Just WTF are UFOs?

I believe that UFOs are real. It’s not something I can directly prove, but my belief is “beyond a reasonable doubt”, ie, if I were a juror on a criminal trial and the evidence of guilt was clear and “beyond a reasonable doubt”, I would believe the accused was guilty. That’s the nature of my belief.

In brief:

The universe is vast and old[1]. Sometime in the past billions of years, at least one alien civilization arose, developed the technology for space travel, and sent out self-replicating probes to explore our galaxy. These probes would

1. Visit a system.
2. Explore.
3. Replicate themselves and dispatch the replicas to nearby systems.
4. Hunker down and wait to see if anything interesting happens.

What we call UFOs originate from some unknown location within our solar system. They may have been observing Earth for millions or even billions of years. They might be based here on the Earth - under an ocean, for example - or they might have established multiple locations here or in space or on various planets. There may be two or more different “UFO Expeditions” watching us, and they may or may not be cooperating, or even aware of each other.

It’s fun and easy to speculate about questions like

• What do they do with their observations?
• Are they doing more than simply observing?
• Why haven’t they made their presence known?
• etc.

Speculation about self-replicating probes goes back at least to lunchtime sometime in 1950, when Enrico Fermi asked his physicist pals “But where is everybody?”[2]

Why haven’t they made themselves known to us? My cop-out of an answer is

• We have not yet met their criteria for contact, or
• They may not be interested in contact at all - they just like to watch.

Given our current level of experience with aliens (ie, none) any speculation about the motivations of an advanced alien civilization is, well, speculation.

But while we’re speculating, I’ll toss out a couple of things:

1. The “Watchers” are experienced at operating on extremely long time-spans. They may be machines, or maybe they hibernate for long periods when nothing interesting is happening, or maybe they simply have extremely long life-spans.
2. The “Watchers” may indeed look like “grays”, and they might engage in things like abductions, anal probes, cattle mutilations, and activities taken straight from X-Files and various conspiracy theories. I’m not saying they do. Just: we can’t rule it out.
3. They don’t want to talk to us. It’s not a language barrier thing: they’ve been watching human civilization grow for thousands of years. They can certainly speak and understand any human language perfectly. But they don’t want to.
4. There might really be a conspiracy. But I seriously doubt it, primarily because people suck at keeping secrets. If aliens are in contact with any humans, they are a very small, select set of people who are possessed of a unique psychology. Or the aliens are blackmailing them to keep quiet.

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[1] Current scientific thinking has that the universe is very large (93 billion light years in diameter) and very old (14 billion years). It is also generally agreed that the speed of light is an upper limit on how fast something can travel.

[2] The Fermi Paradox asks the question “where is everybody?” Even given the light speed limit, if there was a space-faring civilization out there in the Milky Way galaxy, it could have explored the entire galaxy with self-replicating probes (as above) within just a few million years, ie, a very very short span of time on the cosmic scale of things.