Where Are All the UFOs?
Now, let me see if I understand this: aliens come all the way from God knows where with some fantastical methods of propulsion. Technology that looks like magic, as they say. But, they have a nasty habit of crashing and always in the United States. And, with all that technology, they have to resort to abducting people to rape, cut them open or fondle their genitals. You mean to tell me that the TSA has better technology to look at you with a simple three-second scan than this supposedly advanced alien race?
Oh, and further: why would any alien race expose themselves to this other alien race with all the medical exams? Are they totally immune to all forms of microscopic elements in the universe? Have they ever caught something from one of their unwilling patients that devastated their entire crew because it's an unknown biohazard? How is it that these aliens can operate in our exact mixture of nitrogen and gravity that allows them to breathe the same air and stand upright without any kind of protective suit? Oh, I forgot, they're super advanced dimensional beings who don't have to worry about any of that.
Why don't we ever see aliens taking soil samples or examining trees? We never hear of large swaths of any forest disappearing. We've been told they have a penchant for mutilating cattle, but there are so many species of life on this planet that it's hard to believe their scientific curiosity is limited to bovines.
There are three other terrestrial planets: apparently aliens find them so boring (or are oblivious to them) that we've never actually spied alien probes around them. We've taken high resolution images of the surface of Mars but have found no other landers not of our world wandering around. And really, here's the biggie: is life that common throughout the universe that aliens don't want us to know they exist and are here? It makes no sense to come all this way--to a planet teeming with millions of life forms--just to zip around the atmosphere at ridiculous speeds, or fly within the oceans (!) like it was nothing **and not even say hello.**
Let me illustrate my point with one of my all-time favorite scenes from "The Quiet Earth," one of those apocalyptic movies of the 1980s. After some cataclysm that results in one (male) character being the last person on Earth, we follow his slow acceptance of this fact and his eventual despair. He starts to go crazy because he's all alone. But then, unexpectedly, he sees another human, who happens to be a woman. With no words, they run to each other and embrace so deeply at knowing neither was alone. So in this vast universe, I'm supposed to believe that aliens come across a planet full of life and sentient beings...and do nothing.
Sure, that makes perfect sense.
For me, alien visitations and UFO sightings are like angels and demons, which before, were other good and evil spirits. They're always just out of reach: there and not there. People swear they seem them and report their experiences. Other people then come forward with similar stories to the point where someone says, "Why are all the stories the same? Because they must be true." But the aliens/angels/spirits just never make themselves known without any ambiguity. It ** always** has to be a mystery or an enigma, told by an ordinary person who will swear he is not making this up, he is not crazy. And of course, there's always an element of defying physical law to add a supernatural air to the proceedings. Everyone else then starts seeing aliens or UFOs, taking (intensely shitty) pictures or making drawings and then more and more people take their existence seriously. How is this any different from angels? Joan of Arc claimed to hear voices, one which she identified as the archangel Michael: nowadays, "contactees" claim aliens talk directly to them, presumably between the medical exam and removing human/alien hybrid fetuses from horrified mothers.
In the famous Rendlesham Forest episode, Sgt. James Penniston claimed that he was taken aboard a UFO and later wrote down page after page of binary code (1's and 0's) in a small journal. He doesn't know why he did that, only later to surmise that it was implanted in him to do so. When later analyzed, the binary code pinpointed certain latitudes on Earth (including Sedona, Arizona and the Nazca Lines in Peru, surprise, surprise) along with some cryptic message about "exploration [of] humanity." Now, if this message was of extraterrestrial origin, why not just leave a message that could be easily deciphered: this is who we are, this is where we come from. Math may truly be the language of the universe, but do aliens also use "1" and "0" and know and latitudes based on how *we've* mapped the globe? In other words, if aliens mapped the Earth, I don't expect them to use exactly 40 degrees lat, 73 degrees lon to mark out New York City. It should be something we've never seen before but these communications are always, conveniently, in our own language with our own measurements. What a cosmic coincidence.
I do believe that's it's probably arrogant to think there aren't planets out there with life. That's a favorite position of lots of UFO believers, except it often sounds like a way of explaining all this extraterrestrial phenomena. There may be other sentient life forms out there, but I strongly doubt they're making beelines for Earth and crashing all over the place or feeling up men in alien doctors' offices. And it isn't that I don't *want* to believe. Sure I do, but I'm tired of all this fiction and the total lack of science, and appealing to the power of the government to cover everything up (where before, it would have been the Church) as explaining why the aliens have not just said, clearly and unambiguously: hello.