This is just a fantastic piece by @ezraklein. https://t.co/tm1mqCRcJo

I'm totally agnostic on the issue of alien existence, but my very biased opinion on the topic of trippy, wondrous, philosophy-adjacent column-writing is: yes! and: more!

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) May 13, 2021

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On Fox News, John Ratcliffe, the former director of national intelligence, was given the opportunity to play down the report, which began under his tenure, and he declined. "When we talk about sightings," he said, "we are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don't have the technology for, or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom." Nor are these just eyewitness accounts, made by fallible human observers. "Usually, we have multiple sensors that are picking up these things," he said.

Perhaps Ratcliffe, a former member of Congress whose sole stint in intelligence came at the tail end of the Trump administration, is simply hyping his work. But that doesn't explain why a former C.I.A. director, John Brennan, said in an interview with the economist Tyler Cowen that "some of the phenomena we're going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don't yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life." Well then.

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There is a thick literature on how evidence of alien life would shake the world's religions, but I think Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, is quite likely right when he suggests that many people would simply say, "of course." The materialist worldview that positions humanity as an island of intelligence in a potentially empty cosmos my worldview, in other words is the aberration. Most people believe, and have always believed, that we share both the Earth and the cosmos with other beings gods, spirits, angels, ghosts, ancestors. The norm throughout human history has been a crowded universe where other intelligences are interested in our comings and goings, and even shape them. The whole of human civilization is testament to the fact that we can believe we are not alone and still obsess over earthly concerns.

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There's a school of thought that says interplanetary ambitions are ridiculous when we have so many terrestrial crises. I disagree. I believe our unsolved problems reflect a lack of unifying goals more than a surfeit of them. America made it to the moon in the same decade it created Medicare and Medicaid and passed the Civil Rights Act, and I don't believe that to be coincidence.

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Agristotle said:

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What we don't know is greater than what we know.

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TCTTS said:

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You know, the laser plasma hologram tech theory or whatever is at least a decent alternative theory that doesn't require thousands of people to have been hallucinating or misidentifying natural phenomenon. Granted, it doesn't account for eight decades of continual sightings, but it's at least not a head-in-sand theory.

As for the vast distances an extraterrestrial species would have to travel, I think we need to get that out of our heads as valid reasoning as to why they wouldn't be here. If these things are, in fact, extraterrestrial craft, and are, in fact, doing the things these pilots are saying, and the tracking systems are registering, distance is irrelevant to them. Again, they've mastered gravity/space-time, speed-of-light is a non-factor, and they can basically go anywhere they want as fast as they want. Especially if they've figured out some kind of quantum teleportation or are inter dimensional. At that point, distance would be nothing more than a human concern/construct.

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Champ Bailey said:

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TCTTS said:

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You know, the laser plasma hologram tech theory or whatever is at least a decent alternative theory that doesn't require thousands of people to have been hallucinating or misidentifying natural phenomenon. Granted, it doesn't account for eight decades of continual sightings, but it's at least not a head-in-sand theory.

As for the vast distances an extraterrestrial species would have to travel, I think we need to get that out of our heads as valid reasoning as to why they wouldn't be here. If these things are, in fact, extraterrestrial craft, and are, in fact, doing the things these pilots are saying, and the tracking systems are registering, distance is irrelevant to them. Again, they've mastered gravity/space-time, speed-of-light is a non-factor, and they can basically go anywhere they want as fast as they want. Especially if they've figured out some kind of quantum teleportation or are inter dimensional. At that point, distance would be nothing more than a human concern/construct.

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I don't really buy the time travel theory. I don't think we would ever see people travel back in time, because if you did, you would be creating a new timeline in a parallel dimension. So maybe we invent it, but every time it's used it's creating a new timeline branching out.

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YouBet said:

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Southlake said:

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I have 20k hours in the air and you wouldn't believe some of the freaky unexplained things I've seen up there.

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YouBet said:

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Southlake said:

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I have 20k hours in the air and you wouldn't believe some of the freaky unexplained things I've seen up there.

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