I was doing 70 miles per hour, speeding north out of North Hollywood on the 5 freeway on a typical Southern California morning during the 1990's. Suddenly, a flash of silver in the cloudless sky caught my attention. Then, there was nothing but the pale California blue. Then it flashed again, and again. And just as I started to ponder what it might be, the flashing stopped. Three hours later when I got home the first thing I told my girlfriend now my wife, Samantha, was I had seen a UFO.
Now, any object you see in the sky which you cannot identify is by definition, an Unidentified Flying Object. And I had seen one. But what I had not seen was a flying saucer, as in something built by aliens to visit our world.
While watching the ten o'clock news my UFO was identified as a small home-built experimental “light” aircraft, flying out of Whiteman Airport, in Pacoma (above). The engine had suddenly quit, and the plane had spiraled into the ground, sadly, killing the pilot. And with this knowledge, I realized every time the spinning plane's wings caught the light, they flashed in my direction, otherwise the plane was too small and too far away for me to have seen it.
But what were the odds that I would have been in the exact position and looking in the exact direction to see that plane during the 20 seconds it took to fall three thousand feet? My sighting of that UFO was an extremely unlikely event, but far more likely than an alien spaceship visiting the earth.
Twenty percent of Americans expect aliens to first land in Washington, D.C., which means that 20% of Americans are, in my opinion, too stupid to find their own feet in the dark. About one in three Americans believe flying saucers are alien visitors. Barely two in ten are brave enough to assert unequivocally that UFO's are not alien spacecraft. I say all of this not because I believe I am right, but because I know I am.
Just to leave the earth you have to be going 25,000 miles an hour, which is a very expensive and complicated thing to do. And if you should see a rocket from an odd angle or at an odd time of day (above), it may look nothing like a televised launch. Being humans, with brains designed to make "sense" of what we see, connecting what we see with what we expect to see, with what we have seen before, it becomes easy to see something that is not what we think it is.
In one of the first UFO sightings, in 1947, over Seattle Washington, an experienced private pilot reported a formation of UFOs that raced away from him, climbing and diving in defiance of gravity, while maintaining perfect formation. Since no one else saw the "aliens" the report can never be absolutely confirmed or absolutely denied. But a recreation by the PBS program NOVA showed the UFO's could have simply been sunlight reflections on the airplane's canopy. I can't prove that is was reflections. But ask yourself, what is more likely - aliens or a simple mistaken assumption when seeing something the pilot did not expect to see when and where he did not expect to see it? Do you want to panic? Then it was aliens. If you prefer not to panic, then it probably wasn't, and life goes on. It's your choice
Also, consider this; as difficult as it is to go 7 miles a minute just to get off this rock, in terms of space travel, escape velocity is like backing out of your driveway.From the earth to the sun (called an Astronomical Unit) is 93 million miles. It would take 176 years to drive to the sun in a Chevette at 70 miles an hour, and you would need special glasses. Call them sun glasses.
Neptune, the 8th and farthest planet in our solar system is 30.5 AU's from the sun, so just to get out of our neighborhood you would have to drive that Chevette at 70 miles and hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, for 5,369 years to get to Neptune. And that would just get you into your own backyard, speaking universally.
The nearest star to our own sun, in other words the house next door, is Proxima Centuri (above, in the red triangle), which is 15, 300 AU from our sun. That means it would take you, at 70 miles an hour, two million, six hundred ninety-two thousand, eight hundred years to drive there. And at 30 miles to the gallon, that would be a very expensive trip for a Chevette.
Of course, the assumption is that aliens have warp-drive, or hyperdrive or star-drive or can "fold space", which allows then to travel faster than the speed of light. I guess, on a Saturday night future human teenagers will just zip down to the McDonald's on Proxima Centuri to hang out.
And I wish that were true, I really do. I am a big Star Strek/Star Wars fan. (Dr. Crusher was the MLF. of my 30's ) But it ain't gonna happen, folks.
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