Credit: George Stock/Wikimedia Commons
From my forthcoming Cambridge University Press book,
The New Cosmos . . .
The multiple efforts now underway to search for extraterrestrial civilizations invariably raises the favorite question of many TV shows: Has alien life visited Earth in the form of UFOs? After all, half of the American public believes alien beings have visited our planet. The claims of UFO proponents, when actually subjected to the principles of scientific analysis, are not very good. Moreover, anyone who spends a few hours investigating the distance scale of the universe should realize, with a fair bit of sense, that the odds of traveling around the galaxy, given the time and energy realistically required, are not promising.
Reports of UFOs commenced in earnest just after World War II with a well-publicized incident near Mount Rainer and the claims of a businessman who said he spotted nine shiny “flying saucers” moving at high velocities. But the thousands of UFO reports made since, many of which have been thoroughly and scientifically investigated, have yielded nothing about the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. They have, however, revealed a great deal about the human beings here on Earth who have made the reports. People see things in the sky they often don’t understand. That’s the conclusion.
The fact that observers can’t identify an object, or that it seems mysterious to them, should not be surprising — particularly given the nature of some of the reports. The “unidentified” part of the term UFO does not mean turning over all we know about science, about energy and the cosmic distance scale, about Occam’s Razor, and leaping right into alien visitation. Far more solid evidence would have to be collected and analyzed by actual scientists to get over that hurdle.
Face it, folks, it’s a very, very big universe. But that gives us a little perspective, if nothing else. Earth is a pretty special place, at least for our species, and we should take good care of it, our fellow human beings, and everything else that lives along with us. It’s the only home we have.
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