In the early nineties, I "studied" at the University of Oslo, and spent a lot of time in the computer labs, which was one of the few places you could access the then fairly new internet. One of the services I spent a lot of time on was Usenet, a kind of predecessor to later web-based discussion forums. And one of the topics I was very interested in was UFOs.
It probably all started when a family member and a neighbor saw a mysterious light in the sky. The association UFO Norway got involved and came to my home town to hold a public meeting. We became members and were sent their membership magazine, which was always full of stories about people who had seen mysterious spaceships, been kidnapped by aliens and found pieces of metal in their bodies afterwards.
Hessdalen was of course also a recurring story, and when I later read up on information about Roswell and Area 51 in posts on Usenet, and the famous "alien autopsy" video appeared, I was sold.
This had to be real, and the government was obviously hiding something from us!
Gradually, I got better at critical thinking and my conviction began to wane. The evidence was always anecdotal and, of course, the infamous autopsy video turned out to be fake. As exciting as the X-Files was, claiming that The Truth was out there, I was no longer a believer.
The last couple of decades have been pretty quiet around UFOs. Perhaps because everyone suddenly carries a high-resolution digital cell phone camera with them everywhere, but the high-quality images and videos of flying saucers and aliens suspiciously haven't multiplied as a result.
But in recent years, UFOs have become a topic again. This time under the less stigmatized name UAPs - Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon.
While Unidentified Flying Objects, UFOs, is a bit of a leading term, because it implies that this must be both flying and a (physical) object, UAP is a bit more neutral. This probably makes sense as a large proportion of UFO sightings have turned out to be neither in the air nor any physical object at all.
US authorities have published some videos of such UAPs in recent years, and earlier this year whistleblower David Grush came forward with claims that authorities in many countries had both vessels and non-human biological organisms in their possession. But despite several interviews and official hearings, nothing of substance has yet to emerge.
As usual, however, the truth is "just around the corner", and soon the Big Reveal will finally come! But as usual, there turns out to be no hard evidence. It's just someone who has heard about someone who knows someone who has seen something...
I don't think there will be any groundbreaking revelations or evidence that we have been visited by intelligent life in modern times, or that there has been intelligent life on our planet before our own species became intelligent. It's not that I don't think there might be intelligent life out there somewhere. I think it's likely that there is. But because I don't think they have visited us - or ever could.
Here are some reasons why I think the UFO fans and whistleblowers are not telling the truth:
It's impossible to visit Earth from other solar systems
My first insight is perhaps the most obvious: The speed of light limits how fast you can travel, and the distances are too great.
The nearest exoplanets with potential for life are too far away from us. The closest exoplanet we've found orbits our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is a little more than 4 light years away from us. On a galactic scale, that's not really that far. If you could travel at the speed of light, it would only take four years to travel from Proxima Centauri to Earth.
But the laws of physics dictate that we cannot travel at the speed of light, as a particle of any mass would require an infinite amount of energy to reach that speed. It would therefore necessarily take considerably longer than four years.
Even if you traveled as fast as the fastest man-made object, which is the Parker Solar Probe flying away at an insane 700,000 km/h, that's still only 0.064% of the speed of light. It would still take thousands of years to reach our planet from our nearest star.
To top it all off, the planet Proxima Centauri b is unlikely to have higher life forms on it. If there was high-tech life so close to us, we would probably pick up electromagnetic signals from them, e.g. from the communication systems they use, as they would be able to reach us in just over four years. Other features of this star system also make life on its planets unlikely.
There are other planets that are only a few light years further away than Proxima Centauri b, but the laws of physics on how fast you can travel unfortunately still limits the possibility of anything or anyone travelling from there to us.
But perhaps intelligent beings on other planets have found a way to travel faster than light?
Is it perhaps arrogant to think that we humans, who are after all a fairly recent intelligent species and who have only known the basic laws of physics for a few hundred years, should have any answers? Perhaps super-intelligent beings who have had thousands or millions of years to research and develop technology have found ways to travel faster than light after all?
It's unlikely. Based on everything we know about the Universe, and everything we have seen and measured back to the origin of the Universe, the physical laws we know today have been valid everywhere and at all times. We have never observed anything with physical mass moving as fast or faster than light.
But if someone out there found a way to accelerate to a speed of, say, 10% of the speed of light in a short enough time, and they traveled from an exoplanet just a few tens of light years away, surely they could have sent unmanned craft to investigate Earth in a reasonable amount of time? Perhaps guided by artificial intelligence?
Or if they're manned and can accelerate fast enough without killing the crew with G-forces, perhaps they could create spaceships that higher life forms could live on for generations to make enormously long journeys? It would be a gigantic investment to make for intelligent beings who might have family and relationships like humans do, but perhaps they would find it worth it to make contact with other intelligent life forms?
After all, there are people who would be willing to make a one-way trip to Mars if given the chance.
Of course, we can't rule this out. But it's likely that intelligent beings curious about Earth would start by sending electromagnetic signals to us. It would be amazing to find a signal from space that had to be of intelligent origin.
And believe me, we've been listening. For example, through the SETI project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). This is something we've been scouring space to find for decades without yet discovering anything that probably comes from another intelligent civilization.
The closest we've come is the LGM signal, which was detected in 1967 but turned out to be from a pulsar. And then the WOW! signal in 1977, which we still don't have an explanation for, but which has also never been detected again since.
Yet even radio waves travelling at the speed of light would still be an impractical way to communicate, as it would statistically come from a civilization hundreds or thousands of light years away, and would take just as many years to reach us. If we received this signal, were able to interpret it, and send a response in return, those who received our response would likely be someone who no longer has knowledge that someone who lived "ages ago" ever sent us a signal. Or, more likely, their civilization will have perished before we can respond to them.
If they were unable to contact us via radio signals, or they wanted to be more discreet, perhaps the next logical step would be to send unmanned vessels to us, as previously discussed. After all, we have sent out unmanned space probes ourselves that might reach another intelligent civilization through sheer coincidence sometime long after our civilization has died out.
But if other civilizations have done the same, with more intelligent probes that have Earth as their specific target, we certainly haven't seen anything of them.
Not in modern times, at least. But could they have visited us with unmanned probes before Homo sapiens existed, or before we could write or had the technology to document this? Perhaps. But it must have been a very long time ago for them to reach us, send information back to their own planet, and then send out manned craft that have reached us now in modern times.
Given that the laws of physics place a limit on how fast both information exchange and spacecraft can move, all these hypotheses make little sense.
Should they have explored Earth on the basis of spectroscopic analysis of our atmosphere, or previous visits by unmanned craft, they would have encountered a very different planet than they thought. Because in the thousands or millions of years that have passed between when they first became aware of Earth and when they arrive here themselves, a lot has changed - to say the least. Dinosaurs have been replaced by humans, cars and skyscrapers.
They've also found a civilization that they obviously don't want contact with, as they've kept themselves very well hidden from us. So what's the point? Why go the incredibly cumbersome route of sacrificing their own inhabitants on journeys that will take several generations, and then not wanting to make contact with us, when they will never be able to return with the information and knowledge they have gathered about us to someone who was alive when they left their home planet?
What would be the point of visiting us to gather information they can't use because it can't be communicated back to their home planet in a reasonable amount of time, and at the same time they would have no contact with us?
That doesn't make sense either.
Intelligent life is out of sync
Another problem is that the Universe has been around for an awfully long time. Life on Earth emerged around 3.5 billion years ago. Homo sapiens only maybe 200,000 years ago. And the age of space travel has only existed for around 70-80 years on our planet.
How long will a technologically advanced civilization exist here on Earth? We don't know, of course, but there's no good reason to think we'll be around for millions of years. At best, we will survive a few thousand years before we perish as a result of war, pandemic, natural disaster, global warming, lack of resources, being smashed by a space body, or something else. Maybe we only have a few hundred years left.
If we assume that other intelligent civilizations will have the same challenges as us, it gives each intelligent civilization a very short window of time to interact with other civilizations.
For two intelligent civilizations on different planets in different solar systems to visit each other, they would have to exist at roughly the same time. But the Universe has existed for almost 14 billion years, and the likelihood of two intelligent civilizations having developed space technology and survived long enough to overlap with an intelligent civilization on another planet that is quite close is very small.
So while statistically there may be other intelligent civilizations out there somewhere, it's unlikely that those at the right level of development on a planet close enough are out there right now.
But what about pictures and videos of UAPs?
Those who truly believe that we have been visited by extraterrestrial intelligent life will argue that there is documentation of this in the form of photos and videos. Unfortunately, this is not true.
Photos are virtually useless as documentation, because they can be so easily faked, and because a static image provides too little information to be able to say anything about movement, speed or other characteristics that can say whether it is extraterrestrial or not.
Videos provide more information, but can also be easily faked, and the same issues of size, speed and distance arise here too. Even without the use of computer technology or advanced graphics, it is extremely easy to film videos of "flying objects" that appear to be moving extremely fast or in violation of physical laws simply by exploiting optical illusions related to parallax, zoom, unknown distance and size.
Virtually all known videos of UAPs can be explained if you have the right knowledge, which people like Mick West have done with most of the known UAP videos published by the US government and others.
For a good review of this, I recommend watching the new UFO movie from skeptic Brian Dunning, where Mick West explains why the known "UFO videos" are not documentation of extraterrestrial craft.
It is also important to remember that all allegedly unexplained videos of UAPs are always of poor quality. Why are there no really good quality videos documenting a UAP? Well, precisely because good quality videos show that there is nothing unexplained after all. Therefore, by definition, such a video must be of relatively poor quality to qualify as "unexplained".
From this, it can be extrapolated that the poor quality videos do not contain genuine footage of UAPs either. It is the poor quality itself that makes the videos inexplicable. Not what they actually contain. They are just "noise in the data".
But David Grush says that many countries possess evidence?
One of the claims of the latest whistleblower David Grush is that US authorities, as well as those of many other countries, have for many decades been retrieving crashed vessels - and in some cases also "unknown beings" - that they have kept secret and researched for a long time.
This makes no sense. If a farmer somewhere in the world suddenly digs up an alien craft in his field, what is the likelihood that we have never heard about it? It would mean that they somehow alerted the authorities before talking about this mysterious discovery with anyone else, such as family, neighbors, local journalists, police or scientists.
Since such discoveries have reportedly been made many times in different countries, even in recent times, what is the likelihood that no one ever took photos that they shared on Instagram? Or that none of them were visited by local journalists who took pictures that ended up in the local newspaper? Or that no local TV crew went out and filmed and did a story on this mysterious find?
How likely is it that the authorities are always contacted first so that they have time to remove the evidence and convince the eyewitnesses to shut up before someone else spreads the information via word of mouth, the media or the internet?
Almost zero, I would say. Unless there are Men in Black who have memory wiping gadgets like in the movies...
And why is this kept secret in the first place? If only the USA had such technology in its possession, one could perhaps understand why they would keep it secret. But if many countries have found similar technology, and all these countries obviously know that other countries have found the same thing, why keep it secret? Secret from whom? For what reason?
It's also strange that no new technology has sprung from these discoveries. If scientists all over the world have been investigating these vessels for over a hundred years already, have they really not been able to extract any useful information?
There is no modern technology that we don't know the exact, slow progression and development of. Nothing revolutionary has ever appeared "out of the blue". So what does the government have to gain by keeping something secret for so long when they obviously can't get anything useful out of it, military or otherwise?
Illogical crashes
According to Grush, many countries have found crashed high-tech vessels that they have brought to their secret research bases. But why do these vessels keep crashing?
It seems somewhat strange that these super-intelligent beings can construct such advanced space technology that they can travel perhaps thousands of light years to Earth at insane speeds with no problems, only to crash when they reach our planet.
Not just once, but repeatedly.
We don't know how many such vessels have been found. But they have been found in many countries, so maybe at least ten spaceships? If the crash rate equals one, then they must have sent at least a thousand such vessels to us. Why so many? Since Grush claims the US government has living aliens in its possession, it must have happened in fairly modern times. So why have we never detected them in flight if they are of such a mechanical nature that they can crash and be dug up from a field in Italy somewhere?
Maybe the living organism crashed ten thousand years ago, before we had cameras and newspapers and the internet, but they just live an awfully long time. Who knows? But all of this just ends up in more and more silly hypotheses that are strictly speaking completely unnecessary when the chances of being able to travel to Earth are probably zero in the first place.
Who is it that sees UAPs?
Another point that makes me find it implausible that Earth has been visited by extraterrestrial intelligent life is that those with the best knowledge of the Universe have never seen any signs of this.
When pictures and videos of UAPs do appear, it's almost always from amateurs. People like you and me. In most cases, these turn out to be the moon, Venus, balloons, light reflections, shooting stars/meteors, airplanes, artificial satellites (most often Starlink satellites in modern times), atmospheric phenomena, or anything else that those with knowledge of space would not be fooled by.
However, those who immediately understand that these are natural phenomena, strangely enough, never see anything that is completely unexplainable. Astronomers who scrutinize the sky and the Universe 24/7 have almost never discovered anything mysterious. They have never taken pictures or filmed anything that could be characterized as a convincing UAP. How strange.
Today, we have several advanced telescopes and instruments both on the surface of the earth, as well as out in space, that are watching all the time. And they see nothing unnatural. Yet people think that some random guy with a cell phone must have filmed something out there that all the world's professional astronomers and thousands upon thousands of amateur astronomers never discovered?
Well, there are some scientists who have been open to the possibility that we may have been visited by extraterrestrial beings. Perhaps the most famous is J. Allen Hynek, but he investigated UFO sightings in the 1950s and 1960s that are no longer considered credible today. When the US government released a report in 2021, and later thousands of documents, photos and videos of UFO sightings and investigations that had not previously been public, there were no conclusions that any of it was extraterrestrial in nature.
The best they could say was that there were some that were unexplained. But when they released the best videos they had of such UAPs, the so-called "Pentagon videos", these were all quickly debunked by critical UFO nerds.
When the best evidence coming from the most credible sources within the military and scientific communities did not hold water, there is little reason to assume that the other sightings are any more convincing.
Another highly respected professional who believes there is evidence of extraterrestrial visits to Earth, Harvard professor Avi Loeb, despite his scientific credentials, is probably a little too caught up in his own convictions to think clearly anymore.
See Rebecca Watson's short review of his somewhat embarrassing outburst here:
And although Hynek's UFO projects such as Project Blue Book concluded that there were too many unexplained sightings to dismiss the idea that this was something from outer space, these were sightings made decades ago. The fact that since then, with much more advanced equipment and extremely widespread possession of cameras, we have not documented anything credible does not support the hypothesis that the early sightings studied by Hynek are of any particular value.
UFO sightings and cultural impact
Also, why are almost all UFO/UAP sightings made in the US, and to a lesser extent other high-income countries?
Part of the reason is, of course, that rich countries often have equipment such as cameras and video cameras to document the sightings. But today, most people in low-income countries also have cell phones with cameras, and yet we get almost no observations from there. At least none that are convincing.
Even in industrialized countries, the USA and to some extent the UK stand out as countries with extremely more UFO reports than other countries such as Norway, Spain, Russia, Japan and Australia. Why is that?
The likely answer to all of this is popular culture. UFO/UAP sightings tend to increase when popular culture makes it trendy. The American space program in the post-World War II era led to a cascade of comics, books, TV shows and movies about UFOs and aliens. Not unexpectedly, there was a flurry of alleged UFO sightings in the wake of this.
The descriptions of spaceships or "aliens" that people have seen also largely follow cultural expectations over time. In the fifties, "flying saucers" were described as having an appearance that was quite rounded and with a shape reminiscent of the car design of the time. Whereas in more recent times, they are described more in line with something reminiscent of modern car design, or something seen in Star-Wars or other movies. The same goes for the appearance of the aliens themselves.
It suggests that the brain is doing what it always does: When we see something we don't immediately understand the nature of, the brain will automatically try to "fill in the blanks" with something we can understand. It then feels as if we have seen what the brain tells us we have seen, even though it often does not correspond to reality.
Oddly enough, this also applies to images and videos, which tend to show vessels that follow earthly design trends and popular culture. A clear sign of fakes, as I doubt that extraterrestrial beings care much about our fashions...
In Tanzania, "flying saucers" are probably less visible in popular culture than they have been in the US for the last 70 years. Therefore, they won't think they're seeing a flying saucer when they see something their brain can't immediately interpret. They are more likely to "see" something that fits into their local mythology.
But surely a fighter pilot can't be wrong?
Some people also have an exaggerated belief that military personnel or pilots have a special competence to always know and understand what they see. In the US in particular, people in the military enjoy (undeserved) respect, and it is all too common for credibility to rise in line with military rank. But it's silly and wrong. They are as easily fooled as the rest of us.
The physicist Richard P. Feynman once said something that I have used both in my book and in my lectures when I talk about how the brain tricks us:
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
James Randi demonstrated this clearly when he tricked researchers Targ and Puthoff into believing that a couple of young men had paranormal abilities - even though they had only learned some fairly simple magic tricks from the magician Randi. Their belief that serious scientists like themselves could not be fooled meant that they were easily fooled.
This has been shown time and time again in the military - think of the US government's research projects like MK-Ultra, which included research and belief in telekinesis and clairvoyance. Something that fell apart completely when the self-delusions eventually subsided.
A more recent example was when the Chilean military in 2017 published a video that was hailed as finally being a genuine recording of a UAP - something they claimed there could be no earthly explanation for. They had put their best military scientists and specialists to investigate this video for over two years without finding any natural explanation.
But after the video went public, it took Mick West and a team of internet nerds just a few hours to show that what they had filmed was just Iberia flight 6830 taking off from Santiago airport. Oops.
The same goes for the latest so-called "Pentagon videos", as well as a number of other videos that UFO enthusiasts swear must be evidence of extraterrestrial visitations, even though West and co, or other people with knowledge and computer graphics and animation, have mostly given very plausible natural explanations for all of them. Or in some cases incontrovertibly demonstrated that they are outright fakes.
We humans are very poor observers, and observations made with our eyes, or with cameras and radars, must be interpreted in the light of correct information about distance, relative motion and more. Without this key information, even the best-trained fighter pilot will not be able to know if an object is moving fast and far away, or slow and close.
Despite all the testimony from military personnel or pilots, only rigid scientific investigation can give us the answer. And the answers so far have been that the UAPs show no signs of moving in any extraterrestrial way.
Conclusion
We have no evidence that extraterrestrial intelligent life or vessels from other intelligent civilizations have visited our planet.
- The images and videos that exist have one by one proved to be either fakes or something that can be explained as terrestrial objects or phenomena.
- Those who scrutinize space all the time, and who have the expertise to understand what they see, have never presented any good evidence for anything like that either.
- It is statistically unlikely that intelligent civilizations exist at the same time as us and close enough to us that they would be able to visit us.
- The laws of physics dictate that they would not be able to visit us.
- And claims about vessels and beings that have been found all over the world without a single ordinary person or journalist ever having documented this are unreasonable.
I believe there is intelligent life out there somewhere. There are too many planets in our galaxy, and too many galaxies in the Universe, for it not to be statistically probable.
But I don't think they can visit us. Unfortunately. Because nothing would be more exciting and amazing than if that happened.
