I have not had much to say on this subject for a long time. This is partly due to the fact that I haven't posted for a long time. It is also due to the fact that it has been a while since anything has come out that made it worth the effort necessary to put together a post on the subject. But the amount of space devoted to the subject in the press in the past year or so has increased substantially. So, now is a good time to survey the situation. And, of course, the place to begin is at the beginning.
The ancient Greeks catalogued the heavens. The found them populated by a large group of "fixed stars" that rotated around the North Pole. They were called "fixed" because they did not move in relation to each other. But they did move. Certain stars rose and set as the night progressed.
And the specific stars that rose and set changed on an annual schedule. If you were sufficiently versed in the details, you could tell what time of the night it was and what time of the year it was by means of careful celestial observation. That was handy, but also a mystery.
There was a more dramatic form of change in the sky. Seven objects moved. The most obvious was the Sun, which rose and set every day. The next most obvious was the moon. Here its behavior was more complicated. But it was similarly predictable. Then there were the five "wanderers", Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Their location relative to the fixed stars changed continuously.
The latter three were most peculiar. They periodically engaged in "retrograde" motion. Compared to their normal movement with respect to the fixed stars at times they literally changed direction and moved backwards. So, there were some mysteries for which no satisfactory solution was ever found. But all these objects moved in regular and predictable patterns.
This led to the belief that whatever was happening in the heavens, it was regular and predictable. Except, of course this was not the end of the mysteries. There were even more mysterious objects, objects that were very short lived. We now call them shooting stars. They appeared and disappeared in intervals measured in seconds. There was a little bit of regularity apparent. The number of shooting stars increased at certain times of the year. And there was a preferred location in the sky and direction of travel for some of these bursts of activity.
We now know that many shooting stars are debris left over from the disintegration of comets. The debris hits the upper atmosphere and burns up. And that brings us to the other category, the longer-lived mysterious objects that we now call comets. They would show up, brighten, reach a peak, dim, and disappear. All this took place not over a period of seconds but over a period of months. Each comet seemed to be unique. The paths they traced were more likely to be found in certain parts of the sky. But they otherwise seemed random.
The ancient method of dealing with shooting stars and comets was to mostly ignore them. So, people got into the habit of thinking of the heavens as this well understood thing that behaved in a very predictable manner. And it wasn't just the ancient Greeks. Civilizations from that period, civilizations like the Chinese and the Babylonians, did the same thing. The details were different. But when they looked at the sky, they saw order and regularity.
All of these early civilizations saw and catalogued pretty much the same 3,500 objects. That changed when Galileo became the first of many to point a telescope at the sky. There were lots more objects up there. But that discovery did not require a fundamental change in attitude. The heavens were more complex, but they were still filled with objects that behaved in regular and predictable ways. Nor did the change from "eyeball" astronomy to photographic astronomy, a change that took place in the early part of the twentieth century, change things. Everything was still assumed to be regular and predictable.
And, except for the heavenly creatures posited by many religions, it was presumed to be lifeless. But adventure fiction, most notably that of Jules Verne, and later what came to be called Science Fiction, most notably at the hands of H. G. Wells, introduced people to the idea that space aliens of one kind or another might populate the heavens.
This spilled over into the realm of science when Percival Lowell, a noted and well-respected astronomer, announced that he had seen "canals" on Mars. He used the "mark one eyeball" to make the observations this announcement was based on. But he made his announcement just as the photographic plate was starting to replace the eyeball as the preferred method for astronomers to observe the heavens.
His announcement was immediately controversial within the astronomical community. Other did not see what he was seeing. At that time these kinds of disagreements were common. Different astronomers often reported seeing different things when observing the same celestial object. The fact that these disagreements were so common was one of the two main reasons why astronomers switched over to using photographic plates instead of relying on direct observation.
Switching over allowed multiple astronomers to examine the same photographic plate. There were few disagreements about what a specific plate showed or did not show. Astronomers looked at lots of plates showing Mars and could find no evidence of canals. This lack of photographic evidence for Martian canals caused most astronomers to conclude that Lowell had gotten it wrong.
The second advantage is that photographic plates can be exposed for long periods of time. An eyeball gathers light for less than a second before turning it into a picture. A photographic plate can be exposed for many minutes. This allows objects that are too faint to be made out by direct observation to register on a photographic plate in an unambiguous way.
Neither of these changes made a fundamental difference to astronomer's belief about the question under discussion. They had long since decided that there were no creatures, celestial or otherwise, occupying the heavens. The "canals of Mars" controversy came and went relatively quickly. In the end it served to cement the idea that the heavens were void of life.
At least it did among professional astronomers and other scientists. The beliefs held by general public were another story. Verne and Wells were very popular. They were not alone. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of the spectacularly popular character "Tarzan the Ape Man" also created a second character that for a long time was almost as popular, John Carter. He starred in a number of popular books that chronicled his adventures on Mars. Mars, in Burroughs' conception, was populated, not by a single race of aliens, but by several.
By the 1920s adventure stories featuring the likes of Carter became popular enough that they were spun off into a new category: Science Fiction. The stories were populated by brawny men, gorgeous women, and space aliens of all types. Most but not all of the aliens were evil. Most but not all of the aliens lusted after human women.
Sure, it was fiction. But it firmly planted into the consciousness of a large segment of the public the idea that intelligent life that was not human and that did not originate on earth was possible. Lots of people looked down on the purveyors and the consumers of Science Fiction. But that didn't mean that they rejected out of hand the possibility that space aliens actually existed.
Then in 1947 a spectacular story started making the rounds in the press. An airplane pilot, presumably a reliable observer, saw what came to be called "flying saucers". The pilot never used that phase. But after his initial report had passed through several hands, that's what the press decided to label what his report described.
We now know exactly what the pilot saw. It was something called a "lenticular cloud". ("Lenticular" is a fancy word for saucer shaped.) Lenticular clouds are an uncommon phenomenon. At the time most meteorologists had never heard of them. That's because it takes an unusual set of circumstances to produce one.
You need a tall mountain. In this case, the mountain was Mount Rainier, one of the tallest mountains in North America. Then you need specific weather conditions. With the right mountain and the right weather conditions air flowing over the mountain causes water vapor to condense at a certain place and form a cloud. As the air travels a little further, atmospheric conditions change enough for the water to evaporate back into clear gas. This restricts the extent of the cloud. In short, we get a small lenticular cloud located in a specific place relative to the mountain.
This particular pilot had never seen the like. Since most meteorologists had never seen the like, the pilot can't really be blamed for being surprised and confused by what he saw. Nevertheless, it made for a good mystery. And mysteries sell papers, so it got widespread coverage.
What was actually going on was quickly determined. But the explanation was a bunch of boring technical mumbo-jumbo. So, it got little coverage. Many people knew of the mystery. Few people knew that the mystery had been solved. That's all it took to set off the whole UFO craze.
Interest in UFOs waxes and wanes, but it never quite goes away. People want to believe in their existence. So, they accept skimpy evidence. And the field is ripe with charlatans. The manufacture of phony pictures and films started almost immediately. Why? Because there are several tried and true ways to monetize a supposed sighting.
Alien abduction stories, especially those involving "anal probes" and other sensational nonsense, began to appear regularly. The people at the center of these stories were a mix of honest but credulous people and outright fraudsters.
Much but not all of this was eventually debunked. As with the original UFO story, many more people heard the story than heard the explanation. And many people who heard the explanation chose not to believe it. This left a large residue of the unexplained for true believers to cling to.
But unexplainable events are an ordinary part of life. And most of the unexplainable UFO events fall into the category of "bright object in the sky doing something weird". In most cases it is literally impossible to gather additional information after the fact. So many of these events linger without any confirmation of refutation. Believers point to the sheer number of these events as proof of something. It is not.
Over the last couple of years, the UFO story has received a new injection of fuel. A Freedom of Information request forced the Federal Government to release a bunch of "UFO" files. The release was bracketed by bunch of nonsense about a massive government coverup and various secret government projects. But we've been here before and this nonsense is par for the course.
So, is there anything new in all of this? No! Sure, there are new reports. But they differ in no significant way from the old reports. There are just more of them. But that's because there is more opportunity for something puzzling to happen. So, the increase in frequency is not surprising.
The only truly noteworthy development is that the government has finally caved. It has now established a small permanent group charged with collecting and tracking reports of this sort of thing. The group is accepting reports from both inside the government, primarily from the military, and from the outside. Anyone who wants to report something can now do so.
Instead of getting swept up in all this manufactured frenzy it is important to step back and take a look at the big picture. A 1977 movie popularized a good UFO categorization scheme. The movie was called Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So, what are the three kinds of "close encounters"?
A close encounter of the first kind is a reported sighting, perhaps backed up by pictures or videos. In other words, what we have been putting up with since 1947. A close encounter of the second kind is the collection of actual physical evidence. I want to go into that in some detail.
Imagine you are magically transported a hundred years back in time. That is not a long time. Civilization has been around for thousands of years. The earth has been around for billions of years. Life on earth has been around for most of those billions of years.
What would people whose lives are not that different from ours make of a smart phone? Phones were a common part of daily life back then. Many smart phone functions would not work (no cell or web signal), but some would. The phone itself, however, would appear to have been created out of alien technology. As a single example among dozens, the glass the screen is made of had not been invented a hundred years ago. The reaction to your smart watch, should you be wearing one, would be similar.
But wait. There's more. How about the fob many of us now use instead of car keys? Cars were another common part of life back then. But keys were used to unlock and start them. The proximity sensor built into the fob, however, would look like magic. Or how about something completely mundane like cash?
Credit cards would be a mystery. But money in the form of bills and coins, that was something people of the period were intimately familiar with. But the way coins are now made has gotten a high-tech upgrade. A modern quarter looks superficially like the quarter of a century ago. But a modern quarter could not have been made a hundred years ago.
And what about the anti-counterfeiting innovations now found in currency? The holographic number. The "security band". More alien magic. The technology to study these monetary innovations existed back then. But the technology necessary to create them would reek of alien technology to an expert of that period.
What's my point? My point is that any truly alien artifact has a strong likelihood of being obviously alien. An actual alien object would be unlikely to consist entirely of materials that are capable of being manufactured in quantities and at low enough cost to be incorporated into common consumer products. In short, it would almost inevitably contain one or more components like the glass used in smartphone screens. It is also likely that, like the modern quarter, it was manufactured or assembled in a manner beyond our current technical ability. In short it would be obviously and unambiguously alien.
A close encounter of the third kind is a face-to-face meetup with an alien. Again, the alien is likely to be obviously and unambiguously alien. The movie I cited ends with a spectacular and very cinematic close encounter of the third kind, a face-to-face encounter between humans and aliens. An actual encounter with an actual space alien is likely to be much more alien than the event shown in the movie.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out in 1977. By then the UFO phenomenon had been around for decades and had received lots of publicity. And the movie did and does a good job of laying out the appropriate benchmark for judging where we are at. And where we are at is precisely where we were at in 1977.
Then and now we have lots and lots of examples of close encounters of the first kind. And then and now those examples are crappy. Grainy pictures and videos. Unsupported eyewitness reports. No physical evidence available for examination by actual experts. Given the ubiquity of smartphones containing high quality cameras, why is there not even high-quality visual evidence of a close encounter of the first kind?
We are soon presented with good quality stills and/or video every time some tragedy or other event of note occurs. Many of these events are unusual, uncommon, or both. Cameras are literally everywhere these days. Yet they are somehow never present when a flying saucer zips by, or a space alien waves at someone. The quality of the evidence for close encounters of the first kind never seems to get any better.
And we still have no examples of close encounters of the second kind, let alone a close encounter of the third kind. The capabilities of the technology necessary for investigating and documenting close encounters of the second or third kind has grown by leaps and bounds. Crime labs can work miracles with skin cells, hair fibers, and other kinds of trace evidence, even if it is found in miniscule quantities. Yet not the tiniest sample of an alien artifact, or the alien itself, has ever turned up.
The great scientist and philosopher Richard Feinman made an important observation that bears on this issue. When something is first observed it is often fuzzy. What's going is often unclear because we start out having little observational data, and what we do have may be of poor quality. The proper thing to do is to try to improve the quality and quantity of the data.
If that is done then one of two things will happen, Feinman observed. Things will come into focus. There is something going on there and these are its characteristics. Or it will not. Often subsequent observation with better equipment results in the hypothesized phenomenon going away completely as the canals of Mars did.
If subsequent observations using better equipment and procedures do not cause something to come into focus, then it is likely that there was never anything there in the first place. Seventy-five years of UFO observations indicates that it is likely that there is nothing there.
The universe is a big place. There may well be intelligent life out there in the form of space aliens. But they are likely to be a long way away. So far away that unless someone finds a way around the limitation imposed by the speed of light, then it is impractical, perhaps impossible, for them to visit us.
And that makes it unlikely that in the last seventy-five years space aliens have buzzed military aircraft, civilian aircraft, or anything else. It is also unlikely that they have abducted and returned people in order to perform unnatural medical experiments on them. They are also unlikely to have been lurking in woods or swamps or anywhere else shining the occasional light at us. They certainly have made no crop circles, a hoax that was debunked years ago.
It is possible that space aliens visited earth thousands, or millions, or billions of years ago. Short of leaving some space garbage behind in a protected cave, evidence of their visit could easily have been erased in the interim by natural processes. But absent high quality evidence, which would count as a close encounter of the second kind, even that is unlikely.
I like a good science fiction book or movie. I am perfectly happy if it is jammed to the rafters with space aliens. But it is not real. The presence of space aliens is just another fantasy element. Fantasy elements do not stop me from enjoying something as a fun piece of entertainment. But I am never confused about where entertainment ends and where reality begins.
I am also fine with people who become deeply invested in Star Trek or Star Wars. They are no different than the people who become deeply invested in Lord of the Rings, or Manga, more obvious examples of fantasy. As long as they know where fantasy ends and where reality begins, then I salute them for their energy and creativity. But as to the people who believe that UFOs are real based on the crappy evidence that is all that has been produced since 1947, a period lasting the better part of a century? Those are people that I have a beef with.
