Home »
Flying saucers – myth or scientific fact?
“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner
Op-Ed Commentary
At the tender age of 10 and a budding scientist, I became an eager fan of ufology even though I didn’t know what it was. Years later I found out ufology was the study and/or belief in “flying saucers” or Unidentified airiel Phenomena (UAPs ) as UFOs are now called.
As a child I believed extra-terrestrials were up there in the stratosphere waiting to wreak death and destruction on us poor earthlings below. As an educated adult, I renounced my belief in little green men and insisted it was all a hoax being played on gullible believers who used crystal balls to determine the truth.
Now, I’m not so sure.
Perhaps you feel the same way in light of several recent headlines spurred by government and scientific committees saying there may be some credibility to flying saucer sightings and they’re more than just tales of little green men and alien abductions.
Last week, a retired US Navy fighter pilot told a Congressional Committee that Washington has been too secretive in the past about UFO sightings and it’s time to take the issue more seriously. “Unidentified objects in our airspace present an urgent and critical safety and national security issue, but pilots are not getting the support they need and the respect they deserve,” said Lt. Ryan Graves.
“When I served, my squadron was encountering UAP’s nearly every day, and nothing was being done.”
Well, it’s being done now with the launching of Americans for Safe Aerospace, a pilot-led advocacy organization that will press for more protection for pilots, military or commercial, who speak out about UAPs that can’t be explained and bring the issue out of the closet so to speak.
So, what can we expect in the future? UAPs have been regularly sighted in the skies all over the world including Canada but not taken all that seriously because so many of them can be attributed to natural causes, including debris falling from aging satellites, weather balloons, meteorites, sunshine reflecting from clouds, ice crystals, fireflies – and in today’s increasingly high-tech world – drones zipping around.
Despite this, NASA, which has conducted a highly secretive UAP investigation for years, cautions that two to five per cent of UAP sightings cannot be easily explained and more investigation is needed.
In a July 26 Congressional hearing, former NASA intelligence officer David Grusch shocked many attending saying a military investigation discovered what he called “non-human” beings. Attempts were made to “reverse-engineer” the non-humans to determine what they were. But Grusch said he was not allowed to see the final report on what was found – if anything. But going public with his allegations resulted in “very brutal” retaliation by his colleagues against him, Grusch said. “It hurt me both professionally and personally.”
“Non-human beings?” If that doesn’t send a chill down your spine you haven’t been paying attention. But more and more people have been paying attention and more hearings are scheduled.
Personally, I don’t know what to believe anymore. Despite increasingly strong telescopes being built all the time such as the James Webb Space Telescope that can look deeper into space than ever before – almost to the “Big Bang”– nothing approximating life as we know it on Earth has been found except for a substance that looks like green mould, not little green men with pointed ears or giant Redwood trees.
As far as life goes, there seems to be no flashy, oval-shaped objects zipping around the Milky Way touring the galaxies and gawking at primitive planets like Earth. If there were, they would probably be wondering why its residents never get their act together and indeed seem on the verge of destroying their precious, blue planet. With billions of star-saturated galaxies “out there,” surely there are other forms of intelligent life in the universe? Are our human egos so big that we believe we’re the only conscious beings in the cosmos?
Surely not! But then again why can’t we see other signs of life using the best technology we’ve been capable of developing, technology that’s capable of looking into the farthest reaches of the universe and almost six billion years into the past.
Perhaps they just don’t want to meet a civilization as screwed up as ours. And who can blame them?
Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and wannabe astronomer despite his retirement.
