UFO FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Roswell, Aliens, Whirling Discs, and Flying Saucers – UFOs and Us
Over the many centuries of human history, and particularly since the late 1940s, countless people around the globe have witnessed Unidentified Flying Objects that could not be explained in conventional terms. Not that the authorities haven’t tried. Official explanations of recent decades have invoked conventional aircraft, cloud formations, stars, planets (Venus is frequently cited), ball lightning, and St. Elmo’s Fire (glowing, ionized air). Many UFOs have been explained away as satellites, weather balloons, reflected light (particularly off windows, camera lenses, and eyeglasses), smog, and a perennial favorite, swamp gas (spontaneous combustion of methane). Because government and other official agencies can be obdurate about holding to their findings, a great deal of UFO discussion has roused emotion and become simplistic, holding that 1) UFOs are hoaxes or illusions, or 2) UFOs are real. Reasoning of this sort hardly encourages anyone to consider the many subtle aspects of arguments for and against UFOs.
Fabricated reports of UFOs exist, too, and although many of them scream hoax, a great many find people willing to accept them. For many, UFOs suggest adventure and wonder, the thrill of being witness to visits from a heretofore unimagined civilization. For the conspiracy-minded (see chapter eleven), unidentified flying objects connote underhanded American or “world government” activities based on extraterrestrial technology—technology that humans have reverse-engineered or that, alternatively, has been shared, to no good purpose, by the aliens that created it.
On the other hand, people with a more sanguine view of UFOs and the crafts’ operators look to the phenomenon as an antidote to the horrors unfolding daily here on Earth. Perhaps, just perhaps, the alien visitors are made of nobler stuff.
Perhaps they are willing to show us the road to peaceful fulfillment of our potential as human animals.
As we’ll discover in chapter two, the existence of extraterrestrial life, particularly the sentient variety, depends on a specific confluence of events: a planet situated within its sun’s “golden zone,” with an atmosphere and water, where life was germinated by an energized chemical soup that . . . well, it’s complicated. During the last forty-five years, exciting information about conditions in near space has been generated by crewed space missions and probes launched by many nations. Fabulous telescopes, like the Hubble Space Telescope (launched 1990) and the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope (launched 2008), bring knowledge of extrasolar planets, the nature of quasars, the electromagnetic spectrum, and possible origins of the universe.
Evidence of life remains elusive. A case might be made for microbial life on Mars; that possibility, though thrilling, does not satisfy our craving to learn of intelligent life. The search continues. In 2009, NASA’s Kepler mission set off to locate planets similar to our own. Before 2010 was out, Kepler had discovered more than twenty-three hundred potential planets. One of those, Kepler-22, is the first that we know orbits in a star’s habitable zone. What—or who—is on that planet? We don’t know. In the course of a single day’s research, we can be stimulated, encouraged, discouraged, and then encouraged all over again.