Alien View: Skepticism About UFOs Ignites Boosters

I make more friends defaming cats than I do doubting UFOs.

Of the several letters I have received in response to my column expressing skepticism about alien landings on Earth only one agreed with me.

The author’s reason was the same as mine: It would take them too long to get here.

Henry J. Shames of Santa Barbara points out that the nearest star, Alpha Centauri C, is four light years (or 23,462,784,000,000 miles) away, a light year being the distance light would travel in a year at 186,000 miles a second. (Some stars are billions of light years away.)

Assuming, Shames goes on, that an alien spaceship could travel 100,000 miles an hour (four times faster than our fastest satellite) it would take 234,627,000 hours to reach Earth from Alpha Centauri C, or 26,784 years. If their spaceships traveled at 1 million miles an hour, the trip would still take 2,678 years.

“It would take hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of travel for a spaceship from most stars in our universe to reach Earth, and the probabilities of that are so utterly infinitesimal as not to be worthy of serious discussion.”

I will concede that evolution might produce creatures who could physically survive such a trip, but how would they stand the boredom ? They couldn’t pack enough reading matter or videos aboard a spaceship to last a crew of only half a dozen beings.

Believers have sent me assorted pieces of literature. Writing in UFO, the bible of UFOlogists, Barry Taff foresees a craft that will utilize something called Field Resonance Propulsion and get you from one point in space to another instantly. Alien planets may be thousands of years ahead of us in technology, and thus have perfected such machines.

William Hamilton differs with my complaint that aliens seem to land only in the boondocks and to abduct only country bumpkins. “Among those reporting abductions to researchers are professionals such as businessmen, engineers, lawyers, physicians, psychiatrists and others. They seldom come forward for fear of ridicule.”

He also disagrees with my doubt that creatures from space would even remotely resemble us. “Some biologists have expressed the possibility that our planet has been seeded with life from space and that it is perfectly possible that we have cosmic cousins who resemble us in appearance.”

“I would certainly like to know,” says Scott W. MacKenzie, “which biologists you are referring to when you attempt to imply that the descriptions given of aliens ‘are most improbable?’ ”

In “Wonderful Life,” his book about the fossils of the Burgess shale (where modern multicellular animals made their appearance 570 million years ago), Stephen Jay Gould observes: “Replay the tape (of evolution) a million times from a Burgess beginning, and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.” Thus the odds are at least a million to one (maybe a trillion) against the appearance of humanoids on another planet.

UFO also reports two abductions as described by their victims. In one, a couple camping in Hawaii see a lighted craft the size of a football field. The husband retreats to their tent. The wife vanishes for two hours. She thinks she has only been gone a few minutes. In the morning she finds strange wounds on her body.

In Arizona, a couple see a large circular object over their new house. It gives off a blinding light and a loud hum. They go back to bed. In the morning they find themselves marked by mysterious wounds and bruises.

Taff concedes that such stories may be “examples of contagious mass hysteria caused by people reading books (on UFOs)”; on the other hand, he says, as many UFO researchers believe, they may be true abductions.

Taff tells of talking to a mother and daughter who were examined and probed by two 4-foot “humanoids” with reptilian skin and massive heads. When alarmed by the women’s screams, the visitors lighted up and “blinked out.”

All we can do is speculate about such stories, Taff says, unless the visitors show themselves “more blatantly.”

That’s what troubles me about UFOs. If they’ve been visiting us for 40 years, as UFOlogists say, why haven’t any of them stayed around long enough to be on television? Surely creatures so technologically advanced can’t be afraid of us.

Steve J. Scatchard of Arcadia says I am missing the point. “Unless every witness for the last 40 years has been fabricating his or her story, there must be something to it!

“All I can say,” he concludes, “is the next time you’re driving to Vegas and a huge, brightly lit, disk-like object descends on your car then vanishes straight up in a fraction of a second (leaving you without an invitation to board) you’ll have an immediate change of attitude. I guarantee it.”

I doubt that I’ll ever go to Vegas again. That town is on another planet.