From the Editor’s Desk: UFOs Are Not Real (Premium)

As a child, I was fascinated by everything a child of my era would be fascinated by, including dinosaurs, astronomy, and the afterlife, and of course all of the pseudoscience and, let's be honest here, nonsense that these topics inspired. Monster movies on "Creature Double Feature" on Saturday afternoons, UFOs and aliens, ghosts, and every cryptozoological organism imaginable.

But I'm not a child anymore, and I learned long ago what's real and what's not real. I know that Bigfoot, Chupacabra, the Loch Ness Monster, and all that ilk are fairy tales. That ghosts, despite one terrific experience to the contrary, are fake. That there is no Lost World where (non-bird) dinosaurs still exist (though I do still have hope that science will, "Jurassic Park"-style one day bring back all manner of prehistoric and other extinct animals). And I wish it were not so. The unexplainable can be so delightful, and so mysterious, and each of these myths and stories worked in a sort of secular way to remind us to feel awed that the universe is bigger than we can ever know.

I did, however, hold out hope, based on both logic and math, that alien life exists out there, and that it has visited us here on earth.

From a math perspective, it is improbable if not inconceivable when you consider the vastness of the universe that life has not arisen elsewhere, similar to us or not. And that at least some of that life is or was as advanced as us if not more so. It just seems like a mathematical certainty.

The logic bit seemed equally sound. In this era in which everyone has a high-quality camera with them at all times, there are no irrefutable images of ghosts, Bigfoot, or any other creatures, but there are so many images and videos of unexplainable objects flying in the sky or in space, objects we once called UFOs (for unidentified flying objects) but are now supposed to called UAPs (for "unidentified anomalous phenomena"). But don't, because UAP is a ridiculous term.

Of course, I communicated a similar logic to my friends on the playground of the Oakdale Elementary School where, as a small child, I laid out the rationale behind my belief that the Easter Bunny was fake but that Santa Claus was obviously real. Put simply, there is belief and then there is knowledge, and these things don't always intersect. And while I wanted to believe, and spent my entire life wanting to believe (in UFOs, not Santa), it is now clear to me that with this topic, I've been fooling myself the entire time.

Yes, I still believe that there is life out there because there has to be. But it is clear that no one on this planet has evidence that any of that life has visited us, even one time. UFOs---as we know them, craft piloted by alien life forms---are fake.

I write that having witnessed one of the most dramatic and public UFO incidents of the 20th century, the so-called "Phoenix Lights" incident of 1997. My wife and I were taking golfing lessons at night in Phoenix...