A Sceptic's Affectionate Audit of Humanity's Best Evidence for Aliens

Believers and Sceptics - UFOs and ETs

A Sceptic's Affectionate Audit of Humanity's Best Evidence for Aliens

Or: Why, after eighty years of looking, the smoking gun keeps turning out to be a weather balloon, a swamp gas hallucination, or a bloke called Bob.

There is something genuinely poignant about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Billions of stars. Hundreds of billions of galaxies. A cosmic lottery so vast that the mathematical probability of us being alone is, frankly, embarrassing.

And yet our best evidence — the absolute crown jewels of ufology, the exhibits we'd present to a galactic jury — consists largely of grainy footage, the testimony of pilots who quite reasonably saw something they couldn't identify, and a man in New Mexico in 1947 who found some unusual tinfoil in a field.

Let us proceed, then, with the audit. Solemnly. Affectionately. With the gentle scepticism of a coroner examining the remains of a thousand promising leads.

Exhibit A: Roswell, 1947 — The Founding Document

Every great religion needs an origin story, and ufology has Roswell. A rancher named Mac Brazel found some debris. The military issued a confused press release saying they'd recovered a "flying disc". They retracted it within twenty-four hours and said it was a weather balloon. Decades later, they admitted it was actually Project Mogul — a top-secret balloon designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests, which is admittedly cooler than a weather balloon but, crucially, still a balloon.

This has not stopped Roswell from generating, by conservative estimate, approximately 17,000 books, 4 feature films, an entire town's tourism economy, and the unshakeable conviction that the United States government is hiding alien bodies in a hangar somewhere. The dark joke writes itself: the most famous piece of UFO evidence in history is a thing the government admitted to lying about, just not in the way everyone wanted.

Exhibit B: The Pilots

This is where things get genuinely interesting, and we should be fair. Naval aviators are not the demographic most prone to flights of fancy. They are trained, screened, sober professionals operating multimillion-pound aircraft. When Commander David Fravor encountered the "Tic Tac" off the coast of California in 2004, he was not on mushrooms. He was a fighter pilot, and he saw something that moved in ways he couldn't explain.

The footage — eventually released by the Pentagon, formally acknowledged as authentic, and rebranded with bureaucratic poetry as "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" and then "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena" — shows objects doing things that, if real, violate our understanding of physics. If they're not real, they're sensor artefacts, parallax errors, or distant aircraft that look weird through infrared optics.

The dark humour here is exquisite: the most credible UFO witnesses in history are people whose entire job is to identify flying objects, and even they can't tell us what they saw. This is either the most damning indictment of our airspace surveillance or the most comforting thing imaginable about how genuinely strange the sky can be.

Exhibit C: The Whistleblowers

In 2023, a former US intelligence officer named David Grusch testified under oath to Congress that the United States has been recovering "non-human biologics" and reverse-engineering alien craft for decades. Under oath. To Congress. With his hand on metaphorical Bibles.

The dark joke here writes itself across two layers. First: if true, this is the most important news in human history, casually delivered between hearings on infrastructure spending. Second: nobody reacted as though it was the most important news in human history, which means either (a) Congress has become so jaded that revealing the existence of aliens registers somewhere between a tax bill and a postal service reform, or (b) literally nobody actually believes him, including the people who wanted to.

Grusch did not provide any of the bodies, craft, or biologics. He couldn't, he said, because of classification. The evidence was too secret to share, but he was definitely sure it existed. This is, theologically speaking, the same epistemic structure as faith.

Exhibit D: The Wow! Signal

In 1977, an astronomer at Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope spotted a 72-second narrowband signal from the direction of Sagittarius. He circled it on the printout and wrote "Wow!" in the margin. It has never been detected again, despite decades of follow-up.

This is genuinely the best evidence we have for extraterrestrial intelligence, and it consists of one signal, heard once, by one telescope, nearly fifty years ago, that we cannot replicate. Recent research has suggested it might have been hydrogen clouds excited by a passing comet, which is either reassuringly mundane or a cosmic-scale "no comment" from whoever was broadcasting.

Exhibit E: 'Oumuamua, the Cigar from Beyond

In 2017, an interstellar object passed through our solar system on a hyperbolic trajectory. It was elongated, behaved oddly, and accelerated in ways that weren't easily explained by outgassing. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb suggested — with the casual confidence of a man who has tenure — that it might be alien technology.

The mainstream astronomical community responded with the polite horror of dinner-party guests when someone brings up homoeopathy. The current best explanation is that it was a chunk of nitrogen ice, or possibly a hydrogen iceberg, or possibly something else that is definitely not aliens, because saying it might be aliens is professionally ruinous unless you're already at Harvard.

Exhibit F: Crop Circles, Cattle Mutilations, and the Greatest Hits

We must pay our respects to the classics. Crop circles turned out to be two blokes from Southampton called Doug and Dave, who admitted in 1991 that they'd done it with planks and rope for a laugh. Cattle mutilations turned out to be predominantly natural decomposition, supplemented by predators with a taste for soft tissue. Alien abductions correlate strikingly well with sleep paralysis, a condition affecting roughly 8% of the population that produces, with eerie consistency across cultures, the sensation of being immobilised while shadowy figures stand over the bed.

The dark conclusion: a great deal of what we think aliens have done to us is, in fact, what our own brains do to us in the small hours, supplemented by what crows do to dead cows, supplemented by what lads do when they're bored.

Conclusions

After this honest audit, we are forced to admit several things at once.

The first is that there is no piece of evidence — none, not one — that survives serious scrutiny as proof of alien intelligence visiting Earth. Every photograph has a mundane explanation, every artefact has gone missing or turned out to be terrestrial, every credible witness saw something they couldn't identify, which is not the same as seeing something extraterrestrial.

The second is that this is, in itself, deeply strange. The Fermi Paradox — the question of where everyone is, given how many planets there ought to be — only sharpens with each passing year.

We've found thousands of exoplanets. We've found organic molecules on Mars and water on Europa. The universe is wet and organic and suspiciously suitable for life, and yet our radio telescopes hear nothing but the hum of background hydrogen, and our skies offer up nothing more compelling than a Tic Tac that might have been a sensor glitch.

The third, and darkest, is that the most likely explanation for our lack of evidence is the most depressing: either we are alone, which is terrifying; or we are not alone but the others are silent, which is more terrifying; or we are not alone and they are here, but they're so much more advanced that they regard contact with us as roughly equivalent to us striking up a conversation with an interesting moss.

The best evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence, in the end, is the universe itself — its sheer, statistically obscene vastness — and the worst evidence is everything we've actually managed to gather. We are a species that has looked up at the sky for a hundred thousand years, and the most concrete thing we've come back with is some grainy footage and a man in Ohio writing "Wow!" in a margin.

Honestly?

Given the alternatives, that's probably for the best.

The author would like to acknowledge that if this article ages badly because aliens land tomorrow, he will be the first to admit it and the second to ask for receipts.

Alan /|\