reasons to think that it does. Bottom line: We don’t know yet.
“They Can’t Get Here.” [187] Skeptics argue that even if there is intelligent life elsewhere, it’s too far away from Earth to get here. Relativity theory tells us that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). At .001 percent of light speed, or 66,960 miles per hour—already far beyond current human capabilities—it would take 4,500 Earth years for any vehicle to arrive just from the nearest star system. And at speeds much closer to light a single spaceship would need to carry more energy than is presently consumed in an entire year on Earth.
Physical constraints on interstellar travel are often seen as the strongest reason to reject the extraterrestrial hypothesis, but are they clearly decisive? Computer simulations suggest that even at speeds well below light, any expanding advanced civilizations should have reached Earth long ago.[188] How long ago depends on what assumptions are made, but even pessimistic ones yield encounters with Earth within 100 million years, barely a blip in cosmic terms. Additionally, there are growing doubts that the speed of light is truly an absolute barrier.[189] Wormholes— themselves predicted by relativity theory—are tunnels through space-time that would shorten greatly the distances between stars. And then there is the possibility of “warp drive,” or engineering the vacuum around a spaceship to enable it to skip over space without time dilation.[190] Such ideas are highly speculative, but given how far we humans have come in just 300 years since our scientific revolution, imagine how far another civilization might have advanced 3,000 years (much less 3,000,000) after theirs. In light of these arguments, if anything, visitors from other civilizations should be here, which prompts the famous “Fermi Paradox,”[191] or “Where are they?”
“They Would Land on the White House Lawn.” So skeptics often take the argument one step further, by asking: If visitors from other planets have come all this way to see us, why don’t they land on the White House lawn and introduce themselves? After all, if human beings were to encounter intelligent life in our own space exploration, that’s what we would do. On this basis, the fact that UFO occupants have not done so is evidence that they are not here.
But is it? It is not at all clear that space-faring humans would land on an alien equivalent of the White House lawn if they journeyed to a distant planet. Perhaps advanced explorers would maintain a policy of noninterference toward lower life forms. Regardless of what human beings might do, however, on what scientific basis can we know the intentions of alien beings, whose nature and agendas might be utterly unimaginable to us? There is none, and as such one cannot rule out the possibility that extraterrestrials might have reasons for avoiding contact.
“We Would Know If They Were Here.” This final argument appeals to human authority—that, due to our vast surveillance of the skies with sophisticated radar and telescopes, the world would know definitely by now if extraterrestrials were here, because the experts would have discovered them.
This position, too, is by no means decisive. First, it assumes an ability to observe and recognize UFOs that may be unwarranted; if some are vehicles able to visit Earth, then their occupants could easily have the technology to limit knowledge of their presence. Second, the authorities have not actually looked for UFOs, and what is not looked for or expected is often not seen. Finally, in view of pervasive official secrecy about UFOs, more is probably known about them than is publicly acknowledged. This does not mean that what is known is their origin, but in the face of so much secrecy it is natural to raise the question.
Importantly, our point about each of these arguments is not that they are wrong, but that reasonable people can disagree about whether they are wrong, since they all ultimately rely on unproven assumptions rather than established scientific facts. Indeed, the very fact that it is so easy to raise reasonable objections to UFO skepticism is further evidence that, scientifically speaking, human beings can’t rule out the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Some of us may look at the evidence and arguments and conclude that the probability is zero, while others may give the hypothesis more credence—but who really knows? No one knows, because we do not have the scientific knowledge to make such probabilities meaningful. As former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld might put it, we are dealing here not with “known unknowns” but “unknown unknowns,” where objective likelihoods are anyone’s guess. And when there is such “reasonable doubt,” scientific hypotheses should not be rejected a priori. Far from proving that UFOs are not extraterrestrial, in short, current science proves only its ignorance.
If the proper application of science demands that at present we be agnostic about whether any UFOs have an extraterrestrial origin, neither believing nor rejecting this, then the taboo on trying to find out what UFOs are is deeply puzzling. After all, if any UFOs were discovered to be from somewhere else in the universe, it would be one of the most important events in human history, making it rational to investigate even a remote possibility. It was just such reasoning that led the U.S. Congress for a time to fund the SETI program looking for evidence of life around distant stars. So why not fund the systematic study of UFOs, which are relatively close by and at least sometimes leave physical evidence? Even for those for whom the question of extraterrestrials is not on the table, what about simple scientific curiosity? Why not study UFOs, just like human beings study everything else?
Our thesis is that the origins of this taboo are political. As political scientists, we are concerned with a possible connection between the need to dismiss the UFO and the way in which modern peoples organize and govern their societies. The inability to see clearly and talk rationally about UFOs seems to be a symptom of authoritative anxiety, a socially subconscious fear of what the reality of the UFO might mean for modern government.
The threat is threefold. On the most obvious level, acceptance of the possibility that the UFO is truly unidentified, and that therefore an unknown, very powerful “other” might actually exist, represents a potential physical threat. Clearly, if some other civilization has the ability to visit Earth, then it has vastly superior technology to human beings, which raises the possibility of colonization or even extermination. As such, the UFO calls into question the state’s ability to protect its citizens from such an invasion. Second, governments may also be reacting to the possibility that a confirmation of extraterrestrial presence would create tremendous pressure for a world government, which today’s territorial states would be loath to form. The sovereign identity of modern states depends on their difference from one another. Anything that required subsuming this difference into a global sovereignty would threaten the fundamental structure of these states, quite apart from the risk of physical destruction.
Third, however, and in our view most important, the extraterrestrial possibility calls into question what we call the anthropocentric nature of modern sovereignty. By this we mean that, in the modern world, political organization everywhere is based on the assumption that only human beings have the ability and authority to govern and determine our collective fate. Nature might throw us a curve ball in the form of a pandemic or global warming, but when it comes to deciding how to deal with such crises, the choice is ours alone. Such anthropocentrism, or human-centeredness, is a modern assumption, one less common in prehistoric and ancient times, when Nature or the gods were considered more powerful than human beings and thought to rule.
Significantly, it is on this anthropocentric basis that modern states are able to command exceptional loyalty and resources from their subjects. Because a possible explanation for the UFO phenomenon is extraterrestrial, taking UFOs seriously calls this deeply held assumption into question. It raises the possibility of something analogous to the materialization of God, as in the Christians’ “Second Coming.” To whom would people give their loyalty in such a situation, and could states in their present form survive were such a question politically salient? Our contention is that the political survival of the modern state depends on that question not being politically salient. As such, an authoritative taboo on the UFO is functionally necessary for rule to be sustained in its present form.
In sum, the UFO creates a deep, unconscious insecurity in which certain possibilities are unthinkable because of their inherent danger. In this respect the UFO taboo is akin to denial in psychoanalysis: the sovereign represses the UFO out of fear of what it might reveal about itself. There is therefore nothing for the sovereign to do
