Happy World UFO Day!

Today is World UFO Day. Why July 2? That was the date in 1947 that something crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. Something? Wasn’t it a flying saucer that crashed? Well, no. I’ll get back to that later. The Roswell incident happened only eight days after pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine shiny objects moving very quickly near Mt. Rainier in the US state of Washington. That sighting quickly morphed into alien flying saucers, which spawned an alien spaceship craze, with similar sightings worldwide. So the mysterious crash near Roswell just eight days later fueled further speculation, and the world has not been the same since. Rashes of such sightings have occurred since then.

Honest Government Investigations or Government Cover-Ups?

Military and other government officials took each sighting seriously. After all, it was the beginning of the Cold War, so any peculiar events could have been Soviet spying or even military threats. And such threats still exist today. Therefore, the US government and other governments around the world began to investigate UFOs, or unidentified flying objects, a term that has now been officially replaced by a new term, UAP, meaning unidentified aerial phenomena or unidentified anomalous phenomena. Yeah, I’ve been calling them UFOs for 60 years, so I’m not likely to switch to the new name either.

By the 1960s, polls showed that many Americans thought that the US government was hiding information that might be evidence of alien visitations to the earth. And you thought this was something new, didn’t you? Though the US Air Force had two previous UFO investigation programs, Project Blue Book, which ran 1952–1969, was the most famous. Much of Project Blue Book’s findings were made public in the 1970s. That should have settled the matter, but it didn’t. The UFO true believers insisted that the government was still hiding evidence of alien visitations to earth.

Project Blue Book
Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Partly in response to this demand, while running for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter promised to release additional government files about UFOs, but after becoming president, citing security concerns, Carter never released any documents about UFOs. Nor did the next five presidents release any UFO reports. This was viewed as stonewalling by the UFO true believers, and it further fueled speculation about what the government must be hiding by withholding this information.

This all changed in the spring of 2020 when the defense department officially released some videos of UFOs (I still can’t bring myself to call them UAPs) made by cameras aboard military aircraft. At the time, many people asked me if I had studied these videos. I didn’t. Why? Partly because I’m lazy. But I also knew if any of these videos provided any smoking gun evidence of alien visitation, the UFO true believers would find it. You didn’t hear anything about that, did you? Neither did I. That’s because the UFO true believers didn’t find any such evidence. Did that settle the matter? Of course not. UFO true believers just insisted that the government had thrown them a sop, hoping that it would satisfy them. So the speculation goes on.

Again, in response to this, in late spring this year, the Trump administration released documents and videos in three batches. Before you ask, no I haven’t really looked at these much either. Why? Yeah, I’m still lazy, but I can rely on the UFO true believers to once again do my work for me and report on any smoking guns that they find. They haven’t so far, and I don’t expect them to find any this time either.

Do ETs Exist? What Does the Bible Say?

Why don’t I expect anyone to find evidence of alien visitations on earth? It’s simple—I don’t believe ETs exist. Let’s look at this biblically for a moment. The Bible doesn’t address whether aliens exist. But the Bible doesn’t address many questions that I might have (whether I have a spleen comes to mind). When the Bible gives no clear answers to a question, we must use biblical thinking to answer the question. First, let us assume that God created beings like us on other worlds. For those beings to be truly like us, they must be created in God’s image like we are (Genesis 1:26).

This raises the question of whether those alien races are sinners as we are and thus require God to intervene to provide a way of salvation as he has done for us on earth. If the aliens are sinners as we are, then why? It could be because of Adam’s transgression as it is for humans on earth (Romans 5:12–15; 1 Corinthians 15:22). But to the aliens, we are the aliens. And Adam is an alien. So if you were living on that alien world and wanted to share the gospel with your fellow being, wouldn’t your message begin something like this: “A long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away?” No, that obviously is science fiction, not gospel truth. You might say, “Perhaps it was because of the disobedience of another couple on each of those alien worlds that sin entered their worlds.” But wouldn’t that have required that when Jesus finished his earthly ministry that he ascended to go to another world and do it all over again to redeem a race on that world? And again? And again? But this is not what Scripture clearly teaches, for we know that Jesus ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father (Mark 15:19; Acts 2:33; Ephesians 1:21–22; 1 Peter 3:22). Therefore, we know that Jesus truly died once for all.

Therefore, we know that Jesus truly died once for all.

You may protest that perhaps beings on other planets never fell into sin. But Romans 8:18–25 tells us that the whole creation is under the taint of man’s sin. That is why the creation itself must be redeemed by destruction and creation of a new heaven and new earth (Isaiah 65:17, 66:22; 2 Peter 2:10–13; Revelation 21:1–2). Thus, if there were alien civilizations that had never sinned, there would be sinless creatures in a sin-tainted world. This raises all sorts of theological problems. Therefore, I conclude that we are alone in the universe (though that does not preclude spiritual beings, such as angels and demons).

Do ETs Exist? What Does Science Say?

Does science have anything to say about whether there is life like us elsewhere in the universe? As I’ve discussed elsewhere, yes. There are three lines of evidence:

1. The Fermi-Hart paradox
2. The results of SETI
3. The lack of earthlike planets

Enrico Fermi
U.S. Department of Energy, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

During a discussion of the possibility of alien life around 1950, the famous physicist Enrico Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?” What he meant is that if intelligent life in the universe is common, then there probably are alien civilizations far advanced beyond ours so that they long ago conquered space. So why haven’t any shown up? Of course, that is assuming that the UFO true believers are wrong.

SETI stands for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, referring to eavesdropping on radio transmissions from other worlds. A decade after Fermi’s observation, the astronomer Frank Drake also pointed out that if intelligent life is common in the universe, then other civilizations long ago would have discovered radio. Once that happens, it would be difficult to hide those radio transmissions. Frank Drake did the first SETI experiment in 1960, and his effort has expanded tremendously since then. All one need do is attach a very sensitive receiver to a large radio telescope pointed at other planetary systems, and one can detect radio transmissions. Radio transmissions would be easily distinguishable from random sources. SETI has expanded tremendously over the past six decades, and probably terabytes of data have been recorded and analyzed. Not one intelligent transmission has been found. It’s as if no one is out there.

SETI Satellite in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands
adam gaston, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, via Flickr

Once people four centuries ago realized that the earth is one of several planets orbiting the sun, speculation began as to whether other planets in the solar system may be inhabited. And it was an easy step to realize that the sun is a star, so it is conceivable that other stars might have exoplanets, other planets orbiting them. For three centuries, this was speculation. But this all changed three decades ago as technology progressed to the point where it became possible for the first time to detect exoplanets. If one had asked scientists 30 years ago that when the number of known exoplanets reaches 6,000, how many of those exoplanets would be habitable, most scientists would have opined that hundreds of habitable planets must exist. Why did I pick the number 6,000? Because today more than 6,000 exoplanets are known, yet not one of them is habitable. That is a daunting statistic, suggesting that even if we are not alone in the universe, life—let alone intelligent life—is an extremely rare commodity.

These three lines of evidence lead one to conclude that we probably are alone in the universe. So both biblical principles and science leads to the conclusion that we are alone in the universe.

Both biblical principles and science leads to the conclusion that we are alone in the universe.

Return to Roswell

Earlier, I promised to say more about the Roswell incident. The Roswell incident really didn’t happen in 1947. Oh, something happened then, but it was quickly forgotten. The real Roswell incident happened three decades later when an author published a book in which he shared interviews of witnesses with fantastic stories from 1947, making the Roswell incident the legend that it became. And I must emphasize that it is a legend. One must wonder if these stories were true, why the gap between those supposed events and reporting them?

1947 Newspaper
Roswell Daily Record., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

As it turns out, there was a government cover-up at Roswell in 1947. Some ranchers out on the range came across some strange debris in the desert. They had been out of touch with news for days and, upon their return to town, heard about the flying saucer report in Washington the week before. They wondered if the wreckage they had found was the crash of an alien flying saucer. The military did some quick cover story, along with some confusing, conflicting statements. The official conclusion was that the wreckage was a crashed weather balloon. It wasn’t, and the military knew it was a lie. The wreckage was the crash of a balloon that carried sensitive microphones to high altitude, with the purpose of listening for Soviet nuclear bomb tests. At the time, it was the only way to monitor such tests, and the military did not want the Soviets to know about the technology, so the lie was told (or half lie—after all, it was a balloon). Better technology for detecting Soviet bomb tests soon was developed, so the sensitive nature of this technology was no longer an issue. Still, it took 40 years for the US government to confess that its initial official conclusion was false. Of course, this sort of belated honesty never satisfies the UFO true believers.

So enjoy today. Perhaps it can be a warm-up act for America’s 250 birthday in two days.