UFOs - Unlikely circus or unlikely mistake?

Published online (October 2023).

This is a sequel to UFOs - David Grusch and his witnesses.

When the UFO topic comes out, you often have skeptics saying that it's impossible, ridiculous, and there's no evidence, and believers saying that with so many stars in the universe, we can expect that some allowed the development of an intelligent species, which is just coming to explore with very fast craft. I think the two parties are staying on positions that prevent them - us - from seeing further.

I will use a metaphor.
I'm in the middle of the Sahara desert, crawling, there are hundreds of kilometres of sand in all directions, nothing else. I could hope to find a Bedouin who might help, but nothing. Then, guess what, another lost guy like me comes crawling the opposite way. How many chances are there that this happens in real life? In the middle of the desert? But it could happen. If I tell people, they won't believe me, I'll need very good evidence to prove it, but it's conceivable.
Now let's change the metaphor. I'm in the middle of the Sahara desert, crawling, same conditions as before. Then I see, coming from the left, a belly dancer. She ignores me, she's in a hurry, she just proceeds. "What the hell...?", I think. I'm still wondering, when, from the left, a fireman arrives, but he has things to do, so he just ignores me and proceeds. He's followed, within minutes, by a lawyer, a builder and a millennial listening to some music, all in a hurry. This second metaphor has a different explanation (hallucinations aside): I totally failed to grasp the reality around me, there's clearly something I'm missing. If you say: "But there are thousands of people in the desert, millions of people in the world, millions of lawyers, firemen and millennials", you're missing the point and misleading the conversation.

Let's go back to real life. Based on the little we know, scientists expect 1-10 intelligent species in our galaxy. Let's say they are wrong, let's say there are 1000. In our galaxy there are 100 billion stars. So on average every 100 million stars there's an intelligent species. That number is hard to visualize, but you'll agree that it's very unlikely that an intelligent species sits right on the closest star. Then let's talk about the closest star, Proxima Centauri. It's 4.2 light-years away. Having in mind the past and present fastest things that we put or could put into space, it would take 20.000-80.000 years to reach Proxima. Stephen Hawking proposed to send a probe as small as a smartphone, propelled by a laser on Earth that would keep pushing, increasing the probe's speed over and over, and that would allow the probe to reach Proxima in 20 years. But let's go crazy, let's say that we can travel at the speed of light. It would take 4 years to reach Proxima, and it would take 40 years to travel 10 more stars away. So, key point of this article: stop thinking that aliens can travel around the galaxy because they go very fast, it's not about being fast. Alcubierre drive? Nope, it's just not about speed, forget speed. It is true that when you go at the speed of light, you don't experience time, so you can cross half galaxy (50.000 light-years) in a second from your point of view, but that's not the case for the reality around you. What about your planet? You send them a message that will be received 100.000 years after you left home? Or you just fly back there to report, and for your species you have been gone for 100.000 years?

One day we stumble into the first metaphor. An egg-shaped object lands on Earth. It appears to be intelligently controlled. Maybe the alien is a robot, maybe it's a living being that hibernated, maybe it's an artificial intelligence. Mind, this is the first and last time that anything like that happens, nobody ever reported a UFO. A probe has arrived on Earth, from many star systems away. The DoD puts the probe in a hangar and keeps the secret. The news goes around by word of mouth, people find it hard to believe, scientists say they need evidence.
Then we stumble into the second metaphor. Every 5-10 years (since the 1940s) we get visited by what seems to be a different species, which appears with one type of craft, never to be seen again. We have the typical disk shape, the cigar shape, then more recently the tictac, the orange plasma sphere, the black triangle (also an old classic), the football-field-size red cube, and the deep-sea submarine with rams horns as landing gears. Just to cite the most credible sources. We're at the junction of a network of space superhighways, with God knows how many species that just keep stumbling into our planet, sometimes they touch and go, sometimes their craft lands or crashes or gets caught, but that seems to only happen once or twice per type of craft or per species. If that's the case, we totally failed to grasp the reality around us, there's clearly something we are missing.

Skeptics and believers should focus on the same questions:
- Based on what evidence should we accept the circus suggested in the second metaphor?
- If we find enough evidence and we all conclude that such a circus exists, how do we explain it without using speed?

If we take speed out of the conversation, we can also move away from the problem of distances, and we can consider the universe instead of just our galaxy. Even if there are just 1-2 intelligent species per galaxy, we have 1000 billion intelligent species in the observable universe. Out of 1000 billion intelligent species with different degrees/directions of evolution, we can think of some having figured out how to move among stars and galaxies without making it about speed.
Maybe such technology has been found only once, and then other species managed to reverse engineer that technology through accidents like the ones we get on Earth. Maybe we're the only stupid guys who couldn't do the reverse engineering. Oddly and unfortunately, it seems that both UFO sightings and reverse engineering are all about speed, and not about disappearing and appearing somewhere else, which is what we need for the circus to happen. As here we are just speculating, I can suggest that this could have to do with our atmosphere. Appearing out of nowhere into an atmosphere full of gas atoms like ours could be disastrous. You want to appear in the emptiness of space and then move down to Earth. That's why down here we only see the speed side of it. This was also suggested in the wonderful sci-fi novel What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown.

When it comes to interstellar or intergalactic travel options that don't involve speed, we necessarily have to dive into science fiction. Yet, these are more likely than a circus allowed by mere speed:
- Some people suggest that aliens could be able to travel through dimensions. They are already here but in a parallel dimension. Too far-fetched, and it explains one alien species, not ten.
- Some people suggest that aliens could be able to travel through time. They are already here but in a different time. Too far-fetched, and it explains one alien species, not ten.
- Some people suggest that aliens have always been here. That explains one alien species, not ten. Rogue planets? Again, not enough to explain the circus.
- My favourite option is about wormholes and teleportation. Physics is generous with these. Wormholes haven't been observed in nature but more than one scientist wondered if they are out there and if they can be created. There's a whole ongoing discussion about black holes and quantum entanglement (ER = EPR), and Maria Spiropulu could be the one who found the road to enter the circus (Google links). With wormholes and teleportation, you can leave your home planet at lunchtime, spend a few hours in another galaxy, and be back for dinner.
- Some people suggest two more deformations of spacetime: 1) The craft deforms the spacetime around itself, to get rid of gravity, matter and friction, and possibly to surf the spacetime wave as in the Alcubierre drive. But it's still about speed. 2) The craft "hooks" spacetime. It moves the spacetime that is one or one thousand star systems away and it brings it where the craft is. This can't happen just from the craft's point of view, enough said. I'm no genius, but if I were an alien species that can play with spacetime, I would work on wormholes and teleportation.

If one day we'll be able to say with no doubt that the circus exists, apart from the legitimate one thousand questions that we all have, whose answers will likely match with how we conceive reality, let's not forget the least exciting question, whose answer might completely change how we conceive reality: how did they get here?

...or unlikely mistake?

There's an argument I keep hearing: "Either our men, the same people that we trust when it comes to national security, are completely insane, or... it's aliens". It reminds me of those people who, after having seen Contact, pull out Occam's razor whenever they want to prove that their crazy hypothesis is correct. The answer is the same: Ehm... mistakes?

Our beloved and seemingly perfect science is riddled with mistakes. For centuries, respectable scientists made tons of mistakes. We can only presume that everything we know about everything is correct, just until we find out that it's wrong. Anything you read in any science book could eventually be proven slightly or totally wrong. The whole point of science is that it keeps checking and testing to find the mistakes. It doesn't try to convince you that it doesn't make mistakes, it presents the evidence it has so far to support an argument. You can correct the evidence or add more evidence, it's all welcome. You should become suspicious when someone wants to convince you based on who he is, based on the fact that he can't make mistakes, and not based on evidence.

Now, if you go to the Pentagon with a banana and you say that the banana came from a UFO retrieval program, the banana will get closed in a box, the box in an archive, the archive in a hangar. If anybody asks about the banana, the DoD will deny its existence. The people who know about the banana will be threatened. The people who study the banana can't figure out how it works. If an officer says: "It's just a banana", the DoD will say: "Who knows, one day we'll check better, but until then, it's aliens". Maybe the general in charge knows it's a banana, but now it's too late, he can't admit it. If you are just an officer and for the first time you're allowed to enter the hangar that hosts alien material, would you believe that's just a banana? Would any officer dare to send a piece of the banana to a lab for DNA testing, with the risk of the lab noticing that the banana has alien DNA? Would a general allow tests on presumed alien material if he knows it's not alien but doesn't want other people to know? One day, an officer might admit that the DoD owns alien material. If the POTUS asks the DoD about the officer, the DoD will deny what the officer says. Because they are crazy? No, because that's their job. They are supposed to defend. Once the banana gets entangled in this system, it's gone, it's very hard for the system to expel the banana based on science.

In 2004, during the Nimitz UFO incident, Chad Underwood took a video. That video was thought to show the tictac UFO, but it's clear that it shows one of the Navy's jets. When the video was published in 2017, it took the internet a few hours to figure that out. Yet, in the period 2004-2017, the video faced the same fate as the banana. In fact, technically, it's still stuck, and it's considered unidentified by the DoD.

In 1933, a UFO crashed in Northern Italy. It was bell-shaped. It had two passengers who died in the accident. The passengers were 1.80 m tall, blond, with blue eyes and pale skin. Mussolini thought they were German (I tend to agree), and you want to be an ally of Nazi Germany if they have weapons like that. Guglielmo Marconi and others, who studied the UFO, thought it was aliens. Eventually, the UFO was given to the U.S. and faced the same fate as the banana. Last thing you know, David Grusch says that a witness told him that the oldest alien craft they have is the well-known Mussolini UFO (by the way, Grusch also said that no bodies came to the U.S. with the UFO, and that the bell shape was probably due to the object having lost in the crash the "typical", flat ring that surrounds the centre).

In 2011, journalist Annie Jacobsen reported the story of an old engineer from EG&G. What happened at Roswell (1948) was not aliens. It was a fake alien craft made by Russia, with children purposely modified to look like aliens, all to create panic. Exactly what the Robertson Panel (1952) feared most, and the Robertson Panel is the reason why UFOs are surrounded by secrecy and ridicule. According to the source, the DoD knew the craft was fake, but instead of making everything public, they tried to build their own, for the same purpose. The story works pretty well in principle (although I belong to those people who Roswell = Project Mogul). How many countries sent fake craft to other countries to create panic? How many craft were used by Russia or China as Trojan horses to know more about the places where the U.S. stores such objects, and vice versa? How many countries kept the fake thinking it was real, and how many knew it was fake and built their own fake? How many of these faced the same fate as the banana?

How much alien stuff is based on bananas and bad science?
Are tons of mistakes, with a sauce of disinformation mixed in, enough to explain all UFO reports? I don't know. But if we manage to go down to just one actual alien probe, we could forget about the circus.