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We are at that point in the news entertainment cycle where an apparently credible source claims that the US government has been covering up the arrival of aliens.
David Grusch is an air force officer and intelligence official turned whistle-blower. He claims to have seen documents that proved, and spoken to witnesses who claimed, that authorities had retrieved “non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will… that have either landed or crashed”.
Despite what the rest of the world thinks, it turns out America has not yet reached peak bonkers, and he was called before Congress to expand on his claims.
At the recent hearing, Republican representative Tim Burchett blamed the devil – Satan, himself – for the cover-up. He also said international interest was enormous: “I met a fellow who came in here all the way from Denmark.” That’s 6500 kilometres or 6.870505421E-10 of a light year. A long haul for a Dane but a walk in the park for an alien.
There was much enthusiasm for alien sightings and abduction claims in the 1950s – when the Cold War made people wary of things they didn’t understand floating around in the sky. So, it’s only natural that it should resurface now, in another period of existential anxiety.
Is the US even studying the possibility of alien visitors? One would hope so. To do otherwise would be dereliction of duty. If – or when, if you insist – the aliens get here, someone needs to be prepared.
According to The New York Times, Grusch said he had “personal knowledge of people who’ve been harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal … extra-terrestrial technology.”
Really?
“When pressed by Mr Burchett about whether people have been murdered as part of a government effort to hide UFOs, he said he could not talk about it in a public session.”
Really?
The idea that working for the US government bestows a certain level of credibility is wearing increasingly thin.
Although Grusch said he had seen documents referring to wreckage of an alien craft, he had not seen the wreckage and did not produce copies of the documents. In other words, the trouble with his evidence was that there was no evidence. Most people use “aliens” to mean intelligent life forms from other planets. This is different from life in outer space at the level of microbes or anything else that grows and has a life cycle.
To most scientists this alone would be an incredible discovery. It is also much more likely, as life at this level could develop much more easily than more complex forms. Sadly, there is no evidence that aliens have visited earth, though it is hard to disprove. Maybe we didn’t recognise them because they were just so … alien?
They wouldn’t be like us, proclaim the faithful. Following this argument to its logical conclusion, we are left with the notion that aliens could be so unlike us that there would be no point to making contact.
Speaking hypothetically, though – and it doesn’t get much more hypothetical than talking about visitors from outer space – what are the odds?
Swedish astronomer Erik Zackrisson has calculated the number of planets in the universe should be 70 quintillion or 7 followed by 20 zeroes.
Whether any could sustain life is another question. Whether that life would be intelligent and of a kind we could recognise is another question.
Whether that recognisable, intelligent life could have developed to be capable of interstellar travel is another question. And whether it would want to make this journey is yet another question.
Of course, if aliens are smart enough to get here, they are probably smart enough to lie low on arrival. Our historical health and safety record when different human populations first encounter each other hasn’t been that great.
Our kind of life evolved thanks to a combination of extremely unlikely events occurring in the right order; things like Jupiter appearing in the solar system in just the right place to intercept and protect us from numerous asteroid collisions. Equally fortuitously, it didn’t prevent the asteroid impact that tilted our planet on its axis and created the seasons, without which life wouldn’t exist.
Interstellar travel is fraught with impediments. One is the impossibility of exceeding the speed of light, a constant that has been, er, constant since Einstein calculated that it could not be exceeded nearly 120 years ago. Some things in the universe just are, and this may be one of them. But let’s say it could.
The space travellers would still have to get around the problem of the space dust that floats around the universe and that would have an incredible destructive power on impact with a craft travelling at anything near the speed of light.
The likeliest spaceships therefore would be sub-atomic particles – a sort of chip loaded with knowledge that would slide between the motes of space dust and would definitely not need a secret air force hangar in a US desert to contain it when it crashed.
It seems the most we can say with any certainty is that alien life may have visited here, but it’s not likely; and that it may not have visited here, which is much more likely.
