May 27, 2021 by Maggie McNeill
My go-to argument for skepticism about flying saucer sightings (which have been in the news again lately) is as follows: Any technology capable of getting here across interstellar distances would be able to avoid detection. And if they wanted to be seen, they'd simply hover over New York City or something. It's basically the same as my argument against the idea that hypnosis can promote recall of past lives: If the deities or forces that control reincarnation wanted us to remember past lives, we would. And if they didn't, the Divine will couldn't be circumvented by a parlor trick. See, avoiding detection by radar and the like isn't that difficult; we already have ideas (and elementary techniques) about how to do it right now. But people without a background in physics and/or astronomy really don't grasp just how difficult it is to get from one star to another within any practical timespan. Popular sci-fi makes it look easy, but it's incredibly difficult. Surpassing the sound barrier was mostly a problem of engineering & metallurgy, but surpassing the light barrier is so hard we don't even have any widely-accepted (by physicists) theory about how it might be done. Compare the plethora of fictional ideas about what FTL travel might look like (hyperspace, wormholes, tachyons, spacetime folding, etc, etc, ad absurdum) to Renaissance fantasies about going to the Moon; the real thing, when we finally develop it, will probably resemble Star Trek about as closely as a Saturn V resembles a kite towed by birds. I'm defintely not saying that there are no such thing as alien visitors; what I am saying is that I won't get excited about it until I'm offered more convincing proof than, "Some jet-jockeys saw lights that appeared to move impossibly fast."
Incidentally, there's a reason I say "flying saucers" rather than "UFOs". Even when I was a tween (during the '70s UFO craze) and people asked "Do you believe in UFOs?" I'd answer, "Yes, I believe there are things that fly that those who see them can't identify." At the time, I was still young and impressionable enough to believe in alien visitation, ancient astronauts, the whole schtick. But even then, I recognized using "Unidentified Flying Object" to mean "definitely an alien spacecraft" was dumb.
