Alien abduction redux
JENNY RANDLES asks if recent discoveries mean it’s time to reassess the case for ET visitors
In a recent column ( FT348:25) I asked why alien contact cases have become an endangered species after once being the most dramatic type of close encounter case, reported with some frequency. I now believe this is just a phase in our human interaction with the UFO mystery.
Four hundred years ago, any mysterious events that happened around an individual – such as apparitions or teleportations – would be ascribed to the then common notion that witches existed and could exhibit such nefarious powers. It was an explanation that suited the era. But we would today mostly consider such a resolution absurd, a product of supernatural thinking. In the 20th century similar events can and do occur but – as we saw with the Godfrey UFO abduction in Todmorden, West yorkshire (see FT269:44-47, 270:46-49,
325:27 et seq) – such phenomena were interpreted quite differently, with aliens being the perceived cause for things once ascribed to the power of witchcraft.
I now believe that the ‘UFO’ phenomenon is eternal but the explanation placed upon it by society is ephemeral; and that this is really the key to understanding any possible intelligence behind any part of the mystery, outside and beyond the one that we know for sure is always involved – that is us, the human component through which every sighting is filtered into perception.
Whilst most comments that I received about my recent column were supportive, I received an interesting recent one asking if I now look back on it with different eyes. This was because in the months since I first expressed those doubts about any alien component to the UFO mystery, big discoveries have been announced about the prospects for alien life in the Universe.
These discoveries include the existence of the first Earth-like worlds in the Goldilocks zone around a star close enough to our Solar System to make space travel there imaginable with technology only just ahead of what we possess today. The Goldilocks zone (as in the fairy tale where the porridge is not too hot and not too cold, but just right) is a narrow band that surrounds every star, within which Earth-like conditions could prevail on any planet orbiting inside. One of these planets, GJ 1132b, in the constellation of Vela and about 39 light years away, has now even been found to be the first Earth-sized world to have a dense atmosphere, and, while it is thought to have a surface temperature too high for our kind of life, it may have steam, suggesting the presence of water somewhere below that could be a key to some kind of life. Even more remarkable is the ice moon of Saturn, Enceladus, within light hours of Earth and a place we have already reached by NASA spaceship. It was never thought of as a candidate for life because of its frozen surface, far below any temperature at which human life could thrive. But close study of jets that are being emitted into space through cracks in its surface points to the possibility of liquid oceans deep under the ice, within which life could exist, as it does in similar environments on Earth.
So in just a few months we might have found strong pointers that life is not unique, even in our Solar System, and that it might be common on the millions of Earth-like worlds we now know to exist around other stars. And the odds that some of that life might have developed intelligence seem high enough that it now seems very probable. Which takes me back to the reader who asked whether my thoughts on aliens being the ‘go to’ explanation for UFOs mostly because of socio-cultural reasons have now changed. 2017’s astronomical discoveries do make the theoretical likelihood of aliens existing ‘out there’ more probable. However, I have long assumed this to be true anyhow. It is still some way from any such life being intelligent, having the interest or ability to travel the Universe, and wanting to visit Earth so as to abduct humans from a lonely road in yorkshire.
The so-called Fermi Paradox has long posed the basic question about the abundance of life, if proven by observation of the Universe. If it is out there, given that many star systems are millions of years older than our own, then where is it? Surely, some intelligent species would have travelled the cosmos and left signs of its presence wherever it went? Were we an uninhabited rock at the time and they simply passed us by? Did they study the dinosaurs and move on, with evidence of that trip destroyed millions of years ago? Is intelligence so rare and the Universe so vast that our paths have never crossed? Or is there available proof that we are misinterpreting as something else – suggested by the ‘Gods and spacemen’ school of thought in which the myths of ancient civilisations record encounters with advanced intelligences from space in an age when humans could not understand their true origin?
These are all options worth considering, and they make the concept of alien visitors feasible – but only that. My doubts have not been removed by the new discoveries, although they mean we shouldn’t discount the possible reality of the strangest close encounters, even if there are better ways to interpret most unsolved cases. Two major reasons for caution over accepting an alien presence on Earth remain. Where is the physical evidence? When we have reached other worlds we have left junk on the Moon or ‘alien UFOs’ driving around Mars for years. Meteorite rocks, not of this Earth, are identified readily from their geophysics. But no hint of alien DNA or unearthly dust, let alone fragments of alien space metal, has ever been left here.
Then there is the problem of the ‘observed abduction’. In almost every case where a witness chances to see someone else who claims to be abducted by aliens, the observer never sees them physically go
anywhere, let alone into a spaceship. They might witness the person in an ‘altered state’, and might even independently see a UFO in the vicinity of the ‘abductee’. That is enough to make the phenomenon a real one – but the alien interpretation remains a matter of perception.
So in just a few months we might have found strong pointers that life is not unique, even in our Solar System