Unidentified Flying Objects: The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis

"Unidentified Flying Objects: The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis: Part Two","

FADS: A fad is a temporary fashion - a flavour of the month.
 For example, the big band/swing era; white wall tires and tail fins; hula hoops and yo-yos; the Charleston and the Twist; disco music, pet rocks, slicked back hair (greasy kids stuff) and wearing baseball caps on backwards; westerns on TV and the silver screen have mostly ridden off into the sunset; goldfish swallowing; miniskirts, bell bottom trousers and hot pants; and lots more.
 It's often the next 'must have' gadget that you just can't live without (so you are told), but which will be superseded in a year or two by the next 'must have' gadget Mark II.
 Sex isn't a fad.
 Even bicycles aren't faddish because they have become an overall essential, tried and true ways and means of transport.
 What's the duration of a fad? There's no fixed time frame - clothing fashions can change drastically from one year to the next; the influence of a blockbuster TV series or a motion picture, or say toys - maybe over several years.
 So, I'll pick an average of one generation, on the grounds that the next generation don't want to imitate or do like their parents did.
 Kids born in the 1980's aren't likely to get to misty-eyed and nostalgic over Elvis and the Beatles and ""I Love Lucy"".
 UFOs in fact are over three generations old by now and going strong.


Fads and non-fads appear in all manner of genres.
 Yet a non-fad in baseball is throwing strikes and not making defensive errors.
 The man-on-the-Moon (Apollo) program however proved to be just that - a temporary blip on the landscape.
 For example, string theory has been a reasonable career path for physics students for many decades now, so string theory can no longer be considered a fad in physics.
 So, crop circles, if all are manufactured by humans, would have to be faddish, were it not for the long duration of the phenomena.
 UFO hoaxes are faddish; immediately jumping to conclusions of alien spaceships when seeing just a light in the sky is voluntary.


The bottom line seems to be, if it proves to be ongoing, without any prior cultural background infrastructure, it's not a fad.


So, are UFOs (and say crop circles) a passing fad? Are UFOs all in the mind, something we adopt as a temporary way of assisting us coping with current reality, perhaps a novelty to give us respite from the ordinary? Are UFOs a reflection of our existing culture, say as expressed via Hollywood themes? Or, are UFOs like the weather - ever present and hammering that point home to us? Does Hollywood reflect the actual presence of UFOs in their themes, or are films perpetuating them in a faddish sort of way?

The origin of the UFO phenomena, if one is to believe the idea that UFOs are all in the mind, was due to the onset of the Cold War, and hundreds of Hollywood films in the fifties played up to the red menace threat, often in the guise of alien invasions (can you recall that catch phrase 'look to the skies'?).


Whatever bona fide unexplained UFOs are, they certainly aren't a fad, rather an ever ongoing phenomenon that's part and parcel of our environmental background, cause or causes unknown, but probably extraterrestrial IMHO.
 Why? Firstly, it was the first - no prior contamination and media saturation with the subject could have influenced them.
 An interracial couple (this was the 60's) wouldn't need that sort of publicity, and they certainly didn't make any fortune out of eventually going public.
 So we have two witnesses giving the same story.
 & Marden, Kathleen; Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience; New Page Books, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey; 2007: [Kathleen Marden is the late Betty Hill's niece and trustee of her estate.
: The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours ""Aboard a Flying Saucer""; Dial Press, New York; 1966:

NAME DROPPING: There are physical scientists with professional academic qualifications, who took (or take) the UFO ETH (extraterrestrial hypothesis) question very seriously.
 Allen Hynek (scientific advisor the USAF Project Blue Book), James E.
 Haines.
 Ruppelt) and the British Dept.


Then there are former NASA astronauts like Gordon Cooper and Edgar Mitchell who have come out in no uncertain terms that the UFO ETH is not only plausible, but beyond doubt.
 In fact, based on over four decades of serious interest in this field, I've noted that there have been far more sceptics turned UFO = ETH believers, than the other way around.
 I don't wish to say too much about the Roswell, N.
 case (July 1947), other than to point out that the then US Army Air Force admitted publicly, in the media, in newspapers, on radio, that they had captured one of those mysterious (and only recently sighted - the modern UFO era was just weeks old) flying discs.
 It's on the record.
 Firstly, forget the dozens of after-the-fact investigators into Roswell and their tomes.
 When it comes to that, the name Marcel should ring your bells and whistles.
 Now to achieve a rank of Major, in the military, suggests you've been around for a while.
 It suggests that one is competent enough to distinguish wheat from chaff.
 It's the sort of thing a SETI scientist might excitedly do if s/he received 'that' signal.
 Because of the unusual and highly suggestive other-worldly nature of the debris, the base commander ordered his public relations officer to issue a press statement that the AAF at Roswell had collected the crashed remains of one of these new fangled flying discs.
 Major Marcel, the base commander and the press officer, being dutiful military types, just followed orders and said nothing - then.


That a Major in the US AAF somehow could not tell the difference between debris from a crashed weather balloon (or even in yet another turnaround about-face, a Project Mogul balloon trail - well it's still just a balloon) and a metallic crashed disc is too implausible or incredible to believe or take seriously.
 His son, 11 years old at the time daddy woke him up, became a medical doctor and also a career military officer.
 Marcel (Junior) remembers vividly that night and that material from the crashed disc collected by his father.
 Jesse Marcel (Junior) on YouTube.
 In fact he eventually rose to the rank of that of Four-Star General.


Finally, the biggest 'giggle' factor detrimental to Roswell credibility are the reports of the alien bodies recovered.
 Of course one could argue that maybe the UFOs aren't 'manned', but remote controlled drones - we have such things ourselves.
 But back to the bodies - by analogy, on balance, it would seem odd for an airliner to crash and there be no bodies.


Further reading on Roswell:

Marcel, Jesse (Junior); The Roswell Legacy: The Untold Story of the First Military Officer at the 1947 Crash Site; New Page Books, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey; 2009:

SETI vs.
 The track record for UFOs as a bona fide ETI subject is way better than the track record for SETI.
 If 5% to 10% of all interesting-at-first-glance SETI signals also proved, after proper analysis, to be legitimate 'unknowns'; 'WOW' signals after the one and only one such 'unknown' ever recorded, that would really set the SETI community abuzz.
 My point is that each and every one of those 5 to 10% bona-fide unexplainable UFO incidents is, for all practical purposes, a ""WOW"" event, equal in potential to the lone SETI ""WOW"" signal.
 As I said, UFOs have more ""WOW"" runs on the board than SETI.
 Say their radio leakage window of (our) opportunity for (our) successful SETI is 100 to 200 years before all transmission traffic is via fibre optical or other cable and the radio noise, their radio leakage, for all practical purpose ceases.
 Now, what's the duration of our extraterrestrial civilization's attempts to boldly go - interstellar exploration? 100 years? 200 years? No, its way more than that because once started, even assuming the home planet goes kaput, exploration is ever ongoing.
 If they are not here now (UFOs), maybe there's some evidence they were here 200, 2000 or 20,000 years ago; or maybe tomorrow.
 Radio leakage is short term; exploration is long term.


Now that's not an attack on SETI.
 I wish SETI every success and if SETI captures THE signal tomorrow, I'd be delighted.
 UFO research is not a replacement for traditional SETI, but complementary.
 SETI scientists need that radio (or optical or infrared) transmission.
 One such race was the Asgards, and as the name suggests had connection with our Old Norse mythology.
) lore.
 This fictional show also confirmed several times over that Area 51 both housed and studied alien/extraterrestrial technology.
 That other interesting bit is that the stargate in ""Stargate: SG-1"" was a (fictional) USAF top secret enterprise.
 In fact, two actual then currently serving USAF Chiefs of Staff (4-star generals) appeared in the actual TV show as themselves! How's that for endorsement? So, we have the actual USAF assisting (by providing an advisory role, aircraft and personnel to the show) and endorsing a TV show that prominently featured UFO 'greys'.
 In all probability the USAF connection probably had no actual relevance to any indirect approval of the UFO 'greys' in the show by the USAF.
 So I do have to admit that there's probably no deep meaning underlying this connection, but I still find it interesting.
 This fact apparently excites the scientific, astrobiology, and SETI communities not one jot.


In a similar vein, if 5 to 10 percent of particle interactions were unexplainable by the current standard model of particle physics, that would set the physics community abuzz without question.


If 5 to 10 percent of galaxies showed a discrepancy between their red-shifts and their distances, that would set the cosmology community abuzz.
 There's a mystery just begging for serious attention here that has the potential for massive ramifications, not just scientific ones.
 It's more a case of where there's smoke, there's smoke, but smoke there certainly is, and lots of it.
 Valentich piloted a private plane from Melbourne, intended destination, King Island in Bass Strait.
 The UFO was spotted by several independent witnesses.
  Mr. Valentich dissapeared
 An extensive air and sea search failed to find any sign of missing man
 No oil slick, no floating wreckage, no body - nothing, zip, bugger-all.
 The weather had been perfect for night flying.
 Valentich staged his own disappearance, although friends and family could offer no reason why he would do so.
 But keep in mind; it wasn't just Mr. Valentich
 One entire aircraft vanished as well, never to be seen again.
 Valentich wanted to 'drop out', there were easier and less conspicuous ways of doing so.


Was suicide a motive? Again, no wreckage or body was ever found, and who would go to all the bother of reporting a non-existent UFO overhead - a non-existent UFO that happened to be independently reported by others.


It's a mystery, and while it doesn't prove aliens nicked off with Mr. Valentich
 Now multiply this sort of unexplained case by the thousands worldwide, and you do have the ETH as a plausible hypothesis.
 To this day, to the best of my knowledge, that report has never been publicly released.
; Melbourne Episode: Case Study of A Missing Pilot; L.
A.
 Haines was at the time a research scientist for NASA and an accredited air safety investigations officer.
 That was a really excellent plot device - it was also lousy science! If there is one truism in biology, it is that cross-species infection is rare.
 Micro-organisms tend to be species specific in terms of their nastiness.
 I'm not about to infect any of my garden plants by touching them with my dirty soiled hands - I'm not likely to become infected with deadly disease from a maple tree.


What's the point of all this? Well, if UFOs can be explained by the ETH, then it is unlikely in the extreme that the ETH exists in a species vacuum.
 We do not exist in a bacteria free environment, nor could we even if we wanted to.
 We haven't endured or experienced any pandemic or epidemic due to micro-organisms associated with 'ufonauts', and presumably 'ufonauts' haven't caught cold or smallpox or the measles from microbes associated with us, our cats, birds, or any other terrestrial life forms.
 So, by all means, shake hands with ET (if you meet him/her/it) and don't worry about any resulting medical bill - it ain't gonna happen.
 That is, extraterrestrial microbiology.
 Presumably, said ET microbes would be so biochemically distinct or unique that any microbiologist examining same would immediately note that something was afoot! Of course, if you're not looking out for it, you're unlikely to find it or get that 'eureka' moment even if you do find it.


So what then to make of the (late Sir) Fred Hoyle et al.
 Specifically that is, Earth's orbit intersects now and again a stream of bacteria-laden cometary dust and debris - germs from outer space - that impact Earth's atmosphere and ultimately filter down to ground level and do their infectious thing.
 The two sources of alien microbes are just that - two independent extraterrestrial sources that have no connection with each other.
 Then too many scientists give any credibility to the UFO ETH, hence to alien microbes originating from that source.


WASHINGTON, D.
 1952: In July 1952, on two separate occasions, separated by one week, UFOs buzzed America's National Capitol, making long term incursions over restricted air space.
 Military jet fighters were scrambled to intercept and identify the UFOs, but were outmatched and didn't succeed, although they were witnessed by the pilots.
 USAF Major-General John A.
C.
 It's on the public record.
 So the idea of 'temperature inversions' explained all - hogwash.


THE END (For Now)

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