It’s Never Aliens

Credit Stefan Xp – CC-BY-SA – Self-made UFO over Meersburg

It was a good year for aliens. Whether it was the fluctuations in the brightness of Tabby’s star, the oddly shaped interstellar visitor that passed through the Solar System, or a spate of sightings of UFOs, aliens received a lot of nominations. As always with the advocates of alien visitations, they want us to prove that it isn’t aliens. They say, “How do you know it isn’t? Can you prove it isn’t?” They always get that backwards, don’t they?

From the Scientific American article:

What do a strangely fading faraway star, an oddly shaped interstellar interloper in the solar system and a curious spate of UFO sightings by members of the U.S. military all have in common?

Far from being close-minded killjoys, most scientists in the “never aliens” camp desperately want to be convinced otherwise. Their default skeptical stance is a prophylactic against the wiles of wishful thinking …

Finding aliens, or coming up empty in our searches, has profound implications for our own ultimate cosmic fate.

UFO detections have remained marginal for decades; they’ve just gone from being blurry shapes on film cameras to blurry shapes on the digital infrared sensors of fighter jet gun cameras. This, in spite of the fact that the world’s total imaging capacity has expanded by several orders of magnitude in the past 20 years.

Hypothetical aliens with advanced technology could do that, of course. But then you have to ask why they would choose to remain marginally undetectable rather than just being undetectable.

Read the original article at Scientific American.

via It’s Never Aliens–until It Is – Scientific American

It was a good year for alien hunters, but not good enough. They still haven’t come up with solid proof that their beliefs are true. I guess that’s why they keep asking us to prove that they aren’t, even though that’s the wrong way ’round.

rjb