Blowing Hot and Cold

 

The latest reports on “UAP,” which used to be called UFOs, seem to up the ante. There is a video circulating of a craft that is invisible to the eye, but emits a heat signature detectable in infrared. And it shifts from hot to cold—yet is still visible to infrared in its cold state. Which means it shifts not just from warmer than its surroundings to the ambient temperature, but from warmer to colder than its surroundings. Why? And there are reports of people entering an alien craft about forty feet square, and finding the interior “the size of a football field.”

Before this, it seemed to me—not following this closely—that all could be accounted for by someone somewhere figuring out time travel. And so the likeliest explanation was not aliens, but a visit from our own future.

But if these latest reports are legitimate, time travel does not seem sufficient to account for it all. That does not allow invisibility, or the distortion of space itself.

Neither does mass psychosis—we have video.

How about a government conspiracy? It makes sense: governments are currently in a low-intensity war with their own citizens everywhere. A good scare about a common enemy is a way to grab more power. Covid is no longer frightening enough; global warming may be losing its potency. The principalities of this world may need a new wolf.

Really large conspiracies, as this would have to be, are intrinsically unlikely, due to human frailty and incompetence. Yet, if we believe these UFO sightings are all real now, we must also believe there was a general conspiracy among governments to suppress UFO reports previously. If the first conspiracy was possible, so is the second. The simplest explanation is that there is only one conspiracy, and it is the second…

The fact that we have video is of no significance on the hypothesis of government conspiracy. Much can now be computer generated, and in the case of something alien, a fake becomes difficult to detect. What is it supposed to look like? What is it supposed to be able to do? If it can violate any of the laws of physics, how can a fake ever be discovered?

Indeed, the comment often heard is that these supposed craft “violate the laws of physics.” 

What does that actually tell us? 

Unless we somehow have the laws of physics all wrong, a thing that violates the laws of physics is not a physical object. 

So, it might all be a government invention.

The other possibility is that these are spiritual objects. “Violates the laws of physics”?  That defines a miracle. We know by deduction that God exists, God can necessarily produce miracles, can break the laws of physics. He may be sending us a message. 

The problem with this explanation is that, if so, it is hard to tell what that message is. Angels are heralds; they speak plainly, or they are not doing their job. Prophets speak plainly, “make the ways straight for the Lord. It is ungodly to be ambiguous.

Demons, on the other hand, love ambiguity. What demons love is to disorient, to sow doubt and confusion. Demons will also always want to mask their identity. 

And demons, too, reputedly can perform miracles. And, if I may say so, demons also typically work in tandem with and through governments, "the rulers, the authorities, the powers of this dark world "

Could there be any practical reason for alien explorers to create a craft that shifts quickly from very hot to very cold? 

Why Are Pigs Sprouting Wings?

 

There is apocalypse in the air. Governments are doing unaccountable things, as though they know something we don’t. Snow falls in Mecca; lightning strikes the Vatican; maybe such things happen in normal times, but people are now in the mood to notice. And then there are the growing claims about UFOs. Tucker Carlson says he knows things about UFOs so dark he will not even tell his wife, and “there is a spiritual aspect to it.”

Which last comment gets me thinking: here’s one explanation for what is going on.

Christopher Hitchens, seeking to debunk Christianity, argued the improbability that God would let mankind subsist on Earth for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, right up until 1 AD, before revealing himself. What about all those previous generations? And why then did he do it in such a backwater, in Palestine?

Hitchens is exactly wrong. The early years of the Roman Empire were probably the first time in history that God could have sent a message to mankind, and expect it to reach from Britain in the West, to China in the East, and down to Ethiopia. The Roman Empire had, for the first time, secured those trade routes. And Christianity did quickly extend this far.

No doubt God was sending local revelations all along—which is why so many of the world’s myths seem to contain elements of the Gospel story, with avatars, virgin births, and the like. But until 1 AD, they inevitably stayed local. 

And Palestine was not a backwater. Jerusalem is actually, literally, the centre of the populated world, now as it was then—the one spot from which it is easiest to get everywhere else. This is why Middle Eastern airlines have been so successful: their headquarters and stopover point is most efficiently located for everywhere else.

And this is true not only by air. Palestine is a land bridge, a funnel, that joins three continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe, and their trade routes. It is at the crossroads of the three great ancient civilizations, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece-Rome.

And this is true by sea as well: it is roughly the meeting point of the Mediterranean with the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, the necessary point of portage to go by sea from Europe to East Asia and vice versa. All lines of communication and travel met here. This was God’s megaphone.

Now… if either God or perhaps some alien civilization wants to send all of mankind a further message, we have just now reached a similar, but greater, inflection point. Now, with the internet, with smart phones, is the first time in history he/they could appear to all of us, all at once, without filter by government or earthly authority with their own self-interests. 

We might now be getting the preparatory attention-getting signs; like the herald’s trumpet or the town crier’s bell. Or like John the Baptist in the New Testament. And the panic of Herod at the birth of a more legitimate ruler, or the mind-frame of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, may explain the current actions of governments. 

I don’t jump immediately to the idea that these are the End Times. Perhaps; perhaps the beginning of the thousand-year just reign predicted in Revelations. Yet, more simply, revelation is ongoing, as it is throughout the Bible: there are repeated calls from God to return to faith and fealty, reminders that he is there, new and renewed covenants. In more recent years, we have seen apparitions of Mary calling us back to faith. She has even appeared on Egyptian TV. Now may be the time for an emphatic reminder, a visit from the boss himself, perhaps a renewed covenant. 

Or, alternatively, now may be the opportunity for some more advanced civilization to make itself known and tell us what it feels we need to know.

I think, in the end, aliens are less likely. That hypothesis requires too many assumptions.

Advanced Alien Cilvilizations

 

I have no insight on the recent claims of alien craft in the possession of governments. I have always thought that, because of the extreme distances, travel from another solar system was improbable. To make it possible, almost necessarily, an alien civilization would have to know how to travel not just through space, but through time. This would also explain the “impossible” maneuvers the craft are reported to make.

But if the critical factor is time travel, there is no need to assume space travel as well. These uncanny visitors could be from our own future; Occam’s Razor.

But whether or not they are alien visitors, commentators on UFOs are shockingly ready to assume the possibility of civilizations “more advanced” than ours on other planets. Shockingly, because in any other context, claiming that one civilization is more advanced than another is rank heresy. It is racism, and will come, quite possibly, in Canada, with criminal penalties. We cannot, for instance, suggest that the European culture that appeared on American shores in 1492 was more advanced than that of the natives, or that contact was likely to be a boon to them on balance. No; such an idea is “cultural genocide.”

Worse, the government scientists are reputedly trying to "reverse-engineer" the acquired crafts, to learn from them. This is blasphemy. Necessarily, as all civilizations are equally advanced, we can have nothing to learn from any aliens. This is all blatant alien supremacy.

Yet it is obvious that one civilization, or culture, can be more advanced than another. Advanced not just in this way or that, but even overall. It may, as is theorized about the UFOs, have had more time to work out the various kinks of mortal existence; less time preoccupied with mere material survival in a state of nature.

A culture or a civilization is a tool for achieving the best life. Not all tools are equal. 

Some tools are even harmful. One thinks of the need to wipe out Nazism in Germany, or the cult of the divine emperor in Japan. The ancient Israelites, Greeks, and Romans similarly saw a need to wipe out the Canaanite and Punic practice of child sacrifice. The British felt justified in wiping out the Thug cult or human sacrifice in India, and the practice of widow-burning, suttee.

An immigrant society like Canada, the US, or Singapore, can take advantage of this fact of cultures living cheek by jowl by choosing the best from each. A wise workman chooses the best tool for the job, not the one manufactured closest to his home. It is no accident that immigrant and outward-looking trading societies have been the main sources of culture and technological improvements over the centuries. 

Tragically, more recently, we have instead deliberately tried to halt the progress of civilization, with concepts like “multiculturalism,” “cultural appropriation,” “affirmative action” and “equity.” In the natural course of things it is likely that different ethnic groups will dominate in different spheres, in which their culture gives them expertise, and which their ethnic culture most values: Irish in policing, say; Dutch in luxury trades; blacks in preaching; aboriginals in the military; English in accounting; Italians in the food industry. It is cruel and artificial to try to prevent this, barring people from their dreams, and we all lose as a result.

We’ll never achieve time travel with this approach. 

So it may indeed be aliens.

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.

Aliens!

Some years ago, Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Defense Minister and perennial leadership contender, made a bit of a splash by declaring UFOs to be real, and claiming an international coverup. I took little notice; sounded like a guy used to being in the public eye trying to attract attention one last time. In fact, Hellyer has always been like that.

A friend turned out to be a UFO buff. Again, I took little notice. He spoke of multiverses. My problem with that was Occam’s razor: it is the worst possible violation of Occam’s razor. It is much simpler to assume the existence of a spirit world.

Now Tucker Carlson on Fox News has apparently been won over to the idea that UFOs are real.

They might be. Certainly there are UFOs in the literal sense: unidentified flying objects. The only question is, what are they? Are they alien visitors?

I am skeptical for several reasons. First, the vast distances of space. The nearest planet with possible life, let alone intelligent life, let alone intelligent life with such advanced technology, has to be light-years away. I am under the impression that the laws of physics prohibit travel at faster than the speed of light. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps our present physics is wrong. But if not, that means it would have to take anyone years to get here. More likely hundred or thousands of years.

The obvious next question is, why would it be worth their while? What could be here for them that they could not get at home, and needed so badly?

I could see visiting out of curiosity, to have a look around. Fine; but then they surely would send robot craft, not come themselves. There would be no need for that, and it would be a big sacrifice. So perhaps that is what we are seeing.

I am also more skeptical than most about the inevitability of an intelligent life form developing such advanced technology. The fundamental belief that the physical world is real, and so worth paying much attention to, is rare among human cultures. It is pretty much a Judeo-Christian thing. You need that before you get very interested in physical technology. It seems to me that a non-human civilization could be highly intelligent, and last for many centuries, but concentrate more on issues of spiritual and emotional, not physical, well-being. And then, if they decide to concentrate on physical, I can see them focusing on things like eliminating disease and poverty rather than exploring space. The number of even highly intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations, if any exist, who would think it worthwhile to have a space program might be quite small.

If what we are seeing is robot visitors coming to look and study, it is not really an alarming or earth-threatening event. It is not as if, as Tucker Carlson or Paul Hellyer suggest, we need to develop some plan for defense against alien attack. The logic still holds that there is very unlikely to be anything here worth their while to come and get. If there were, somebody somewhere would have probably come and gotten it centuries ago, when we could only defend with longbows or assegais and were easy pickings.

Might it be possible for someone to invent a device like the old transporter in Star Trek, that immediately beams something to any distant place, by dissolving and re-forming them at a molecular level? There are a few problems with that concept. In Star Trek, the thing or person always dissolves at the point of departure, as it or he reforms at the destination. But that would obviously not be necessary: one could just as well create an exact duplicate while leaving the original intact.

Now we have a problem, if we are transporting sentient beings. Where would the consciousness reside, in the original or in the duplicate?

I think it has to be in the original. There is logically nothing in the act of recreation at the molecular level that would unplug the consciousness connection from one body, and insert in in the other. And if in the original when there are two, then also in the original if there is one. The consciousness would not be transferred. If conscious, the transported body would be a new and separate person. Meaning that any such transportation would mean death for the subject, subjectively speaking. Kind of unattractive.

Those who are religious have a possible alternative explanation: these lights in the sky are angels, or demons, or sprites. Yes, they are visible to the eye and to radar; but according to our ancient sources, angels and demons can be too, if they choose to be. And these craft do, after all, violate the known laws of physics. That might after all suggest something.