"You're So Dumb It's Endearing"

That message appeared on my Twitter feed today right after I reposted an interview conducted by Mike Wallace with Major Donald Keyhoe in 1958 regarding “flying saucers.” As the United States Congress prepares to hold open hearings on the topic this week, I thought I might take a moment to discuss why I’m interested in this phenomenon. It’s not because I care about UFOs.

While it would be fascinating to discover that we are not alone in the universe, that’s not my primary motivation for understanding what’s happening. In fact, if it turns out that the simplest answer – an advanced alien civilization – is the sole entity responsible for what we’re experiencing, I would be a little disappointed. Why? Because the beautiful thing about what we’re seeing isn’t the potential new physics or the possible technological advancements; for me, the beauty is the mystery.

I’ve long been a consumer of pop science. Despite the fact that I have the reading comprehension of a sixth grader, I love reading about advances in genetics, cosmology, physics, biology, etc. I was one of those people cheering on the discovery of the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider even though I had very little understanding of what the Higgs boson actually is. The idea of thousands of people coming together over decades to construct a five-billion-dollar particle collider spread across the borders of two countries in the pursuit of detecting a theorized quantum particle that isn’t even a particle fills me with a particular kind of joy and awe. Pure science has always been a reason for optimism in a world that sometimes feels devoid of purity.

But science alone increasingly feels like it’s falling short in describing our reality. Or maybe our reality is exceeding the bounds of science. However far afield we search, however small we drill down, we only find more questions. It’s almost as if the search itself produces the complexity that follows. To me, UFOs fall into this camp. Not because they are necessarily inexplicable but because they raise more questions than they answer. Say, for example, that the most prosaic explanation for their existence – the ET hypothesis – turns out to be correct. If that proves to be correct, our universe changes overnight. Human history has to be rewritten to incorporate this new knowledge. Physics must be revised. New fields of biology, sociology, psychology will unfold. Religion has to be re-evaluated. Everything about who we believed ourselves to be has to be wrung through this new paradigm.

What new questions will follow?

A still simpler explanation for the phenomenon, the one favored by skeptics: it isn’t real at all. The objects we observe and track, the witness testimonies, the gamut of experiences, both exhilarating and terrifying, from sincere people… all of it is proven to be some kind of mass psychosis. What mechanism of the human mind can create such misbeliefs? How do we trust anything when we cannot even trust our senses? What would such delusions say about the nature of our reality? For all of human history, people have experienced life-changing encounters with… something. For all of human history, people have experienced anomalous phenomenon. I have. My wife has. My mother did, too. What stories do we tell ourselves to quiet the urgent voice in our heads asking for an explanation? Even if it’s just us out here, there’s something deeper within us that demands our attention.

Ultimately, the UFO question is about the nature of reality. It awakens the caveman in us looking up at the stars wondering how those lights got there. What is their meaning? What is our meaning? These questions can be framed in any number of ways: philosophical, scientific, religious. They force us to look anew at the way we investigate our world. Is everything reducible to the materialistic? Can everything be sorted into quarks? Are we just a happy accident of sticky particles, or is there something more going on?

Does reality create us or vice versa?

Any way I slice the explanation for unknown craft zipping around our skies and swimming through our seas, defying what we believed to be true about our physical world ends up leading me back to these questions. That’s not even considering the more exotic explanations – inter-dimensional, time travelers, simulation theory, etc.

When I sat down to write today, I had the vague notion of writing something about loneliness. It’s been on my mind a little because I’ve been spending a fair amount of time alone in my little flat in London. Also, I’ve been following Senator Chris Murphy’s efforts to identify loneliness as a profound American problem. Zooming out a little, I wonder if the fascination with UFOs also speaks to a deep, species-wide loneliness. For all we know, we are the only creatures in the universe capable of asking questions of the universe. Imagine what it would feel like to reach into the night sky and find a friend.

(Or we could find an adversary, or an enemy.)

For me, UFOs are only an onramp to mystery, the same way religion might be for somebody else. We are creatures who wonder. Maybe it’s the one thing that makes us who we are. Yes, Twitter pal, I am dumb. Deeply dumb. Whether or not it’s endearing, I have no idea. I’m grateful for my stupidity and my capacity to be moved enough by my lack of understanding to look for answers. I love being dumb because it has brought me to this place of wonder.