This essay is in response to the Medium article listed above!
I've followed the field of UFOs, for over fifty years, though I have drifted away in the last two or three decades, for — spoilers! — more or less the reason advocated in the article.
Time is too short to do this whole field justice, but here's a rough breakdown of what seems to be really happening in my view.
Overall, the main issue is that people are unfamiliar with the full range what the sky can look like, and that "rare" atmospheric phenomena are happening somewhere in the world all the time. Any police station in a rural area knows they will get UFO sighting reports on nights that Venus is particularly bright.
Up until around ten to twenty years ago, personal drones weren't really a thing, but now they are.
So historically, next come US military craft and devices. When I was young, there was a "craze" for triangular UFOs that would rise up over the horizon in southwestern states and fly over with almost no sound. A decade later, the Stealth Bomber was revealed.
Here's my only actual piece of "hidden" information — repeated rumors over decades from critical people that the US military has some sort of electromagnetic projection device that allows them to make convincing radar bogies, which is obviously useful in air warfare.
Two famous incidents involving the Mexican and then later the Iranian air forces experiencing an event with coherent radar bogies that flew around but with which they were unable to make visual contact are generally quoted.
I don't think this is wildly unreasonable but it is unproven.
Now, we're left we're left with "silvery craft or lights that turn corners or accelerate at thousands of Gs", and contactees.
You know, any bright high school student can make "something" travel faster than the speed of light!
Just build a moderate-sized laser, and sweep its beam across the moon really fast. (There's a mirror there, you could even pick up its reflection to prove you did it.)
The moon occupies half a degree in the sky, and it's circumference is almost 11,000km, so your laser would travel across 5.5M m - half the circumference - but the speed of light is about 300M m/s so you'd have to cover that 1/2º in about 1/60 of a second to actually exceed the speed of light, which works out as 720 / 60 or 12 seconds per full revolution - quite slow. But you'd have to be very, very accurate.
No contradiction with Einstein of course - this is well-known, and no energy or information is actually moving at this speed.
So when someone tells me that something turns corners or accelerates "instantly", my mind goes to something that can do that - a projection, again. And again, my thoughts would go to the US military.
(Another thought is that instead of being far away from the camera and moving fast, they are close and moving slowly, but that would be a deliberate hoax, as if you were there you’d see it instantly.)
So we’re left with contactees.
I have met many. Some are obviously in a different consensus reality but some were very rational people. Some small number of contactee cases have multiple unconnected individuals in different locals with sightings at the same time or otherwise aren’t obviously a psychotic interlude.
Jacques Vallée has written a lot of very interesting work here which I strongly recommend even to hardcore skeptics.
Three takeaways are that stories about UFO contacts are very similar to stories about meeting angels, or the little people, so similar that it’s likely that these are all the same phenomenon; that disturbances in the temporal lobe are common in contactees who have had a brain scan, and in a couple of cases, an earlier scan had showed nothing; and that there’s a fairly strong geographic correlation between geomagnetism and these events, and a weaker correlation to earthquakes, which might be the well-known piezomagnetic effect in compressing granite.
Taken together, that would mean that some contactees are reporting an objective geomagnetic phenomenon, but one that disturbs their temporal lobe so they are unable to objectively report on it.
A more far-fetched explanation is that coherent and self-sustaining “living plasma” electromagnetic systems are possible and this is what is being encountered on some occasions, but absent the slightest evidence or plausible mechanism, I include this only for the sake of completeness. Given our still fairly limited knowledge of this area, I would only call this very unlikely and not impossible.
It’s not even really important that the above list exhausts every reported case, because I am going to need a lot more than flickering images or reports corroborated by a few reliable witnesses to entirely change my worldview.
The very idea that intelligent alien creatures have been with us on Earth since 1947, flying around in their technological airships, coyly allowing us to see glimpses of them in an ambiguous fashion but never showing up on the White House lawn! Why would these intelligent beings waste their lives on something so childish?
The more we learn about our universe, the more we realize how incredibly slow, difficult and expensive in resources it would be to travel even to the very closest stars, which we are really fairly certain are uninhabited.
Despite speculation, there’s absolutely no evidence at all that faster than light travel is possible. Ideas like wormholes or the Alcubierre Drive take astonishing, sun-sized amounts of energy to get going.
Physics has not been moving toward magic. It’s become harder and harder in terms of energy to explore the edges.
Why would intelligent beings spend all these resources just to hang out flashing lights in our sky?
Or could it simply be that humans are unreliable reporters of reality, and that some of the $20+ trillion, that is $20 million million dollars, that the US has spent on “defense” in my lifetime has gone into making clever toys to fool radar and observers?
