If intelligent aliens ever visit the Earth, it would be one of the most profound events in the history of humanity. Ever since we were Neanderthals who discovered fire and started evolving into the humans we are today, we have had a fascination for strange beings in the sky.
If intelligent aliens ever visit the Earth, it would be one of the most profound events in the history of humanity. Ever since we were Neanderthals who discovered fire and started evolving into the humans we are today, we have had a fascination for strange beings in the sky.
There are theories that ancient aliens taught us everything we know today, planted the seeds of development into our brains. Surveys conducted show that nearly 50% of Americans believe that aliens have visited the Earth, either in the ancient past or recently. That percentage has gradually been increasing. Belief in alien visitation is greater than belief that Bigfoot is a real creature, but less than the belief that places can be haunted by ghosts.
Scientists dismiss these beliefs as not representing real physical phenomena. They don’t deny the existence of intelligent aliens. But they set a high bar for proof that we’ve been visited by creatures from another star system. As Carl Sagan had once said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
UFO simply means unidentified flying object. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. In America, there’s a long history of UFO sightings. Air Force studies of UFOs have been going on since the 1940s. In the United States, “ground zero” for UFOs occurred in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico.
The fact that the Roswell incident was soon explained as the crash landing of a military high-altitude balloon didn’t stem a tide of new sightings. The majority of UFOs appear to people in the United States. It’s curious that Asia and Africa have so few sightings despite their large populations, and even more surprising that the sightings stop at the Canadian and Mexican borders.
UFOs are part of the landscape of conspiracy theories, including accounts of abduction by aliens and crop circles created by aliens. I remain skeptical that intelligent beings with vastly superior technology would travel trillion of miles just to press down our crops. So, while UFOs continue to swirl in the popular culture, scientists are trying to answer the big question that is raised by UFOs: Are we alone? Starting 2008, there have been numerous reports of sightings of strange cigar-shaped UFOs.
Dozens of astonishing UFO sightings witnessed by pilots and classified as “near misses” have been released by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The detailed list of reports covers UFO or so-called Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) sightings from January 1, 2008 to the present.
The list, published on the Black Vault site, covers more than 60 “near miss” encounters with unexplained objects recorded by trained pilots in just 14 years. The sightings have been reported in abundance in the last few years, with conspiracy theorists having eagerly engaged in speculation about what kind of creatures could be operating the gigantic oblongish objects.
Californians have spotted a cigar-shaped craft hovering in the sky above the state, akin to previous, similarly-shaped “UFOs” earlier seen in the area. A puzzling footage showed a rather long dark object that emerged on 31 January, 2021 under the caption “UFO over the Pacific” and instantly drew a slew of responses and went viral.
A silver, cylindrical object with no visible wings or windows and a linear shape. The object was filmed at 4 PM one can just see it cruising over the horizon. The visibility is very good, and there are no clouds to speak of because there is nothing in the way of this object. “This is not a UFO but a flying cigar,” one viewer wrote under the video shared by Antoni ENKI, with another apparently being lost for words over the sight of the enigmatic structure remaining motionless in the air for some time.
Earlier in the same month, another recording of what seemed to be a similar “craft” in the night sky was shared. Such objects have been seen in the US multiple times, with the frequency of sightings increasing as the years progressed. Speaking of cigar shaped UFOs, if a famous interstellar visitor comes to your mind, then you’re not alone. Yes, I’m talking about Oumuamua.
Astronomers from the University of Hawaii first spotted the mysterious celestial body known as “Oumuamua” in October, when it passed the Earth at about 85 times the distance to the moon. It is the first object discovered in the solar system that appears to have originated from another part of the galaxy.
Although thought to be an asteroid, Oumuamua’s elongated shape – hundreds of metres in length but only one tenth as wide – was considered highly unusual for a space rock. Traveling at up to 196,000 mph, the object’s high speed also suggests that it is not gravitationally bound to the sun but is destined to head back out of the solar system.
Even Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million programme which was backed by late British physicist Stephen Hawking, Russian digital tech mogul Yuri Milner, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, was investigating whether Oumuamua may have unnatural origins. The organization, whose aim is to search for evidence of civilizations beyond Earth, was using the world’s largest maneuverable radio telescope at Green Bank in West Virginia to track the object.
The giant dish began “listening” to the object across four radio frequency bands, in an attempt to detect electromagnetic signals that cannot be produced in nature. According to many scientists, the trajectory and behavior of Oumuamua consistent with the motion of a spaceship whose engines have failed.
A derelict spacecraft would, if they are not traveling so fast that they escape the Galaxy, eventually ‘thermalize’ with the stars and end up drifting around like any other interstellar comet or asteroid. But, since they presumably no longer have attitude control, one would expect that they would eventually begin to tumble, and if they are very rigid that tumbling might have a distinguished motion than that of ordinary interstellar asteroids.
And in fact, just because their propulsion is broken doesn’t mean that their radio transmitters would be broken. While we were never able to fully answer the questions about the true nature of Oumuamua, there’s no doubt that it was very unnatural and stranger than any space rock ever seen. Coming back to the cigar shaped UFOs spotted across the skies in different locations, could they perhaps be the non-derelict, still functional versions of Oumuamua’s peers? Ones that managed to make it close enough to Earth to get a clear picture of our planet?
And what’s interesting is that all these sightings of the cigar shaped UFOs happened during the lockdown. A time when the whole of humanity was forced to stay behind closed doors. Seems like the perfect time if some alien species wanted to make a quick stop by. In closing, even the known universe is an unimaginably vast expanse, forget the unknown. We’ve no good reason to assume we are the only intelligent beings in the universe.
Astronomers are finding exoplanets everywhere they look. Many fall in the habitable zones. Just think back fifty years. Think of the technological advances you’ve seen. Think how they have affected your daily life. Now, envision our technology some 1,000 odd years into the future. The universe is estimated to be 13.
7 billion years old, so extrapolate technology 10,000 years into the future, or a million … or a billion years. Yeah…there’s no way you can still think ours is the only planet that developed life on it.
