Five Good Reasons To Believe in UFOs
As most credible UFOlogists readily admit, proving that extraterrestrial spacecraft have visited our planet is a maddeningly difficult chore.
“The hassle over the word ‘proof’ boils down to one question: What constitutes proof?” Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed the U.S Air Force’s secret investigation of UFOs in the early 1950s, once wrote. “Does a UFO have to land at the River Entrance to the Pentagon, near the Joint Chiefs of Staff offices? Or is it proof when a ground radar station detects a UFO, sends a jet to intercept it, the jet pilot sees it, and locks on with his radar, only to have the UFO streak away at a phenomenal speed? Is it proof when a jet pilot fires at a UFO and sticks to his story even under the threat of court-martial? Does this constitute proof?”
More recently, Investigative journalist Leslie Keen, author of the 2011 book “UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record,” has noted that in roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings, observers turn out actually to have seen weather balloons, ball lightning, flares, aircraft, and other mundane phenomena. But another five to 10 percent of sightings are not so easily explainable, but that’s not the same as demonstrating that they are extraterrestrial in origin. Nevertheless, she argues, the hypothesis that UFOs are visitors from other worlds “is a rational one, and must be taken into account, given the data that we have.”
Here is some of the most compelling reasons that UFOs may be more than simple misidentifications of natural phenomena or terrestrial aircraft:
01-The long, documented history of sightings.
UFOs were around, in fact, long before humans themselves took to the air. The first account of a UFO sighting in America was back in 1639, when Massachusetts colony governor John Winthrop noted in his journal that one James Everell, “a sober, discreet man,” and two other witnesses watched a luminous object fly up and down the Muddy River near Charlestown for two to three hours. There are documented sightings of what were then called “airships” during the 1800s as well, such as the July 1884 sighting of a Saturn-shaped UFO (a ball surrounded by a ring) in Norwood, NY, and a fast-moving object that briefly hovered over the startled townspeople of Everest, KS in 1897.
02-Numerous modern sightings by credible, well-trained professional observers.
In Ruppelt’s 1955 book , “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects,” he documented numerous instances of military service members, military and civilian pilots, scientists and other credible professionals who had observed UFOs. In one instance, Ruppelt describes the experience of a pilot of an Air Force F-86 fighter jet, who was scrambled to track a UFO and got to within 1,000 yards of a saucer-shaped object that abruptly flew away from him in a burst of speed after he fired upon it. He also mentions a 1948 UFO encounter in which two airline pilots got to within 700 feet of a UFO and saw two rows of windows with bright lights.
03- Consistencies in the descriptions of purported alien ships.
Over the decades, witnesses who’ve seen UFOs have shown remarkable consistency in the shapes and other characteristics of the objects they’ve described. In 1949, the authors of the report for Project Sign, one of the early military investigations of UFOs, identified four main groups of objects—flying disks or saucers, cigar or torpedo-shaped craft without wings or fins, spherical or balloon-shaped objects that were capable of hovering or flying at high speed, and balls of light with no apparent physical form that were similarly maneuverable. Nearly a quarter-century later, a French government investigation headed by Claude Poher of the National Center for Space Research found similar patterns in more than 1,000 reports from France and various countries. One caveat is that in recent years, reports of wedge-shaped UFOs—which bear a similarity to the latest terrestrial military aircraft—have begun to supplant some of the traditional shapes.
04-Possible physical evidence of encounters with alien spacecraft.
The 1968 University of Colorado report, compiled by a team headed by James Condon, documented numerous instances of areas where soil, grass, and other vegetation had been claimed by witnesses to have been flattened, burned, broken off, or blown away by a UFO. A report by Stanford University astrophysicist Peter Sturrock, who led a scientific study of physical evidence of UFOs in the late 1990s, describes samples of plants taken from a purported UFO landing site in France in 1981. French researchers found that the leaves had undergone unusual chemical changes of the sort that could have been caused by powerful microwave radiation—which was even more difficult to explain, considering that they found no trace of radioactivity at the site.
05-Physiological effects on UFO witnesses.
The Sturrock report describes in detail various symptoms reported by individuals who had encountered UFOS, ranging from burns and temporary deafness to persistent nausea and memory loss. Among the most vivid examples: Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and Landrum’s young grandson Colby, who reportedly happened upona“large, diamond-shaped object” hovering over a Texas road in December 1980. All three became ill afterward; Cash, for example, developed large water blisters on her face and swelling that closed her eyes, in addition to severe nausea and diarrhea. The effects persisted for years, and she was hospitalized more than two dozen times.
Respected polls reveal that half of all adult Americans believe UFOs are real and 12% claim to have seen one.1 Credible UFO experts estimate the number of alleged sightings worldwide in recent decades to be perhaps in the millions.2
This fascination has given rise to a number of UFO religions or cults, including the Aetherius Society, the Unarius Academy of Science, and the Raelian Movement. The Aetherius Society and the Raelian Movement have claimed more than several thousand members at their peak. The Heaven’s Gate cult received wide press attention following the mass suicide of 39 of its members in 1997. The group believed that by committing suicide they would join a flying saucer trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.
The beliefs of UFO cults are centered on three ideas: (1) flying saucers are physical crafts, (2) people receive channeled messages from alien intelligences associated with flying saucers, and (3) these messages are of immense importance. These groups have an occult ancestry and engage in various occult practices.
While it may be tempting to dismiss the phenomenon as the captivation of eccentric or sectarian groups, most UFO reports come from average people. And while UFO experts estimate between 90 and 95% of all reported UFOs are either natural phenomena, hoaxes, or man-made crafts, some 5 to 10% defy such explanations.
Three popular explanatory hypotheses have been proffered in an attempt to explain these residual UFOs (RUFOs).
The Misidentified Hypothesis (MIH): This position asserts that if 90-95% of UFO reports have natural or human explanations then maybe all of them can be so explained. Cornell astronomer and popular science writer Carl Sagan reflected this view: “Although it is not possible to prove that all UFOs are misapprehended natural phenomena, there are no compelling reasons to believe otherwise.”3
The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH): This view states that UFOs are physical realities (literal spacecrafts) piloted by interplanetary visitors. These space aliens represent what is thought to be a vastly advanced civilization (technologically, and possibly morally and spiritually) that studies mankind, and will, at the appropriate time, make contact with humanity. Outspoken advocate of the ETH, Stanton Friedman remarks “the evidence is overwhelming that some UFOs are alien spacecraft.”4
The Interdimensional Hypothesis (IDH): This theory holds that UFOs are a real phenomenon that may exhibit physical and empirical effects, but whose origin and nature belongs not to extraterrestrial spacecraft, but to another dimension of reality beyond our time-space continuum. Sometimes described as the paranormal/occult view of UFOs, some UFO experts (especially Christian) have ascribed a demonic interpretation to this alleged extra-dimensional presence. Such leading secular UFO experts as Jacques Vallée have argued for a correspondence between the UFO phenomenon and the occult or demonology.5
Using what logicians call abductive reasoning, the best explanatory hypothesis is balanced between complexity and simplicity, is coherent, corresponds to the facts, avoids presumptions, is testable, and thus has true explanatory power. In applying this approach to UFOs it is evident that all views have their difficulties. Nevertheless, while the vast majority of UFOs have natural explanations (possibly 99%), RUFOs consistently defy a natural explanation. So the MIH does not explain all the data. The ETH, which calls for traversing vast distances of interstellar space, exhibiting behavior that violates the laws of physics, and sustaining untold numbers of spacecrafts, is scientifically, technologically, and logically untenable. The IDH also has weaknesses (physicality of reports, difficulty in validating psychic-like phenomena), but seems to offer the most explanatory power. RUFO-related phenomena strike an objective person as being real, but not physical, being deceptive in nature, and possibly malevolent in intent. Also, a biblical case can be made that RUFOs reflect a demonic influence. One should be cautious, however, about drawing any hard and fast conclusions about UFO phenomena.
Christians can communicate several things when engaging the culture in UFO discussions. First, in the highly improbable event the existence of physical extraterrestrials will be proven, this development would not disprove Christianity. The Bible reveals God created all things, regardless of where they reside. The God of the Bible is not a mere Earth-based deity, but is the transcendent Lord of the entire cosmos. Second, RUFOs are for the most part a religious phenomenon and religious beliefs have real consequences, as was evidenced in the case of the Heaven’s Gate cult. And third, historic Christianity provides powerful and livable answers to life’s ultimate questions, and those answers are more convincing than anything RUFO phenomena can provide.
Was This A Mothman Sighting?
.jpg)
