Recently I was watching an episode on one of my favorite YouTube channels, Answers with Joe. The episode was about UFOs, which made it was automatically a winner for me. Specifically, it focused on a few UFO videos that even a smart skeptic like Joe finds compelling. I enjoyed the episode so much, in fact, that I wanted to respond to it, and especially the last part, in which Joe enumerates some very rational arguments against the idea that UFOs are aliens. This is the so-called Extraterrestrial Hypothesis—the school of thought that believes UFOs are real and explicable as alien spacecraft.
(For the rest of this post, I’m going to use UFOs and the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis interchangeably. And, yeah—I believe UFOs are alien craft.)
Obviously, I have some deep feelings about the subject, although I’m not sure why, exactly. I can’t claim any special knowledge about UFOs. But like millions of other Americans, I have seen a UFO. It happened one night on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, when my son and I were having dinner at a little joint on shore. We were sitting outside, and somewhere the course of the meal we saw a strange light in the sky. It shone a powerful beam of light in our direction, then disappeared, then reappeared again. This went on for nearly an hour.
And, of course, it was totally silent.
As strange as this encounter was, it was hardly a transformational experience for me. Rather, it was one more rung in the ladder that I have been climbing over the last ten years or so, gradually increasing my belief in UFOs. Another rung was the testimony of thousands of ordinary but unrelated people, like those who witnessed the so-call Phoenix Lights event in 1997. On this one night, hundreds of Phoenix residents saw a V-shaped craft sliding silently through the sky.
One reason this story, in particular, affected me so deeply was that I went to grad school in Arizona, not too long before the Phoenix Lights appeared. I was impressed by the smart, level-headedness of Arizonans, and so I was very inclined to believe them when the news of the event came out. Conversely, I was very disinclined to believe the so-called “rational” explanations offered up by skeptics. These ranged from the merely implausible (the lights were flares dropped my military aircraft) to the patently ridiculous (the lights were a mass hallucination).
Even beyond the Phoenix Lights discussion, I find it ironic that many UFO skeptics, while assuming the mantle of scientific rigor and dispassion, come off as weirdly passionate themselves, if no delusional. For instance, when they trot out their favorite, go-to chestnut: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Who, I want to ask, is making claims? Those who, like me, subscribe to ETH are simply trying to explain a pervasive reality—that of strange craft that often appear in the skies about above us.
And as far as evidence is concerned, don’t we already have real evidence? The Nimitz Encounters were recorded on video by Navy F-18 pilots, which was declassified in 2012. The video clearly shows a wingless craft that is capable of evading military jets with no visible means of propulsion. If that’s not good evidence, what is?
Well, okay—I know what skeptics would say to that: real evidence—hard evidence—is something you can lay your hands on. Capture it, put in it a laboratory, and study it with a microscope. But this attitude seems incredibly naïve. UFOs are not a natural phenomenon like photosynthesis or Brownian Motion. Rather, if ETH is true, then UFOs are a manifestation of intelligence, of civilization. And this puts them squarely in the domain the soft sciences like anthropology and sociology.
Indeed, when looking at the UFO debate through the lens of the soft sciences, one finds that many of objections of UFO skeptics simply fall away. For example, some find it unlikely that ETs would be 100% effective in preventing us from getting ahold of one of their fallen spacecraft and studying it the lab. But a social scientist could point out that we humans, even in our primitive state, launch millions of commercial airline flights every year with virtually no crashes. (And those that do crash are often lost at the sea.) Is it really so hard to believe than an alien civilization, capable of reaching Earth in the first place, would be capable of patrolling earth with no crashes or mishaps?
Or take another common UFO skepticism: If ETs have gone to the trouble of voyaging across space (which, as UFO skeptics love to point out, is really big), why would they waste their time gliding over Phoenix or scaring the shit out of some rednecks in Pennsylvania? Why wouldn’t they head straight for Washington, D.C. and land on the White House lawn? Anyone who’s taken Intro to Anthropology in college will have a ready answer for this one. Aliens must be smart, and, as such, they would want to answer a few questions about us before revealing themselves openly. They would want to study us first, to observer our character. Even more important, they’d want us to get used to their presence, first—the way anthropologists gradually introduce themselves to newly discovered tribes.
Actually, now that I think about it, screw the soft sciences; let’s head straight for the Liberal Arts building. An English major or any other fan of literature would know that aliens—just like us—are endlessly complex and unpredictable beings, full of conflicting motives and impulses. Maybe they’re not studying us so much as flirting with us, making up their minds as to whether we’re worth the effort.
But it would take a Journalism professor to properly respond to my all-time favorite anti-UFO argument: If aliens were visiting us, the government would know. It would take a massive, world-wide conspiracy to hide it. To which my hypothetical Journalism professor would have a two-word response: Bill Cosby. No major news magazine or other news outlet ever reported the allegations—made by dozens of women—that Cosby was a rapist. The evidence was hidden in plain sight; it could be found by anyone with an internet connection. So why didn’t it come out sooner? Was there some global conspiracy in place to protect Mr. Cosby? Of course not. Rather, most journalists are not actually in the news business; they’re in the entertainment business. And most Americans were not ready to entertain the idea that their favorite TV dad was actually a serial rapist.
I would argue that, similarly, they are not quite ready to face the possibility that aliens are visiting the earth. So, journalists don’t write about it, except to dismiss or mock the idea.
And now that we’re done with the Journalism school, let’s finish our journey by wandering into the Theology Department (assuming our imaginary university still has funding for such a rarified field). We need to go there to get some ammunition against the final, last-ditch objection that UFO skeptics unleash when their backs are against the wall: Belief in UFOs is just a modern religion—an irrational belief in a Higher (Otherworldly) Power; it’s a myth.
I love this argument. It manages to completely dismiss the UFO phenomenon without any evidence or facts. But don’t worry; our imaginary Theologian has a good come-back: bullshit. Lots of people who have had encounters with UFOs are also religious (that is, they practice an actual, recognized religion), and these people, to my knowledge, have no difficulty delineating between what they saw in the sky and their religious beliefs. In fact, the only people drawing a connection between UFOs and God are the UFO skeptics themselves.
And even if some people do find something sublime or inspirational about UFOs, this doesn’t mean they aren’t real. Heck, some people find the stock market sublime, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get rich (or poor) by betting on it.
So endeth my sermon…
(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)
Ash Clifton, Writer 