November 9, 2011
No Evidence Yet of ET, White House Says
The best place to find "aliens" might be Comic-Con (2008, credit; Jim Merithew/Wired.com, via Wired Photostream on flickr)
A 2010 poll found that one in four Americans (and one in five people worldwide) believe that aliens have visited our planet. And many of these people believe that the evidence of these visits has been covered up by the government. Area 51, Roswell, mutilated cows in Colorado—there’s got to be some truth in that, right? And so two petitions were created on the White House We The People site, one calling “for the President to disclose to the American people the long withheld knowledge of government interactions with extraterrestrial beings” and the other asking the President “to formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.”
The petitions easily reached the threshold of 5,000 signatures needed to get a response from the White House. But the signers are likely to be disappointed. Phil Larson, who works on space policy and communications at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, wrote in the response:
The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.
He gives a few examples of ongoing and planned research—SETI, Kepler, the Mars Science Laboratory—that may lead to the discovery of alien life and then reminds us that the odds of finding alien life are probably pretty slim:
Many scientists and mathematicians have looked with a statistical mindset at the question of whether life likely exists beyond Earth and have come to the conclusion that the odds are pretty high that somewhere among the trillions and trillions of stars in the universe there is a planet other than ours that is home to life.
Many have also noted, however, that the odds of us making contact with any of them—especially any intelligent ones—are extremely small, given the distances involved.
While reading this, I was reminded of a conversation I had with Cassie Conley last year when I was reported a story about what will happen should we actually find alien life. Conley is NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer; she’s the one who makes certain that NASA missions don’t contaminate other planets and that any sample return missions don’t harm us here on Earth. She told me that after she took the NASA job, some people befriended her in the hopes of ferreting out NASA’s secrets about aliens. “I was dropped as an acquaintance immediately upon their realizing that, in fact, I didn’t have any secrets,” she said. “They were disappointed when they found out there weren’t any.” (But at least she had a good attitude about it all: “It was rather entertaining,” she said.)
I will admit that it is possible that some grand conspiracy exists, that a government or corporation could be hiding this information from us all. (I can’t disprove a negative.) But keep in mind what Conley says: “If you think the U.S. government is that good at keeping secrets, you’ve got a lot higher opinion of them than I do.”
In addition, such a conspiracy would necessitate excluding the scientists most interested and most qualified in this area, and all of them have committed to making a discovery of alien life public. “I think there’s a big misconception in the public that somehow this is all a cloak-and-dagger operation,” says Arizona State University astrobiologist Paul Davies. “It’s not. People are quite open about what they are doing.”
Even the White House.
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The White House response was an insult to those of us who signed the petition. They did not even bother to do an investigation before sending out the response that there were no known extraterrestrials. All they had to do was to talk to some CIA or Pentagon people. It is the US military/intelligence community that has kept this secret for so long. They think the disclosure will jeopardize US dominance of the world. See ufocoverup.org for more info
I believe the White House is telling the truth about “ET,” but that the spokesman, Mr. Larson, was being cagey about what he said. Let’s break it down:
Larson: “The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet…”
I don’t doubt that a bit. I believe certain people in the Defense Department have evidence of an intelligent, non-human presence here on Earth, but that’s not the same thing. There’s nothing to suggest that it’s extraterrestrial. It might be from a parallel universe, or something even stranger than that. It might even be the actual dominant life form on this planet, and we’re simply too obtuse to be aware of it.
Larson: “…or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race.”
Again, I evaluate that as true. Do we “contact or engage” chimpanzees? Do we negotiate with them? No. A few people like Jane Goodall have studied them, but if it comes down to “engaging” them, we dart them and do with them as we please. If they pose a life-and-death hazard, we kill them without hesitation. There is no negotiation. If something is here, there’s no reason for it to say, “Take us to your leader.” It could smear us in a heartbeat.
I will even go so far as to suggest that if crackpots hadn’t invented the “we are negotiating with ET” nonsense on their own, it would be in the Defense Department’s best interest to make it up and leak it into the culture. At least a quarter of us don’t believe their denials anyway, but the “secret negotiation” and “reverse-engineering of alien technology” lies have the advantage of making our government look powerful and in control. Disinformation comes in more than one flavor.
Even if our government has physical evidence, what makes anyone think they could understand it? Could Sir Isaac Newton, brilliant as he was, reverse-engineer your laptop? No. The best he could do would be to break it. He didn’t have the tools or the theoretical know-how to analyze a single chip.
Larson: “In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.”
Larson is fudging a little on that one. I’d call Leslie Kean’s book, “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record” credible. This is just one of those situations where Larson could weasel by saying, “Well, it depends on what your definition of ‘credible’ is.” If this were a murder trial, the defendant would be going to the lethal injection gurney on eyewitness testimony alone, but “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Nevertheless, I’m sure there isn’t much ‘credible information’ — at least, not as far as the White House knows. It would be so stratospherically classified, not even the President of the United States could get at it. He has no “need to know.” In matters such as this, what he needs is plausible deniability, and I’m certain he has that in abundance.
I can’t even blame the Defense Department for the denials. What are they supposed to say? “We know something is here, but we don’t know what it is, we don’t know where it’s from, we don’t know how its technology works — if it is technology, and we don’t know its intentions. All we know is that it’s so far ahead of us, if it’s hostile, we’re doomed.”
They can’t afford to say that. It would undermine the public’s confidence in them. It might create a panic too, but human chaos is their bread and butter. They can handle panic. What they can’t allow is for themselves to look impotent, and in this situation, that is exactly what they are.
Military analysts have to evaluate threats according to capabilities, not intentions. Even the intentions of our allies could change tomorrow. Whatever is here could squash us. This isn’t a dumb movie like “Independence Day.” We are not going to be infecting their computers with a virus from a Mac laptop. This is for real. Any attempt at conquest would be over before it even started.
The government can’t admit that, and that’s why they don’t want to talk about it.
I know an indivual in the service that says otherwise as he was one of the first that visited the Roswell crash.
Laraine, I don’t have a strong opinion on the authenticity of the Roswell story one way or another. Maybe it happened, or maybe it’s more disinformation designed to make the “Visitors” look vulnerable and our own military seem on top of things. If the latter is the case, there’s no reason to believe that the ex-military people who have said it was real are lying. Some might have been duped by a psychological operation.
I lean slightly toward the Disinformation Hypothesis for the simple reason that I doubt such advanced beings would mess up so badly, but even if something did crash, I absolutely, positively do not believe we could reverse-engineer it. We’re still reeling over CERN apparently discovering that neutrinos can move faster than light (although the jury is still out; nevertheless, that those experimental results are even making us look tells me something). Relatively speaking, we’re in the Stone Age. We’re chimps… or less.
I direct your attention to my “Sir Isaac Newton reverse-engineering a laptop” analogy. He couldn’t have done it, and we could not reverse-engineer a faster-than-light or extra-universal drive. We don’t have the tools or the theoretical knowledge to do it.
Carl Sagan once said that if two space-faring civilizations ever meet, the laws of chance dictate that one will be so far ahead of the other, it will be “no contest.” He was right, and that knowledge is sobering. The idea that we could relate to them is a Star Trek fantasy.
If they’re here, they’re like boys with a magnifying glass contemplating an anthill. The best we could do would be to pray that they’re gentler than we are, and I suspect that’s exactly what the few Defense Department personnel who are in the know are doing.