Surveillance From Space?—Part 1

In two recent blogs I very briefly summarized the history of UFOs—noting that, after all the decades of investigations by the US government, most (about 95%) sightings can be explained by natural phenomena or human aerial activities. There is, however, a small proportion (about 5%) of sightings that cannot be explained, so have a credible possibility of having at least an unknown or even an extraterrestrial or outer-space origin. 

I choose the term “extraterrestrial,” here, in order to indicate that, in the government’s opinion, these sightings do not seem to point to any technology likely to have yet been developed on Earth. That finding could possibly point toward outer-space visitors. Moreover, that possibility is also what readily occurs to us humans—given our long history of speculating that life may have originated elsewhere. Many books and stories have been spawned by this notion.

So in this posting I will consider some of the features that might be associated with visitors from space—without necessarily attributing the currently unexplained UFO sightings to alien visitors. My intent is to step back, suppose that life did arise elsewhere, that that life did achieve a technological proficiency allowing space travel, and has decided to visit Earth. 

One conundrum that I described in my previous posting on UFOs is that, thus far, there is no irrefutable evidence of other-worldly visitors in the way of either a clean photograph, a chunk from an alien space ship, or a piece of their trash. That lack of solid verification causes many skeptics to doubt we have been visited. A similar conundrum exists in the field of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI): despite decades of searching space for the potential existence of aliens, no signals have yet been detected. It raises the question: If they're out there (or have come here), why have we not yet irrefutably detected them? These are vexing questions.

So, let's suppose that we might have been, or soon will be visited by alien space visitors. What might we assume about them, or what questions might come to mind about them?

1. Their technology has to be much more advanced than ours, just to have been able to traverse the vast distances.
2. Why have they not made contact? Why are they seemingly hiding from us?
3. Do they have some sort of Prime Directive—as posited on Star Trek—whereby they have a strict prohibition on interfering with the evolution of inferior or developing species? The Star Trek version is intended to avoid disturbance of an alien species' natural development.
4. Could it be that what we are detecting is not craft with outer-space beings aboard, but are robotic missions, or even some sort of holographic projection? Unless advanced civilizations have found a way to exceed the speed of light (extremely unlikely, if the cosmos behaves as we think it does), space travel between star systems would require hundreds of thousands of years, so sending live beings aboard a spacecraft would require an enormous amount of food and other life support systems to haul along.
5. Might the visitors simply wish to observe us and to avoid contact? This possibility differs from the Prime Directive proposal (#3), in that technologically-advanced species have likely long ago solved the issue of aggression and war, in order to survive—if they ever had it. They may be shocked at how the human species mistreats itself and its environment and have decided to keep their distance, until we either do ourselves in or grow up and figure out how to get along and behave.

I'd like to think that this last point is what may be the most likely option. If those UFOs do happen to be from outer space and their technology is so superior, we would be no match for them, if they decided to attack. But might that possibility be just a projection of our violent tendencies onto them? Why should they be like us? Maybe they are peaceful  beings and are just waiting to see how we develop. After all, if they’ve invested all that time for space travel, they could afford to wait.