(IOU)-FOs
Author’s note: I’m writing on this subject at the request of an old college friend and in light of recent Defense Department admissions. Your FB and email comments are welcome.
I see them with some regularity. They often appear as lights in the nighttime sky moving across the heavens. They may be unexpectedly large or of a color I don’t recognize. Others have orb-like silhouettes I can follow until they disappear in their upward ascent. Some are spherical; some have wings and fly erratically. Many of them, at least at first glance, strike me as UFOs—unidentified flying objects--and I’m quite sure many of you react just as I do to strange objects flying overhead. My ornithological interest has allowed me to type them most of the time, and my childhood experiences near Air Force bases help me dispel some of the mystery from aircraft with unusual profiles or unexpected stratospheric maneuverings.
Our fascination with UFOs probably goes back to the first puzzled looks of ancestors tracking the flight of a strange bird or wondering what the streak of light in the night sky might mean. Could it be a dragon, or a projectile thrust at us from the gods? Explanations we now count as primitive once made sense in the pre-flight eras of our past, some serving as portents of divine judgment or cataclysmic upheavals about to come.
In the nuclear decades since WWII, UFOs have been reported with increasing frequency. Not surprisingly, these are often noticed by aviators flying higher and faster into the atmospheric envelope that surrounds our planet. Some have been described as disks, others as darting lights, and a few have resembled oblong tubes. Pilots have seen them, radar operators have followed them on their screens, and an increasing number of men and women, feet firmly planted on the ground or on vessels at sea, have witnessed them too. On occasion people have claimed to see them land, leaving behind suggestive clues to their existence. A surprising number have claimed to have seen their occupants, and a few have recalled encounters of the fourth kind, either as hostages on their space crafts or as subjects on their exam tables.
If there is anything we can say for sure about the UFO phenomena it is this: THEY ARE REAL! There is no getting around this fact. They are real for one self-evident reason: they are “U”—unidentified. By the time the Air Force put its Project Blue Book to bed in 1969--after 17 years investigating these aerial mysteries—it had explained 94% of the 12,618 that were investigated--701 of them listed as being of undetermined origin. What that means is that most of the eyewitness reports turned out to be identifiable—IFOs if you will. All of this goes to show how our vision can deceive us or how easily we can jump to conclusions driven by suggestion, fear and other predilections. Yet the 5% that the Air Force could not explain--true UFOs—remain a puzzlement. And now the recent Defense Department admission of ongoing UFO sightings keeps the question alive: what are these things?
Ruling out optical illusions, halucinations and the machinations of those looking to make a buck on popular credulities, it seems to me that there are but three explanations for UFOs. The worst case would be if they are actually sophisticated, highly superior aircraft being operated by some other earthly power. Since they haven’t yet taken hostile actions towards us, that would suggest they might be experimental test vehicles or that they are engaging in reconnaissance missions. It would be far more comforting if they turn out to be ours, part of our R & D machinery that tests out technologies that have heretofore been the preoccupation of science fiction writers. But if they are the products of human ingenuity, why aren’t we, or one of our foes, using them to command aerial superiority? Either of these scenarios is a bit unsettling to me.
The third possibility is the one that arouses our highest level of interest and obsession: they are not only UFOs; they are O FOs—otherworldly in origin. That so many people seem drawn to this explanation speaks to a certain Buck-Rogers’ romanticism that has been around at least since H. G. Wells’ 1897 Martian invasion. Hollywood has certainly given us plenty to imagine in some of the cinema’s most memorable films. As a child of the 1950s I was caught up with this genre of movie-making, from which two dominant themes seem to recur.
· Extraterrestrials far more intelligent than we routinely visit our planet, some coming to warn us of our violent behavior as in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)—an enduring sci-fi classic.
· Extraterrestrials have singled us out for conquest, either through direct assault as in War of the Worlds (1953 and Spielburg’s 2005 remake), and Independence Day (1996), or through more surreptitious invasions where they insidiously take over our minds and bodies as in The Thing (1951, 1982) and the recurring versions of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978, 1993, 2007).
But even the most ardent believers in extraterrestrial life have to come to terms with the enormous logistical problems involved in interstellar travel. The universe is so infinite in size that its distances must be measured in the somewhat hypothetical measurement of years traveled at the speed of light. Even if our closest star might have habitable planets, it would require a journey of over four years moving at 186,000 miles/second to get there. What are the chances that some cosmic neighbor would be loitering in our part of the galaxy given such unthinkable constraints? Before we started sending space probes into our own solar system it was easy to fantasize about little green men on Mars or legions of Amazonian females on Venus. But none of our planetary neighbors appear to be life supporting, and none of the decades long efforts of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has turned up anything but indecipherable space “noise.” Nonetheless we busy ourselves planning forays back to the moon and on to Mars. It may well turn out that distance, time, and survivability in space will keep us moored to this wonderfully placed haven for life, 93 million miles from the sun, that has been our home as long as we’ve been around.
Hollywood does make an appealing case that we will soon be able to travel at warp speed (that wonderful Star Trek convenience allowing Kirk and company to canvas vast stretches of deep space within a 60-minute prime time frame). But whether this is possible, or will ever happen, remains more speculative than certain. Carl Sagan and other astronomical authorities have piqued our interest in the mathematical probability that, among millions of galaxies with millions of suns like ours, there have to be some life-supporting planets. But how many of these actually fit into that ideal range where life can be sustained—which astronomers call The Goldilocks Zone? Is our earth one of a kind, or one of hundreds or millions like it in the cosmos? If the latter be true, are any close enough, or advanced enough, to be able to send astronauts into our atmosphere for us to see and report as UFOs?
So here we are, 74 years after businessman/aviator Kenneth Arnold first spotted what he called “flying saucers” near Seattle. We’re still watching the skies, still seeing things we can’t easily identify, still speculating that we are not alone in a universe we no longer regard as topped by a fixed firmament on high. While I’m not at all sure how this will all play out, I do hope that, if we are being visited by extra-terrestrials in their physics-defying crafts, their occupants turn out to be peace emissaries like Klattu from The Day the Earth Stood Still, and not the scorpion-inspired critters of Alien, Independence Day and Predator intent on consuming our resources or enjoying us for dinner.
May the Force be with Us !
