UAPS in the News Again
On July 27, 2023, a Congressional hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and the seriousness of the threat they pose to American air safety and security was convened. There were three witnesses who testified at this hearing, two ex-Navy pilots, David Fravor and Ryan Graves, and an ex-Air Force intelligence officer, David Grusch. The two former Navy pilots testified of their encounters with UAPs during Naval training exercises in 2004 and 2015. Fravor stated before the committee: "I have no idea what I saw. It had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s." And Graves, who has spoken elsewhere on this topic, arguing that UAPs pose to our national security, said to the committee: "The American people deserve to know what's happening in their skies."
Yet the most surprising testimony came from David Crusch, who had been connected with a secret Pentagon task force investigating UAPs, who argued, on the basis of interviews with 40 people over a four-year period, that there had been "a multi-decade UAP crash and retrieval and reverse-engineering program" secretly funded by the government and military, without any Congressional oversight or control. And it was obvious from several well-known UFO investigators attending this hearing, as they nodded their heads in agreement with Grusch's statement, that they agreed that this secret program should be exposed and brought under proper Congressional control. But what actual decisions and actions will be taken by Congress as the result of this hearing remains to be seen.
One thing clear from the questions that were asked, and the responses given, is that UAPs are now seen as a real phenomenon deserving scientific investigation. Yet their true nature and purpose still remains open to question. That is, as regards the 10 % that cannot be explained by misidentified aircraft, weather balloons, atmospheric, or astronomical phenomena. Of course, in certain quarters the so-called "extraterrestrial hypothesis" remains the majority explanation among ufologists. It is their conviction that these objects must be spacecraft coming from advanced civilizations on other planets who have discovered and are now investigating our planet.
But even if it were true that, in our own galaxy, there were a large number of solar systems with earthlike planets on which intelligent life had evolved, those who maintain the ETH have to adequately overcome ten hurdles to alien visitation:
1. How can these alien spacecraft quickly traverse vast interstellar distances, given the physical limitations on how fast such craft can travel in space?
2. How can these alien spacecraft sustain crews over such long distances?
3. Why do sophisticated surveillance systems fail to detect incoming and outgoing UAPs?
4. How feasible is it for any extraterrestrial civilization, however advanced, to maintain a mission to earth?
5. How is it that these apparently metallic craft come in such a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and colors so different from each other?
6. Why are so many different life forms observed, and how do they truly adapt to space travel, as well as earth's atmosphere and gravity?
7. Why do UAPs, if they are physical spacecraft, not behave like physical craft but instead manipulate and violate the laws of physics?
8. What intelligent reason exists for the apparent bizarre and inexplicable behavior so often manifested by UAPs?
9. If alien visitors are physical beings, why, as many reports seem to suggest, do they so closely resemble or correspond to psychic or occultic phenomena?
10. As a proposed "advance civilization" (in the areas of technology, morality, and spirituality) why do these aliens, as many contactees have reported while undergoing psychotherapy, act in a crude, sloppy, deceptive, and malevolent manner?
Earlier in my life, when I was a religious agnostic and interested in astronomy and life on other planets, not only did I find the "UFO phenomenon" (the designation for UAPs in the 1950s to 1990s) fascinating but was also pretty much convinced they were spacecraft from inhabited planets in other nearby solar systems. But as I grew in my knowledge of astronomy and the real challenges of interstellar travel, and started asking myself some of the above questions, my confidence in the "extraterrestrial hypothesis" started to waver.
In addition, after reading some of the writings by Clifford Wilson, John Keel, Jacques Vallee, and other UFO investigators who argued that the evidence available indicated these objects had an "interdimensional" origin rather than an "interstellar" one, the nature and purpose of these objects seemed less explicable in purely scientific terms to me. However, a consideration of the "interdimensional" origins of UAPs and what that means will be the subject of a follow-up article.
