UFO wouldn't bother with Stephenville

Noel S. Williams

I hope peaceable space aliens, preferably carbon-based humanoids who aren’t too smelly, visit us. After such a long journey, they wouldn't bother with Stephenville.

It’s a bit bewildering when upstanding citizens insist they’ve seen a UFO. They may otherwise be reputable, but their close encounters are probably as fictitious as films like “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” I do like it when Klaatu exhorts humans to pursue peace and Gort vaporizes our weapons of mass destruction, but the inconvenient laws of physics make me dubious this could happen outside Hollywood.

The unidentified part is explainable: light’s refractive and reflective properties create all manner of illusions, especially with the sun low on the horizon. There’s plenty of space debris, but maybe the unidentified objects are more banal, like a series of particularly luminescent military flares hovering silently beneath some cirrus-like trail of condensed water vapor. Then again, it may just be a squadron of F-16s on maneuvers unbeknownst to the public affairs officer from a nearby base.

Even if an object remains unidentified, it’s the “Flying” bit that has me confounded since it implies navigation. No disrespect to our friends in Stephenville, but why in the universe would E.T. visit a field in rural Texas? Surely they would come to admonish the Politicians in D.C., or at least pop-in on the U.N. in New York to chide them for corruption.

Beyond E.T.’s peculiar itinerary, it’s the speed of light being the absolute speed limit that makes me suspicious of these sightings. Under this immutable law it would be miraculous if we could even communicate with E.T. let alone meet it.

In our vast universe, rocky planets with a salubrious atmosphere may exist. Some might even have a moon to moderate perturbations and climate; some may be the optimal distance from their sun to sustain intelligent life. Unfortunately, we can’t communicate with them: they’re at least hundreds, likely thousands or even millions of light years away – our average Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years across.

It’s just implausible to communicate with space aliens given their probable distance from us. We’ve been sending radio waves for about 60 years, so they’d have to be within 30 light years, detect us forthwith and respond immediately. Since radio waves travel at the speed of light, the round trip would mean SETI might get their response in a decade if proximity allows, more likely next century even if we’re all on the same wavelength.

If E.T. has a telescope which could somehow obfuscate the brilliant glow of our sun while focusing on our infinitesimally small and dim pinprick of rock, they’d probably be seeing Earth long before our earliest civilizations took root – that’s how long the light would take to get there. Even if they’re looking in our direction, our planet may be nothing but dark, invisible matter to them, observable only indirectly by its tiny gravitational pull on the sun. No reason for them to pack for a thousand-year voyage to unremarkable fields in rural Stephenville, though it must be tempting to visit San Francisco to see why some humanoid earthlings undergo metamorphosis into a different sex.

If communication is tricky, you can see it’s a bit preposterous to imagine Klaatu or his ilk travelling close to the speed of light. It’s easy for Hollywood, but Klaatu and Gort would have difficulty devising propulsion systems that defy Einstein’s famous equation: E=MC2 . After all, their spaceship’s mass, approaching the speed of light, would require an infinite amount of energy, in turn requiring an infinite mass. They better also have a darn good refrigerator given the length of their voyage.

Indeed, they’d have to have started so long ago that the dinosaurs were likely roaming deep in the heart of Texas. Maybe that’s why the recent UFO in Stephenville vanished so quickly: they were expecting T-Rex not us weird looking humans.

Still, after such a long ride you'd think they'd at least say Hi. After a little R&R at Disneyworld maybe they could do us a gesture of goodwill and abduct Hillary and Bill so we could “give change a chance.” If they don’t have amenities for Billary perhaps they can at least endorse Barrack Obama; after all, he seems to be getting the educated vote – on that side, anyway.

Pending discovery of some unknown physics that allows time travel via mysterious cosmic holes in hyperspace, I’m a bit dubious of the nice folks in rural Texas. That may seem a bit discouraging, but there’s no assurance the UFOs come in peace. Instead of Klaatu and Gort perhaps they’re piloted by an alien tripod and “War of the Worlds” is a better allegory. Makes me glad the expansion of the universe is accelerating, making us even harder to reach.