A UFO the Size of a Planet is Heading Our Way!

On rumor, speculation, and the desire to make something out of nothing

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the European Space Agency spots a giant object moving through space in irregular ways, appearing to perform “braking maneuvers” and “course corrections.” The object is approximately ten light years from Earth. The James Webb Space Telescope confirms the sighting. Whatever it is, the object is massive, possibly even planet-sized, and it appears to be heading towards our solar system.  

Or maybe you’ve heard this one: the James Webb Space Telescope detects “techno-signatures” from a star system about 124 light years away. Contact is established using some sort of quantum technology unknown to the general public, who are told, at first, only that the presence of dimethyl sulfide - a gas that only exists as a product of biological activity – has been possibly detected in the atmosphere of an exoplanet known as K2-18b.

Artist’s interpretation of K2-18b, located in a galaxy far, far away.

These are both current rumors swirling through the UFO community. I’ve heard them from people who I think are sincere in their beliefs about both. The people I speak to speak to people who are in a better position to know than any of us. Which, to me, gives both rumors a shred, albeit a shred, of credibility. If you’re hearing about these rumors from me, you’re hearing about them fourth-hand. If you believe many fourth-hand rumors, you are likely even more gullible than myself.

And I’m pretty gullible.

Setting aside the likelihood of such rumors turning out to be true for a second, one of the reasons I’m so interested in the world of UFOs is that I’m interested in the way information gets passed around and the memetic nature of communication. How do we transmit information, myth, and folklore? How do we derive meaning from the ineffable? When do fringe beliefs tip into mainstream beliefs? Questions like that lead to deeper questions, some of which might nudge us towards understanding something deeper about ourselves.

I’ve always been interested in “secret knowledge.” It could be any kind of secret knowledge: the rites and rituals of ancient Egyptian Lector priests, or how to hot-wire a car. The rise of the internet, which should have democratized knowledge, has, instead, created evermore pockets of esoterica. One can get as deep into any subject as one wishes until you either learn everything there is to possibly know or you end up on the frayed edges of our knowledge and cross over into speculation, rumor, and innuendo. It’s those frayed edges I find fascinating.

If I were a smarter person, perhaps I would have gone into the sciences to pursue answers to some of these questions. What is the boundary between life/not life? What is the “dark energy” that appears to be pushing our universe apart? How does the act of measurement collapse a wave function? What is a near death experience and why do they happen?

The UFO question sits right at the nexus of all of these other questions. I’m not going to get much into the question of “are they even real” because that appears to be settled. Yes, they’re “real” in the sense that they’ve been reported across the world for at least decades, there’s overwhelming evidence of their reality, and the Pentagon has agreed that they’re real and has set up various offices to study them, as have other governments. The question then becomes, what are they?

Are they piloted or unpiloted? If they’re piloted, are the pilots alive? Are the craft themselves “alive,” as some have reported? Where do they come from? Someplace “out there,” or is it possible they come from here? What powers them? How do they fly when they appear to have no propulsion system? Why are they here? Those are all obvious questions, of course, but then you get into some weird possibilities about their nature, one of which I’ve recently become fascinated with; is it possible that, in some sense, they’re our own creations? Is there a tipping point in the spread of knowledge and ideas into a collection consciousness that we actually create these things? It sounds ludicrous, and yet, the whole subject is ludicrous. In fact, the religious scholar and UFO researcher, Dr. Jeffrey Kripal, referred to UFOs as a “technological koan in the sky.”

What he meant by that is that anybody who spends any time at all looking at UFOs quickly comes to understand that nothing about it makes sense, and that its apparent senselessness appears to be a fundamental quality of the phenomenon. The most famous researcher in the field, Jacques Valle, even named his collection of materials on the subject, “Archives of the Impossible,” which has grown to well over a million documents on the subject. After decades in the field, Vallee still doesn’t know what UFOs are, but believes they offer a clue into the nature of reality itself. The problem is we haven’t even figured out how to interpret the clue.

Do I think a planet-sized object is heading towards our solar system? I do not, and yet I can’t entirely dismiss the possibility either. Not because it’s likely, but because it’s at least not impossible. More than that, though, the idea nestles itself very comfortably into the worlds of myth and mystery, worlds I have grown to love residing within. Do I think the Americans have some sort of secret tech that allows us to communicate with beings a hundred light years away? Again, I do not. But I want it to be true, and in wanting it to be true, I wonder if, in some way, I don’t increase the likelihood of it becoming true? Sounds ridiculous until you consider how much of science fact started out as science fiction.

People are strange. How strange I have no idea because we have no creatures of comparable intelligence to compare ourselves with. To my knowledge, we are the only creature that asks the question, “why?” The ability to question something’s cause and effect produces another unique quality to our species, mystery. From mystery springs myth. From myth comes belief and belief has the ability to alter reality. One doesn’t invent the electric lightbulb without believing such a thing is possible. Might that not also be true for UFOs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. That’s what makes it all so cool.