Top Ten Reasons Why Flying Saucers Aren't Real

July 14, 2008

Several of my blog posts have speculated on the lack of evidence for intelligent life beyond Earth. When this comes up in conversation with friends the discussion invariably turns to Unidentified Flying Objects, UFOs. Aren’t aliens visiting us now? All those UFO sighting can’t just be misinterpretation of Venus, birds, weather balloons, burning swamp gas, and so on. Isn’t the government hiding something?

Pouring cold water on “fun” ideas like UFOs is sure to make you a bore at any cocktail party. I’m usually dismissed as one of those snooty scientists who aren’t “believers.”

Having physical evidence of intelligent life off the Earth would be the most extraordinary discovery in history. It is a true civilization game-changer. At the least it would certainly boost NASA’s budget!

Sixty-one years ago last month the first use of the term “flying saucer” launched the modern era of UFO paranoia.

On June 24, 1947 private pilot Kenneth Arnold reported spotting nine mysterious high-speed objects moving “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water” along the crest of the Cascade Range in Washington state. His story made international headlines and immediately triggered hundreds of similar accounts of flying saucers locally and across the nation.

What bores me to death about the whole UFO phenomenon is that despite six subsequent decades of flying saucer sightings absolutely nothing of any scientific value has been learned. It hasn’t told us anything about the abundance of life in space, the distribution of exoplanets in our galactic neighborhood, or the nature of exobiology. These answers are being addressed daily through the hard work and perseverance of scientists.

UFOs are nothing more than a myth spawned by our a technological age.

So, to borrow from David Letterman's Late Show top ten lists, here are Ray’s top ten reasons why flying saucers don’t exist. Save them for your next cocktail party conversation:

1.No Evidence They Come From Outer Space
Even if we accept the belief that extraordinary vehicles carrying humanoid-looking inhabitants are flying around our skies, then why do they come from other stars? There are any number of equally speculative answerers such as time travelers and visitors from parallel universes.

2. No Well-Documented Photos
Rare events such as the tragic 9/11 terrorist attacks were recorded by numerous cameras and observed by hundreds of witnesses. In the past 61 years there has never been a single daytime sighting of an exotic machine clearly not of this Earth (like those mega-saucers in the 1996 film Independence Day) and flying over a populated area where multiple photos are taken by a number of independent witnesses. There’s a boatload of pre-Photoshop faked hokey single-camera UFO pictures. My favorite (shown above) is a contraption hobbled together out of 1930s vacuum cleaner parts.

3. Disproportionate Number of Nighttime Sightings
A majority of UFO sightings are nighttime events where witnesses report unusual lights in the sky but no physical vehicle. Unless an alien version of Dracula is at the controls, daytime sighting of the extraterrestrial vehicles should be equally common but are not.

4. No Rationale for a Space Armada
Why wouldn’t extraterrestrials send just one exploratory ship instead of an armada of vehicles to our solar system? UFOs of every shape and size have been reported for decades. The aliens must have their own air traffic control system for Earth.  Presumably there has to be a base or mothership somewhere else in the solar system. Yet 40 years of exploring the Moon and other planets by our space probes have not uncovered any evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships.

5. Improbable Time Intersection
The galaxy is 12 billion years old and Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Humans have only been here for a tiny fraction the age of Earth. It is highly improbable that a space-faring civilizations just happens to come by Earth just now. What’s more, it is very unlikely that Earth would be visited by a culture that is within a few centuries of us in their technological capabilities. It would be as improbable as two people lost in a forest coming upon each other and finding out they were born in the same year and only a day apart.

6. Implausible Physical Appearance
Given the infinity of pathways in biological evolution it is highly improbable that extraterrestrial beings  -- especially the very first ones we just happen to come in contact with -- would resemble humans, as reported in numerous contactee cases.

7. No Rationale for Visiting
Throughout the history of the UFO phenomenon there has never been an obvious motive for a biological intelligence to cross the immense space between stars to visit Earth. Their stealthy behavior as purported in contactee cases contradicts the logic in going to all the expense and effort of traveling here in the first place. It would be vastly cheaper to reconnoiter Earth with artificially intelligent space probes.

8. No Artifacts
Despite 61 years of alleged visitations there are no artifacts of an extraterrestrial technology. Compelling evidence would come from finding a piece of utterly exotic technology that is impossible to fabricate on Earth (sorry, all those scraps of aluminum foil allegedly from a stricken spaceship don't count). So would an artifact having a unique isotopic composition. This would be telltale evidence for its fabrication at another star system (which was born out of a protostellar nebula with a different isotope mixture that our Sun). Even more absurd is the claim that captured alien technology has been " reverse-engineered" to give us computers, rockets, microwave ovens, etc. This is as impossible as giving Thomas Edison an Apple IPhone and asking him to replicate it.

9.No Evidence for Global Conspiracy
The UFO buff’s answer to the lack of artifacts is that there is vast a government cover-up where the technology and even alien biological remains are locked away for decades. This would need to be a monolithic worldwide conspiracy because UFOs are reported around the globe.

10. Pop Culture Imitations
Contactee stories are simply projections of what people think would be inside a flying saucer – lots of light, buttons, and eerie planetarium effects. The notion that these vehicles are being piloted by big-headed, bug-eyed space jockeys is equally ludicrous.  In UFO sighting reported in the late 1800s people describe the vehicles as Jules-Verne style airships, complete with spinning paddles for propulsion.

All of this said, it is not totally crazy to think that there could be alien artifacts in our solar system from one or more extraterrestrial visits that happen over the vast expanse of geologic time. Even the popular astronomer Carl Sagan once considered this in a scientific paper.  I’m not talking about the legendary black monolith from the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. We might simply stumble upon a small bit of disturbed material or artificially made debris on an asteroid, left behind by a visiting extraterrestrial probe.

This would be the ultimate blow to our conceit in thinking that space visitors are going to land at the White House, raise their right tentacle, and pronounce something like “live long and prosper.”

Perhaps in a survey of the galaxy some manifestation of an extraterrestrial intelligence came by, dispassionately collected data, and left. It hardly gave our tiny blue planet a second thought.  It’s kind of like all those boxes in the secret warehouse at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Earthlike worlds are so abundant in our galaxy that they all begin to look alike.

Photos: George Adamski; Associated Press

Comments

[Wertyui]

Personally, I dare not be closed to the idea of ET's here on Earth. You said yourself the universe is much older than Earth, so why would you assume there wasn't living beings from the beginning....that know much more...see much more....can do much more, without us knowing, because we can't perceive it. Seems far fetched, but assuming anything is impossible in this sense is naive.

[enchant]

This is a perfectly reasonable man with no access nor fund of study in the factual data of our Universe AND the Star People reality. It is vital to those in the scientific community to 'protect their self interest' by not crossing the line by acknowledging information that has not been vetted or approved via collective inference in Academia. A monolithic control of Ideas and facts is present today.

Suggested reading: HALT MEMO, ALIEN AGENDA by Jim Mars, The DISCLOSURE PROJECT Briefing Document, www.drboylan.com

in the light and my best wishes to your future and extended exploration of facts that fall outside of your current world view!

[Dave Mosher]

@Wertyui: Sounds like you're trying to prove the existence of god. Interesting.

@enchant: You offer isolated accounts from some not-so-reliable sources.

For both: Show me the money.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to believe aliens have visited our planet frequently in their super-advanced spacecraft... that's a fascinating thought. But there's simply no convincing body of evidence. There are far more parsimonious explanations for all of these accounts than another form of intelligent life secretly slipping around our planet. Sounds pretty ridiculous to me that you'd travels light-years of distance only to be sloppy in attempting to be secretive around the intelligent civilization you set out to study.

[Rich Reynolds]

Ray...

You are right on the button.

Good list, and blog

Rich Reynolds
RRRGroup

[Brian]

http://www.ufologie.net/htm/astronauts.htm
Briefly, I take issue with your article, here are a few points:

7. No Rationale for Visiting
The US is concerned about Iraq/Iran having nuclear capability. So why wouldn’t ETs? We have atomic weapons and the ability to travel into space. We have the potential to destroy not only our planet but others as well. The collective testimony of government witness knowledgeable of these things indicate that the bulk of sightings have been around facilities relating to nuclear weapons and energy production.

9.No Evidence for Global Conspiracy

UFO buffs are not the only ones saying this. Several credible government witnesses are coming forward and admitting this as well.

The best evidence that the government is hiding something goes back to Roswell. The military publically admitted that they had found a flying saucer, and the local paper ran such an admission as a headline. The next day they came and retracted the story and said that it was only a weather balloon.

The Roswell Army Air Force Base was home of the group that was responsible for dropping atomic during WWII. Can even the military not tell the difference between a weather balloon and a flying saucer if they saw one? Weather balloons have information on them who to contact if found.

Not sure where you are getting info that most craft are seen at night. Please reference your sources.

[Ray Villard]

Dear Brian,

The Late Arthur C. Clarke once said that any advanced civilization would have a mastery over matter and energy indistinguishable from magic. To such a civilization an atomic bomb would be a mere firecracker.

For example, just one of the 1994 comet Shoemaker-Levy impacts on Jupiter unleashed as much energy as the entire world's nuclear arsenal (At the peak of the Cold War) going off at once!

What's more, at the speed of our current spacecraft it would take 80,000 years to send nuclear weapons to the nearest star. So aliens aren't losing any sleep over this. It's as pointless as us being fearful of cavemen with spears.

Below are links to two independent studies that show there is a steep rise and peak of UFO sighting in the evening hours. One paper is by veteran UFO hunter Jacques Vallee:

http://www.canadianuforeport.com/survey/images/time2007.gif
http://www.jacquesvallee.net/bookdocs/AIAA.pdf

[david eberhardt]

Please pro ufo folk- before making any comment- submit some proof of what you're offering- otherwise- preface your remarks as fantasy, speculation, hypothesis, poetry etc.

Why are'nt scientists like Ray invited to UFO conferences? don't abductees and sighters have open minds?

[david eberhardt]

As I think on it further, the pro UFO and abduction believer side is really practising religion- in that- just as w Jesus- one must have faith ultimately- one must take the "leap to faith" to believe in an afterlife or that Jesus is the son of God.
Really scientific proof is not needed!

But to me, science is more exciting, reality is, than speculation and fiction.

Exploring deep sea vents to find that there is life that doesn't need oxygen, or trying to figure out just how evolution works, or examining distant suns to detect a wobble that may indicate a planet...how exciting is that?!?!?

I don't want to condemn the pro UFOs folks as in it for the money or as manipulators or schizophrenics, even. I myself am descended form the founder of the Mormons, Jos. Smith- who claimed to have discovered golden tablets from the angel Moroni.

My take on this is that- in that day and time- people were simply very impressionable as to belief- that Smith may have dreamt it? maybe it was auto suggestion? a sort of trance induced state?

Maybe it is a feature of education that the more educated you are, the less likely you are to grasp onto the sensational.

Certain folk are ready to believe Rush Limbaugh, for example.....Anyway...