Belief in UFOs, once the province of cranks, has gained respectability. This is for good reason: The Pentagon has acknowledged that footage of “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP), as it prefers calling them, is real and that the military is still investigating them. It also has admitted to “testing” UFO wreckage. Moreover, an increasing number of credible people — such as rational former Navy pilots — have come forward to attest that they’ve observed craft displaying flight characteristics that appear to violate the laws of physics.
In keeping with this new era of supposed UFO transparency, the government is poised to issue a report on the matter later this month. But X-Files fans who may think we’ll learn that Uncle Sam has been breaking bread with little green men shouldn’t get their hopes up. For there’s a good reason why the government won’t answer the UFO question:
It can’t.
So says American Thinker’s Robert Arvay, pointing out that UFOs are a “paradox.” He explains:
Briefly stated, a paradox occurs when two statements of supposed facts are perceived to contradict each other. The UAP paradox is that the UAPs behave as if they wished to avoid detection, yet they get detected anyway. Why is that a paradox? Because, any technology that is capable of the reported flight characteristics of the UAPs, capabilities that exceed anything earthly we know about, and indeed, can seem to violate the known laws of physics, must surely be capable of stealth technology vastly exceeding ours — and ours is fairly good, and getting better, despite having been first developed in its present form only in recent decades.
In short, if the UAPs are the product of advanced technology, as they seem to be, then either they wish to hide or not. If they wish to hide, we should never, ever, be able to detect them. If they do not wish to hide, we should see them frequently, under conditions of irrefutable evidence. The paradox is that they do neither. They hide, and then they don’t hide. What could be the explanation for that?
I’ve long asked this question as well: Why would beings with such advanced technology allow themselves to be spotted? Sure, it’s plausible that a glitch in their systems could cause them to appear to our eyes and technology once in a blue moon. But reports are that these UFOs are detected continually.
Arvay is open to the possibility that UFOs are extraterrestrial in nature, but finds the evidence to prove this thesis insufficient. Yet he correctly says it’s even less plausible that UFOs have earthly origin, as this also presents a paradox.
To wit: “Any nation (or organization) that possesses the technology to do what the UAPs are reported to do would have in its hands such power, such force, such a threat that no one could oppose it,” he writes. “Yet we see no evidence of any nation wielding such power, an inaction that would be highly implausible were they to have it.”
Moreover, Arvay points out that man’s possession of UFO “technology” would have as a prerequisite the development of “enormous scientific infrastructure.” “By that, I mean that if someone has developed inertial drive, or anti-gravity, or some equally advanced expertise, the scientific principles underlying such advancements would surely have affected other areas of science and technology,” he continues. “We would already have such exotic things as flying cars, indestructible materials, ten-mile-high buildings, and so forth.”
No doubt. We’d be living in a very, very different world if we possessed such technology.
Yet there is another possibility: hologram technology — which is being developed for military applications.
A hologram is, of course, “a three-dimensional image reproduced from a pattern of interference produced by a split coherent beam of radiation (such as a laser),” as Merriam-Webster puts it. Now, let’s say the government were working on holography that could make it appear that ships, planes, tanks, and other objects exist where they don’t. Wouldn’t the best test of this technology be if you could, on a regular basis, fool trained pilots and others into believing the holograms were real craft?
While this would explain the frequent UFO sightings, a flaw in the thesis is that the UFOs are sometimes detected not just by the human eye but also radar.
Then again, there’s this: “Scientists at Bristol University have discovered a way to make 3D holograms that we can touch and feel in mid-air,” Newsweek reported in 2014. Does this mean that holograms visible to radar could be created as well?
(Of course, it should also be considered that UFOs have been detected for longer than hologram technology has existed.)
I lack the scientific knowledge to answer that question intelligently. Speaking of which, Arvay contends that a lack of knowledge on the government’s part is precisely why the UFO report will present nothing substantial.
This likely is true, too. So if UFO buffs are looking forward to something titillating later this month, they’d better watch reruns of the X-Files.
(Note: For those interested, below are three interesting Tucker Carlson Tonight UFO segments from the past year.)
