UFOs, aliens, mysticism and science. Was not and was not created - was it?

UFOs and their aliens are flooding the media and recently us too. The phenomenon is making waves in the public and the number of believers is increasing. Is there a scientific truth behind the belief?

By Dr. Noah Brosh, from: "Galileo"
Before the full moon of December 1996, hundreds of people gathered in a hotel in Eilat, convinced that there are aliens visiting us frequently. The first convention on this topic was officially opened by Uri Geller, an Israeli whose name is associated worldwide with supernatural phenomena, and who testifies that he received these powers following an encounter with aliens. For three days, the participants absorbed experiences and testimonies from people who claim to have met aliens and seen flying saucers.

At the opening of the conference, a platform was also given to other opinions at the "Shulchan Dion", where your faithful servant also sat and next to him other UFO disbelievers: the chief rabbi of Eilat and Ish Aviram, an expert on human behavior. About half of the 500 on the assembly island belonged to the group of believers. Some of them even claimed to have experienced UFO landing events, been abducted by aliens, and there were those who said that medical experiments were done on them. The second half consisted of the curious and "swingers", who believe that life may exist somewhere in the universe, but are not at all sure if beings from other worlds have ever visited here in human history.
The personal experiences brought by the UFOists to strengthen their views were not acceptable according to any scientific standard. They can be used, at most, as a subject for sociological or psychological research. Another type of reinforcement was the historical claims. Kabbalist Rami Shekalim tried to convince with the help of "historical evidence" that from what is written in the Zohar book and books of Jewish mysticism, as well as ancient Indian letters and scriptures of ancient cultures, it follows that aliens visited the earth. This claim is not new and was brought before Mr. Shekelim; For example, by Erich von Daniken (in his book "Chariots of the Gods"), who claimed that human culture was implanted here by aliens. The historical claims are one way of interpreting ancient writings, where faith, mysticism and facts are mixed in the fabric of human history.
These claims do not stand a scientific test, because they are only one way to interpret phenomena that are brought as evidence. In science, the principle of reduction in assumptions is accepted, that is, if you want to explain a certain phenomenon, you must follow a logical path of developing a theory while trying not to make claims that cannot be proven. The scientific method "worked" already in the Middle Ages and brought us this far.
The scientific method

This is how the scientific method works: after an observation of a certain aspect of the universe, a theory is formulated that corresponds to the observation, with as few assumptions as possible; The theory is used to predict phenomena, occurrences, or new findings; The theory is tested with experiments or additional observations and it is changed in light of the new findings, and God forbid. Only if all these requirements are met can it be said that the theory meets the scientific standards.

Scientific development progresses in gradual stages, although sometimes giant leaps are made, such as the emergence of quantum theory, which brought about a revolutionary change in the perceptions of physicists at the end of the last century. But even this change met the standards of scientific development. The path of scientific research is full of doubts, and the search for truth usually requires a certain restraint of the imagination. So, for example, scientists prefer to find explanations as simple as possible for phenomena and not to assume that they were caused by creatures from other planets visiting us. By the way, even before the beginning of the scientific age, similar claims were made to those brought by the UFOists today; So it was demons, angels, and gods who did the hard work of explaining, not aliens.
Only fields of research that meet the criteria listed above can be included in the scope of what is called "science". If the research does not conform to scientific standards and methods of operation, it is not science but something else. Science, and the technology derived from its discoveries, can be considered a success story. One measure of success is, for example, the culture of the human race. If at the beginning of the industrial revolution the world population numbered only a few hundred million people, within a few years it will reach the sixth billion. This huge increase in the population is a direct result of the improvement in the standard of living, which came mainly due to the technological-scientific development.
UFOs: mistakes and deceptionsIf we return to UFOs, it turns out that about 95% of the reports stem from a mistake or lack of knowledge on the part of the reporter. A small part is an invention or a lie, literally, probably for the purpose of self-publicity (see: "UFOs - phenomenon or appearance", Galileo 10 p. 50). An example of a misidentification is an incident that occurred in early December 1996, when in the wee hours of the night, a UFO sighting was reported by phone to the Mitzpe HaKohavim in Mitzpe Ramon. The observer at the observatory asked what they were seeing, in what direction and at what height above the horizon, and realized that the reporter had seen the planet Venus. At this time of the year, Venus appeared in the east towards morning so bright that its light caused shadows to be cast on moonless nights. The event is unusual, and it is likely that a person not versed in astronomy could recognize the strange luminous body as a planet. What is a UFO, if not an "unidentified object"? The reporter really saw, for him, a UFO, but the experienced recipient of the report was able to identify it with a natural phenomenon.
An example of deception in its name is the "Duck Night," which occurred on January 5, 1997, when most of the country's residents looked at the sky in the hope that the UFOs predicted by a mystical eccentric would appear. Although at the end of the entertainment program, the moderator admitted that all the phenomena that were filmed were "pyrotechnics", that is, catching the viewers' eyes, but the convinced people could not be swayed - they did indeed see a UFO, even if to others it looked like an airplane!
What is special about the UFO phenomenon is the interesting cross section of the reporters. As far as I know, there has never been a report of a UFO from a professional astronomer, even though most of the reports refer to objects seen at night, when many astronomers are awake and studying the sky! There are about 8000 professional astronomers in the world, who are affiliated with the International Astronomical Organization, and each of them spends an average of thirty nights a year in their research near a telescope in an observatory. If you add all the nights together, you get a huge number of nights where people with scientific-research education, experts in their field, are waiting for an unusual celestial event. Despite this considerable and skillful "covering" of the nights, the astronomers do not report UFOs at all.

The absence of a report by the astronomers can be interpreted in two ways: it is possible that there are no UFOs for the astronomers; Astronomers do not recognize unidentified objects because they know how to recognize any strange and unusual phenomenon. It could also be that there is a global bond of silence between astronomers in particular, and scientists in general, to hide the existence of alien visits from the general public. The reader will be able to judge for himself, and he would do well to take into account the truth-telling, which is built into the scientific education of every scientist. Although there are also "weeds" in the field of science, which falsify research results, this is not a widespread phenomenon, but only in isolated and exceptional cases, and usually in high-income fields such as biotechnology or pharmacology. My argument is that the scientists as a whole report the truth, and there are probably no alien visits to the earth.
To strengthen the claim that Arabization is a "pathological" phenomenon that characterizes our society, we can bring the paucity of reports (if not the general absence) from our immediate environment. The number of testimonies about UFO visits and aliens coming from the neighboring Arab countries, or even from the "territories", is tiny compared to their number in Israel. This too can have an 'Abmist' explanation, that Israel is a special country, where the people of Israel who received the Torah lived, etc. But there is not much similarity between the current borders of the state and the historical ones of the Kingdom of Israel and there is no reason for a UFO arriving according to the historical coordinates of the Kingdom of Israel to maintain international borders that are only decades old.
If we do accept that the reports about UFOs are based on errors or deceptions, the question arises, is the human race truly unique in the universe? Many scientists believe that there is life and even civilizations in different places in the universe, but the problem is the great distance between the civilizations, which apparently prevents direct contact between them. Only in our galaxy there are about a million millions of stars (actually suns like our sun - they may be bigger or smaller than it, at one stage or another of their development), and maybe about half of them are single stars (not in pairs or multiple systems). Following the discoveries of planetary systems near other stars in the last two years, when an average of one new planet is discovered every two months, there is reason to believe that most stars have planetary systems around them. If it turns out that the bodies recently found inside the Martian meteorite found in Antarctica are indeed fossils of ancient single-celled creatures, it means that life evolved on Mars at the same time as it appeared on Earth. This would confirm the assumption that life is a widespread phenomenon during the evolution of planets, if they have the right conditions. If this is the case, then the universe is full and saturated with life.
Interstellar civilizations and their relationshipIn order for cultures to contact each other they have to be at a similar stage of development. Life has existed on Earth for about 4 billion years, but only in the last 100000 years has the intelligent man evolved. The technological culture, within the framework of which spacecraft and devices were created that basically allow communication via radio waves with nearby interstellar cultures, was created in the last decades. We have no idea what the lifespan of our technological culture is and whether a technological stage in culture is necessary for every possible culture in the universe. In order to calculate the chances of contact between cultures, this must also be taken into account. When considering all the factors, too
Those who are uncertain, arrive at estimates that the distance between civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy is several tens of light-years or more. The chance that two cultures will be found near each other, and at a similar developmental stage, is extremely low. Add to that the huge expenditure in energy involved in physically moving from planet to planet, and you find that the chance of intelligent beings visiting the earth is zero. It is this consideration that motivates scientists to think that the communication between interstellar cultures should be done by efficient radio communication that transmits a lot of information at the speed of light.
For about a decade, scientists have been trying to receive targeted transmissions from possible extraterrestrial civilizations located around relatively nearby stars in the galaxy.
The search was done as part of a project - SETI "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). This project is being conducted in the USA with a rather meager budget that all comes from private sources, using existing radio telescopes to check if transmissions from intelligent beings are received. The researchers are systematically moving from star to star within a range of about 50 light years from the sun, but so far in the night of radio waves received from natural sources in space, no transmission that can be identified as a transmission carrying an "intelligent" message originating from any culture has yet been received. The lack of transmissions is strange, given the fact that radio signals from Earth have been transmitted into space for about 70 years, starting with the beginning of very short wave transmissions, and especially with the beginning of television transmissions. From this period, humanity began to "advertise" itself in the immediate environment of the universe. The transmitted radio waves have left the Earth's ionosphere and are still spreading everywhere. The earliest waves already reached a distance of about 70 light years from the solar system. In this volume there are several tens of thousands of stars and perhaps life has developed on one or some of them. It is possible that at this moment an extraterrestrial scientist is pointing a radio telescope towards the sun and picking up unnatural "intelligent" transmissions, which do not match the nature and power of the transmission expected from a sun-like star. From the analysis of the broadcasts, they will understand that there is a technological culture here and will even conclude, after continuous observation, that it is a planet whose distance is the distance of the Earth from the Sun. If the alien civilization decides to respond to transmissions from Earth, we will only receive their responses in 70 years or more. These days it is only possible to receive rebroadcasts (answers) from cultures that are at most 35 light years away from us; Even in this volume there is a considerable amount of stars.
Back to UFOsAnd what about the UFOs? This phenomenon is probably related to the people's desire to find a simple solution to their longings, or perhaps to their problems, and is close to religious belief. Those who see UFOs and meet aliens are probably fulfilling a hidden need in their souls. This is a way of adapting to reality, but together with other beliefs it does not pass the test of the scientific approach. People rely on different beliefs, such as those who wear red threads near them "against the evil eye", or who prostrate on graves to bring balm for their pain. It turns out that at the end of the twentieth century, many do not accept the logical-scientific approach, but are controlled by passions and beliefs. The more phenomena such as religious cults and UFO contracts are studied, it becomes clear that the "intelligent man" has not changed much in the tens of thousands of years since the Stone Age - the technological-scientific culture is only a thin layer that covers irrational depths.