The Truth May Not Be Out There

Way back in the mid-1970s I was a kid who read a lot of science fiction and watched a lot of monster movies. Then, as now, my imagination had a tendency to get the better of me.

So, one summer night I remember laying in a sleeping bag next to my brother in the yard. Back then, I didn’t mind sleeping under the stars on the hard ground – it was a lot like camping, but breakfast would be waiting for us in the kitchen in the morning. I remember Kerry snoring next to me while I looked up at the stars.

We were lucky to live in the mountains where the only light pollution came from billions and billions of stars. I never knew about the constellations, nor did I care that much. At 10, I knew I wasn’t going to be an astronomer or anything like that. My dreams were of writing stories that were fed to me by my imagination.

It was startling when I saw an object high above quickly moving across the night sky. There were no colored lights or changes in direction or any of that movie crap. It just went across from left to right.

I knew then that it was an alien spacecraft just driving by looking for 10-year-old kids to abduct. I was hoping that their sensors had not detected me because I was deathly afraid of being abducted. I didn’t want to be probed and prodded and dissected. I didn’t go in the house because I’d already gotten enough grief from my older brothers over the fears that haunted me. I lay there awake until daylight, ready to scream when the ship came in for a landing and the aliens got out.

It wasn’t that long when I learned that a person could see satellites up in the sky at night sometimes. I felt a little foolish when I was struck the realization that what I saw was probably a satellite, but the fear had been real.

For some reason, I always think about that incident when someone brings up UFOs, which are now called – in typical military jargon – Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAP. Where this most recent conversation occurred is a little odd, because I was sitting across the desk from my financial advisor. I was there to talk about retirement and whether I was going to be able to do so.

He is a competent and nice enough fellow the same age as me. Being from a generation that has considerably fewer members than the ones ahead or behind us, we have a tendency to chat each other up in such settings. There’s the usual talk of kids and work and weather, but I know underneath the exterior of the professional business person is a guy who had once slammed at a Misfits concert or a woman who had once shaved the hair off one side of her head and dyed the rest green.

The financial guy, I learned, was a UFO guy. Normally, if you are into that kind of stuff you don’t usually bring it up during professional type meetings. However, I’d opened the door when I casually talked about the science fiction books I had written and were working on. Add to that the fact that we were meeting just as a former military intelligence officer was testifying before a congressional subcommittee that the US military had “multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs.”

Financial Guy then told me that he is fascinated by such things and always had been. Again, if you stop and think about the topics of discussion during a financial analysis meeting, this one would not have been in the Top 10. We all have different things that keep our mind occupied in those quiet moments of contemplation, and his was UFOs. I know I’ve been guilty of thinking about the consequences of little green men showing up on our doorstep, if they haven’t already. I just don’t obsess about it.

However, Financial Guy brought up something that I’d never really considered.

“I wonder what the economic impact that a revelation like that would have?” he asked. I think it was a rhetorical question, and I went off in a different direction. When he thought of UFOs he thought in economic terms. That made sense, he’s Financial Guy; he spends his days thinking of markets and funds and indexes and such things. When I think about UFOs I think of the sociological issues, specifically related to media and marketing, because that’s my background.

The US government, I told him, have known about aliens for years. However, they know that if they were to announce tomorrow everything that they do know it would send the world into a panic. So, since 1982 and the release of the movie “E.T.” the government has been working on branding aliens as not something frightening, but as something benevolent; a cure creature that befriends children, loves Reese’s Pieces and just wants to phone home.

The point of revealing something earth-shattering will happen soon, I explained. The evidence is that recent videos released by the Pentagon, feature stories on CBS Sunday Morning, congressional hearings and everything else is laying the groundwork for the reveal, at which point most people will think to themselves, “Oh yeah, we already knew that.”

Did I believe that line of shit I gave Financial Guy? Not really. The specifics were created from my imagination based on the large amount of information that I read. To me, it seems plausible in a borderline conspiracy kind of way. If you are paranoid about the government, it might make perfect sense. I’m not big on government conspiracies, though, because in my experience, the government does a somewhat competent job of delivering the mail, but the rest of it moves forward mostly through inertia. I also know a thing or two about human beings and for a conspiracy to work, you have to make sure your conspirators keep their mouths shut, and that is just not in our nature.

I do think there are things out there that defy explanation. We’ve all seen the famous Tic-Tac video from 2004 in which a Navy pilot recorded a UAP as it zipped around the sky. The pilot didn’t know what it was. Analysts who have studied the video don’t know what it is. There wasn’t much of an investigation on the incident and numerous others over the years. In fact, pilots don’t report much of what they see if it’s out of the ordinary because they fear picking up the reputation of being a weirdo.

We are human beings, though, and we demand answers. We must know the reason behind everything and if we aren’t satisfied with the answer we believe it is a conspiracy to hide the truth. Many times, however, there is no answer other than “I don’t know,” which is unacceptable.

So, are there alien spaceships flying around Earth and abducting people? I don’t know, but the evidence seems to suggest probably not.

Back in 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi was having lunch with some colleagues and the discussion got into the UFO mania that was sweeping across the US at the time. Being physicists, they put their big brains to casually looking at the odds that alien life exists. They argued that if we accept the Big Bang Theory idea that the universe is just under 15 billion years old and that our solar system is just over 4 billion years old, you can assume that in that vastness there would be planets that could sustain life and develop civilizations. Being so much older than humans, these civilizations could feasibly come up with interstellar travel.

Fermi must have stopped the lunchtime conversation when he reportedly responded to all of that with the question, “So, where is everyone?”

Indeed, where are all those aliens? We are at a point in time where access to technology and research is available to just about anyone. We have radio telescopes pointed to the heavens looking for those guys. Where’s the evidence of little green men? Of spaceships? Even though nearly every human being on this planet has a computer with a camera in our pockets, there has yet to be any footage shot in 1080 pixels to be posted showing spaceships, or Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster.

So, yeah. I believe that there actually might be other civilizations out there in the universe, and maybe even they are visiting us. But it doesn’t make much difference in how I go about my life. I have many, many things that worry me more than aliens, and there many, many things that scare me more than the idea of becoming an attraction in some alien zoo.

Not long after that night when I saw the satellite skimming across the sky, my brother and I were out in our sleeping bags again in the yard. I awoke to a sight that was much more frightening than an alien space ship.

My brother was asleep on his back and in the moonlight I could see there was a skunk sitting on his chest and looking at his face. The skunks tail looked to be in attack position, so I did not make a move. I watched for five minutes before it got bored and went wandering off. But I didn’t know where it had gone of if it would come back.

Again, I spent the night awake paralyzed in fear, because most of our fears are grounded in something terrestrial, like whether I have enough saved for retirement.