other end to provide the light to brake against.
Something in physics that we don’t know about may yet provide interstellar travel though, we’re only at the very early stages of advanced physics as yet.
Yes, presumably the energy required to accelerate your vessel to 25% of light speed would be the same as that required to decelerate it to 0 from that speed. You’d have to make sure that the acceleration and deceleration didn’t exceed 1G or some comfortable level for your occupants (which goes away if unmanned).
I don’t know what effect hitting a micrometeor the size of a grain of sand would have on an object travelling at 0.25C. But a 4g rifle bullet travels at about 1,000m/s, so a grain of sand 1/1,000th of the mass travelling 300x faster would presumably be catastrophic on any small object.
Actually I figured this all out years ago wile living alone in the Arctic, and had nothing to do for months but think.
1) Build a crystal where the sides and angles allow light to enter, but then reflect inside to another reflecting angle, like light does in an aquarium. And so the light enters and then just runs loops inside endlessly. Light has no mass, takes no space, so this golf ball sized crystal will keep storing light infinately! Charge them, and they are the energy source to travel accross sppace – just make a scratch on one end, point it opposite the way you want to go – and let the photons push you to Alpha Proximal. Easy really.
The problem with these UFO sightings is that they can’t be studied scientifically – all you have is a bunch of varied, one-off phenomena about which you can speculate. Nothing is replicable, and the sightings seem to differ from each other as much as they share similarities. If an explanation is ever found, my money is on some as-yet-unexplained visual / natural phenomenon.
There’s some pretty good videos on Youtube demonstrating precisely that for many of the recent ‘sightings.’ The phenomena responsible are entirely explicable as well, usually something to do with the relative motions of the plane, object, plane’s camera and ground making it look like something’s doing loop-the-loops through the space-time continuum when actually it’s probably just an effect of parallax.
There is plenty of -on the ground – evidence too. Just ask ‘Who has ever been probed by aliens’ to a large crowd – you will be amazed how many hands are raised.
Anyone care to venture a prediction on how long it will take for someone on the left to say this is all the work of Jews?
And I’d just upticked your earlier comment!
If anyone does say that they would also be saying those Jews would be shooting themselves in the foot , bearing in mind they are alleged to be the first proclaiming monotheism and an unseen God and who picked on them to be the light to the world.
An alternative explanation may simply be that after getting thousands of freedom of information requests, as they have, they’ve just decided to push everything into the public domain because there really is nothing to see. There are plenty of sceptics on YouTube who do a credible job of demolishing tic-tac and the other more famous clips.
I find it far more plausible that we’re hearing so much about UFOs, or UAP if you prefer, because the US now has a Space Force. If the idea that aliens might be around, and might be a threat, becomes widely enough accepted, voters will be less likely to object to massive amounts of resources being devoted to putting loads of advanced weaponry into orbit. Once there, of course, it can be pointed either up, or down.
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” – Arthur C. Clarke.
My money is on false sensor images generated by Trojans inserted into the military electronics supply chain by the ChiComs.
Doesn’t explain visual sightings by military pilots which back up the sensor images. The US govt have been softening us up for this for a couple of years by revealing snippets of footage… I think something big is coming.
You never fail to disappoint.
So I’ve been told…
I knew it, after fooling the masses so easily over the bat flu they’re rolling out the ‘alien invasion’ scare. Flight and travel bans, curfews, etc to keep us safe from the Martian’s.
with this bunch, anything is possible.
A space craft travels 10’s of trillions of miles with technology I cannot (nor can anyone else apparently) even begin to imagine and finally gets to a planet called earth and what happens? It crashes! I’m calling BS on this narrative. I have a camera on my phone that can read a license plate from a mile away. We have thousands of cameras in space that cover the whole globe and can read license plates from hundreds of miles away. And yet not one crystal clear image of a UFO? Not one? Why? We have telescopes that can pier several hundred sextillion miles into space and what have they found other than some pretty star formations? Nada!!
And we do have technology that can project pretty lights and shapes into the sky and make them leap and jiggle around.
Yep… I’ve seen those too… Nothing at all like what I saw.
What was different? There are various ways of using lasers and so on to create lights in the sky, and they’d have no problem with huge apparent accelerations.
Ian, for starters, it was a clear night with no clouds (or anything else) to project onto. You will have also noticed that powerful light projections, including lasers, tend to illuminate stuff on the way to the projection point; there was nothing like that going on either. It’s also illegal (thankfully) to point lasers at aircraft and, as I lived under one of the Heathrow approaches, that was a factor. As an aside, my initial post wasn’t there to convince anyone that UFOs are real nor offer suggestions as to where they might be from or whether or not they have life on board. I was merely stating that, as a fairly rational and fairly well-qualified earth-bound human, I’ve seen them and I don’t need government endorsement to convince me about what I saw. I’m a UFO ‘liberal’ by the way – I am quite tolerant of other peoples’ views on this matter.
Thank you.
It can be only days before Robert Peston confides in us that “sources” have confirmed that yet again he was right all along about UAP’s (Robert knew all along that’s what they’re called by those in the know).
Sorry just saw your comment after I wrote mine! Apologies
‘A source close to Darth told me……..’ no doubt.
It is staggering to me that people are so smug (if smug is the right word) to assume that there is no other intelligent life in the universe. Because of course our science has not proved it.
Follow up. It’s quite possible to accept / believe that aliens exist but that they (may) have not yet visited earth. 1) Because the physics of interstellar travel are prohibitive 2) why are they only buzzing us; after decades they haven’t figured out what to do with us?
Maybe they’ve been doing what they want with us for decades and we just don’t know it? Ever wonder where the obesity epidemic came from? Maybe they’re fattening us up 😉
Perhaps they are gradually introducing us to the concept of an alien civilisation so we don’t all suffer from a devastating culture shock when we actually meet them.
The Labour Party feels like an alien creation. No morally competent human being could vote Labour. Perhaps the 30-odd percent that always do are Krolls from the planet Tharg, where the main virtues are hate and envy?
That’s an out of context post. Pathetic. If you wish have a whine about your hatred of Labour do it where it makes contextual sense. Posting here makes you look stupid.
Keir Starmer was sent in human form to fool the mere mortals? Might need some tweeking.
Lizards, David Icke is about to be exonerated.
There’s two things here.
No sensible intellectual, scientist or anyone is claiming that there is no intelligent life in the universe – that’s a straw man you’ve created there. Just by the sheer size of the universe it’s so statistically improbable that there isn’t, that it’s borderline impossible that intelligent life isn’t somewhere, if not all over.
Now the question of a) that intelligent life has visited b) that some government(s) are aware and have kept the fact secret is another debate to be had.
I want to think the universe is teeming with intelligent life. I can’t say why it should be but it feels like it should. It’s too big and too old to be empty.
Does anyone assume that?
The argument that we’re unique rests on some reasonable assumptions: that life forms on planets with liquid water, that asteroids that would wipe it out get deflected by outer planets, that it takes a long time so you probably need a main-sequence star to provide the heat, that the planet contains heavy elements from several previous supernovae i.e. it would have been rare when the universe was young, that it needs an iron core so the magnetic field filters the wrong sort of radiation, that its gravity is sufficient to hold on to an atmosphere, and so on.
The number of planets exhibiting these features is very few, the number that would exhibit life with those features in place is unknown, the instance among those of intelligence is also unknown but based on Earth experience very low, and the intelligence would have to overlap in time with ours, and be reasonably nearby.
All that greatly stacks the odds against contact with another intelligence but not, given the scale of the universe, against the existence of one. So it’s a rational position to say that we’re unlikely to encounter another intelligence, which is not the same as saying there aren’t any.
That is all prevalent that other life forms are based on the same chemistry as we are. Just because we can’t imagine a different chemistry leading to an intelligent life form doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, just that we don’t understand how it could be possible.
Up to a point, but there are good reasons for these assumptions too. The two elements best able to combine with others in lots of different ways are carbon and silicon, but silicon seems less likely to do so because it usually manifests as lumps of rock. So it’s not obvious how the required chemical reactions spontaneously occur. Water allows carbon molecules to move around, so those reactions can occur. At very low temperatures ammonia likewise, but it’s conjecture that it ever does happen.
So the rationale for the assumptions that we know life is definitely possible in these circumstances, but we’ve no idea whether it is in others.
This was summarised into an equation in the 1960s (The Drake Equation), giving answers between 20, and 50,000,000 instances of intelligent extraterrestrial life throughout the universe, depending upon how it is parameterized.
The trouble with which was that not a single term in the equation had a known or even guessable value.
I’m not smug there is no other intelligent life in the universe, I just hope and prey that is the case.
Why?
Because of the ‘Great Filter’ hypothesis (by Nick Bostrom).
Potted version here: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
The formal technical paper here if you want to look at it a bit more academic: https://nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf
AI Always exterminates the life which creates it. AI has no interest in biological life, AI is now visiting Earth to see what kind of Brethren AI we are creating, and if it will be able to be absorbed in the Borg, or if it it will have to be ‘Exterminated’. That is why they are here now.
Your concept is incorrect at its lowest level! We are not in the universe but are a computer simulation and the so called UFOs are simply instrumentation from those who created the simulation.
Read enough SF and you’ll come to realise so many conflicting things are true simultaneously.
I always understood we were an experiment being run by the mice to determine the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything?
Are you sure the word OTHER is appropriate?
“And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space
‘Cause there’s b****r-all down here on Earth!“
How can there be an article about alien life without even a single mention of the ‘The Great Silence’ aka ‘The Fermi Paradox’??
Good question. I have just finished reading Extraterrestrial, by Avi Loeb (chair of astronomy at Harvard) that makes the simple but hitherto unknown-to-me point, re “the great silence”, that we really haven’t been listening all that hard. (The book concerns the many bizarre features of Oumuamua, the first interstellar object observed by humans in 2017, and makes the case for it being a technological artefact; it does not mention UFOs. It’s a great read.)
Thank you, I will check out that book. Oumuamua though, is just a (somewhat smooth) rock, not at all convinced any suggestion it is a technological artefact would stand up.
Read the book! According to Loeb, an expert in the subject, the “smooth rock” hypothesis requires some pretty heroic assumptions…
I thought the latest thinking was that it’s a lump of frozen nitrogen. The Sun’s heat caused it to emit some of that nitrogen as gas, pushing it in the opposite direction.
Also Occam’s Razor
Once AI arrives it ends its biological creators and uses an entirely different communication – my guess is quantum, and so biological tramsmissions just span, say 1930 – 2030, the 100 years between biological life making radio transmissions, and them being killed off by the AI they create, and so only quantum signals from them, and we cannot spot those. Tiny window to see with SETI.
The ufo.s are here now to see what kind of AI we are creating, and do not want to interrupt us as we are doomed anyway – and they want us to finish our job.
Well I’m not buying the ‘UFOs are here to check on what kind of AI we are creating’ theory, but the hundred year window point is exactly right. I suspect the reason for The Great Silence is that any lifeform that gets to where humanity is, is only going to stay in that state for the blink of an eye, cosmically speaking.
We are on the verge of hacking our own genetic coding, and when we do, it’s unlikely humanity will retain any of it’s existing evolutionary/biological drivers for long (including the desire to look for alien life) so all assumptions about what humanity becomes or wants thereafter are unknowable, and terrifyingly that scenario is likely no more that a dozen decades away.
Uh… why would UFOs fly halfway across the galaxy and then not LAND or interact with anyone (or any creature/plant)? Ridiculous.
But they are interacting with US navy pilots, for a start!
Possible reasons to visit:
The first seems most likely, the second unlikely (it would be evident that we aren’t without needing to visit). The third is possible, but what would benefit would conquest bring? Any civilisation that can cross the universe probably has enough natural resources (easier to mine an asteroid). They’ve probably solved the Labour problem so don’t need slaves. And ditto food supplies (although people do travel for a decent steak).
So that leaves the “our planet is dying so we are taking yours”). Which is possible I suppose.
Here on earth, all cars look much the same. All planes look much the same. All drones look much the same. All bicycles look much the same. All helicopters look much the same.
If you were sending drones the length of a universe, wouldn’t they look much the same? Instead every sighting appears very different. So either there is an estate agent somewhere who has been advertising Earth to many civilisations, or these sightings are atmospheric or photographic or other forms of anomaly. Occams Razor?
‘So either there is an estate agent somewhere who has been advertising Earth to many civilisations’
Classic.
This is very good. But why does it have to be aliens?
The UK MoD’s Condign Report into UAPs (yes, they were using the term way back in 1996) concluded with the suggestion that the entire phenomenon is in fact ‘buoyant plasmas’ caused by meteorites and tectonic events, which might also cause ‘responses in the temporal lobes of the human brain’. (I’m not kidding).
There’s a link to the now-declassified report in the wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Condign
I read a very interesting and credible hypothesis by the military reporter Tyler Rogoway in The Drive.
He says that all of the UFO phenomena recorded by US Navy ships and Aircraft are completely explainable as low-tech drones, balloons.
It is likely these are being deployed by Russia and China to spy on the US Military’s latest electronic communications and sensor tech. They have tapped into American UFO folklore to hoodwink them into believing that these are mystery, supernatural appearances, and so got away with lots of extremely valuable signals intelligence.
I’ve had a lifetime enjoying various (and varied) conversations about UFOs (or UAPs as they’re now apparently called). I’m moderately rational with a degree in physics and a masters in aerospace engineering as well as 18 years of military flying under my belt. In those 18 years I didn’t see one UAP. However, aged 12, I spent a happy 20 minutes watching 3 UFOs, 3 lights forming the corners of an equilateral triangle rotating slowly about its centre, directly above my house. Living under the Heathrow approach, I was familiar with aircraft lighting and these lights were a uniform white with no flashing (i.e. not one of ours). After around 20 minutes, they stopped rotating, sat motionless for a few seconds, then broke off to their respective horizons 120 degrees apart apparently instantaneously reaching some mind-blowing speed. It took each light no more than a second or so to disappear over the horizon from directly above my head. These were not atmospheric or weather phenomena. These were not aircraft or spacecraft following a predictable linear flight-path. They were, quite clearly controlled in some way and my perception of their acceleration were orders of magnitude higher than the 9gs or so which humans can deal with. And knowing what I know now, they were certainly not any technology that I am familiar today some 30 years later. I’m glad I saw them so young because it made all the subsequent debates somewhat academic. We do have visitors and I’m looking forward to what will soon be released by the US Government.
Could they have been anything to do with lasers and so on, a light show put on, for whatever reason, to look like UFOs?
I think aliens would read the authors comments about disbelieving China could brutalise it’s people for no reason (to get the rest of the world to do the same in a display of cultural compliance and economic self sabotage??), and conclude there is no intelligent life here.
Hasn’t been since March 2020: Enlightenment RIP.
Can I suggest that Robert Peston would be the first highbrow hack to step forward?
As the leaked-lab hypothesis of the covid origin gains traction. One has to realise that if it is true, all that Chinese covid reaction was nothing but well orchestrated theater. In fact, much of the covid response already feels like ‘pandemic’ theater. One has only to wonder if this UFO business is not just some more theater designed to distract us from what really matters.
It is lovely to see culture come around on the topic, though all that is happening is the sanctification of what people have been describing for decades, if not centuries. Either it’s aliens, or state or quasi-state actors have been sitting on human condition-changing technology for generations. I think the latter is probably worse.
I agree with your final sentence, but doubt that any country could sit on that kind of tech without using it.
We send probes out into space looking for alien life. They send probes out looking for alien life but have better tech. Does it really seem so surprising when the distances are so vast and space so inhospitable and dangerous?
I do hope they never come in person, it is unlikely but native Indians didn’t fare well when Europeans came to visit either.
There is an even more interesting connection between Covid-19 and the UFO’s that I had hoped the author would touch upon now that he has overcome his Normalcy Bias twice. What if the vaccines, which are being pushed out with extreme vehemence and fear-mongering on often unwilling populations (even in countries with near zero Covid deaths (Cambodia)), are designed to protect not against Covid-19 but against the aliens that are about to land? Assume certain officials can agree the timing of such visit with the aliens through some form of communication so that the degree of vaccination can be maximised (and vistims minimized) and the picture becomes really fascinating….The truth is out there!
What if the vaccines are provided by aliens in cahoots with Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum? There’s as much evidence for that as for your suggestion.
As for Cambodia, it’s gone from no deaths a few months ago to nearly two hundred and rising now, and many of its citizens would far sooner be vaccinated than go through more lockdowns or face the numbers of deaths and hospitalisations seen in other countries.
The Cambodian deaths occurred after vaccination started.
I think Cambodia’s first COVID death was on March 11, by which time 1.4% of the population had received one dose, and 0.3% were fully vaccinated. So yes, what you say is correct, but of highly dubious relevance.
Apparently if one in a million other places are inhabited, a million would be as there are so many other planets, and which are being ” made ” all the time. IF the Earth is the only one inhabited, the millions of others are an awful waste?.
I’ve often thought that the drip feed of aliens and conspiracy theories and sci-fi in popular culture was a deliberate ploy to desensitise us and get us used to the idea of first contact. After the last few years NOTHING would be surprising to me if we now found out it was real and aliens are the next big story.
Or..we have a fake alien landing. If aliens come and start asking for very human things (women, gold and money), then we should be suspicious.
Mick West of “Metabunk” gives a very credible explanation for the recent “tic tac “ series of videos. https://www.metabunk.org/home/
I’m trying to think of a time when an encounter with a vastly more technologically advanced civilisation worked out well for the underdog . I think we should stop shouting out there .
An alien civilisation capable of actually getting here would likely have little problem detecting our presence, even if we stopped shouting.
Oh, that’s really good point. Yes, quite so.
Or, you know, you could just be mad. A cold virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan and was all over the world in next to no time.
The only sane thing to do when faced with a mostly non-lethal but highly infectious and contagious virus is…..nothing.
What has happened instead, with a few notable exceptions, is that governments have gone bat sh)t crazy and introduced measures which have had virtually no impact on the spread of the virus but have wrought destruction on a scale not seen outside times of war.
What have witnessed is not only all the deaths that were unavoidable (you do know death is unavoidable, right?), but also an unknown and never-to-be-quantified-so-we-can-save-our-political-skins number of deaths stretching into the future which are a direct result of the measures that so hopelessly failed to stop the virus.
Also: “I know, let’s visit Earth. It’s half a quadrillion miles away but if we get a move on we can be back in time for tea. However, when we get there let’s tease the locals by becoming visible for a couple of seconds and darting erratically about the sky. Let’s not stay hidden, and let’s not make our presence known properly. Let’s travel halfway across the galaxy so we can f*(k around for a while.”
The aliens might have come here for tea! Look at the lengths Britain went to over it in the days of Empire.
Maybe Earth is a good spot for a picnic. You just don’t know, do you? What if we are just off the galactic highway and aliens use the earth for a quick rest break. It would explain why they never hang around for very long, and maybe why they don’t worry about slightly leaving possible traces of their existence.
Or maybe the earth is part of a galactic pub crawl. Maybe the atmosphere is an inebriant for a few races of aliens, and they dip into it for a quick snort before leaving. It would explain the haphazard flight paths.
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1978).
I’m going to have to join this site. 125 comments and not one claiming that Donald Trump is an alien…..
The evidence of unexplained objects in the sky is scant. Usually a grainy video. I am suspect of anything caught on radar as that could simply be an electronic malfunction. I do not discount civilian and military pilots who have described craft that do not behave normally. It is more likely for the government to simply say we get stories of UFO’s and we cannot explain them. I doubt will see Klaatu exit his spaceship on the National Mall.
Turn the argument around and if you think we are the only intelligent life in the universe you realise that is absurd. It would give humanity a status in an infinite universe that defies any logic. Maybe there are sensors in every star system that pick up traces of a nuclear explosion. That would mean that a culture had reached a certain level of development and become of interest . Makes sense to me.
Add to that the very short ( by geological time) period of recorded history of our species and you have another oddity. Six or seven thousand odd years is really not very long. We just think it is.
There could be hundreds of millions of intelligent species in the universe, but we would still be too far away from any to ever be aware of each other’s existence now or ever.
For us alien tech can never be ahead of our imagination so it is very restricted! – We live the illusion of knowing a lot because we know so much more than we did just a few generations ago but we really know ‘F’ all – It would need a gigantic pie chart to make the piece of pie representing our current knowledge against the still unknown optically ascertainable – Judged by our own experience we are surely the remote uncontacted tribe of primitives who should just be observed and remain uncontacted – Here is something that has an appeal – If gravity has polarity as per magnetism then all objects with enough gravity to form spheres will have a hollow or low density interior and astonishingly this is compatible with the latest observation of gravity on Saturn and previously of Jupiter and certainly the seismic survey of the Moon which famously ‘rang like a bell’ as if hollow and the weird gravity data from surveys in our deepest mines – If this is so then excellently protected habitats for life development exist inside every sphere throughout the Cosmos. Also astonishing is that the Earth’s crust provides such a huge habitat for the tiny life, that thrives without sunlight, we find everywhere we dig that they actually outweigh all surface and marine life – Also we keep finding life here where we did not expect it so either way it likely teems everywhere – What seems like interference with our nuclear weapons is hopefully indicating an interest in our survival maybe by specialists or perhaps surface dwellers are the extremophiles of Galactic life and of great interest or entertainment so what we see as aliens is actually the edge of instruments of observation – Surely they are as likely to contact us as a snorkeler is of contacting corals – The less advanced as perhaps indicated by Oumuamua just might though?
There’s some very dodgy science in there. Saturn and Jupiter have hollow or low mass interiors? Subterranean life outweighs all surface and marine life? News to me.
“I was driving down a dark secluded road when a weird light descended … ”
*IF ONLY I HAD A CAMERA* says no one anymore
Airline pilot sees weird object out the windshield … IF ONLY WE HAD RADAR AND SATELLITE IMAGERY.
*Unidentified Foolish Oafs*
This article raises an important question: why does the US military, with all their money, expertise and technology, have such horrendously grainy videos?
I can get better resolution from a webcam in Venice watching people going to lunch.
I want to know if the aliens piloting these vehicles are gender fluid and antiracist.
‘Alien life is out there’? No, alien life is here ad living in Gillingham: I’ve seen them!
From images they appear to have numerous models and styles of craft.
They’ve been visiting for some time. Why haven’t they done anything yet? Or perhaps they have and it’s just been very subtle.