Thursday, June 9, 2022

Why Do Space Aliens Only Do Retail?

This is a question that's been pestering me in various forms almost ever since I learned about flying saucers. Here we have extraterrestrial beings from an advanced civilization, always in the popular imagination possessing great truths for earthlings, and they're always turning up piecemeal, visible only to individual pilots or people who see their planes' radar, or to individuals wandering alone or with a few associates in rural environments. A question that's come up somewhat more often as camera technology improves is why images purporting to be UFOs continue to be so blurred and sketchy.

Most recently, the question has come up for me in the popular History Channel series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, a product of Prometheus Entertainment, whose most respectable show is The Curse of Oak Island, but others include Ancient Aliens -- Skinwalker, with its focus on UFOs, cattle mutilations, and so forth, seems much more compatible with aliens. Searching the web for skeptical opinion on Skinwalker, I found this:

His conclusion about the show is "ulltimately, they're making entertainment", and since my wife and I have fun watching it, I tend to agree. But a commenter to the post says,

My concern has always been the issues with all of their electronic devices. They show so many issues with various electronic devices all over the ranch such as cell phones, ground-penetrating radar devices, etc. however, there are never any issues with the television cameras. The last time I checked, TV cameras were also electronic devices. Why don't they experience failures?

Good point. And following up on that, how come the forces they stir up when they dig on the property or shoot rockets into the air are so passive-aggressive? Rather than, say, just smiting down a too-curious earthling for shooting an annoying rocket into a critical zone, they merely cause malfunctions in their telemetry software, the sort of plausibly deniable jab that someone's sister-in-law might do. Or several hours after the rocket shoot, they just send a glowing ball bobbing in the breeze down a forest path that's visible only to the camera the earthlings have set up to track that sort of thing, which, as the commenter points out, for some reason doesn't malfunction the way every other instrument did that evening.

We're back to the peculiar retail-only level of paranormal phenomena. There's no paranormal equivalent to, say, the laws of thermodynamics. Why did the water in the vase evaporate? Well, there's a clear, universal explanation. Nature is operating at the wholesale level. Why did the pilot spot a tic tac UFO? We don't really know, but the whole episode is operating at the retail level. The explanation is a point solution, as the techies would put it.

The other thing that strikes me is a remark that Bp Barron made in his recent address at the US Air Force Academy: life is exuberant. Where it exists, it's everwhere. It swarms. It can't help but be visible. Why is alien life, if there is such a thing, so esoteric, so hidden, so deniable, so passive-aggressive?

My object isn't to pooh-pooh this stuff; the TV shows are fun up to a point, but doesn't the fact that the paranormal always seems to require a personal revelation, not a public manifestation, present a puzzle about human (not alien) nature worth working through?