Oh and by the way, we’re not alone
On the 28th of April, amidst rushed white house press briefings, where journalists seemed more interested in cornering an uncomfortable president regarding his comments the previous day about consuming disinfectant, the Pentagon made the following startling declaration.
Almost without any warning, the murmurings of a hundred years of denial and doubt were silenced by a video which now bore an official stamp. Even as this video above sat on the sidelines next to CNN’s headlines, I paused for a moment and wondered, did a watershed moment just go by unnoticed amidst the coronavirus clamor?
My mind wandered back a few decades to when a very different genre of Hollywood movies were first made from Close Encounters of the 3rd kind, E.T. , Star Wars to the many more that followed.
Despite our fear of the unknown, films went on to create a surreal new-age space-cult around the green men, also called aliens. Whether it was an abandoned alien left behind on earth or elegantly designed Star Destroyers moving at warp speeds, the movies stretched our imagination to what was deemed possible. Ask even the best scientist today and he would tell you that we’re at least a decade away from inter-planetary space travel although Elon Musk would like to think otherwise.
Beyond Hollywood, U.F.O. watchers couldn’t stop gazing at the skies wondering when the world would take their extra-terrestrial claims seriously. Governments however were happy to sit on the sidelines and allow the scientific community to debunk these folks and their U-F-O-ria. A skeptics job was simple, refute those claims based on alternate theories such a bizarre weather conditions or human tampering of images or videos.
Over time however, many more UFO’s were caught on camera, over farms, open areas and sometimes even populated cities. Sometimes these objects made strange awkward movements that defy any laws of aerodynamics known to us today. For scientists to make any hypothesis, they need empirical evidence along with supporting data to be able to verify these claims prior to airing their findings. Sadly, most of the camera footage on UFO’s are deemed to be hoaxes and dozens of worked-up witnesses or abductees do not a hypothesis prove!!
So lets get to the burning question. Why Now?! Why take great pains across the ages to deny the existence of U.F.O.’s right until this point? Could it be that we were asking the wrong question all the time? Maybe the question was always when would the right time be, to disclose to the public at large what they may have suspected all along about U.F.O.’s without causing possible large scale pandemonium. Wait !! Would a Pandemic do the job?
It certainly would. In fact its quite a common human trait to let less important news fly by unnoticed in times of great calamity or excitement.
One possible reason may have been the mounting body of evidence that has gathered over time and a public sense of unease with the government’s concealment approach on everything extra-terrestrial. This was on full display even as masses of people threatened to storm Area 51 last year, prompting a strict warning from government officials.
Another more simple theory (too easy to believe), is that the government has simply run out of options on the entire U.F.O. saga and wishes that it would just disappear down a black hole. It could just be the case that a lot more went down in Area 51 than they are wiling to admit and maybe it’s time humanity does know that there are certain things which modern science cannot explain or justify yet.
S.E.T.I. was after all set up in 1984 to reach out to the stars and alert whoever was out there to our existence. A little over 30 years may be half a generation on earth but when you compare it to 1 light year (the distance light travels in a year), its not even a pie in the cosmos. Light from our adjacent galaxy Andromeda is 2.5 billion light years old and this is the scale of cosmic distances in our immediate neighborhood.
Before he passed on, the famed Physicist Stephen Hawkins claimed that “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans”. This clearly seemed like a sharp turn after decades of research, although one must admit that not all scientists share his opinion.
So will this disclosure herald in a national discourse on whether we are really alone in the Universe? Will this watershed moment drag out those frozen alien skeletons from the underground laboratories. Maybe the cutting edge technology being developed in secret cannot be contained anymore. But wait! Was it developed or is it Alien?
The truth is really out there.
