Book of the Week: Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe

Just how much do believers really care about the truth and how much are they invested in preserving a belief-system that has become vital to their sense of identity?

Perhaps the question could be rephrased as whether there is anything in today’s science that precludes the possibility of interstellar travelers visiting the Earth?

We know that our sun is only an average star among countless ones within our galaxy which, again, is just one among literally countless galaxies which, in their turn, are parts of an incomprehensibly vast universe so the number of planets very similar to our Earth appears to be gargantuan.

The famous Green Bank formula (a/k/a the Drake equation) attempted to estimate the number of planets with intelligent life with very conservative assumptions and yet arrived at a mind-boggling figure which reportedly is being revised upward all the time.

Also, if we compare the state of today’s human science and technology with that of only five thousand years ago (a mere twinkling of an eye by astronomical standards) then one can only wonder what kind of science and technology may be possessed by civilizations who are only a few centuries ahead of us and space travel may be just as routine for them as air travel is for us.

In other words, we may be floating among innumerable advanced civilizations without being aware of it which is a sobering thought. They may also very well be wondering whether there is intelligent life on Earth and our science not only has nothing to preclude the possibility of their visiting us but, in fact, our own recent extraplanetary excursions (however primitive they may be) seem to point quite strongly in that direction.

So why do we then tend to hide and discard evidence even when they are presented by reliable witnesses like policemen, pilots, military personnel, large crowds and even well known politicians who make laws that govern our very lives? Even Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto (which is still a planet as far as I am concerned) had claimed to have seen a UFO.

One answer may be that a popular theme of many horror stories happens to be that some other creatures are doing to us what we routinely do to them (the classic episode titled To Serve Man of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone series is just one example). Which may be why we feel so terrified by the prospect of meeting more advanced beings who are capable of treating us exactly the way we treat our lower animals and our mental block regarding the possibility of an alien visit may very well originate from that unspoken fear.