From time to time I find a list of ideas about the sort of unexplained issues we discuss here.
Sometimes that list is worth addressing one item at a time.
I am in no way a proponent of the idea we are being visited by dozens of alien species on a daily basis, hundreds if not thousands of times a month if for no other reason than the math that comes from that equation does not add up. We can send one observer or maybe a small party to study a new species or an isolated indigenous culture, take samples and provide for continuing observation in controlled fashion and learn pretty much what we need to learn about them. In fact limiting exposure, contact and conflict is pretty much a standard method of observing species and cultures. Proponents of alien visitation would have us believe that alien visitors have been sampling cattle, and people on dark country roads in order to study us. That they have been doing this for decades, or centuries, or millenia depending on the version you ascribe to.
I grant you that the ideas below were expressed decades before some of our current technology was developed, but very little of it was not conceivable, and much of it was in its infancy at the time. So I admit, some of the arguments against these ideas may seem unfair for that reason, but there are still people who propose all these ideas to this day. So that is how I address them.
What are UFOs? Brad Steiger has a few ideas.
Brad Steiger’s 17 Theories Of The UFO Enigma
Sometime in the late 1960s or early ’70s, Tim Beckley asked me to present my favorite theory of UFOs for one of his publications. I told my friend Tim that it was impossible for me to select one above many others, so I submitted 17 possible solutions to the UFO enigma:
I am not proposing that Mr. Steiger believes any of these ideas and do not know other than that he proposed them merely as an intellectual exercise. I did offer him the opportunity to respond to my arguments against each, but did not receive a response to that inquiry.
1: They come from an extraterrestrial civilization: While it seems likely that the visitors have had Earth under surveillance for centuries, they most often choose to conduct their activities in secret, perhaps even misleading humankind and deliberately misleading us for some undetermined reason, such as one of the following:
* They are a benign species that follow a policy of noninterference in our planet’s evolutionary development.
* They are largely indifferent to us as a species and dispassionately observe and study our planet’s evolutionary struggles.
* They are in the final stages of conducting important tests that will determine whether they will destroy us, exploit us ruthlessly, or totally enslave us. It is this category of visitors who conduct human abductions and who have made secret deals with certain levels of Earth’s governments – agreements that they may break with extreme prejudice.
If a benign species has a policy of non-interference, why spend so much time here making themselves obvious by thousands of public appearances, abductions, stirring up the locals to try and shoot you down? And since there are many claims of UFOs having crashed or been shot down, why not leave at that point since you have clearly overstepped your objective?
If they are indifferent to us, why do they care about our evolutionary struggles? Dispassionate observation is not affected by the sort of interference that the number of sightings reported yearly indicate, even after sorting out the obvious hoaxes and mis-identifications.
Final stages of conducting tests? Again, depending on what version you believe, they have been testing us for 70 years at minimum, and over five thousand if you are an Ancient Aliens believer. In fact they may have created us by some stories (included later on this list). If they wanted to destroy us, well, that decision could well have been made even in the last 70 years since the Kenneth Arnold sighting, when we have made the largest leaps in technology and our capacity to do harm to others. There is no gain in exploiting or enslaving us as a species more advanced than we are will certainly have more advanced robotics with which to replace fragile mortal laborers, and resources are far more plentiful, available and accessible in meteors, asteroids and comets, even in the dust in empty space than here on Earth.
2: Military Secret Hypothesis: The entire concept of alien spaceships, “invaders from Outer Space,” was created by military intelligence to mask highly classified research being conducted at such bases as Area 51.
* Or — The “aliens” are actually our own military scientists conducting secret maneuvers with highly classified aerial vehicles based on captured Nazi technology brought to the United States immediately after World War II in Project Paperclip.
* Or — The crews of UFOs are terrestrial astronauts conducting secret military maneuvers with classified aerial vehicles based on alien technology reversed engineered from alien technology recovered in extraterrestrial vehicle crash sites, such as that near Roswell, NM in 1947.
Then where is the technology?
Paranoid as we are, history shows that as we advance from one level of technology to the next, the older technology does make its way into the mainstream. There is no technology available to, and in use by the public that cannot be traced back through its development from first principles to final product without interference by or contribution from alien beings.
Nazi UFOs were pure fantasy born out of the paranoia of the early days of the Cold War, and vague, distorted and misunderstood stories that circulated about German missile and nuclear research.
You can read more about that in an article about Renato Vesco and this article about Nazi UFOs.
IF we have our own versions of alien technology, and we are making it work, why are we still using chemical rockets to get into space? Why have half of our Mars Probes gone missing?
I have always wondered HOW we would reverse engineer alien technology. It seems rather like suggesting a medieval alchemist could figure out how to build a television or a radio if we gave him one. Reverse engineering sounds good, but it really takes a fairly equal level of technology to actually accomplish.
3: The UFOs are products of a terrestrial secret society: Centuries ago, a secret society of alchemists developed an advanced technology, which they kept hidden in underground or undersea cities. This ancient society has been subtly guiding Earth’s “elite” throughout history, and when it deemed the proper times, it provided certain “outsiders” with scientific breakthroughs. This mighty secret society only awaits the appropriate moment to conquer the outside world and enslave it.
4: They come from the Hollow Earth: Ancient secret societies, traditions, and folklore speak of an underground empire inside our planet. This underground world is the home of the Master Race, both feared and sought after by occult societies throughout world history. This shadow race has been responsible for the appearance of mysterious aerial vehicles and many of miseries that have plagued humankind.
5: A program of deceit and lies: A secret agency within the established government, allied with its counterparts in foreign nations, has created the UFO myth for its own nefarious purpose in bringing about a New World Order. Abductions, impregnations, and mysterious disappearances are all the sinister handiwork of those working for a One World Government – a goal which may have been assisted since ancient times by extraterrestrial intelligence.
I group these three together because they are all basically the same and bear some of the same problems.
These advanced civilizations remain in hiding? Why? Waiting to conquer us? Why wait when it is far easier to conquer a less technologically advanced society? That end would have been much more easily affected decades or centuries ago during which time they could have been breeding us and training us to their own hidden purpose. If a secret society or advanced alien species is in control of a lower society, then what do they have to fear? Alexander the Great did not rule in secret, nor the Romans, nor Ghengis Kahn, Charlemagne, or the British Empire (at its height). They had the power, they ruled in the open.
Then there is the fact the Earth is not hollow, and if by some chance it were and/or some buried underground master society did exist, you would think we might have gotten their attention with the number of underground nuclear tests that have transpired over the years,conducted by The United States, Russia, France, Britain, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.
6: Unknown terrestrial life-forms: Great numbers of UFO sightings may be explained by the existence of previously unknown, unidentified life-forms largely indigenous to the higher reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. The “sky-critters,” the “sky fish,” may be plasmic, electrical, nearly pure energy forms that have the ability to assume a variety of forms.
Thousands of aircraft are in the sky at any given moment, and these “sky fish” remain in hiding. Where? Google Earth has photographed the entire surface of the Earth and not one image of a “Sky Fish” has ever appeared. No body has ever been found. People find spent weather balloons all the time, it is how the data is collected. I found one myself once, they come with a postage paid envelope and you mail it back to NOAA so they can download the recorded data. Where are the sky fish?
Okay, they are pure energy. Well, it is an attractive concept, popular in science fiction but impractical when it comes to actually deciphering how it could happen. Matter is matter, and energy is energy. Yes at a certain level they are merely different states of the same thing, but the transition from matter to energy is a destructive one and not supportive of life. We are not, as many believe, evolving by some plan toward and ultimate life form. if you insist on placing some vector on evolution it is at best sideways, a process of adapting to the current environment. And, energy dissipates from a positive state to a negative state. If there were an energy life form it would not last very long.
7: Astronauts from Atlantis: The UFOnauts are the descendents of an ancient civilization on Earth that developed space travel and set about colonizing other worlds at the time when their own terrestrial empire was being destroyed by cataclysmic forces wrought by their own superscience. From time to time, the contemporary Atlanteans return to visit their home planet.
How does this make sense? They used the technology that was causing cataclysms to escape to other worlds. If it is their own “super science” that was causing the cataclysm then in order to survive elsewhere did they abandon that science? How do they retain the ability to travel here if they did that? Did they solve the problem, and then why didn’t they solve it here? Why do they stay away? Where are the signs of their previous technology? Then consider that clearly whatever cataclysm their superscience wrought upon the Earth was localized, as the Earth is rather noticeably still here. It seems likely they could have opted to move geographically instead of interstellarly.
8: Time Travelers from the Future: Our descendents from the future return to study the true destiny of humankind by using the past – our present – as a kind of living museum. They cannot openly declare themselves for fear of up-setting the linear flow of history and thus altering the future – their present.
If time travelers are coming back from the future with a non-interference policy, then this idea fails to explain abductions? The thousands of sightings reported yearly pose the same problem as the Alien Non-interference of option #1. Today we keep records of everything, where did those records go that they need to come back and watch us struggle to become them all the while risking through interference that we would not end up becoming them, unless you ascribe to the concept of multiple time lines, at which point they are not necessarily observing their own history anymore.
9: Other Dimensional Visitors: The Visitors come not from a faraway world in our solar system or any other, but from an adjacent space-time continuum, co-existing here on Earth, but on another vibrational/dimensional frequency or level.
Which sets an entirely new level of improbability on us being discovered. First, an inter-dimensional race would have to discover and travel to our dimension, then they would have to find the proverbial “needle in a haystack” of the Earth within the nearly 15 billion light years radius (or more) of our entire Universe. That is roughly 212 quadrillion cubic light years to search.
10: Psychic Phenomena: The UFO phenomenon is the result of some as yet unknown physical energy that can be activated by the psyche, the unconscious level of the human mind. This physical law or energy would not itself be intelligent, but it would be able to absorb, reflect, or imitate human intelligence.
11: Projections of human beliefs: The UFO enigma is a phenomenon of the collective human psyche that charges to reflect the prevailing belief structures of the time. The UFO constitutes a paraphysical phenomenon that is related both to the psychological state of the observer and the zeitgeist which enmeshes the observer.
12: Psychic need: Certain of humankind’s basic psychic needs tap into psychokinetic and other paranormal energies and create images of wee people, holy figures, and other worldly beings. The familiar forms that these manifestations assume have been intrinsic elements in the human psyche since very ancient times, but they appear modern in that human experiences perceive them in the context of ideas that the conscious mind has acquired through acculturation.
13: Archetypes: UFOs and their occupants are quasi-real images created by the human collective unconscious. Jungian archetypes surface as the result of thought-field energies that are accessible to humans through dreams, meditations, and other states of altered consciousness. These archetypes may, in certain instances, be directed by highly evolved entities who seek to influence and guide human affairs.
These are all really just aspects of one option that boils down to hallucinations. It presumes that enough people all have the same basis for belief that they would “collect” to create a cohesive image of something. Then there is the question of the number of sightings that happen in remote, isolated places where only one person is present. Since there are major religions with pretty well defined entities and deities, and millions if not billions of followers, you should expect if collective unconscious were the root of mass hallucinations, then religious figures would be the result much more often than unknown aliens.
As an interesting (or possibly not) side note, I have heard this same as a proposal for sightings of Nessie, and Bigfoot. I am sure it is out there for ghosts as well. I do not find it any more plausible in those cases.
14: The Magic Theater: Such paranormal machinations that we associate with UFO phenomena are the result of the “magical” manipulations of time and space that are performed by the entities we have dubbed “elves, fairies, devas,” and so forth. These entities are paraphysical beings that have coexisted with us as a companion species and appear to participate somehow with us in an evolutionary design.
15: The Supernatural: The UFO intelligences are the same entities who are described in the scriptures of so many world religions as angels – both the messengers of God and the fallen armies of Lucifer. The entire UFO mystery may be the continuation of the struggle between the two warring factions of angels for the souls of humankind.
These two also are really only one substituting religion with folklore.
16: We are property: The UFO intelligences maintain an interest in our planet because they are literally the lords of the Earth, the creators of the human species.
Why? We clearly serve no purpose to them, and clearly a restating of the “Alien Overlord” idea that requires a supposed absolute ruler to remain in hiding for some unfathomable reason.
17: The Reality Game: The UFO intelligences are playing a teaching game with humankind in which our concept of reality is being gradually changed. In the teasing fashion of a Zen riddle or a Sufi joke, we are being provoked and guided into a higher consciousness.
Apparently B.F. Skinner was an alien. I wonder if it is working?
The article quoted above comes with a lengthy disclaimer
So I find there to be really only 10 or 11 possibilities here, none of them with any particular plausibility. Of course it is not reasonable to think we can create out of our imagination a motive for a species or entity completely unknown to us. That does not seem to stop is.
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