Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

                                            U.F.O.s AND MY TIN-FOIL HAT

I may or may not have mentioned before on this blog that, for my health, I take a long walk every morning, either just before or just after the sun has risen. And as I indulge this habit, I listen through my ear-plugs to podcasts, usually about politics, history or (if I’m in a frivolous mood) real-life detective murder stories. Failing all these, I listen to good jazz. But a couple of months ago, I decided to listen to something very different for a change. I tuned into a long series called The U.F.O. Rabbit Hole, an American production narrated, scripted and presented by a woman called Kelly Chase. She has a very assertive American voice except when she is interviewing “experts” in the field of U.F.O.s and other such phenomena. The series ran to over 36 episodes, each being an hour or more-than-an-hour-long.

The intro made it clear that the series was buoyed by the Pentagon’s recent decision to declare that they believed there were some U.F.O.s which they could not account for… so this opened the path for all sorts of speculation.

The U.F.O. Rabbit Hole began in a reasonable tone, at least in the first three episodes. Were U.F.O.s simply human technology made by foreign countries other than the United States?  The first boom in interest about U.F.O.s came in the late 1940s, shortly after the Second World War, when Americans feared that the U.S.S.R. might have created more sophisticated weapons than the Americans had. This proved to be untrue. Then there were rumours [and still are] that U.F.O.s were the result of secret American projects, not made public. This was at least possible. But what if U.F.Os. were extra-terrestrial? … well, maybe. In these early episodes, Kelly Chase was fairly even-handed, calling out obvious frauds but leaving room for belief in extra-terrestrial visits. But then the series began to dip into sheer fantasy. Could the U.F.O.s actually be our own descendants who had mastered time-travel, coming back to us from thousands of years in the future to show us the wonders of their advanced technology… Oh dear. Now we were losing the plot

And it got worse. Kelly Chase gave us a couple of episodes about a certain Tom Delonge, who was purported to have had interviews with C.I.A. agents and high ranking officials in the Pentagon, and who also talked of extra-terrestrial-based machines being constructed in secret by the military.  Possible… but less probable when Delonge also claimed that there were rival gods perpetually warring with one another in the skies and deliberately fomenting war on Earth.

Sure, in later episodes there were sober interviews with academics who suggested a little scepticism but who usually ended up championing the idea of real extra-terrestrial visitations on Earth. And then the episodes turned into really esoteric stuff. There were episodes about ancient societies and how they had created buildings and ideas far in advance of our own technology now… so to achieve what they achieved must have been with extra-terrestrial assistance!!! And all ancient apparitions in all ancient religions were actually extra-terrestrial visitations!!! Then there were fully three episodes which told listeners that the Nazis had occultist ideas and obviously this was originated by extra-terrestrial influence… and there were searches of Antarctica and Atlantis. And – goodness knows why – there were episodes which dipped into Socrates’ (or Plato’s) fable of the cave, a philosophical discourse here hijacked as having relevance to extra-terrestrial intervention.

Dear reader, I finally gave up on the series at episode number 19 out of the more-than-36 episodes that are available. Bear in mind, please, that most episodes were longer than an hour and I would have listened to about 25 hours before I said “Enough!” I had given it a fair trial. I was not bringing in a superficial judgement. Verdict: Despite some intelligent speculation, most of it was high-falutin’ twaddle. And I will not start wearing a tin-foil hat.

So let me give my idea of U.F.O.s.

I would truly be very happy if somebody could definitively prove that the Loch Ness Monster actually existed. Likewise I would truly be happy if somebody could definitively prove that extra-terrestrial beings are visiting us. But the hard fact is that after all the supposed sighting of extra-terrestrial beings, after all the theories and conspiracy theories proposed, after all the un-verified tales of people being kidnapped by extra-terrestrials and having surgery performed on them, all we are left with is speculation, rumour and fiction… much of it being nonsense.

So where do I stand? Am I debunking the whole idea of extra-terrestrial beings? Not really. My reasoning is this: where we live is a tiny planet which circles around a small-to-medium-sized star. In the galaxy where we live, there are millions of stars surrounded by  planets. And our galaxy is only one of untold galaxies. There are not millions or billions but trillions more planets than a human being can understand. The universe is vast. It defies reason to think that, nowhere else in the universe, there are planets with intelligent beings – at least as intelligent or more intelligent than we are. This being so probable, it is quite possible that such advanced intelligent beings have visited, or will visit, our small, limited, planet. But as of this time, there is no verifiable evidence that such an event has yet happened.