When it comes to mysterious phenomena, I've always been more interested in the Earth-bound mysteries than the mysteries surrounding UFO sightings and whether life might exist out there in space somewhere. In recent weeks I finally developed an interest in the world of flying saucers and little green men and decided to delve more deeply into it.
Things like beasts who live in the woods, lost cultures, weird things that swim in the sea, super-human powers, and the paranormal, have eaten at my imagination and stoked my curiosity since early childhood.
For example, I grew up in a heavily wooded area in the Appalachian Mountains, and when the sun went down, I always felt like there was something just beyond the tree-line staring at me, waiting for me to get close enough for it to reach out and grab me.
Sometimes I thought it was Bigfoot stalking me from the darkness. Other times, I was afraid it was the large cats hunters occasionally reported spotting in the woods despite scientists claiming they haven't existed here in more than a century.
Dark rooms and late-night looks into the mirror also sent my anxiety into overdrive and my imagination into a frenzy, wondering, "What if…?"
Stories about beasts and apparitions were tangible to me. They were entities alleged to exist in my every day world. The possibility of their presence was something that affected me because at any moment, wherever I was, I could encounter one. It was a fear I could feel.
I've never looked up at the heavens worried that I might see an object hovering overhead with its mechanical eye trained on me, intending to beam me aboard for an uncomfortably thorough probing.
Unlike ghosts and Sasquatch, UFOs and aliens never even grabbed my attention when I browsed the stacks at the local library, or flipped through the channels on my television. It's not like I don't believe such things could exist.
As Carl Sagan pointed out in his now seemingly ancient series, Cosmos, the probability of another life-supporting planet is inevitable when one considers the number of stars and planets in the universe. Given the continued lack of concrete scientific evidence of creatures like the Chupacabra, Bigfoot, and ghosts, I now believe it's far more likely there are beings on other planets than there are weird creatures haunting our woods and ghosts haunting our basements.
Sagan's point was solidified again just last week. Researchers from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University concluded in the Milky Way galaxy alone, there are approximately 60 million potentially habitable planets, by human standards, orbiting red dwarf stars. That estimation is double what scientists previously believed, because the latest research took into consideration the effect cloud cover has on a planet's eco-system.
When it comes to the possibility one of those planets currently sustaining life, the degenerate gamblers of our world would call those kind of numbers in the most recent research, "a lead pipe lock of a bet."
Researchers from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University claim there are 60 million inhabitable planets in the Milky Way Galaxy alone.
As an adult, I'm not prone to the same mental excitement I had as a child. The fuzzy photos and eye-witness accounts of mysterious creatures and apparitions simply aren't enough to convince me without a doubt such things exist. My skepticism probably won't change unless someone captures a ghost in a box and charges me $1 to see it, or cages up a Bigfoot at the local zoo. Until then, my mind will remain open to the possibility of such things existing, and in my heart I will keep hoping I see their existence proven beyond a reasonable doubt, even though my skeptics eye keeps telling me otherwise.
As part of my initial research, I've been monitoring a few websites dedicated to reporting UFO sightings and alien encounters in an effort to open my mind to the reality of Earth being visited by space vehicles. At least, that's what I had hoped to do, however, that simply hasn't been the case.
What I thought I would find were occasional sightings of space craft by farmers and recluses who, at the very least, were viewed as eccentrics by friends and neighbors. I expected to find two or three cases per year with in-depth studies and analysis of each one, but none of that is what I encountered. No, my digging into UFO sightings information online proved to be an encounter of a different kind.
What I found were reports of nearly daily sightings of weird lights in the sky, or unusual cigar-shaped crafts, defying the laws of physics above cities around the world. It wasn't farmers and recluses reporting these sightings at all. The reports were from regular people, living regular lives.
Here are a few examples from the past few weeks: (Taken from www.Latest-UFOs.com)
Multiple UFO sightings during protests on Tahrir Square, Egypt, on 3rd July 2013
Protestors captured video of two cigar-shaped objects flying in the sky among military helicopters.
Click here to view the embedded video.
UFO lights over Charlottetown, Canada, 30 June 2013
Two strange lights in the sky come together.
Click here to view the embedded video.
UFO activity over North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina on 20 June 2013
Yet another report of strange lights jetting through the night sky.
Click here to view the embedded video.
These near daily reports were pure information overload at first, but then I began to parse it out and think things through. Unfortunately, when one thinks things through, it doesn't bode well for the UFO faithful.
To begin with, the term UFO is quite broad. Even though most people immediately think of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or ET, the term UFO is still just an acronym for an unidentified flying object, and just because it is unidentified doesn't mean it's other-worldly. When most reports come down to being little more than lights in the sky, it's hard for a skeptic like me to be swayed into believing I'm seeing something significant.
To go another step beyond just questioning the sources of the lights reported as UFOs by witnesses, I think the frequency with which these sightings occur harm ufologists' claims we're being visited by aliens on a regular basis.
Our planet is surrounded by satellites, littered with various types of telescopes monitored by astronomers and their computer equipment, and it's also protected by a thick layer of space junk orbiting the planet at bullet-like speeds. This means each alien pilot would have to successfully navigate this protective layer of an estimated 250,000 speeding projectiles without once colliding with any of it and causing some kind of disturbance someone in the science community would notice.
This computer generated graphic shows the objects in Earth's orbit currently being tracked, 95-percent of which is non-functional, orbital debris.
As Carl Sagan said, the numbers presented by the universe support the idea of another life-sustaining planet, however the number of eyes in the sky, and obstacles in a pilot's way, make it difficult to believe we're visited as frequently as is reported without better evidence than just some guy's cell phone footage or the equivalent of poor-resolution polaroid pictures.
Another thought that enters my mind are the laws of physics. Just because you might live in a galaxy far, far, away, it doesn't mean you're going to be dealing with a new set of physical laws. Physics is universal. That means if Albert Einstein was right in his Theory of Special Relativity, no one, not even those big-headed, super-smart aliens, can travel faster than the speed of light. Einstein's theory proposes that as an object approaches the speed of light, it would have an infinite amount of mass, and thus, would require an equally infinite amount of thrust to keep it moving. Infinite is not finite by definition, meaning you can't get there from here or there. In other words, traveling hundreds, thousands, or millions of light years just to visit Earth, seems unlikely; unless Einstein was wrong, and he could be for all I know. (Read the basics of Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity simplified by the folks at Nova)
Then of course there is the frequent presence of man in Earth's orbit with a bird's eye view of the planet for long periods of time aboard our own space craft and space station, who do not report seeing crafts flying by on a daily basis like people on the planet's surface do.
The existence of alien-piloted UFOs is an ancient mystery, but perhaps not as much of a mystery as why sightings happen so frequently without any of the previous situations I've explained occurring.
I don't claim to know what witnesses are seeing in the sky, or what the sources of the lights in the above videos are, but I'm fairly certain that like the Yeti, it's something from this planet.
While aliens might be out there somewhere, I don't believe they make a habit out of visiting us, just as we don't make a habit out of visiting them. As far as I can tell, the numbers simply don't add up.
Then again, what do I know? I don't even know, without a doubt, how the universe was formed and how life really began on Earth. The Big Bang Theory is the generally accepted answer, but when it comes down to it, doesn't it still seem to leave a lot of questions unanswered? So if something as basic as how it all began is still somewhat of a mystery, there is no telling what possibilities the universe holds.
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