Are Aliens Among us?

This is part 2 in a series. See part 1, Are we Alone in the Universe?

“But where is the evidence? It’s MIA. Neither [David] Grusch nor anyone else claiming to have knowledge of secret government UAP programs has ever been able to publicly produce convincing photos showing alien hardware splayed across the landscape. And remember, we’re not talking about a Cessna that plowed into a wheat field. We’re talking about, presumably, an alien interstellar rocket, capable of bridging trillions of miles of space, and sporting technology that is obviously alien.” – Astronomer Seth Shostak

I have found the recent UFO (now called UAPs) revelations a bit curious. The media is acting like this is something new. The public is surprised the government is studying UFOs? Ever hear about Project Blue Book? Since the end of World War II, this topic has entered the public mind ever so often. The cyclic nature of UFOs is something to keep in the back of your mind. It makes this all seem orchestrated. Why, at certain times, are the flames of UFO encounters fanned?

I’ve already explained the unlikelihood of aliens visiting Earth, but getting past that, we need to first address a problem in ufology. Many researchers, though not all, seem to start with the assumption that UFOs are extraterrestrial life from other planets. The problem with this assumption is it colors these studies. For example, we often hear UFO sightings increased after WWII due to humans acquiring nuclear weapons. The aliens are supposedly here to monitor us and stop us from destroying civilization.

Why would aliens, so much more advanced then us, care if we had nuclear weapons? Why are these advanced beings crashing all of the time? Why are they mutilating cattle?

None of it adds up. The exponential increase in technological research during the Cold War, much of it secret, is a much more rational explanation. Many UFO accounts, when looked at a little deeper, appear rather terrestrial from a technological aspect. Even events like the iconic Roswell crash, with its alleged alien bodies, has a terrestrial explanation, one that’s more diabolical than aliens harassing us (see the work of Annie Jacobsen and Joseph P. Farrell). What then of the whistleblowers who claim they have access to secret sources about UFOs?

In the 1980s, Bob Lazar revealed he had worked at a site associated with Area 51 where they were reverse engineering alien spacecraft. He also claims to have glimpsed strange bodies that may have been alien. I undertook a meta study of Lazar, and looked at a number of Lazar’s interviews, documentaries and writings. His story has stayed remarkably consistent over the decades, and he doesn’t come across as a deceiver, nor has he benefited financially in a significant manner. As a whistleblower, though, the government has largely left him alone. Here are what I think are the potential interpretations concerning Lazar:

1. What Lazar is saying about aliens is true, and the government had recovered spacecraft.
2. Lazar misidentified and misunderstood what he saw and worked with.
3. The government wanted Lazar to believe there were aliens, when they weren’t, so he would spread misinformation to cover up classified projects.
4. The government and Lazar, together, spread misinformation and there aren’t any aliens.

All things considered, I suspect it is #2 or #3. What about others in this UFO space like David Grusch, Luis Elizondo, or Steven Greer? Even when people have solid credentials, as many of these people do, it still comes down to “a guy says he knows a guy who knows another guy who heard from a guy that the government has alien spaceships” as astrophysicist Adam Frank wrote. We see a lot of secret sources, things that were seen but cannot be revealed, etc. Are these people being unknowingly used to spread disinformation? Are the efforts of some, like Greer, influenced by their own personal beliefs? Is the government about to use the alien scare as way to control us, as Werner Von Braun warned many decades ago? Whatever the case, over the past seventy years, no whistleblower or person with access to secret knowledge has brought us closer to evidence of aliens visiting Earth.

What of the small percentage of UFOs that can’t be explained away as misidentifications, frauds, or terrestrial technology? Astronomer Hugh Ross calls these RUFOs: Residual Unidentified Flying objects. These, as professor Diana Pasulka discovered in her research, are “UFO contact events [that] include supernatural and paranormal elements that influence people’s lives” much like similar events throughout history she had found in ancient archives, though those weren’t described as UFOs.

In part 3, we will take a look at what these encounters may be. Is there a part of this world our ancestors intimately knew, which we have relegated to myth?