What is it about unidentified flying
objects and extraterrestrial visitors that holds such allure?
Surveys
consistently show that about a third of all Americans think alien spaceships are real
— and that as much as 10 percent of the population have seen such
spaceships. Eyewitnesses abound, but the physical evidence is flimsy.
"Why is the evidence so poor?" said Seth Shostak,
senior astronomer at the SETI Institute and director of the Center for
SETI Research. "One really good case might clinch it for them."
Shostak definitely
thinks there's intelligent life out there. Otherwise he wouldn't be
spending so much time and energy on the radio-based search for extraterrestrial intelligence,
a.k.a. SETI. But he also spends more than his share of time debating
people who are certain the aliens are already among us. Shostak
encountered one such true believer during a speaking engagement in
Chicago.
"One guy stood up and
said, 'You're just a mouthpiece for NASA!'" Shostak recalled. "And I
said, 'If that's true, don't they owe me some back pay?'"
Fermilab physicist Don Lincoln has also puzzled over society's fascination with extraterrestrial life — and wrote a book about it, titled "Alien Universe."
Among the subjects he
covers are the long-term projects to find traces of microbial life on
Mars or elsewhere in the solar system, or identify potentially habitable
planets beyond our solar system, or pick up radio signals from E.T. But
he also traces how our fascination with aliens has changed through the
years. For example, we're more likely to think of aliens as weirdly
altered humans — like the little green (or gray) men of "X-Files" fame or the pointy-eared Mr. Spock from "Star Trek."
"When we talk about the
more intelligent extraterrestrials, we're really holding a mirror up to
ourselves," Lincoln said. "If we didn't see ourselves in the vision, we
wouldn't find them nearly as fascinating."
But what about all those eyewitness reports? Lincoln said such reports don't cut it, even if they're attributed to presidents or generals.
"With something like this, which would have such breathtaking
consequences for our understanding of the universe, we're going to need
something more than 'somebody said so,'" he said.
And what about all those unexplained phenomena, like 2012's sightings of an object buzzing over Denver?
Just because someone can't explain why an object is behaving in a
particular way, doesn't make it an example of alien technology, Shostak
said. "That's an argument from ignorance, and that's not good," he said.
(By the way, the buzzing objects in the Denver video look a lot like bugs caught on camera.)
Shostak said the UFO
community has "its own iconography, its own lore," and even its own
belief that it's being held back by a vast conspiracy. John Podesta, who
left his post as a senior adviser in the Obama White House last month,
added fuel to the fire when he said in a tweet (perhaps in jest) that his biggest failure of the previous year was "once again not securing the disclosure of the UFO files."
Is the UFO debate a matter of science, politics ... or faith?
"People have accused
SETI of being some sort of religion," Shostak acknowledged. "But maybe
you could make that argument about the UFO community."
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