GENERAL ARGUMENTS PRO AND CON UFO REALITY

THE “THEY WOULDN’T KEEP IT SECRET” ARGUMENT

Skeptic. (a)If we are being visited by other-worldly beings in flying saucers, then the government, who surely would know about it, has been covering it up. (b)If they’re covering it up, they must have a reason to do so. (c)But there’s no conceivable reason why they would cover it up — to the contrary, since it would be the greatest discovery in the history of science, NASA would be elated — they’d go to congress and get more funding. (d)So, the government isn’t covering up any visitation by any exotic, otherworldly beings. [b,c,d Modus Tollens] (e)And therefore, we are not being visited by other-worldly beings in flying saucers [a,d,e MT] [from an argument advanced by Michael Shermer]

Skeptic says (at c) that there’s no conceivable reason why the government would cover up the existence of flying saucers. But there are many possible reasons why they might cover it up. For instance:

The government would want to prevent societal turmoil; for example, acquiring alien technologies might cause economic problems. And the practice of some religions might be disrupted.

The government would not want to lose credibility: it would not want to admit that it cannot protect the people against any alien attack; also, the government would not want to admit to having lied about UFOs for 70 years.

Also, the government would want to figure out how the saucers work so that they might duplicate them and so that they could protect the U.S. against enemy nations that might themselves be duplicating the alien technology. Since the government doesn’t want any enemy to know what’s been learned, they keep it secret.

I find most interesting the possibility that if some UFOs are alien devices, then the otherworldly beings want to have control over exactly what is believed, about them and by whom. It seems reasonable to suppose, then, that the aliens themselves have been coercing the government, in one way or another, to impose the coverup.

[Much of this material is inspired by Stanton Friedman’s “The UFO Why Questions.”]

THE “THE DISTANCES ARE TOO GREAT” ARGUMENT

Skeptic. (a)If the distances to other stars are vast, and the chances of any stars even relatively nearby supporting advanced life are slim, and travel cannot be faster than the speed of light, then extraterrestrial craft have not been visiting Earth. (b)In fact, the distances to other stars are vast, and the chances of any stars even relatively nearby supporting advanced life are slim, and travel cannot be faster that the speed of light. (c)Therefore, extraterrestrial craft have not been visiting Earth. [a,b,c Modus Ponens]

Skeptic, you say (at b) that travel cannot be faster than the speed of light, but it is not clear at all that science has never developed or can never develop a means for traveling faster than the speed of light (using wormholes, etc.). I would ask the skeptic to tell me: What are the chances that there are such possible means and that other races have discovered them and can use them. If the skeptic says, “There’s no way to know,” I would answer, Well, then the chances seem to be 50–50 that faster-than-light travel is possible.

Also, you say (see a) that if the distances to other stars are vast, etc., then extraterrestrial craft have not been visiting Earth. But this is unproven. Even supposing that there is no way to travel faster than the speed of light, your point is still unproven. Assuming that the universe did, in fact, come into existence in a Big Bang 16 million years ago, it would have taken about 2 billion years for the first planets capable of hosting life to come into being. It would then have taken another 4 billion years for intelligent life to form. That leaves about 10 million years for possible spacefarers to have discovered and colonized the earth. “By time the Universe is a shade under two billion years old — just 13–14% its current age — we should have galaxies in it with Sun-like stars, Earth-like planets, and nothing to prevent life from arising or sustaining. The ingredients for life should be there. The conditions for life-as-we-know-it should be there.” [“What Was It Like When The First Habitable Planets Formed?” by Ethan Siegel, Forbes, Nov 28, 2018.]

Eric M. Jones, of the University of California, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, wrote:

A colonizing, space-faring civilization which exercises population control will colonize the Galaxy in about 5 × 10⁶ years. This result assumes population growth rates and emigration rates appropriate to human experience and a 0.1c ship speed. The results are independent of the optimum population. Only with extreme assumptions is the colonization wave velocity less than 0.01 c [6,706,166.29 mph]. [Abstract, “Colonization of the Galaxy” Mercury, Proceedings of IAU Colloq. 34, held in Pasadena, CA, June, 1975. Edited by D. Morrison, Icarus 28, 1976., p.421]

Jones later came to prefer a colonization time of 60 million years, not 5. [Stephen Webb, in If the Universe is Teaming with Aliens…Where is Everybody?: Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life, Springer International Publishing Switzerland, 2002, 2015]

If Jones is correct about the 60 million year estimation, then the galaxy could have been sequentially colonized 167 times. And, actually, the number of times that we could be colonized by the most distant
stars could be many times more than that, because it is reasonable to suppose that, assuming that intelligent life is common in the galaxy, many not-yet colonized races on these most distant worlds would embark on colonization at about the same time, and, in fact, they would do so all during the history of the galaxy.

Furthermore, colonizers from closer stars could find us more quickly, some much more quickly. We can safely suppose that, again assuming that intelligent life is fairly common, the number of times that colonizers could reach us from all parts of the galaxy over the galaxy’s history is an absolutely enormous number. We have only to presume that some logic dictates to advanced colonists that they should be secretive in their interactions with the less advanced cultures that they discover, and we will see that some UFOs are probably alien machines.

Regarding the possibility of colonization of the entire galaxy, the challenge for the spacefarers would be to develop spaceships capable of traveling .01 c. It seems that the time it’d take to accelerate to that speed is not so great as one might think: the late nuclear physicist and ufologist Stanton Friedman has pointed out that “at 1 G acceleration, it takes only one year to get close to the speed of light” [Flying Saucers and Science, The Career Press, 2008, p. 86]. It should take much less time to achieve a velocity of .01 of the speed of light.

But, of course, there are other problems relating to the possible development of faster spacecraft. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_acceleration), “A major limiting factor for constant acceleration drives is having enough fuel. Constant acceleration won’t be feasible unless the specific impulse for fuel (the fuel’s fuel efficiency) becomes much higher.

“One [broad category for ways to solve this problem] is higher efficiency fuel …. Two possibilities for the motor ship approach are nuclear and matter–antimatter based fuels.

“A related issue is drag. If the near light-speed space craft is interacting with matter or energy that is moving slowly in the planetary reference frame — solar wind, magnetic fields, cosmic microwave background radiation — this will cause drag which will bleed off a portion of the engine’s acceleration.

“A second big issue facing ships using constant acceleration for interstellar travel is colliding with matter and radiation while en route. In mid-journey any matter the ship strikes will be impacting at near light speed, so the impact will be dramatic.”

It would seem wrong to claim that there can be no technological solutions to these problems, and that means that it is wrong to claim that the distances to the stars prohibits the visitation to earth by interstellar travelers. These considerations, in fact, makes visitation from relatively nearby stellar systems completely plausible.

But all this pertains only to the theory that the otherworldly visitors come from other stellar systems. It is possible that the visitors evolved on extraterrestrial bodies belonging to our own solar system, perhaps on worlds which, though today could not support life, but which were once habitable, or perhaps on earth itself, maybe under the earth or in the seas.

And there remains the possibility that the Big Bang theory is wrong and that, in fact, interstellar expeditions have been happening for trillions of years.

And the “distances are too great” skeptical argument has nothing to do with other notions about the identity of the otherworldly visitors — could they be time-travelers, or inhabitants of other dimensions (that is, of, in some sense, parallel universes)?