Don’t drive over .05

A recent image of a UFO careening drunkenly across the London skies has got us thinking. Do UFOnauts have a licensing bureau? And do they have blood alcohol limit restrictions?

The photo in question at http://tinyurl.com/2sl79k touted as ‘genuine’, seems to us to be not quite so. There are reasons why we think it may be a fake, but there are also a number of reasons why we need to doubt our own reasoning whenever we look at an image of a UFO. In fact why all of us on this planet need to rethink and reconsider our thought patterns whenever we are confronted by things ‘alien’ to our dull Earthly milieu.

Why we think it’s a fake:

Well, just look at it. The pilot is flying too low to the ground, he’s too close to large ground-based structures for safety. Like, doesn’t the pilot care that he might knock over that great big Ferris wheel thingy and kill hundreds of terranian holiday makers? No, no respectable pilot (no matter which planet he trained on) would fly that low or that close to a building, would he? Unless he’s drunk. And from the angle of that spaceship, he just might be.

Also, the UFO in question looks too nice, too clean, too ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’… too good to be true in fact. It looks too human to be extraterrestrial, so it just couldn’t be. Could it?

Further, and more realistically, there is too much rain – it causes pixel interference so nobody can judge accurately if the UFO has been pasted into the image at a later date. You just gotta be suspicious of that, right? Nice big shiny UFO flying too close to an internationally-known landmark on a busy evening. In the rain. It screams hoax. It really does.

However!

Reasons not to judge too quickly and too harshly:

What do we, puny little Earthlings with our puny little Earthling educations and our puny little Earthling imaginations, know of extraterrestrial vehicles? Are we adequately equipped to know one when we see one? Are we adequately equipped to look a photograph of a UFO and judge?

As a society we are unbelievably judgmental, and Ufologists in particular are even more so. Pop a photo of a UFO in front of us and first thing we’ll say will be ‘fake.’ Why, when we are clamouring for evidence, are we the first to discard it when it comes our way? Does the reality confront even we, who are so desperately longing for it?

And who are we to say that an alien vehicle shouldn’t look too clean, or too dirty? Are we allowed to dictate if one is too round or too square, too amorphous or too bright, or not bright enough? What do we know, really know, about how alien civilisations construct their spaceships, their cities, their babies’ bassinets? They’re ALIEN – and that’s the whole point. We wouldn’t know the first thing about an extraterrestrial culture, and we could not ever place our psyches into theirs, so how could we ever predict what their artefacts might look like? They have different psyches, the result of millennia of social and cultural evolution on a different planet. Just as we are the result of millennia of social and cultural evolution on ours.

Too much evidence has been buried beneath good intentions by people who think they know what a UFO should, would or could look like. It behoves us to re-examine all the evidence we have, this time with a non-judgemental eye.

The moral of the story:

Perhaps we need to be less hasty in our urge to dismiss UFO evidence and discourage researchers. Because perhaps the truth has been out there all along, and we’ve just been too self-assuredly smug to see it.