UFOs & ALIENS

“Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing.” - Josef de Maistre

There has been a spate of UFO sightings in Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory. The NT is notorious for reports of flying object sightings, perhaps because the air is clear and visibility of heavenly bodies is good, but also because many people tend to spend quite a lot of time in the open in the balmy tropical nights. As the number of sightings of UFOs is high in NT, it is no surprise that a website is devoted to these sightings, which is maintained by Alan Ferguson, a UFO aficionado and photographer who has seen many UFOs and has photographed many. Some people may beg to differ…

According to Ferguson, the sightings increase during the dry season (which is starting now) and which sightings are corroborated by many other people. There were at least seven sightings of UFOs in the last week, around the Darwin area. Geoff Carr, an astronomer, said he believed 99.9% of all the UFO sightings could be explained as simple weather phenomena. The objects that people have seen and have been captured on camera have ranged from dark disks flying in broad daylight to strange lights glowing in the night sky. Many of the sightings have been explained by experts as aircraft, weather balloons, clouds, planets, stars, etc.

These latest reports from the NT are highly topical as the famous astrophysicist, Stephen Hawking warns that our earth could be at risk of an alien invasion. Hawking has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist, as the universe has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

Hawking suggests that aliens might simply raid the Earth strip its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.” He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

The scenario is well known to us from science fiction stories, as for example “War of the Worlds” and “Independence Day”. It is a chilling thought and it is unlikely humanity would have a chance of resisting an attack by technologically advanced aliens intent on coming to earth and stripping it of its resources. However, although it makes a very good story, it is an unlikely scenario in real life. A technically advanced civilisation capable of making spaceships capable of interstellar travel, would certainly have the means to be self-sufficient and able to harvest resources from interstellar space or non-inhabited worlds.

One may also be excused in thinking that to get to that advanced stage of civilisation and technology, aliens would also be advanced socially and would not be bellicose and cruel. I am thinking that perhaps they would be superior to us in every way. I think those poor aliens, should they visit earth soon would have to fear more humans than we from them… Heaven knows we are cruel enough to each other because we have different skin colour to each other, or a different religion or have different politics! Aliens would have no chance of surviving!