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In recent years, aliens are having a moment.
For decades, the concept of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and the little green men roaming Roswell, New Mexico, has remained comfortably confined along the fringes of social discourse. But no longer. Serious people in government take this phenomenon seriously.
The story of why this attitude began to change is long and complicated, starting about 15 years ago. (This New Yorker article is a good place to start). But the basic point is that Harry Reed, a Nevada politician at the time and a powerful politician who at times headed the US Senate, began to take it seriously. So he started raking in money at the Pentagon to research the issue.
In the process, perhaps because of the stigma attached, the government stopped calling sightings of unidentified objects UFOs and started calling them Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). The release of the video of Then, in 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a long-awaited assessment of government files on the UAP.
Alas, this report I want to believe“The limited high-quality reports of unidentified aeronautical phenomena preclude drawing firm conclusions about the nature and intent of the UAP,” the report said. The report never mentioned “alien” on page nine.
But the cat was out of the bag and the government moved on. nominated a member of Having known and respected several members of this research team, we have no doubt that they will do a good job and we can rely on their conclusions.
recent takedowns
All of this brings us to the latest spy balloon mania: Nine days ago a US F-22 jet shot down a Chinese balloon, then shot down three unidentified objects over Canada and the US. . Conspiracy theories are on the rise, given the government’s lack of transparency about what exactly the latter three objects were. After all, misinformation is nothing but a vacuum.
“It must be an alien,” White House spokesperson Carine Jean-Pierre said on Monday, emphasizing the extent of the howl. tackle the problem Press conference. “There are no signs of aliens or extraterrestrial activity in these recent deletions,” she said. that is important.”
Oh yeah, it’s not aliens. Unless, of course, you think the government is covering things up.
Look, the universe is vast. We cannot comprehend its immensity because it is unimaginably vast. There are billions of galaxies and each galaxy has billions of stars. Thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope and other instruments, it has been confirmed that many, if not most, stars have planetary systems in one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the last two decades. So there are almost certainly billions, billions, billions of worlds where life like ours could emerge.
But, most likely, it has not yet been found. Or rather, it hasn’t yet found us, or revealed to us that it’s a poor, carbon-based wretched thing trapped on Earth. , is a great philosophical question.
unusual claim
I conclude this article by mentioning astronomers and physicists. The astronomer is Carl Sagan, perhaps the most gifted science communicator of his twentieth century. He once said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Certainly, the existence of an intelligent race capable of interstellar travel would be an anomaly. And while there is plenty of “evidence” of unidentified flying objects in our skies, there is no “anomalous” evidence to prove it. Sorry, no. The truth is that almost all hyped alien sightings can ultimately be explained by a rather mundane phenomenon.
The second quote is simply Tweet British physicist Brian Cox says today: Launch a detectable balloon into the atmosphere. “
Pretty, Brian. rather.
