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, surrounded by dozens of other people, when a triangular pattern of lights that blocked the night sky behind it flew slowly, as one, from the south, went over us, and continued silently on its way. This incident ground the entire place to a halt, and this craft seemed to all of us to be one V-shaped entity with five lights in fixed positions. It was witnessed by thousands and thousands of people in the Phoenix area, and there are many photos and videos of it online.

I wish it was irrefutable proof of aliens. And really I wish that then-Arizona governor Fife Symington had not chosen to mock the event with a fake press conference in which someone dressed up like an alien. It was only much later that I discovered that Symington—a former Air Force pilot and officer—had witnessed this incident first-hand, was freaked out by it, and had contacted the U.S. military, only to be rebuffed that it was none of his business. Today, he curiously believes that we had all witnessed an alien UFO in Phoenix that night, yet another example of someone who is a subject expert getting it completely wrong.

Yes, the U.S. government tried to explain away the Phoenix Lights incident, with the Air Force at one point explaining that they had just dropped flares from helicopters. That’s ridiculous for all the obvious reasons—it moved horizontally over the ground at the exact same height for hundreds of miles, for example, with no light changing its respective position even once—but it follows a pattern that does help explain why UFOs are fake.

And it’s this simple: despite all our modern technology, and that the U.S. government is now more transparent than ever about what we all see in the sky, there is literally no evidence of unexplainable aircraft flying around, either in our skies or above them. None. What there is, instead, is a long series of secret military and aircraft development that started alongside the Cold War in the wake of World War II, some easily explainable natural phenomena, and then a small selection of unknowns that say more about the fallibility of human witnesses and human-made sensors than they do about aliens.

Here’s the math: 90 percent of UFO sightings are easily explained away, and part of the other 10 percent is just secret military projects that the government won’t discuss right now. The rest of that 10 percent is about the limitations of military sensors and eyewitnesses. That’s it. That’s all of it. And this is one of the most evidence-rich fields of research imaginable in this field, with many, many seemingly mysterious videos and photos.

I learned about this and about the author of two articles linked above via a podcast called Tech Won’t Save Us that I subscribed to earlier this year because of a few episodes about AI. Like many podcasts, I cherry-pick which episodes to listen to, and in this case, it just came up in the “New Releases” feed in Pocket Casts one day, and so I gave it a shot. Honestly, I was expecting some wiggle room there given my previous-stated UFO logic. But I was surprised by how definitive it was, and so I’ve done some further reading, with those two links above being the starting point. And there it is.

I wish it were otherwise, but then I guess that’s the point. As the infamous poster in Fox Mulder’s office in “The X-Files” proclaimed, “I want to believe.” And I do, because belief leads to hope and the idea that things can get better. But now I can’t, and while pop culture has been all over the map when it comes to this topic—movies like “Independence Day” were always fun nonsense, books and movies like “Contact” seemed both plausible and hopeful—it seems that none of it got it right.

That feels weird. And a lot like one’s parents confiding in you about Santa Claus, actually. Sorry.