Look! Up in the Sky!

 

Something is happening in the news about which I have no expertise and no insight. And yet it seems to me dishonest not to note it. Reports of UFOs are rather rapidly becoming both more common and more official.

It looks to me as though people in authority are orchestrating this, to soften us up to the idea that UFOs are a real thing. Governments used to be accused of being secretive about UFOs. The obvious reason, if true, is that they feared mass panic. Perhaps they have chosen this time of pandemic as useful for slipping it in without causing panic, the way governments have always buried bad news by releasing it on a Friday afternoon. We are too preoccupied with viruses to get really upsest about something that seems more abstract and hypothetical.

Back in the 1940s, when this UFO thing began, it was possible to dismiss it all as mass hallucination. Jung did at the time. But this does not work anymore: with smartphones becoming more common, we are getting more video and images, not just hearsay; and the objects are showing up on our instruments.

I find it implausible that these are Russian or Chinese secret weapons. They commonly “defy the known laws of physics.” It is unlikely that the Chinese or Russians have secretly developed technology so much more advanced than the Americans, generally well ahead on technology, that they cannot even imagine how it works. 

Are they America’s own secret weapons? That seems unlikely, as the military itself, at high levels, is now reporting and acknowledging sightings. If it were their own, they would know not to publicize it.

Are they alien craft? I have always thought this, too, highly unlikely. The distances are too great. Even if you could, what would be worth coming this far for? What could they not find closer to home? Breeding stock? An absurd fiction, if you understand the most basic biology and biotechnology. Are they here only to observe? Surely any civilization able to develop the technology to bridge the vast distances would also be able to develop the technology to monitor us remotely, without having to make the long trip, even robotically. 

Are they beings from another dimension? Stripping out the pseudo-science, this means beings of pure spirit—angels or demons. Granted, they are physical as seen and videoed; but it has always been understood than angels and demons could take physical form if they chose. This seems rationally possible; but a motive is lacking. Why would they appear as they do, silent and remote? What message would they mean to convey? Why not just show up and talk to someone, like in the old days?

Elon Musk might explain the UFOs with the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation; we are all video game characters. So these objects are there simply because they are put there by the unseen programmer; or else they are a bug in the code.

I feel this has little explanatory power. Anything imaginable could be accounted for in the same way. Whether we are in a simulation or not in a simulation makes no difference. The question “What are they, and what are they doing?” remains the same.

A more likely scenario, to my mind, is that the UFOs are from the future. This has the advantage of being the explanation most in conformity with Occam’s Razor. 

Is it possible to time travel? Conceptually, yes; we can easily imagine it. The one sure proof that it is not possible has always been simply that we have never encountered visitors from the future.

Perhaps we have. Perhaps they were always up there, observing, but until recently we lacked the technological awareness to conceptualize these strange objects in the sky as spacecraft. They were just unexplained lights in the sky; perhaps angels, perhaps apsaras, devas, minor divinities, perhaps just hallucinations.

It seems reasonable that these visitors would try to be unobtrusive, in order not to alter the past. Leaving aside “time paradoxes,” which might after all be possible to go back and fix if necessary, this could be for the same reason that we do not look kindly on littering in a National Park. They are touring, observing, studying their own origins, as we would. 

The ability to time travel would explain all the apparent violations of the laws of physics. If you can warp time, you need not be concerned with trifles like rates of acceleration or deceleration. Occam’s razor.

Whatever the answer, at this point, any possible answer boggles the mind.