UFOs: Why so weird?

If there’s one topic that’s always sort of lurking in the back of my mind, it’s UFOs. Or as the recent lingo goes, UAPs. But I’m going to stick with the term UFO here, because the whole point of changing the name was to distinguish recent limited reports from the many reports, both official and unofficial, that precede them, and I’m not sure that’s the right approach.

Just to give you a sense of my interest, I’ve read Dr. John E. Mack’s Abduction, Budd Hopkins’s Intruders, a little book by Ellen Crystall Ph.D. called Silent Invasion, Zecharia Sitchin’s The 12^th Planet, Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, and more, plus I’ve watched movies and documentaries on the subject over many years, including ufologist Dr. Steven Greer’s Unacknowledged, MUFON’s Hangar 1, and of course, Ancient Aliens. Some sources seem more reliable than others, but it’s fair to say I’m an attentive skeptic.

A recent unclassified nine-page report to Congress from the UAPTF (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force) states that 143 UFOs have been documented that they cannot explain and that these UFOs exhibit “unusual flight characteristics” indicating a “breakthrough or disruptive technology.” This sample comes from observations made by Navy pilots from 2004 to 2021 – of which 80 were picked up by “multiple sensors.” Pretty interesting, I say. According to the report, one possible explanation for why these craft are able to maneuver in a manner that’s so far beyond our current capabilities is that they are in fact some kind of advanced technology developed by one of our political adversaries, such as Russia or China. But if so, Russia or China has kept this technology secret for that entire span of time, and longer, because in spite of the limited scope of the task force’s study, sightings like these have been going on for decades. So, in all that time, our adversaries didn’t use their superior tech in any way to care for their citizens or to suppress their enemies. Instead, they chose to introduce their advances to the world by taunting us with dangerous flyovers and other distracting maneuvers in plain view of our military personnel. Does this make even a little bit of sense? No.

According to a CNN article discussing the UAPTF report, because these encounters appear concentrated among the military and at government installations, they may give the false impression of a militaristic focus to the intrusions. But the real reason may simply be that we have high-level monitoring equipment at government installations and in support of our military aircraft. That said, the evidence the UAPTF has given seems surprisingly scant, to me. I find it unlikely a million-dollar military aircraft owned by the U.S wouldn’t have cameras looking inward and outward at all times. Of course, it’s probable that the UAPTF collected additional evidence that cannot be shared with the public due to security concerns. To my mind, this would make the report’s conclusions even more compelling. Both the disclosed and undisclosed evidence have still failed to explain away 143 UFOs, making these 143 sightings a vastly conservative estimate of how many may have actually occurred worldwide in the same fifteen-year span.

For decades lay observers and officials have reported downed craft, inexplicable bright lights flying in formation over cities, and craft making trajectory changes that would crush a body with its g-force. If the many documentaries I’ve seen aren’t outright lying, there are UFO witnesses who have sustained radiation burns from UFOs severe enough to require treatment in hospitals and a long list of individuals who show no signs of mental illness but maintain they’ve personally interacted with alien occupants of UFOs. I won’t say I’m convinced these experiences are what witnesses claim they are, but I’m inclined to believe they experienced something.

Our air travel industry wants us to believe they provide the safest mode of travel we have – safer than cars, trains, or boats. Let’s assume that’s true. And then let’s consider how many flights have occurred in the world over the last 80 years. Throw in the Cessna-type planes and the smaller jets, too. That’s a lot of air traffic. How many crashes have there been over the last 80 years? Now, how many UFO crashes have been documented over the same period? Then consider how many UFOs would have to be in the air not crashing if they had the same crash rate as our relatively low-tech planes. Quite a few. But according to the congressional report, UFO tech is beyond our capabilities, which means we can assume, then, that UFO pilots are either strangely incompetent or their crash rate is much lower than ours, which would suggest there have been not just a few but many UFO craft in our skies for quite some time.

Great. But I would like to know why UFOs bother sneaking around only to flash their bright lights for anyone to see. If they don’t want to be seen, why turn on the lights? Our eyeball size restricts our vision to a small band of visible light, so we have technology to help us see at night. If UFO tech is beyond us, we can assume they have the same capability and don’t need light. But, again, if they do want to be seen, why sneak about? Why not land on the White House lawn, or a Walmart parking lot?

They must also know they’re emitting radiation lifeforms on earth are generally not used to (simple observation of our atmosphere and our sun would tell them this). They can easily determine that it will burn us.

To sum up: why do they bother to turn their lights on and hurt us when they don’t have to, and conversely, why bother to turn them off if they don’t care?

Their overall behavior seems to say a few things about them that run counter to popular speculation. (1) They’re not trying to study us in our natural element (too intrusive); (2) they’re not planning to overthrow our planet’s political power base (too slow); (3) and they’re not especially protective of us or themselves (too many avoidable injuries and destruction of property).

Frankly, they behave like a bunch of tourists on safari.

By the way, the technology UFOs demonstrate when they engage in sudden changes in velocity is what we would need for our next level of space exploration. The g-forces of a right-angle turn at high velocity would crush a human brain against its skull. Something in these craft must be offsetting g-force, perhaps a counteractive force, and such a force on its own could serve as an artificial gravity. One of the major limiting factors for humans living in space is the damage low gravity inflicts on our bodies over time, and I worry that torus-shaped space stations are just too cumbersome for large-scale projects or long-term space travel. But if UFOs are real physical craft with advanced technology successfully behaving as they appear to behave, true artificial gravity is at hand! Exciting stuff!

Now, moving past the limited congressional report, according to abductees and other witnesses, the occupants of UFOs have a similar physiology to ours. Not the same, but pretty close. Unless you buy into the idea that advanced lifeforms from other planets would evolve as we’ve evolved, shaped by similar forces, then the fact these aliens look like us tells us something: they are us. Or rather, parts of us – spin-off versions from the future or a divergent line of human evolution from elsewhere, perhaps off planet. (Never mind how that might have come about.) Or they’re kind of us, in the sense that they didn’t begin as us but have since incorporated us into them.

If extraterrestrial visitors are real and we’re not overlooking some major slice of human advancement, from whatever corner of the galaxy or temporal direction, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover we’ve been dealing with machines in biological casings. It might explain their lack of empathy. They might be incorporating traits from various organisms to gain a wide range of adaptive characteristics that further their work – whatever that is. We usually think genetic traits that have survived to be passed on were particularly useful to an organism at some point, even if not useful at present. But based on what I’ve been reading in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, if I understand him correctly, evolution is more about how traits get dropped. It’s more a matter of pruning, which leaves behind a rich variety of both useful and useless traits. All the while, variation continues to spring up. Perhaps these cyborgs have been designed to take advantage of our biological variation which has been shaped over eons to ensure a better chance of surviving this planet or the next planet on their journey. I don’t know. But if they can do it, why not do it?

Considering the weird, erratic behavior of UFOs, and their occupants, if I were incorporating traits from the most dominant species on every habitable planet I ran across, I might try turning on traits associated with the intellectual plasticity of its children (more compatible with my artificial components? a good balance?) but retain some of the emotional maturity of its adults. Hence, adolescent cyborgs piloting UFOs who exhibit occasional bouts of reckless and impulsive behavior. If that’s what’s going on here, then yeah, these partially artificial beings – part us – might want to cut loose every once in a while, and play. Is that so bad?