The U.S. military confirmed last December that it conducted a secret five year UFO investigation between 2007 and 2012, costing $22 million annually.
Pentagon spokesperson Laura Ochoa disclosed that the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program was terminated since "there were higher priority issues that merited funding." This isn’t the first admission of such an expenditure of our government’s time, effort, and money.
Additional millions of dollars were allocated for Project Sign (1947), Project Grudge (1949), and Project Blue Book between 1952 and 1969. While some investigators are obviously still as eager as ever to uncover the reasons for the extreme shyness preventing extraterrestrials from simply introducing themselves openly, it should be noted that sasquatches, lake monsters, ghosts, pixies and other fantastical species are likewise just as keen to avoid the limelight.
Aliens, however, must have only recently overcome their acute introversion, having given no glimpses of themselves or their crafts in the previous five thousand years of history recorded in Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Chinese, Ottoman, and modern chronicles.
Nothing is mentioned of extraterrestrial visitors witnessed in the sky until the instant manned flight was achieved. Just as soon as flying machines became an everyday facet of post-aviation society, at that juncture as if by magic, extraterrestrials coincidentally descended upon us as thick as mosquitoes in the Arctic summer.
History also offers unmistakable tutorials as to the behavior of real explorers, the human kind — Carthaginian, Spanish, Arabic, English, Dutch, Chinese — and it’s diametrically opposed to what we’re asked to believe animates commanders of other-worldly ships who cross unfathomable gulfs of interstellar space only to allegedly play mind games with airline pilots and couples parked at secluded lovers’ lanes.
To imagine Pizarro or Cortes braving the dangerous journey from Spain to the Americas only to lurk for decades sailing forever offshore, playing peek-a-boo with the Aztecs and Incas is not only absurd, but would intimate a form of insanity.
UFO enthusiasts have a rejoinder: alien beings aren’t like us. They’re wayfarers, of course, but aren’t anything like Columbus or Francis Drake or Captain Cook. They’re content to cross mind-boggling distances in space, arriving at the only outpost of civilization in this vast quadrant of the galaxy, and instead of hailing us and engaging in trade, education, culture, alliance, diplomacy, commerce, entertainment, camaraderie and a thousand other obviously gratifying endeavors, prefer to hide in the clouds.
They have opted to traverse the Milky Way, searching for such rare and stunning jewels as Earth with its astounding resources and fantastically vibrant cultures — advanced enough to be spacefarers ourselves — yet upon success end up either biting their tongues and playing the bizarre role of interstellar voyeurs and stalkers or else reversing gears and returning from whence they came without bothering to say "Hello"or "Goodbye."
Indeed — they would have to be extremely different from us to say the least.
To the contrary though, alien space travelers would be very much like us — just like us —in the most intrinsic ways. Their crafts would be subject to the same laws of motion as ours. Gravity, radiation, inertia, and every other physical facet of existence would impinge on them just as it does on us. Hypotenuses would be no shorter in their geometry, entropy could not decrease for them. The arrow of time would go only forward in their estimation— just as in ours.
They would know the same relativity, quantum mechanics, mathematics, thermodynamics, physics and other foundational constructs of the cosmos, and would doubtlessly realize that we humans shared that bond with them. There are 26 immutable constants of the universe; we know them and so would they.
The idea that an extraterrestrial race should conquer the immeasurable vastness between stars, find fellow advanced lifeforms such as ourselves, and opt to refrain from even greeting us and instead chose to lurk in shadows for decades while occupying themselves with mutilating our cattle and mowing circles into our crops, is a notion too outrageously vapid to even consider.
There is this to contemplate too. Mathematicians and scientists have calculated that owing to the age of the Milky Way there has been plenty of time for any advanced civilization —no matter when or where it should have arisen — to have colonized great swaths of the galaxy, a few times over in actuality.
The question isn’t if aliens truly exist, but rather why we aren’t knee-deep in discarded worn out parts fabricated in foreign star systems. Used-up extraterrestrial paraphernalia should be strewn all over Earth if ever any star-hopping race should ever have existed.
But, if the Pentagon is truly interested in studying a society destined to colonize the stars, they’re looking in the wrong place if they’re looking elsewhere. They need not look up.
David Nabhan is a science writer, the author of "Earthquake Prediction: Dawn of the New Seismology" (2017) and three previous books on earthquakes. Nabhan is also a science fiction writer ("Pilots of Borealis," 2015) and the author of many scores of newspaper and magazine op-eds. Nabhan has been featured on television and talk radio all over the world. His website is www.earthquakepredictors.com. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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