t's now unfashionable to call flying saucers conspiracy theories, but
whether you call them UFOs, UAPs, or flying saucers, the evidence so far is
not of extraterrestrial life but of the humans' limited understanding of their
own Earth technology.
This week NASA released a big report on flying saucers. Their conclusion: nothing yet, but we need a lot more funding. (As to whether Hunter Biden exists as the Babylon Bee jokes, that is another matter.)
A "Tic Tac" UAP, most likely an infrared target used to test the ability of an aircraft to track targets
But whether intelligent life or especially intelligent aliens exist is still an unanswered question. If life does exist in space, the overwhelming probability is that it will be mainly lichens, algae, and fungi. We humans greatly underestimate the difficulty our ancestors had in surviving, not to mention the obstacles in building and sustaining a scientific and technological society. Many of these obstacles, including its high cost and threats from new pseudo-religions, remain today.
Another obstacle is maintaining an interest in searching. The huge number of phony reports based on flimsy evidence, blurry images of white dots in the sky, and blatant hoaxes make it risky for any reputable organization to investigate purported space aliens. Witness the reputational damage incurred by that geologist who claimed that Oumuamua, an oddly shaped iron core meteorite from outside the solar system, could be an alien artifact. In my experience as a scientist, he'll be lucky not to lose his funding and maybe his tenure.
In some ways it's a shame people get obsessed with flying saucers when there are so many other real mysteries we could speculate about. Here are some of the misunderstood Earth technologies that are often presented as evidence for aliens.
DNA
This rare in-focus UFO was photographed in Georgia. Witnesses reported hearing a strange alien language coming from the UFO, described as resembling a “Yee-haaa!” sound
If a creature has DNA, it cannot be a space alien. Any creature that evolved in an alien biosphere will not have any DNA as we know it. Even if it had nucleic acids, the number of possible structural variations is so immense that it is very unlikely that any of it would be recognizable to us. Even if it was, the chances of any alien DNA sequence matching anything on Earth are zero. So if those dummies found in Mexico have DNA that was 30% different from that in humans (as was claimed), it is conclusive proof that they are not space aliens.
Now, maybe you could say the aliens were engineered in some way to enable them to survive on Earth. Perhaps the aliens evolved on a planet so different from ours that Earth's environment would be instantly fatal to them. But in that case, why not give them a better chance and make their DNA identical to humans instead of making it so different that it's closer to pine tree DNA? A 30% difference is enormous.
Viruses
Given that alien DNA, if it existed, would be totally incompatible with our own, any viruses aliens might bring to Earth would be absolutely unable to infect humans. Of course, the aliens could engineer a virus, and maybe even start a plague. But we humans are way ahead of them on that front. The aliens would admire our skill in creating deadly plagues.
Bright lights
Lens flare caused by the Moon reflecting inside a camera lens. The solid diagonal line in this seven-second time exposure is caused by one of your Earth airplanes flying overhead. The airplane strobe flashes once per second.
Optical lenses always, always, always show lens flare when a camera is pointed at a bright light source. A lens flare is nothing more than an unwanted reflection inside the camera, as shown in this photo of the Sun and the photo at right of the Moon. If the bright light is out of the frame, you'll still get a lens flare, and it's tempting to think it's something real, especially if optical coma distortion gives it a saucer-like shape.
Landing lights
Earth airplanes have red or white strobes and red and green flashing lights on the wings. If they're permitted to fly at night, they have powerful white landing lights. Aliens could, of course, put lights on their flying saucers if they wanted to, but if they're traveling faster than the speed of light these lights would just be counter-productive. And again, they'd be very unlikely to use the same color scheme and flashing interval as our Earth airplanes.
Crashing
Skeptics make a good point when they say an alien skilled enough to navigate twenty light years and still find Earth would be unlikely to then crash on it. However, believers have the upper hand here. Any number of things can happen to biological beings in space: lack of skill flying on a planet with different gravity, brain dysfunction from space radiation, or even disease. The claim that our Earth military is trying to fly these supposed space ships is also in the believers' favor. Just look at the number of times our submarines and ships crash into each other. How much more likely that this would happen with a vessel that comes with a manual written in an indecipherable alien language?
Lasers
We all know that our Earth missiles use infrared to track their targets, which is why military airplanes are designed to minimize their heat signatures. They also use infrared lasers to "dazzle" infrared missile seekers. This means it's essential for commanders to test whether the equipment their pilots use can detect and track infrared sources. It's clear that this is what was going on in those Tic-tac videos the news media were so baffled about. Naturally, the military encouraged misinterpretation by hinting that they might be flying saucers, but it's unlikely that our adversaries are naive enough to fall for it.
Radar reflections
Much is often made of these supposed alien vessels being tracked by radar. The radar signal may show them suddenly accelerating away at unnatural velocity. Flying saucer fans point to this as evidence of some superior maneuvering tech. But this exactly what we would expect from a military test drone or a spy drone. Radar returns are so easy to fake that it has long been common practice on military aircraft to transmit fake signals that do exactly this whenever they're illuminated by a radar signal.
To measure the speed of an aircraft, we use a technology known as pulse Doppler. The antenna sends a series of pulses and then measures the frequency of the return signal. If the drone is moving away, the frequency drops in proportion to its speed. If the drone wants to shake off the radar lock entirely, it sends a Doppler signal in which the frequency drops dramatically. This causes the tracker computer to decide that that the signal is out of range of its expected parameters, meaning it's one of many possible artifacts in a signal, so it drops the signal.
Whenever you hear about a UAP or UFO suddenly accelerating at impossible speed, that's what's happening. Of course radar experts know this, and there's a sort of arms race going on. Military radars are encoded to make it hard for an enemy plane to replicate a fake signal. So foreign powers send many drones to induce our military to track them so they can figure out the codes.
Visibility
The humans on this planet have long had stealth aircraft that are nearly undetectable by radar. They're also learning how to do cloaking. Our Earth cloaking uses a property of specially manufactured materials called metamaterials, which cause radar and light to simply pass around the outside of the plane, making it literally invisible.
These innocent-looking fluffy clouds are just crawling with invisible cloaked unidentified aerial phenomena
So far, our Earth cloaking is primitive and only works at a single wavelength. But a flying saucer sent here to study us might well have a more sophisticated cloaking mechanism. The aliens, if they were smart, would want to learn as much as possible about us without being seen before contacting us. They'd need to understand, for example, how we live, what a Markle is, and why our Earth politicians do such idiotic things.
Thus, it's a safe bet that anything you can photograph with a camera is Earth-based technology. In fact, it's far more likely that an alien craft is present if you don't see anything. Just look at this seemingly innocent photo of trees and a blue sky. That's exactly what you would expect to see if it was crawling with an armada of invisible alien spaceships.
Skeptics sometimes quote Carl Sagan as saying “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This is nonsense. Ordinary, everyday evidence will do just fine. But obvious misinterpretations of Earth technology just make it that much harder to discover whether something is actually out there. If I didn't know better, I'd think that was their purpose.
sep 15 2023, 7:22 am
