Since UFO observations seem to not discriminate in terms of beliefs, religions, social stratus , gender, age or professions, and many of the witnesses, such as pilots and control towers technicians, put most likely their careers in danger when they talk about witnessing unidentified flying objects, a general feeling of uneasiness surrounds this issue.
Even if many of witness testimonies can be explained as a mix of mundane phenomena observed under odd circumstances it is still unsettling that many other of these accounts cannot be rationally explained and they come from seemingly reliable individuals, pillars of the community with solid reputations for integrity and highly trained professionals who would loose more than gain on the sharing of their experiences.
The truth is that, most scientists and engineers, would love to learn that Dr. Einstein's speed limit could be violated and thus offer proof that we are indeed being visited by those who have travelled across gulfs of space. But whilst this is a most entertaining thought, poised with dazzling possibilities, the speed limit and other classical physics laws demostrate the contrary.
However, through quantum physics we are learning that classical physics nor have all the answers to the nature of the universe nor a complete handle in its functioning.
At a quantum level, the world that surrounds us does not seem to follow the logical physical laws that we have learned.
A particle can be here and there at the same time, matter can behave as an energy wave and an energy wave can behave as matter. As spellbinding as this sounds, the truth is that our knowledge of this universe, that we believe we enjoy of in exclusivity, could very well be in its infancy under the perspective of a more advanced civilization.
Bernard Haisch, an active professional astronomer from Palo Alto, California, who has published a respectable number of scientific papers, who has been Principal Investigator on several NASA studies, have served as referee and proposal reviewer for NASA and NSF says that "UFO sightings are not limited to farmers in backward rural areas. There are astronomers and pilots and NASA engineers -- and others who have been around the block a few times when it comes to observing natural phenomena -- who have witnessed events for which there is no plausible conventional explanation.".
He also points out that "recently astrophysicist Ken Olum at Tufts University argued that anthropic reasoning applied to inflation theory predicts that we should find ourselves part of a large, galaxy-sized civilization, implying that the "We are alone" solution to Fermi's paradox (link) is inconsistent with our best current theory of cosmology.
Beatriz Gato-Rivera, a physicist at the Instituto de Matematicas y Fisica in Madrid, followed up on this (physics/0308078) with the hypothesis that Olum is correct, but that by design we would be kept unaware of a greatly advanced surrounding civilization. She also argues that modern superstring and M-brane theory further aggravate Fermi's "missing alien" problem. It is quite strange that while our best modern physics and astrophysics theories thus predict that we should be experiencing extraterrestrial visitation, any possible evidence of such in the form of a subset of UFO reports is ignored or ridiculed."
And as he also declares: "Any scientist who has not read a few serious books and articles presenting actual UFO evidence should out of intellectual honesty refrain from making scientific pronouncements. To look at the evidence and go away unconvinced is one thing. To not look at the evidence and be convinced against it nonetheless is another. That is not science."
Maybe, after all, the truth is not only out there, but right under our noses. |
