The UFO distraction is coming into the “news” again. Underneath the noise, there is one basic question. Do intelligent lifeforms live on other planets?
Unlike most “philosophical” questions such as the origin of the universe or Free Will, this is a simple physical question which CAN be answered, at least in one particular narrow circumstance.
If such life exists, and if it thinks in a way we can understand, and if it WANTS us to know it’s here, it could let us know. If we start tracking an object coming in from outside the solar system, and we track it all the way down to earth, and it lands and announces its presence recognizably, we can say YES to the question. Lots of IFs but still a specific event that could be provenanced in our usual chain-of-evidence way.
Most of the alternate Ifs remain intrinsically unanswerable. If life exists but doesn’t communicate or doesn’t have a physical form we can recognize, or if the life form already arrived and doesn’t communicate, or if the alien life is part of our genome, we’ll never know.
The real problem isn’t what the aliens want us to know, it’s what our government wants us to know. Last year I was consuming lots of old books and old radio shows about UFOs. Starting at the rebirth of Deepstate in 1946, the government has played with UFOs in both directions, sometimes insisting they don’t exist and punishing people who believe they do exist, and sometimes insisting they do exist and punishing people who deny UFOs. If satellites really spot the object approaching, we’ll never know. More likely we’ll see “convincing” evidence that the object is here, when no such object exists. Like all the fake panics and attacks from Lusitania to “virus”.
Polistra's Mill 