There is a pretty pervasive and consistent assumption in our long history of UFO sightings: that the unidentified objects some of us see in the night sky are vehicles or crafts inside of which are what we’re really interested in—the aliens themselves. But what if this assumption is mistaken? What if the craft or vehicle itself is what’s alien, full stop? What would this discovery entail?
UFOs are like mirrors for human nature
The long history of UFO sightings in the world, taken as a whole, can act as a reflecting pool for our often subconscious beliefs and assumptions. The term “flying saucer” has been around since the late 1940s, when a private pilot named Kevin Arnold reported seeing something fitting that description in the skies over Mount Rainier in Washington state. The moniker stuck because it seems to aptly describe what so many people since then have described seeing in the night sky. UFO sightings often involve a disk-shaped object in the sky, sometimes with lights or doors or other hardware that suggest the object opens to allow for entry and exit. But of what or whom?
UFO lore is full of stories of the mysterious and elusive beings inside these disk-shaped crafts. Commonly, they’re described as little gray beings with two eyes, one nose, one mouth, two arms, and two legs, which sounds suspiciously similar to human beings, as Neil deGrasse Tyson points out in his latest book on the subject, Take Me to Your Leader. Why would beings from a distant corner of our universe or another universe entirely have so much in common with us, the so-called intelligent beings from planet Earth? I always found the cliché of “little green men” to be imaginatively bankrupt and was happy to find out I’m in good company with Tyson on that score.
Imagining Aliens Differently
Recent years especially have given rise to differently and more originally conceived “aliens” that are insect-like in nature (which arguably still overlaps quite a bit with our familiar earthly evolution) or more like octopus (as in the film Arrival) or even as cloud formations, as suggsted in the more innovative alien film, Nope (though it is unclear, likely on purpose, whether the cloud is the alien creature, an alien craft, or just a clever curtain behind which the alien creature or craft is hiding). One of my favorite films ever is Solaris—remade in English starring George Clooney, from the original Russian (Soviet) film released decades earlier—because it features an entire planet, Solaris, that is conscious and able to influence human thought and behavior from afar. Now that’s innovative.
Our search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been admittedly quite human-centric. Take, for example, SETI’s (SETI = search for extraterrestrial intelligence) long-standing habit of sending radio signals and various forms of media (such as TV broadcasts) out into the universe in hopes of, what? Getting an alien to chuckle at our clever 1980s sitcoms? I always wondered whether aliens would even register human-made radio waves. Or would recognize our math. Or have vision, hearing, and touch. Why would we assume these things? We do not know what aliens are like, if they exist at all. And maybe our human imagination cannot even conceive of what they might be like.
Could the UFO crafts be the aliens?
Why not? I think it’s interesting that we assume the objects we see in the sky and admit are “unidentified” are nevertheless assumed to be the vehicle and not the being itself. How would we know?
Some more far-out hypotheses suggest these crafts are some manifestation of ourselves (humans) from the future visiting current reality. Another possibility I like to think about is that if we are living in a computer-simulated reality (à la Rizwan Virk’s The Simulation Hypothesis and The Simulated Multiverse), then perhaps these UFOs are programs that are briefly rendered real (as in taking on physical form) as they dip into our “reality” almost like a 3D-printed object, which begins as an idea and takes form as it’s “printed.”
But if the craft is the being, then where are we getting all these ideas and images of so-called “little green men”? I think it’s telling that perhaps the most robust accounts of UFOs that come from highly trained professionals like military personnel and pilots typically describe only the craft or vehicle and not little inhabitants that are inside the craft, as seen in the final scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Could it be that the little beings have been imagined, a projection of human consciousness, which explains why their anatomy is not wildly divergent from that of human beings? And could it be that the craft, the objects themselves, are what we need to focus on instead of being sidetracked by imagining there’s more inside? The crafts are the things that are stumping pilots and other trained professionals, with their extreme speeds, utter silence, and ability to seemingly pop into and out of our reality in the blink of an eye.
Rethinking the term “alien”
We might go further and rethink the term “alien” as well. “Alien” as a word has pretty much become synonymous with the green alien face we see everywhere in pop culture, the weird-looking being from beyond. But what if alien refers not to the creature itself but to the layer of space or even dimension of time instead? Perhaps these crafts are from an alien time period (the future?) or an alien space (a different dimension?). I believe rethinking our assumptions around UFOs and aliens is a good starting point for beginning to “identify” these unidentified flying objects.
