UFOs are real; that is, there are sightings of things that have not been identified. The whole thing is  based on a sighting by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 that was probably a flight of pelicans and 50s science fiction movies. Arnold described a flight of wedge-shaped objects that flew like saucers skimmed over water. The newspapers got it wrong and called them “flying saucers”, and everyone started seeing saucers and discs. Tropes like missing time, buried memories and alien implants all appeared in 50s films like INVADERS FROM MARS and KILLERS FROM SPACE before anybody reported them in real life; and abductees reported boarding the ship by a ramp, like in the movies, but once STAR TREK came on, they reported being beamed aboard. The people who made the first crop circles admitted it was a hoax. Dr Simon, who brought out abductees Betty and Barney Hills’ abduction story under hypnosis, diagnosed that those were not real memories but a delusion brought on by Betty’s lifelong obsession with UFOs and Barney’s submissiveness to her will. UFOlogists who have brought out other abduction memories don’t tell us that hypnosis does not bring out truth, but only what the hypnotized person thinks the hypnotist wants to hear.  

UFO doesn’t mean alien spaceship; it only means unidentified. Every UFO sighting that has been properly investigated has proved to atmospheric phenomena like lenticular clouds (below), misidentified aircraft, drones, birds, stars, planets, reflections of ground lights, mirages or outright hoaxes. In several cases where clear photos of flying saucers were produced, the miniature models the photographer used were found. There is a known condition called sleep paralysis that causes people to wake unable to move with a strong feeling of being watched; in the middle ages this was blamed on witches - now it’s aliens.

UFOlogists - who have never studied a UFO, only witnesses' stories - have come up with a clever excuse for not having any proof (NOTE: stories, reports, anecdotes, testimony and hearsay are not proof): the government is hiding the truth. Of course they have no proof that the government is hiding anything either.

Think about it. If UFOlogists actually believe in aliens, why haven’t they ever tried to prove it? Have repeat abductees wear a wire. Set up a broadcast signal in their homes such that if the alarm stops, they’d know that aliens were interfering with electronics. Have response teams ready to catch the aliens in the act. They don’t, because they know nothing would happen and they’d be proven wrong.

There is no reason to fear aliens once you understand that they are not real.

13 Reasons To Doubt Aliens

I answered a comment on Quora with a 13 point response to "13 Reasons To Belive in Aliens" at http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/03/13-reasons-to-believe-aliens-are-real.html I worked for several hours and then somebody reported it and without contacting me Quora deleted it. I canceled my Quora account but since I didn't want that work to be wasted I'm posting it here.

I was disappointed in “13 Reasons To believe in Aliens”. Was hoping to find some really challenging material to delve into. None of these reasons hold water – except to believe in life somewhere in the millions of galaxies and billions of stars that we know about. Nothing to make anyone think “they” are or ever have been here, and nothing resembling proof.

1 The Government Literally Just Admitted It’s Taking UFOs Seriously

~ Not aliens but UFOs: UNIDENTIFIED Flying Objects. In fact they changed the designation to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena to indicate that they may not be “objects” at all. That allows for atmospheric phenomena like temperature inversions and noctiluscent clouds, radar glitches, delusions and more. It also includes objects but a lot of false reports have been attributed to stars, planets, birds and conventional aircraft. The government is taking the sightings seriously – but not aliens.

2. Harry Reid Says We’re Not Taking Them Seriously Enough

~He does, but what does he know? In Logic this is a form of false reasoning called Argument from Authority. He was interested in “science, and in helping the American public understand what the hell is going on”, and from a security viewpoint. I have yet to find an interview where he even mentions the possibility of aliens. In fact he said he didn't want to talk about “little green men”.

3. Scientists Are Suddenly Much More Bullish About the Possibility of Life Out There

~Obviously, as we find more and more Earthlike planets, scientists are more convinced that life exists out there Out there – they said nothing about aliens here, and nothing to do with UFOs.

4. THEY’RE ESPECIALLY BULLISH ABOUT THESE PLANETS

~ See 3 above; this is one “reason” split into two. Again, they're talking life on other planets – possibly microbial life - not aliens visiting here.

5. AND THERE IS “DOCUMENTATION”

~Seriously? Some people drew some pictures??

6. THAT “ASTEROID” LOOKS AN AWFUL LOT LIKE A ROCKET SHIP

~ … but is really just an asteroid. It has shown characteristics we'd expect from a natural comet-like object ejected from a distant solar system. In fact the “looks like a rocket ship” shape argues against it being an alien vessel. Rockets are insufficient for traveling the distances between stars.

7. THESE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE ARE OBSESSED (THEY ARE ALSO ALL MEN)

~They are “obsessed” with space travel, searching for primitive life in the Solar system and finding intelligent signals with SETI. Again, this has nothing to do with UFOs or aliens on Earth.

8. AS ARE SOME PROMINENT MILITARY AND GOVERNMENT FOLKS

~Again, Argument from Authority. Prominent people are just as subject to false beliefs as anybody else. Notice that none of them has any solid evidence.

9. (AND THIS GENIUS THINKS HE CAN TALK TO THEM)

~That's totally misleading. Wolfram speculates on how to communicate with hypothetical aliens. He never claimed he talked to them.

10. THERE HAVE BEEN ENOUGH WELL-KNOWN ENCOUNTERS TO FILL ENCYCLOPEDIAS

!Besides the obvious fact that the number of people who claim something does not make it any more true, (Argument from Popularity; thousands of kids who believe in Santa Claus does not make him real), many of these well-known encounters have been investigated and put to rest. Of course the documentaries and UFO books tend to cover up that part.

Barney and Betty Hill for one: Their abduction was recovered by regressive hypnosis, but the doctor who brought it out stated that the memories were not real but a fantasy based on Betty's dreams. Betty was obsessed with UFOs and hoping to see one well before their “encounter”. Even UFOlogist John Oswald stated, "She is not really seeing UFOs, but she is calling them that." On the night they went out together, "Mrs. Hill was unable to distinguish between a landed UFO and a streetlight". Barney drew a picture of an alien from that week's Outer Limits show but changed his description when he overheard Betty's story. Barney saw a row of windows with beings looking out. From the direction he was looking, and the time and date, it now seems clear that he saw the Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway. Its cars are a pretty close match for what he described and for the picture he also drew.

12. WE EVEN HAVE SOME PRETTY DEVELOPED THEORIES ABOUT WHY WE HAVEN’T HEARD FROM ET YET

~Again, speculation about “out there”. Nothing to do with aliens here.

13. AND IN THE MEANTIME, ALIENS CAN BE WHATEVER WE WANT THEM TO BE

How is that supposed to be a reason to believe? Notice how it states that reports began becoming more coherent and similar in the 40s and 50s? That's when pulp magazines and movies began popularizing aliens. The tall blond men and women were straight out of Amazing Stories, and the 50s movies introduced most of the tropes of UFOlogy – before people began imagining them in real life. Missing time, repressed memories, big eyes, alien implants had appeared in films like It Came From Outer Space, Killers From Space and Invaders From Mars and the urban legend that is UFOs swallowed them up. It is very telling that until Star Trek came on, abductees went aboard UFOs on ramps like in those films, but after Star Trek people reported being “beamed” aboard.

Misusing Myth, II

I WANT TO BELIEVE ~ poster on Fox Mulder's wall in THE X-FILES

“What are the facts? Again and again and again--what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history"--what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!" ~ Robert A Heinlein, THE NOTEBOOKS OF LAZARUS LONG

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. " ~ Carl Jung


I used to teach a course on UFOlogy for the Wichita Free University. I presented it in two sessions: the believers stories and the skeptics. I found that the believers, while accusing skeptics of being close minded, never showed up for the debunking session. This is something that UFOlogists have in common, and they share it with other believers, like religious fundamentalists and Bush supporters. They tend to ignore whatever doesn’t fit their mythology.

For example, UFOlogists tout the Barney and Betty Hill alien abduction case while ignoring the fact that the psychiatrist who brought out their repressed memories stated flatly that these were not real memories. The British crop circles and the Gulf Breeze sightings are still a big part of the lore despite the perpetrators being caught red-handed at their hoaxes. The Roswell incident has many witnesses but no one points out that none of them can agree on the date, the site or the number, if any, of alien bodies.

A friend sent me a posting she received from a religious group about the discovery of the Red Square Nebula. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070412-square-nebula.html

The nebula is perfectly symmetrical, so much that it almost resembles a crystal. They suggest that the nebula is the "approaching City of God," based on Revelation 21:16, "And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal" and 20-10,"And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal." Since it is red, the post says, the red shift indicates it is approaching.

My friend asked my opinion. In this case, there is one fact that fits the City of God: the nebula is symmetrical. The facts that don’t fit are:

1. The Biblical quote clearly states that the City of God is twelve thousand furlongs on a side. That equals about 1300-1400 miles. Nebulae are hundreds of light years across. One light year equals 5,865,696,000,000 miles. So according to the Bible itself the nebula is about a zillion times too big to be the City.

2. A nebula is a cloud of gas from an exploded star. A cloud of gas is not a city.

3. Sorry, red shift means going away, not approaching. There is no evidence that the nebula is approaching the Earth. It has only recently been observed because our instruments weren’t good enough before now.

4. There are several scientific theories presented in the article that explain the nebula’s shape. A crystal is a natural formation, not a miracle.

Point 1 invokes Doctor Zen’s rule: if you take something literally, it has to all be literal: you can’t pick and choose. If the shape is literal, the size must be too. If you tell me part of it is metaphorical, then I can say it’s all metaphorical.

Back to UFOs, if you haven’t read WATCH THE SKIES!, Curtis Peebles brilliant dissection of UFOs as myth, I highly recommend it. http://www.amazon.com/WATCH-SKIES-PEEBLES-CURTIS/dp/1560983434

It is also interesting how closely the UFO mythology follows popular fiction. In a 1930 Buck Rogers comic strip, Buck's girlfriend Wilma Deering is taken aboard a spaceship by aliens with large heads and eyes, subjected to a physical examination and released; almost the prototype for the recent alien abduction stories. More of the groundwork was laid in 1950s movies like KILLERS FROM SPACE with abuctees memories being replaced, mysterious scars from alien implants, and memories of big disembodied eyes. Barney Hill's initial description of the aliens (before he changed his story to match his wife's) was an exact description of the "The Galaxy Being" from an OUTER LMITS episode he had just seen. People who claimed to have been taken into alien craft through the 60s reported walking up ramps similar to the ones in 50s flying saucer movies. After STAR TREK, they report being "beamed" aboard.

UFOlogists also use false logic a lot. Some points to remember: The possibility of other intelligent life out there in our galaxy does not prove they're down here or that they kidnapped your Uncle Bob last weekend. Just because a witness could not identify what he saw, that doesn't prove it was alien or a spacecraft. Being unable to prove that something isn't real doesn't make it real. Ask Carl Sagan about the invisible dragon in his garage, or try to disprove Santa Claus.

Some of the writers of books about things like UFOs, the End Times and other subjects like witch cults and Satanists are probably just making a quick buck. But what about the believers? Some, abductees and investigators alike, may live on the attention they get. Alpha-Girl at pinkraygun.com suggests that "for UFO believers and religious fundamentalists, I wonder how much of that tendency is due to needing to be right vs. needing to know there’s something other than our current state, whether it’s as God’s children on Earth or as the only known intelligence (or what passes for it) in the universe."

John Keel used to write books about things like UFOs, Bigfoot and such phenomena and he had a very interesting theory. He wondered whether such manifestations, leaving no physical evidence, were the universe's way of telling us something. The cool thing about this theory is that it works whether these are physical manifestations, hallucinations or imagination. We know from the common archetypes in stories that human minds can connect with images in the subconscious that have deep meanings for all people. Carl Jung suggested this in FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH OF THINGS SEEN IN THE SKY. He wrote that such visions may be common in an era where humankind has its fate in its hands, and faces extinction. UFO aliens seem to warn us about dangers we already know about, like atomic bombs in the 50s and global warming now. The link between such visions and dreams and stories is a deep one, and it goes both ways. The pattern of alien abductions matches age old stories of meetings with elves, faeries and demons. John Ankerberg wrote that "the UFO phenomenon simply does not behave like extraterrestrial visitors. It actually molds itself in order to fit a given culture."

UFOs may not be aliens or even the universe speaking to us, but our own subconscious. As Jung said, "Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes."