Space. Everything beyond Earth. What is the first thing you think of beyond our planet? Stars? Black holes? Mars? Other natural phenomenon?
From The Outer Limits TV series; 1963-65
Or do you think about the possibility of other forms of life … extraterrestrials? Aliens? UFOs?
Will it ever be commonly accepted that we Earthlings have some kind of intelligent neighbours – sentient forms of life? It’s a question that goes back millennia. People around the world (individuals, crowds of citizens, politicians, military personnel and scientists) have claimed to be witnesses to visitors from beyond our planet. (Perhaps you are among them.)
Until recently, the question of extraterrestrial life has been dismissed by North American government officials as ludicrous. Witnesses have been told for over a century that what they saw were not flying saucers but weather balloons; not aliens but swamp gas; not an actual experience but some kind of delirium.
The “Roswell” incident in 1947 kicked off post-war interest. As the story goes, alien craft crashed in rural New Mexico. Many people, encouraged by such TV shows as The X-Files, believe the American government hid the fallen craft and its passengers in Area 51. Many also believe that deep below ground, scientists have been working secretly for the past 75 years or so to study and reverse-engineer this stunning advanced technology to which they now have access, in order to provide their government with futuristic technology…to enable them to compete with the best of our alien visitors. These same interested folks have long wished they could gain a peek into any official documentation of UFOs from government or military sources.
An increasing number of videos have appeared on YouTube and some media outlets over the past 20 years, a number of which seem to show strange objects speeding past military craft and warships. Some of these objects have dived into the ocean, with clearly recorded footage of them plunging beneath the waves off the coast of California. A small number of military personnel have acknowledged having witnessed these events. One of the most famous incidents occurred in waters off the U.S.’s southwestern coast in 2004. Two highly trained fighter pilots described a pyramid-shaped ‘Tic-Tac like’ object which flew near them for hours.
Still image from 2004 video taken by U.S. Navy pilots.
The question of the existence of alien life is, however, a polarizing one. The Amsterdam-based international research agency, Glocalities, conducted a survey of over 26,000 respondents from 24 countries, with questions on the existence of alien life. In answer to the question “Do you believe in the existence of some form of life on other planets?”, 61% of respondents said yes, while 17% ruled this out, and 22% said they didn’t know. In answer to the question “Do you believe in the existence of intelligent alien civilizations in the universe?”, 47% replied that they did, while 17% said no, and 28% weren’t sure.
Citizens of Russia, Mexico and China had the highest rates of belief in intelligent life on other planets – all reaching at least 60%. Thirteen countries, including Canada and Italy, had higher percentages than the U.S., which came in at 45%, according to Glocalities’ research. The lowest rates – the most skeptical citizens – are from the Netherlands (28%), Indonesia (34%) Turkey (36%) and South Africa (36%).
This was not the first major research to synthesize perspectives on extraterrestrials – studies in the United States, the UK and Germany have found similar thinking – but researchers said this was the largest poll of its kind with the widest international reach.
South Americans, though left out of the study, might arguably have the highest level of interest in UFOs and extraterrestrial life. Argentinians, for example, host a festival in the city of Capilla del Monte to honour a reported sighting there from 1986. The annual festival, with workshops about everything extraterrestrial, is a hotspot for UFO sightings and attracts visitors from around the world.
Many ‘UFO’ organizations have popped up worldwide over the years, such as Archives for the Unexplained in Sweden and the British UFO Research Association in the U.K. By far the most, however, seem to be in the U.S. Many of these organizations seek to combat what is thought to be suppression of the facts by their governments. They have become increasingly organized, staging events to promote the idea that, as X-Files’ Mulder used to say to Scully, “the truth is out there”. In lieu of official reporting that we can all trust, it seems that citizens of the world have been seeing, recording and sharing their findings with others around the world.
But in case you haven’t noticed, during the past five years the official perspective on extraterrestrial life has started to change. Major media outlets and various institutions have lent it much more credibility than ever before. The New York Times ran an in-depth piece by a team of contributors (Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean) in December 2017 called Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.1 The article presented a profile of the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which began in 2007 and investigated reports of UFO’s (or UAP’s – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – as they are now being called). Specifically, the program’s personnel studied ‘episodes’ brought forward by Defense Department service members, and produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift. They also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft. Department of Defense officials have confirmed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’s existence. The Pentagon claims it ended its funding for the effort in 2012, but the program remained in existence at least until 2017, funded by other backers.
Then we heard about the very first interstellar object in our Solar system. It was discovered on Oct. 9, 2017 by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, located at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii. The definition of an ‘interstellar object’ is an object from space that is not gravitationally bound to a star. Named Oumuamua (the Hawaiian term for “Scout”) the rapidly rotating, cigar-shaped interstellar object was about the size of a football field, according to Karen Meech, leader of the research team at the University of Hawaii’s Institute of Astronomy.
For decades astronomers and researchers have theorized that such interstellar objects are out there, but now – for the first time – we have evidence that they exist. The object did not resemble any known asteroid or comet, and it was at least 10 times brighter than one of our solar system’s typical ‘space rocks’ – which had some folks suggesting it had the gleam of burnished metal. It was moving too fast to have originated from our own solar system, travelling on a U-shaped hyperbolic orbit that took it around the sun and back out into interstellar space. And according to an article2 in Scientific American Magazine by Lee Billings in February, 2021, “as it zoomed off after swooping by the sun, the object sped up faster than could be explained by our star’s waning gravitational grip alone.”
Oumuamua’s trajectory across our Solar System. Click to enlarge.
The article also discusses well-known Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Avi Loeb’s theory that the object was, in fact, a lightsail – floating in interstellar space (the space between the stars) as debris from advanced technological equipment. In late 2018, Loeb and his co-author Schmuel Bialy, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters suggesting the possibility that “Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”
In June 25 of 2021, the US Congress released its first official report: an Intelligence Preliminary Assessment on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). The Pentagon’s UAP Task Force reported findings from a dozen intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the Department of Defense, with assessment of 144 well-documented cases. All of these examples were witnessed by military personnel, many of which were captured on state-of-the-art camera, radar and laser equipment from Navy and Air Force jets, aircraft carriers and submarines.
Out of the 144 cases, at least 18 cannot be explained away easily. Unlike the usual grainy footage caught on cell phones by private citizens, some of the videos are impressively detailed. All 18 flew in ways that military craft could not possibly behave. The objects had “unusual movement patterns or flight characteristics” – for example speeding ahead as if the strange craft and its ‘pilots’ could foretell the movements of the military craft. Some of the objects had the ability to stay aloft, fixed in the sky, during strong winds. Others could seemingly “maneuver abruptly at fantastic speed, all without visible means of propulsion.”
Pundits, especially from the UFOlogy field, are wondering what to make of the report. Though the nine-page document seems to recognize that there seem to be strange things flying in our skies, underwater, and around the globe, it fails to spell out what this all means. Basically, the report explains what these objects are not. They are not domestically manufactured or domestically flown aircraft. They are not incursions by the military from other nations. And they do not seem to be illusions.
Neither does the report say why the US government is suddenly releasing this report. It would seem to be some kind of preparation for further official reporting, perhaps to prepare citizens for some type of forbidding notion – maybe even the possibility that sometime in the future we might be facing a security threat from somewhere in space.
Whatever position we take, one thing is clear: more and more people around the world are taking the idea of the existence of extraterrestrials seriously. Perhaps soon we will all have to adapt to the idea that human beings are not alone in the universe after all.
All images are in the Public Domain.
- Cooper, Helen; Blumenthal, Ralph; Kean, Leslie (2017, December 16). Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.FO. Program. The New York Times.
- Billings, Lee (2021, February 1). Astronomer Avi Loeb Says Aliens Have Visited, and He’s Not Kidding. Scientific American Magazine.
