Over the millenniums, humans have made various guesses to try and account for unexplained aerial phenomena. Ancient Roman historian Livy speculated they were phantom ships. Some First Century Jews interpreted them as armed angels riding chariots. In Shakespeare’s day, they were assumed to be fairies, incubus, or witches taking flight on brooms.

Consistent with an evolving hypotheses, the prevailing suspicion over the last three-quarters of a century is that unidentified flying objects are of alien origin. More terrestrial conjectures have included top-secret projects, adversarial aircraft, or developmental civilian products. Objects mistaken for alien transport vehicles have included weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, sun reflection, artificial light distortion, planets, meteors, satellites, swamp gas, and ball lightning.

While the great majority of strange sightings are explicable as being one of the previously-listed phenomenon, a tiny percentage remain a mystery. The problem arises when UFO enthusiasts plug their default ET explanation into any gap that does not fit these categories. These are unidentified objects, which means we don’t know what they are. Penciling in the alien answer is to commit a secular version of the god of the gaps fallacy. For while there have been countless reports of alien visitors and the crafts which transport them, none of these accounts have included a verified living creature, nor have we been able to examine their means of conveyance. No known extraterrestrials live among us, nor are any flying saucers housed in the Smithsonian. Believers have yet to produce a confirmed alien artifact, souvenir, implant, or DNA sample.

That is among the reasons that defaulting to extraterrestrials is a mistake. Metabunk founder Mick West serves as the skeptic community’s foremost UFO expert, each week scouring photos and videos of putative alien craft and offering conjecture based on math and science. His level-headed, in-depth analysis makes West a pariah among UFO enthusiasts. These detractors bypass reason and observation in order to launch ad hominem attacks, such as, “This threatens your world view,” “Your mind is so closed you can’t see what is obvious,” and, “You are going to look like such an idiot when aliens choose to make contact with us.”

If such contact is ever made, it is unlikely to be done by an amateur enthusiast or serendipitous video-camera operator. Conspicuously absent among UFO sightings are any made by those whose job it is to keep track of the goings-on in the sky: Astronomers and military radar operators. Almost all of putative encounters with UFOS are reported by those without training in astronomy, atmospherics, aeronautics, physics, or optometry.

On a related note, if alien life is ever confirmed, it is unlikely to be in the form of a flying saucer landing and requesting an audience with our leader. Astrophysicist Katie Mack explained that the discovery would more likely be made by those in her field watching exoplanets orbit their stars. She wrote, “If we can directly image an exoplanet, or see it pass in front of its star, we can search the spectrum of its light for signatures of chemical balances that only biological organisms can produce.” Another possibility is detecting an electromagnetic signal from life elsewhere or encountering an alien civilization’s equivalent of Voyager. So if we reach each other, it will probably be this type of first contact.

And that may be the only type ever made. A species leaving from the nearest exoplanet and averaging 250,000 miles per hour – fast enough to reach the moon in an hour – would take 11,400 years go get here. This hypothetical journey also assumes managing the logistics of repair, refueling, medicine, and food, all while avoiding the perils of deep space. So aliens would need to travel at amazing speeds while keeping a sustainable population housed, fed, clothed, medicated, entertained, cooperative, and sustained, probably for millenniums.

Sure, they could have managed near-warp travel, may have found a way to utilize wormholes, or have perhaps achieved immortality. But those are all baseless conjectures supported by zero evidence and it requires the most desperate desire to believe to take one of those unproven notions, tie it to flashes in Earth’s sky, and deduce they are coming from interplanetary travelers.

Michael Shermer has compared this year’s media frenzy over UFOs to a similar phenomenon in the late 19th Century. Back then, observers and newspapers reported sightings of mysterious airships, which were eventually determined to be dirigibles. Historian Mike Dash wrote, “Not only were they bigger, faster and more robust than anything then produced by the aviators of the world, they seemed to be able to fly enormous distances, and some were equipped with giant wings. The general conclusion of investigators was that a considerable number of the simpler sightings were misidentification of planets and stars, and a large number of the more complex the result of hoaxes and practical jokes. A small residuum remains perplexing.”

Today, as then, most sightings are explicable but a few go unexplained. Some jump to the conclusion that this means extraterrestrial visitors have arrived. But this is a leap so large it would require the existence of a wormhole it is surmising got the aliens here.

Even the most fervent UFO believers consider the great majority of aerial phenomenon to be the likes of weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, secret military aircraft, sun reflection, planets, meteors, satellites, swamp gas, ball lightning, and so forth. All those were in a cattle call that UFO enthusiast Leslie Kean jotted off while writing about the phenomenon.

This made for a reasonable take until Kean meandered into this god-of-the-gaps like fallacy when addressing the one in 20 sightings that remain mysterious: “They probably are of extraterrestrial or interdimensional origin.”

She puts major emphasis on eyewitness accounts, considering them even more reliable if they come from a person in authority, such as Belgian Maj. Gen. Wilfried De Brouwer, who reported seeing “a majestic triangular craft with a span of approximately 120 feet and powerful beaming spotlights.”

Eyewitness accounts are one of the lower tiers of evidence and however much esteem the viewer has does nothing to alter this. Moreover, Kean alters the general’s words in these significant ways: The 120-foot craft becomes “huge”; “moving very slowly” becomes “can hover motionless”; “without making any significant noise” becomes “without making a sound”; and “accelerating to very high speeds” becomes “speed off in the blink of an eye.”

On another note, this year’s reports are seen as a glut of new information, but most are rehashed reports of each other and no one in the media, military, or government is saying that aliens have landed. All that has been called “real” are the videos, meaning they were actually filmed and are not fabricated or a hoax.

Here are the three hypotheses for what these UFOs are: 1. Ordinary terrestrial, such as what were outlined in the third paragraph; 2. Extraordinary terrestrial, i.e. Russian or Chinese spy planes employing physics beyond U.S. capabilities; and 3. Extraterrestrial. The three most widely viewed and discussed videos were filmed by infrared cameras mounted on jets and are known as “Flir1” (from 2004) and “Gimbal” and “Go Fast” (both from 2015).

Extraordinary work dissecting and analyzing these videos has been by Mick West at Metabunk. He describes Flir1 and Gimbal as what one would see if a jet were flying away from the camera, which would account for the eyewitness accounts that the object showed no directional control surfaces or exhaust. As to the object’s apparent saucer shape, West attributes that to camera lens glare.

The object appears to zoom almost instantly off screen, a motion that some interpret as displaying extraordinary speed and turning ability beyond the capability of U.S. jets. However, in the upper left of the screen, the camera zoom indicator doubles when the object shifts to the left. When West slowed video by half at that moment, the seemingly extraordinary becomes a standard maneuver.

Additionally, cameras can make objects look like they are making stunning turns, twists, dips, and U-turns. West wrote, “The supposed impossible accelerations, and eventual loss of tracking lock, were revealed to coincide with – and hence caused by – sudden movements of the camera.”

Then we have the “Go Fast” video, which purportedly shows an object with no heat source, meaning it would be powered by an unknown propellant. It appears to move impossibly fast just above the surface of the ocean. But when West employed trigonometry based on the numbers provided by the video image, he found the object flew at 13,000 feet and was likely a weather balloon travelling at 35 knots.

The most talked-about video is “Gimbal,” in which the object appears to skim effortlessly over background clouds then come to an abrupt stop and rotate in midair, apparently without the propulsion systems necessary to pull off such a maneuver. But spoilsport West noted when the Gimbal object rotates, background light patches rotate in perfect union with the object.

“Gimbal is very hot. It’s consistent with two jet engines next to each other and the glare of these engines gets a lot bigger than the actual aircraft itself so the aircraft gets obscured by the glare,” West wrote. “At the start of the video, it looks like the object is moving rapidly to the left because of the parallax effect, and the rotation was a camera artifact, and that the ‘flying saucer’ was simply the infrared glare from the engines of a distant aircraft that was flying away.”

West also researched the camera’s patents and found the gimbal mechanism to be responsible for the seeming rotation.

Now onto a more Earth-based explanation, that the objects belong to one of our Asian adversaries. The thought is that these flying menaces are Russian or Chinese drones, spy planes, or some advanced technology that the U.S. lacks.

Pilots and observers report these objects accelerate from 80,000 feet down to sea level in seconds and or make immediate turns and complete stops, or zag off horizontally at hypersonic speed, breaking the sound barrier without an accompanying sonic boom. Such a rapid acceleration and sudden stop and turn would be fatal to anyone onboard and the craft seem to do all this without a jet engine or visible exhaust.

All this is greatly beyond the scope of U.S. technology, which brings us historian Geroge Basalla and in his book, The Evolution of Technology. In this work, he explains that emerging technologies develop from either pre-existing artifacts or organic objects. He explained, “Any new thing that appears in the made world is based on some object already in existence.”

On a similar noted, Matt Ridely wrote in his 2020 book that innovation is incremental and occurs because of the exchange of information. He writes it “is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, not a matter of lonely genius.”

That’s what happened with everything from steam engines to search engines. Countries and companies steal, copy, reverse engineer, and improve upon each other’s ideas and technologies. It is highly unlikely that a nation, corporation, or individual would discover the new physics or aerodynamics needed to create an aircraft that was centuries beyond known present technology. It would be akin to someone coming up with a smart phone before the telegraph.

Now onto the third possibility, diminutive emerald critters. The distance that would be required to reach our planet make ET the least likely answer. Furthermore, any species with the intelligence to design such a spacecraft and the desire to undertake a mission, would have come from a planet as doomed as ours is. They have only a few billion years to have life begin as a single-cell organism, evolve to a point of intergalactic travel, engage in such a journey, have a lifespan 100,000 times greater than ours, and find their way here. And once on Earth, they have to be satisfied not with getting out and exploring and attempting to make contact, but appearing in shaky, dark, and blurry videos.

A 60 Minutes segment this month is being advertised as the government admitting that alien life forms are flying overhead, as well as low to the ground, and doing so by accessing a science beyond our means.

But what the government actually said was only that there are some objects we cannot identify. And a more sobering look shows the explanation to likely be terrestrial.

Writing for Scientific American, theoretical physicist Katie Mack notes that most persons in her field find it more likely than not that life exists on other planets. There are heavenly bodies that have liquid trapped under icy surfaces and which are heated due to their close orbit – a descriptor of Earth in the days when life emerged here.

But if life followed that same pattern elsewhere, did it evolve sufficiently to conquer interplanetary travel and be captured by shaky military cameras?

Light from the second-closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, takes four years to reach us. Mack calculated that it would require an uninterrupted journey of 70,000 years in mankind’s fastest spaceship to complete this trip. She wrote, “Whatever technology an alien civilization might have, it’s reasonable to assume they would take the short option first, and send an electromagnetic signal. Or perhaps they would build some large, obvious, electromagnetic radiation–absorbing structure in their own backyard.”

Even if such a species were disinclined or incapable of this cosmic shortcut, the distance seems prohibitive for an in-creature visit. Sure, they could have technology far beyond ours, such as near-warp speed travel or wormhole accessibility. But it is hardly reasonable to assume those developments. If we don’t know what the objects are, trying to plug interstellar spacecraft into the equation is to commit a secular version of the god of the gaps fallacy.

We are open to the idea of alien life; some scientists even consider it extremely likely and examine evidence suggesting it has occurred. For example, Mack wrote that an interstellar asteroid and the dimming of an otherwise normal star have both have been interpreted as possible evidence of alien life, and astrophysicists have checked them out.

So if alien life is discovered, Mack thinks it will most likely be through observing exoplanets orbiting stars. She explained, “If we can directly image an exoplanet, or see it pass in front of its star, we can search the spectrum of its light for signatures of chemical balances that only biological organisms can produce, whether they be microbes or mushrooms or megafauna.”

In other words, if confirmation of alien life emerges, it is unlikely to be in the form of flying saucers, ray guns, and requests to be taken to our leader.

Also weighing in has been Mick West, a skeptic leader specializing in UFO sightings. The 60 Minutes segment was interpreted by some excited observers as the U.S. government admitting UFOs are real. These persons, many of whom would have dismissed any government denial of such extraterrestrial entities, are ready to embrace Uncle Sam this time.

The program opens with an interview of Luis Elizondo, who claims to head a government entity that studies UFOs. He said Washington has already stated the objects are genuine. Of course, UFO merely refers to not being certain what it is, not being certain it is an alien spacecraft.

Elizondo then describes the observed phenomena displaying, perhaps literally, otherworldly technology. We are talking such Flash Gordonesque capabilities as accelerating at 600g, flying 17,000 miles per through the atmosphere, and maintaining high speed in water. To clarify, the government has not conceded that these abilities to have been witnessed or recorded.

What the videos show are flying objects acting in accord with physics and the limitations of human technology. Proponents tout one video as being of an incredibly fast craft hugging the ocean.

But West used trigonometry and numbers on the screen to deduce the object was well above the water and moving at a speed that matches the wind at that altitude. This, in all likelihood, means the object is merely a balloon.

In a night vision video, we see a green flashing triangle, which sounds like a receptacle that could be housing spacefaring creatures. However, West demonstrated that the light pattern matches that of a commercial 737. Further, some night-vision devices come with a triangular aperture. Combined with being a little out of focus and shot from above, it presents the image of a flying triangle. Other triangles in the scene were determined to be stars.

A third video purportedly features physics-defying acceleration, but a closer look reveals that the supposed sudden moves result from the camera moving or changing its mode.

Yet another video, of an alleged flying saucer, seems to in fact be of an infrared glare of a distant plane and a rotating gimbal mechanism.

Taken it totality, there is little reason to suspect these are alien spacecraft, and in most cases aren’t even UFOs. We know what they are, where they come from, and why they act as they appear.

Some believers deride skeptics as blinder-wearing killjoys who would not own up to aliens if they landed on our lawn. I would welcome the confirmation of extraterrestrials and would be even more fascinated by an Earthly visit. I would consider such an occurrence to be the biggest news story ever. But I am not so desperate for it to be true that I consider scientific analysis of the phenomenon to be a denial of evidence that it has already happened.

A headline more suited to the 1970s National Inquirer, rather than the 2020s Popular Mechanics in which it appeared, strongly suggests that a cube-shaped UFO unknown to the military has been photographed.

Kenny Biddle specializes in ghost claims, but the skeptic leader is also well-versed in the UFO field and he writes that he quickly recognized the object as a party balloon, which is something that is regularly mistaken for alien transport vehicles by those who are hoping to spot just such a device. In this case, Biddle thinks the airborne inflatable was a Batman balloon sold at Party City.

UFO enthusiasts dismiss this explanation, citing unnamed pilots who described the object as motionless and not impacted by air currents. Since all such claims are attributed to anonymous sources, it is impossible to verify if they said this or even if they exist.

Biddle’s fellow CSI fellow, Mick West, agrees that the likely explanation is Biddle’s Batman Balloon. West has previously shown how  photographed objects can seem motionless when they are whizzing by and, upon examination of this picture, he has concluded this is another case of that.

Many amateur organizations and science classes often use party balloons in experiments since the inflatables are cheap, effective, and plentiful. Teachers and students fill the balloons with helium, though not all the way since, as they rise, the light gas inside them expands due to the decrease in atmospheric pressure. Biddle writes this is the likely explanation for why the item in the supposed leaked photo appears fully inflated: The helium inside has expanded.

The unnamed sources claim the balloon hovered at more than 30,000 feet, which would be about double the altitude that party balloons can reach. However, unnamed also means unverifiable, so there is no way to corroborate or test this assertion.

Biddle points out that, just from the headline, there are clues about the story being sensationalist instead of scientific. It reads, “Leaked Government Photo Shows ‘Motionless, Cube-Shaped’ UFO.”

He writes, “The term leaked has become an overused buzzword…to grab the attention of those with an interest in conspiracy theories that focus on the government keeping some secret from the people.”

Further, the article describes the image as unclassified, which Biddle notes means the image would have gone through government review and release rather than being leaked or discovered.

Another red flag from the headline is “motionless.” The photo was allegedly snapped by someone in a passing fighter jet, which is far from motionless. This means the photographer would have had less than a second to spot, frame, bring into focus, and snap the image. Even if the flying fast-fingered photographer had managed that, West shows here how moving objects can seem motionless when they are actually speeding by.

The final issue from the headline is the description “cube-shaped,” used even though the object in question is roughly triangular. Playing this loose with the truth suggests that author was skimming over facts, doing no real research, and regurgitating what believers in UFOs and conspiracy theories had fed him.

Biddle’s hypothesis is that a family hosted a Batman-themed birthday party and a few days later, the balloons slowly leaked helium, were set free, and went skyward. With this idea in mind, Biddle got hold of two similar Batman balloons and went to a park to attempt a recreation of how this might have happened.

He describes the results thusly: “My wife secured one of the balloons by a length of ribbon measuring about 100 feet, which placed the balloon well above the trees surrounding the park. I walked approximately 500 feet from her and took some photos. I am satisfied this flying object has been identified.”

His simple experiment suggests this is the cause. Conspiracy theorists condemn the rest of us for blindly swallowing government and media products. Yet they fail to apply the same standard to the claims of their fellow conspiracy theorists. Here, this meant believing that a floating UFO is amongst us and being covered up by military brass. This is a more attractive conclusion for them than conducting a simple experiment that produced an answer that was much more mundane but much more accurate.

There have been countless reports of alien visitors and the crafts which bring them to Earth. So far, however, none of the accounts have included a verified living creature, nor have we been able to examine their means of transport. No known extraterrestrials live among us, nor are any flying saucers housed in the Smithsonian.

Most putative alien beings are described as somewhat akin to us – bipedal, four limbs, eyes, some semblance of a nose and mouth. But others are said to look like robots and one even resembled a giant blue grasshopper. Despite these varieties, some people conclude that they all mean we are not alone. Like the ETs, the vehicles they pilot also have varying descriptions: A saucer, triangle, ball, lighted orb, and even a floating building.

There have been UFO sightings for millennia and how they have been perceived depended on the time and culture.  More than 2,000 years ago, Roman historian Livy considered them to be phantom ships. In the First Century, Roman soldiers thought they were seeing armed angels riding chariots. Stargazers in Shakespeare’s time concluded that unexplained floating lights were fairies, angels, leprechauns, or incubus. By the time humans themselves were taking to the sky, the same unexplained phenomenon had transformed into highly intelligent alien life.

Most believers go with this interpretation, though others consider the creatures to be interdimensional beings, ghosts, or demons. Then there are those, such as your blogger, who think the answer lies with human error and misperception. The number and diversity of sightings, combined with still no verified contact, suggests psychology is more in play than intergalactic travel. The mind tries to figure out what it can’t understand, and because of our aversion to randomness and preference for pattern, we plug into the gaps whatever explanation we can finagle. With UFOs, those answers have evolved with the time.

If aliens were making regular treks here, professional astronomers, whose job is to use the world’s best telescopes to study the skies, would be witnessing the great majority of such visits. Instead, almost all of putative encounters are reported by those without training in astronomy, atmospherics, aeronautics, physics, or optometry.

Moreover, sightings are influenced by the conditions in which they are observed. Bright stars and planets may become UFOs due to their being watched from a moving car, making it seem they are keeping pace with the vehicle. However, to  determine the size, speed, or distance of a presumed craft, one needs to know at least one of those variables. If all are unclear, the viewer is reduced to groundless speculation.

Additionally, a star or planet’s apparent ability to dart, wobble, or zigzag, and to change color rapidly is explained by a natural, involuntary jerking eye movement called auto-kinesis. Also a factor is scintillation, which are variations in the apparent brightness or position of a faraway luminous object. This effect is more pronounced when looking through binoculars or telescopes. It is caused by refraction of different wavelengths, which make an eye or lens think there are changes in motion or color.

Besides seemingly-moving stars and planets, the Identified Flying Objects known as airplanes can take on a saucer shape if viewed head-on and can be misinterpreted as alien craft. They can also move side-to-side, climb vertically, descend, and quickly change direction, which can make the plane take on otherworldly appearances under the right circumstances. Additionally, rows of anti-collision lights on the wings blink sequentially, which can create an illusion of rotation.  

Then there are meteors, balloons, satellites, searchlights, flares, and ball lighting, all of which can also be taken to be an alien transport system, due to the auto-kinetic effect, scintillation, psychology, human error, and ignorance.

Planets, stars, meteors, and ball lightning are all fascinating enough by themselves that there’s no reason to fabricate awesomeness about them. And satellites, balloons, airplanes, and telescopes were the result of persons being inspired enough by reality and what was possible that they used this as a drive to further Mankind. With enough of that spirit, maybe someday instead of inventing tales of piloted space travel, we will be doing it.

Pleiades is an open star cluster in the constellation Taurus, 400 light-years from Earth. That’s far enough away that just seven of the stars can be seen without a telescope. Perhaps because seven has long been thought of as a lucky number in our culture, the star system has been pegged as the alleged home of a group of multi-dimensional, uber-evolved, benevolent beings that make contact with a very limited number of Earthlings.

The assertion that aliens and less than half a dozen humans are telepathically communicating on how to improve mankind brings to mind Christopher Hitchens observation that, “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

But that would make for a two-paragraph blog post, so let’s branch beyond Hitchens’ reasonable declaration and find other points against the idea. A major one is that the Pleiades system is only 150 million years old. When Earth was that age, it was still being regularly bombarded and shaped by asteroid impacts. According to Scientific American, oxygen would not make its Earthly debut for another two billion years. Further, if the history of the universe were consolidated into a one-year calendar, humans would not have appeared until late on Dec. 31.

So if there is a populated Pleiades planet, its inhabitants would had to have evolved exponentially quicker than us to be even single-celled amoebas at this point, much less be capable of inter-solar system travel and possessing vast mind control powers.

And for being this advanced, they have supremely limited communication skills, as evidenced by their having reached only four people. In these cosmic missives, they reveal that they are concerned about our planet and our future and wish to help us ascend to another dimension.

Beyond that, there’s not a lot of constancy. Depending on who the Pleiadians are sending messages to, the ideas change. For instance, they are variously described as descending from the alien species Lyrans,  having coexisted with the Lyrans, or being synonymous with them. With regard to their connection to Earthlings, they are either ancestors of whites, Native Americans, or none of us. The extent of their travel can be either switching between the third and the ninth dimensions, residing permanently in the fifth dimension, or living in dimensions whose only specificity is that they are higher and mightier than what we can access – although, per the narrative, they are here to change that.

There are also contradictory reports as to their appearance. In some tales, Pleiadians are humanoids, albeit better looking versions of us. They are slender, with their women folk tending to be curvaceous. These descriptions, along with their vast intelligence, accomplishments, altruism, and pioneering spirit, represent an idealized version of humanity.

This often means Aryan features, although for those that prefer the mystical romanticized version of Native Americans, there are the aforementioned assertions that tribe members are descended from the aliens. A modified version has the Native Americans not being related to the Pleiadains, but continuing their teachings. This is the script favored by Lia Shapiro, who informs us that indigenous North American legends about Pleiadians have been encoded and kept secret, although she knows all about them, despite her being neither Native American nor Pleiadian.

Today’s aliens are only extremely distant cousins of tribe members, so much so that the former are portrayed as lacking pigmentation, possessing little to no hair, and having skeletons that are largely cartilage. Their brains have large frontal lobes and this provides a possible explanation for Pleiadians’ sense of intuition and their adeptness at multidimensional communication.

Unusual for extra-planetary visitors, some of these space tourists reveal their  personal names. This includes Semjase, a 330-year old expert in robotics, space travel, teleportation, and intergalactic linguistics. Depending on the channeler, Semjase and the other Pleiadians are said to be connected to Atlantis, Lemuria, or various New Age healing methods, particularly crystals, magic energy, and the unblocking of chi. They are also responsible for bringing dolphins to Earth, at least that’s what the ghost of JFK told channeler Barry Martin, who claims that the former president has assumed marine mammal form and communicates with him telepathically.  

It is noteworthy that Pleiadians brought us an esthetically pleasing, intelligent creature with a reputation for friendliness. None of the channelers have reported that the Pleiadians are the avenue which bestowed Earth with mosquitoes, cobras, or the stars of Monsters Inside Me. This is consistent with the mantle of idealism and benevolence that believers wrap Pleiadians in.  

Those believers include Barbara Marciniak, whom the aliens told they share a common ancestor with humans, and that Pleiadians came from another universe to seed various planets in ours. The Pleiadians appeared before we humans did, and ascended to the next evolutionary stage, Akashic plane, or some such locale. While the Pleiadians have been around for hundreds of millions of years, we current Earthlings have the great fortune of living during the precise time that our interplanetary visitors have reached out to our fellow human Marciniak. And she is ready to guide us through our ascendancy to the next stage of existence.

If we reach high enough, may be able to do what the Pleiadians do. This includes traveling in time and to higher dimensions, where they contact beings that inhabit those realms. They are also capable of speed of light tricks to get around any annoying physics issues. This really comes in handy because they are known to bandy about in 10⁴⁹ universes.

Like Young Earth Creationists, Pleiadian advocates believe in an unseen, benevolent higher power who communicates silently with humans. Both groups also ignore scientific evidence for the age of the universe. But while YECs think that starlight from hundreds of millions of light years away arrived here in 6,000 years, Pleiadian believers think the universe is much older than the cosmic background radiation and the amount of hydrogen in the universe indicates. And while Marciniak and her ilk think the universe will collapse, they also hold that it will immediately rebound to form another one, presumably with more shiny happy people.   

Another one of the four humans the Pleiadians have the means and desire to contact is Billy Meier, who claims to have been communicating with them since 1975. Unlike Marciniak, Shapiro, and Martin, Meier writes little if anything about what the Pleiadians tell him, but he has photos of alleged encounters. However, investigator Karl Korff has shown these to be hoaxes, and rather lazy ones at that. The photos came from magazines, catalogues, books, TV screen shots, etc. Meier also claims to possess a piece of alien metal, but has declined to offer it for examination.  

Because his “proof” is mostly photographs, he doesn’t mess with the obtuse indecipherable messages that Marciniak, Shapiro, and Martin deliver. Here’s an example from each. Marciniak: “If you can clear people of their personal information, they can go cosmic.” Shapiro: “One can come awake and realize the divine nature of who we are.” Martin:  “Aliens came to Earth with a sort of engineering animal to begin breeding softer, gentler creatures.”

The Pleiadians are 400 light years away and how they journey to Earth in far less than 400 years is not among the knowledge they are showering on their Earthly conduits. What they are letting them know, per Shapiro, is that they “bring wisdom and their purpose is to enlighten you.” They do this not by telling us themselves but through books and music that Shaprio sells. The music, she notes, is meant “to raise your frequency and vibration closer to the light created by a Pleiadian.”

Shaprio runs the pleiadians.net website, not to be confused with pleiadains.com, which is Marciniak’s domain. On that website, Marciniak writes that the Pleiadians are “here to assist humanity with the process of spiritual transformation in the years leading up to December 2012.” This was presumably to counter the Mayan apocalypse. That this is still on the front page shows that what Marciniak has in interstellar telepathic communication skills she lacks in website maintenance abilities.

Other than Meier, whose collection has been shown to be phony, the channelers give us nothing falsifiable. Nor is there affirming evidence of their extraordinary claims, nor proof of these experiences, nor an explication of the mechanisms behind telepathy and faster-than-warp speed travel. It would be within the capabilities of Pleiadians to explain how they have accomplished these supremely advanced scientific achievements. But there is none of that among their cosmic communiques. Instead, Marciniak offers digital recordings, books, videos, speaking schedules, and a way to make contact – with Marciniak, not with the Pleiadians.

Late last year, The New York Times and Politico both published stories confirming that the U.S. government had conducted a long-running, furtive study of unidentified flying objects.

Called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, it collected video and audio recordings of UFO incidents. An anonymous senior intelligence official quoted by Politico revealed that the main reason was to determine if Russia or China was using military technologies the U.S. was still unaware of.

The Times piece included images of a Navy jet being surrounded by a glowing aura that traveled at high speed while rotating. While the preferred inference of some readers was that it was an alien spacecraft, a more terrestrial explanation suffices.

John Lester Miller, who impressively managed to write an entire book on infrared imaging, described what caused the seeming UFO during an interview with Robert Schaeffer of the Bad UFOs blog. Miller explained that the image resulted from a processing byproduct known as ringing:

“When in white hot, you will see that the aura around it is dark and when in black hot, it is brighter than the background. This is the image processing algorithm compensating for the large signal on neighboring pixels where the signal is not there. The algorithm doesn’t know the shape of the object and over-processes the neighboring pixels.” He added this happens when the captured image is of an object over a cold background, which would describe jet engines obscured by high altitude clouds.

The results were also another example of the stagnant quality of UFO imagery. In a world of increasingly vibrant colors, stunning clarity, and 4K ultra-high definition resolution, the standard candid of Invaders From Mars remains blurry photos and shaky, out-of-focus videos.

The program ran from 2007 to 2012 and today one of its researchers, Luis Elizondo, heads an organization dedicated to UFO research. It was his statement to CNN that most got UFO buffs excited. He said, “These aircraft are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the U.S. inventory, nor in any foreign inventory that we’re aware of.” These supposed limitations on American technology and our ignorance of other countries’ systems were extrapolated by Elizonda into a personal belief that it counts as evidence of alien visitation.

But Dave Mosher of Business Insider interviewed Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, who took a more measured approach. Certainly the military wants to know what’s going on when it sees aircraft above its airspace it can’t identify. But that doesn’t equate it to being Zontar, the Thing From Venus.

Probably the most sizable obstacle to overcome would be distance. If one could devise a spacecraft that could get to the moon in an hour, this ultra-swift mode of cosmic transport would need to maintain this pace for 27 years to reach Neptune and for nearly three millennium to reach the next closest solar system. This hypothetical journey also assumes managing the logistics of repair, refueling, medicine, and food, all while avoiding the perils of deep space.

Shostak said there are about 1,400 solar systems within 50 light years of us Earthlings. This seems to offer plenty of opportunities for the construction of flying saucers or wormhole-threading devices, but the number is actually quite tiny when thinking about one of them being advanced enough to visit us. These systems could house microbial life, which if found, would be the biggest science story of the 21^st Century. But that find would have no bearing on supposed UFOs. Discovering the rough equivalent of a goat on an exoplanet would be more noteworthy and carry more profound consequences, but it would still not explain glowing aerial orbs. And even a civilization advanced as what Earth will be in 4018 would likely be insufficient to manage this interplanetary journey.

Of course, there could be a super-advanced civilization that has managed warp speed travel. And maybe even a civilization still more super-advanced which has attained beyond warp speed travel. And everyone except you could be a hologram, but until evidence surfaces indicating this, that notion should be dismissed, as should these sci-fi transportation scenarios.

Furthermore, these supposed travels would seem to be serving little point. They do not involve the mid-20^th Century Hollywood staple of requesting an audience with our leader. The landings are in the Nevada desert or on a remote hilltop, never in Times Square. While there are alleged eyewitnesses that board these crafts, no souvenirs are collected, no clear imagery of the visit is obtained, and no goodwill ambassador stays behind.

So these interplanetary interlopers travel all this way and are content to flatten crops, maintain an extensive rectal probing program, and make cameos in wobbly cellphone videos. Some extreme believers say aliens are with us in disguise and are interbreeding with humans while taking the form of shape-shifting reptilians who occupy executive leadership and high government positions. They makes these extraordinary claims without satisfying Carl Sagan’s stipulation that they be accompanied by extraordinary evidence.

These claims are also a reflection of the times. There were no reports of these close encounters by contemporaries of Socrates, Leif Ericson, or Jane Austen because the idea in those eras would have been so absurd no one would have ever dreamt it. Only with the advent or rocket technology and the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne did the notion of interstellar travel come along, and with it, the idea of trips coming from the other direction.

Shostak rejects the notion that the most recent video equates to proof that these trips have been made. He said 90 percent of sightings can be identified and he told Mosher they usually involve “issues with camera hardware, unfamiliar optical effects, atmospheric phenomena, bright stars and planets, and the presence of unmanned aerial vehicles.”

The other 10 percent are of undermined origin, meaning that they are unexplained, not that the explanation is extraterrestrial. To make the E.T. deduction is to commit a logical fallacy by claiming that absence of evidence equals evidence of absence. Specifically in this case, the assertion is that since the flying object cannot be explained terrestrially, that means it must have come from outer space. This is not a sound conclusion. For one, it fails to consider that the object may have come from inside a hollow Earth.