Do I Believe in UFOs? Of Course!

Unidentified Flying Objects. When you break it down, it doesn’t sound all that special does it? Just something in the sky that we don’t know what the hell it is. So, sure I believe in UFOs.

But the more popular interpretation is that ‘UFO’ means ‘alien spacecraft’. So do I think that UFOs are aliens coming to visit little old us?

My Grandfather loved UFOs. He had all the TV specials on tape, books, and loved to talk about how aliens may be visiting the planet.

As a result, I was pretty into UFOs when I was growing up. I thought for sure there were aliens visiting us all over the world. How could there not be? With roughly 250 billion starts in the Milky Way galaxy, don’t the odds support the existence of life SOMEWHERE?

That may very well be the case, but as I got older and a bit more educated, I realized that things just weren’t adding up about these UFOs…

First it was the crop circles. Pretty beautiful really. What started off as simple circles evolved into intricate designs with mathematical undertones. Could this be aliens attempting to communicate with us? Mathematics has always been hypothesized as a kind of ‘universal’ language. But then again, if these aliens had the technology to fly thousands, if not millions of light years to reach Earth, wouldn’t they have a better way of communicating than imprinting an image into a field of wheat?

And with so many crop circles getting reported, not one person managed to get a photo or video of them being created. It was all starting to smell fishy. (This is not even mentioning the many people who have come forward and admitted they were hoaxers creating the circles for their own enjoyment.)

Of course there is also the plethora of video and photographic ‘evidence’.

All those TV specials sure made them convincing. But after reading some more, shall we say ‘reputable’ sources, it turned out that most of those images and videos were simple fakes. I was getting exasperated. Why didn’t the UFO specials on TV just say that the pictures were fakes? To a 10 year old, this was all quite disheartening. I had grown up with this magical feeling that aliens were here. This dream was being torn away by lame “science”.

But what about the photos and videos that couldn’t be explained as a hoax? Is it plausible that aliens made it Earth, only to be caught on camera by a family videotaping their vacation? Or could it be something more down to Earth? There are all kinds of natural phenomena that could be taken as a UFO. Take these lights over Norway taken a couple years ago.

Pretty spectacular. But aliens? I don’t think so. Turns out it was a missile test. Meteors, satellites, even secret government planes like the F-117 can easily explain many sightings, without resorting to the visitation of extraterrestrials.

Needless to say, science had totally burst my bubble. Aliens probably weren’t visiting us.

I was sad.

But fear not!

As it turns out, science had in store a vast catalogue of REAL science that was even more exciting than lights in the sky. Quantum entanglement, cosmology, wave-particle duality, string theory, the list goes on and on.

The moral of the story? We all like to believe in something special. But it doesn’t have to be aliens, or ghosts, or channeling, or any other pseudoscience. The real world has a lot more to offer than those bad TV specials ever will.