My
opinion, for what it's worth, is that there is still not enough good evidence to determine what the real UFOs are. Yeah, after many
decades, I'm pretty convinced that there is a small core of UFO experiences that simply defy explanation as possible misidentifications,
hallucinations, or hoaxes.
But I have no idea what they are. A lot of people like to believe they're alien space craft, however, there's no good evidence to support that
contention. I like the time travelers idea. But there's no good evidence to support that contention, either.
A lot of people like the alien idea, though, because it's simple. Unfortunately, to make that notion work you have to throw out an awful lot of UFO
and abductee cases where really, really weird stuff happens that even goes beyond the simple notion of aliens in space ships. The deeper you go into
the literature, way beyond the flying triangles, the stranger things get. And if you're going to look for answers, you can't cheat. You can't
just toss out the bizarre cases just because they are too weird and don't fit the hypothesis.
After many decades, I've come to wonder if perhaps these things aren't some kind of naturally occurring manifestation of the permeability of
spacetime as it relates to consciousness. If modern quantum mechanics has taught us anything, it's that conscious observation is necessary for the
universe to exist. Every conscious, living thing works together to collapse a quantum wave function and separate reality from an infinite number of
virtual possibilities. UFOs (along with many other "paranormal" things, including demons, ghosts, elves, leprechauns, Bigfoot, etc.) may represent
a kind of "leakage" between our reality and other virtual possibilities, including those of our own future.
Imagine that spacetime is like a bubbling pot of water, only working in a dozen or so dimensions. Separate bits of time and space churn around in the
pot in all directions. Sometimes bits bubble up to the surface, and become real, or bounce into each other, depending on how much energy they might
have, or who is doing the observing.
For the most part, in our limited perception of things, things seem to move along normally without a lot of surprises. We all anticipate our
immediate future to be consistent with what we perceive as our present. But every once in a while, enough living things agree on a conscious or
subconscious level to let something exist that wouldn't ordinarily exist. Maybe the virtual consciousnesses (the aliens or demons or whatever) even
play a part in their own creation and manifestation. Then a UFO or Bigfoot will appear. But since they don't "belong" here, they can't stay.
They "vanish," back into the virtual soup.
I'm sure I don't understand the mechanism of how this might work. There's no mathematical formula that would allow this to happen. So in the end,
it's all just conjecture. There are some kinds of experiments being done with this idea, but the results remain inconclusive.
Anyway, as I always say when this subject pops up here, I think if most or all of the UFO sightings could eventually be explained as Star Trek-type
aliens from other planets, who are pretty much like us, flying little nuts-and-bolts space ships around, I think that would be pretty disappointing
and boring. And I think anyone who really and truly believes the ET hypothesis can explain it all shows a very sad lack of imagination.
Which goes back to my original opinion, which is that I (we) really don't have enough good evidence to discount anything, which is the same thing as
saying, "We don't know." We know something's happening, but we have very few clues, and nothing definitive, as to what it is.