Friends, let's talk about UFO's.
The recent 60 Minutes piece has lent credibility to the phenomenon of UFO's, or UAP (Unknown Aerial Phenomenon), as the new term is used.
The footage shown is compelling. The unknown objects, whatever they are, seem to move at fantastic speeds. They change direction suddenly, as if unconstrained by the strictures of physics. They disappear as suddenly as they appear. They are invisible, except in infrared.
What are they?
What amazes me most about the UFO/UAP craze is how quickly people jump to the unlikeliest of conclusions. There is a hierarchy of possibilities, and somewhere way, way down at the bottom of the likelihood pile is alien visitation. Yet that's the one people seem to want to pick first.
There's an old saying in the field of medicine. It applies to any mystery, whether diagnosing a disease, solving a murder, or looking at UFO footage. It goes like this:
"When you hear hoof-beats, think horses, not zebras."
In other words, go with the likeliest explanation before considering the more exotic ones.
Which, oddly, we never seem to do.
This goes for other scenarios as well, obviously. For example, do Democrats simply have a better message for city folk than country folk? Or are they winning elections by funneling money through a Satanic child pedophile ring?
If you need help with that, I have a horoscope I'd like to sell ya.
The hierarchy of likelihood regarding UFO's goes something like this:
1) Natural phenomena: lens-refraction, strange clouds, weather balloons, meteors, satellites, etc.
2) Deliberate hoax: faked footage or photograph, drone, CGI, etc.
3) New technology: experimental aircraft flown by the U.S.
4) New spycraft: Flown by another nation (Russia, China).
5) Hallucination.
6) If none of the above apply, leave it an unsolved mystery.
7) Exotic explanations: alien visitation, time travelers, ancient gods, etc.
In this hierarchy, I would like to propose my own hypothesis, which wedges in nicely between #2 and #3. And then I would like to propose that it's the likeliest explanation for the footage seen on 60 Minutes last Sunday. Here it is:
These UFO's are caused by hackers.
We forget sometimes that our defense systems are getting more and more computerized every day. And those computerized systems are vulnerable to hackers in ways we might not yet have been able to fathom. Hackers in Russia and China might want to experiment with hacking our defense systems in ways that don't necessarily alert the military to the fact that someone's been tampering with our code. So, to test the waters as it were, they put small hacks in which make what appear to be strange objects in the sky.
In reality, these are no more than internally generated, CGI blips. But because they come from inside the defense system's computer, they appear to do amazing things. They will speed up and slow down at rates and speeds which are impossible by our currently known standards. They will appear suddenly, and then disappear just as suddenly again. They will be able to change direction at perfectly right angles without seeming to slow down. They will be invisible to the naked eye, yet visible on the infrared scopes.
All this makes sense, because the objects aren't really there. They exist solely inside the computer, and as a projection on a screen.
On some level, the Pentagon might even realize that this sort of thing is the result of a hack, which explains part of why they don't want to let the public know about it. After all, it would be embarrassing enough if Russia or China had better experimental spying aircraft. But Russian hackers making our defense systems see targets which aren't there? That's the sort of thing you bury, and bury deep! One hopes that they've secretly developed countermeasures, or else the next major conflict may see our planes firing on targets which aren't there, and hitting our own forces or civilians!
No, I don't have proof. But my hypothesis makes more sense than anything else out there currently, and perhaps it will persuade some of you out there to not bother so much with the "space alien" hypothesis, which, on the hierarchy of likelihood, is the least likely of all.
No, this doesn't explain all of the phenomena. But it explains much of it. For those it doesn't explain, possibilities 1 through 5 above are adequate. The fact that so very much UFO footage is explainable by my "Russian hacker" hypothesis should be deeply disturbing to everyone concerned.
Now, what I'd really like to know is why I'm the one offering this hypothesis, and not 60 Minutes.
Eric
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