Silly. “UFO” means no more than an object in the sky that is unidentified.
All this has brought forth a discussion about first contact. If this is aliens should we try to contact them or not? I suggest we wait for them to try to contact us first, if this does indeed involve actual aliens. I am making no assumptions here. Unidentified is “unidentified.” One person suggested these tic tac-like visions may be alien drones. Maybe.
I am suggesting we wait for them for other than the obvious reasons. Yes, IF we understand each other THAT will be the problem: superior technology. Native v. Columbus, natives v. Great Britain rejects, Independence Day. I think it more likely the problem may go deeper than any of that.
Yes, it could become a native v. settler situation, as many have warned. But if we limit ourselves to that we’re still not using our intellect well. Like, how do we know they communicate the same way we do? Socially we may be so different we may never understand each other, or it will take quite a while. Think of how hard it is to understand someone who grew up far away and only know a dominantly Hindu culture, or what if someone from the time of Jesus were to suddenly appear. Imagine the confusion, the misunderstandings, the bad reactions to perceived insult or threats.
If it was a Roman centurion they might start killing right away if they were confronted with those who they deemed to be challenging the Empire’s authority, not knowing, or believing, the Empire is gone. Concepts of compassion and justice were not like they are now. All one has to do is review the hideous means of execution, and why they were executed, to understand it was a vastly different time.
All that is nothing compared to someone raised under a different sun, or suns, who may not even need to inhale or absorb the same gasses (or whatever) we do, may appear vastly different. If they have a hive mind killing may be no big deal. The assumptions that sentient creatures develop exactly the same way is naïve at best. I have to laugh at those who claim math is the universal language: we invented the concept of 1, 0, -1 one and on and on. Sentient creatures from elsewhere might have developed a means of measurement so foreign we might never comprehend it. If the genetics are different there are all kinds of permutations: in Orson Scott Card’s book Speaker for the Dead the sentient beings humans insultingly refer to as the “piggies” turn into what humans think are trees when they are intentionally killed by their tribe. That’s because all life on their planet is genetically far more interconnected than on Earth. Death has a different, often more honorable, meaning.
There’s a gimmick Star Trek used where an ancient race of beings seeded the planets, which explains why there were so many human-like bipeds on across the galaxy in that series. While I don’t completely dismiss the possibility, I imagine it far more likely that aliens: if there are aliens in those UFOs, may be more different than we can imagine.
Let’s let THEM make the first move. And who knows: maybe they already have and we haven’t recognized the knock on the Earthly door. Except aliens may have no doors and knocking on anything might have a different; perhaps threatening, meaning.
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Inspection is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for over 40 years. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks, and into the unseen cracks and crevasses, that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.
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