Calm Down, Everybody, the UFO’s Are NOT Extra-Terrestrials

Let’s all take a step back on this ET thing …

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Ever since government records were released earlier this month concerning “unidentified aerial phenomena”, more commonly known as unidentified flying objects or UFOs, America has oh so predictably done what it does best — plunge headfirst right down a rabbit hole of pure nonsense.

Now I know all y’all ET believers are champing at the bit to throw the facts at me, which you have at the ready and in abundance. But sorry, I’m not going to get down in the weeds with you. Because you can’t really see anything from down there.

Like for instance, any idea what this is here?

If you guessed the edge of a fried egg on a plate, congratulations. But you couldn’t be 100% sure because the image is zoomed in too close. As you zoom out, you get enough context to remove any doubt about what you’re seeing.

And if you notice, the pro-alien camp always wants to stay zoomed in real tight on the details. Instead, let’s step back and consider what’s actually being claimed when someone says that AEPs/UFOs are spaceships.

First off, we have to believe that some extraterrestrial species has gone to all the trouble to travel to our planet, and then make no clear effort to communicate with us. I suppose that’s possible, but if that’s your strategy, and you have the technology to actually get here, then why not observe from a distance that’s more conducive to your goal? Why go zooming around our atmosphere pulling aerial acrobatics like high-speed right-angle turns right out where folks can see you? What’s the point in all that flouncing around?

Second, we have to believe that these space aliens are so advanced that a trip to Earth is like a Sunday drive to the beach for their kind, seeing as how they show up here in every manner of spacecraft, of all shapes and sizes and descriptions. They venture to our planet alone and in fleets. Their vehicles are oblong, round, and triangular, and are tricked out with bespoke lighting of all sorts. You just never know what’s going to roll into town next.

Third, we have to believe they are masters of obfuscation, able to travel among us without ever being clearly detected, while at the same time they manage to be spotted again and again and again, not by the dedicated scientists at SETI who devote their careers to finding them, but by rank amateurs who weren’t even looking. And somehow, no matter how often they are sighted, they always manage to be just remote enough so that we can’t prove they’re aliens. Every single time, without exception.

Now please.

Space aliens are the Bigfoot of the skies. You know, that cryptospecies which is so shy and reclusive that we’ve never found so much as a skeleton or a road kill, yet simultaneously so common that they’re spotted several times a year, sometimes walking right up onto people’s porches.

Like Bigfoot, the space invaders only make sense if you never step back and take in the big picture. Because once you do, they are obviously ridiculous.

Bigfoot and the ETs are products of the game of “I don’t know therefore I do know” which humans so love to play. I have no idea what that weird sound was, so it must have been made by a dead person. I can’t say what that animal is, so it must be a werewolf. I have no clue what I saw in the sky, so it has to be an alien spacecraft. Just stands to reason.

Advocates of extraterrestrial visitation love to pretend that eliminating possibilities somehow makes their case stronger. But no matter how many mundane things you can say something isn’t, you do not thereby demonstrate that it is something fantastic. There are John Does in county morgues all across the country, but deciding who those bodies aren’t does not make it any more likely that they are pod people.

At the end of the day, no amount of speculation and dot-connecting is going to get me to believe that some alien species has come all the way out to our neck of the universe in a motley caravan of spaceships just to mess with us, because there’s no way on God’s green earth they could be so often spotted yet never conclusively identified without meaning to do just that. Coincidence only stretches so far.

The universe is a rather large place. If so-called intelligent life can evolve here, I don’t see why it can’t evolve elsewhere. So who knows, maybe stellar explorers will arrive next week. But if they do, my bet is they’ll arrive in some sort of coordinated fashion and will either intentionally make themselves known or else successfully remain hidden. But this business of zipping around just out of reach like some intergalactic Duke boys, no, I can’t get behind that notion.

Yeah, it’s no fun to be alone in the universe. But so far, the only working brains we know of are on this little planet of ours. And we can either use them to face our situation soberly, or else play a game of spotting horses in the clouds.

And sure, cloud-horses can be pretty, and it can be fun to look for them and even make up stories about them. Just don’t ask me to try to ride them with you.

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Header image by Martin Str