Thursday, January 14, 2021

When UFO-logy starts making sense




"Alien Contact: Outer Space" is a documentary available on YouTube. Somewhat ironically, at an science fiction channel! It was released in 2017.

The documentary mentions UFOs (as in extraterrestrial craft) only in passing. Instead, it investigates whether humans and alien civilizations might communicate through radio waves or slightly more exotic methods.

Since the people behind the show are presumably "true believers", some of the content is the usual conspiracy stuff about the Face on Mars, Elon Musk's Space X being attacked by a UFO, Nikola Tesla, and what have you. The Soviet "Phobos Incident" is given a saucerian spin. In 1989, a Soviet space probe took a photo of a very weird shadow on Mars, which looked like a 20 km long thin ellipse... 

The low point of this production is surely that it takes the so-called Southern Television broadcast interruption seriously. Yes, that would be good old Vrillon and the Ashtar Galactic Command! Does everyone in the universe speak English with an impeccable British accent? 

Other speculations are in the scientific borderland, such as the Dyson sphere some believe is circling Tabby's Star in Cygnus, or the claim that one could instantenously communicate with distant galaxies by somehow tapping into the "strings" postulated by string theory. What if the entire cosmos is one gigantic Internet? 

The most down-to-earth phenomenon mentioned in "Alien Contact" are the number stations. They are real and are probably used by intelligence services to send coded messages to spies. (The Ashtar Galactic Command preferred Southern Television.)

Although somewhat boring, I nevertheless found "Alien Contact" interesting. It seems the UFO mythos has evolved somewhat. Instead of visiting us in space ships of perfect pulp fiction vintage, the aliens now share their vast techno-knowledge through an intergalactic Internet, a kind of literal cyberspace. Of course they are! 

"Alien Contact: Open Space" also promote ideas which might rub the UFO subculture the wrong way. What if the aliens are so different from us, that they aren't interested in communicating at all? Both jellyfish and a praying mantis are used to symbolize aliens through out this production. Or what if their agendas are beyond our comprehension? The agenda might not even include us. Yet another possibility is that we aren't spiritually advanced to communicate with the space brothers in the first place. 

I was pleasantly surprised to hear this. That, of course, is the most likely solution to Fermi's paradox. Other intelligent species simply don't give a damn. Maybe that's why they are intelligent... 

After all these years, UFO-logy is suddenly making sense! 



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