Today marks an important anniversary here in the Grand Canyon State. Ten years ago tonight, the Air Force said it dropped a bunch of flares from an A-10 jet airplane and many of the good citizens of our state said that they saw not flares, but visitors from space, UFOs.
That's right ladies and gentlemen, across Arizona, preparations are underway to mark the anniversary of the ...drumroll please...
the Phoenix Lights. Eyes are turned skyward in case the supposed aliens return for a ten-year reunion. Do aliens have some sort of "Earth wrist-watch" that they wear so that they know when to come back?
Technically, people in Arizona were correct about the lights, at least in a manner of speaking. The objects were (a) unidentified to the observers on the ground, (b) flying (or at least falling) and (c) they were clearly objects. It is when people made the leap to conclude that they were from an alien spacecraft, that they went wrong in my opinion.
Spaceship isn't the conclusion I came to. In the absence of some tangible proof of visitors from space, I remain skeptical of their existence. I hasten to add that as big a mess as our leaders have made of the world, I might be open to giving the Martians a shot at running things, should they pop in for a visit.
The classic proof people usually offer for the existence of alien visitors, is the 1947
Roswell Incident. True believers claim that the wreckage found at the Roswell site was an extraterrestrial craft and that the Air Force recovered and hid the evidence. The Air force says that it was a weather balloon used for a classified project and that they owned it. Which explanation more closely fits into the world as we know it?
I wonder how a civilization could be sufficiently technologically advanced to be able to traverse the vastness of space and then just run into the ground? Plus, what would be the motivation of the government to cover up the evidence of such a crash?
The chief problem with making sense of lights in the dark sky is one of perspective. Without a point of reference in the empty sky, it is impossible for earth-bound observers to judge the speed or distance of lights. Looking up at an approaching airplane in the night sky, it is often difficult to distinguish it amid the background of stars. Is it a plane at 30,000 feet or is it the star, Alpha Centauri A, 4.3 light years away?
When an airplane accelerates on take off the speed of the plane is apparent to the passengers. Once the perspective of the stationary objects adjacent to the runway is gone, the speed of the aircraft cannot be accurately judged by the occupants, even though they are likely moving far faster in flight than they were on takeoff.
So when someone reports that lights in the sky were 10,000 feet up and moved at 65 miles per hours, as one Phoenician reported, it is important to understand that there is no way for the observer to know that.
In addition, our eyes and brains do funny things to our perspective. The rising moon appears to be much bigger when near the horizon, than when overhead, even though we can all agree that it doesn't shrink as it gets higher in our sky. Observers in Phoenix judged the pattern of lights to be as little as a few feet across and as much as a mile. They were either moving slowly or racing along.
Eyewitness recollections are always suspect because our brain is not a recorder in the way a camera is. Instead it fills in gaps around what it actually remembers, with filler that seems logical. For instance, if you envision your yard, much of your mental picture is filled in, rather than actually remembered. Your mental picture is not a snapshot of when you last saw the yard, but a composite of recollections that are stitched together. Plus, when we report what we saw, our recollection is influenced by what we think we should have seen, as much as what was seen. Our biases and experiences help to fill in the picture for us. This is one reason why eyewitness accounts vary so much.
Have you ever wondered why all alleged alien sightings report similar beings? Is it that we are visited by the same group over and over, or is it that we have become accustomed to the motif? Did it occur to the first sighter that these people looked a lot like us, just with bigger heads and eyes?
William of Ockham is credited with positing the notion that the simplest explanation is more likely to be true than a more complicated one. Or words to that effect. As a doctor once told the lovely Mrs. Sneed and me, "When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras." So when the Air Force says it was their flares, it probably was. If you believe they lied, that conclusion invites more questions and a much more complicated answer.
Is it possible that the Air Force lied and that we were visited by aliens? Possible, but there is no hard evidence for that conclusion. Belief is not proof.
Merle.
Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and crankyTag:
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