For all those who believe in UFOs…
For all those who’ve been fortunate enough to see one…
And for all those who are waiting for good fortune to visit them in the future…
July 2 is World UFO Day.
Some people celebrate it on June 24, the anniversary of the date that American aviator Kenneth Arnold sighted nine UFOs near Mount Ranier, Washington on June 24, 1947. July 2 commemorates the date of the infamous crash at Roswell, New Mexico.
My interest in was sparked in the 1970s after I became hooked on reruns of Star Trek in college. I joined the organization MUFON and followed it for several years. As a science fiction writer, I spend a lot of time researching space and space-related issues. The Milky Way is estimated to be about 100,000 light years across. It’s next to impossible to estimate the number of stars it contains, but the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission is mapping the locations of approximately 1 billion stars in the Milky Way. ESA says Gaia will map one percent of the stellar content of the Milky Way, which puts the estimate of the total stars in our galaxy at 100 billion. Gaia’s goal is to make the best-ever three-dimensional map of the Milky Way.
Just a few decades ago, astronomers debated whether planets like Earth were rare in the galaxy. With the power of modern day telescopes and other instruments, we now know non-Earth planets, called exo-planets, are quite common. And a large number of them orbit their stars in what is referred to as the “Goldilock’s zone,” the zone in which a planet can contain liquid water. One system recently discovered has six planets orbiting in the habitable zone, so close to each other that a being standing on one of them could see the others even during the day. Now that’s what I call cool!
All of that leads me to believe it won’t be long before we discover some type of extraterrestrial life.
But the big question is, has extraterrestrial life already discovered us? Although governments around the world have done their best to hide evidence of such life, there is evidence out there.
In 1977, Peter Sturrock, a professor of space science and astrophysics at Stanford University, mailed 2,611 questionnaires about UFO sightings to members of the American Astronomical Society. He received 1,356 responses from which 62 astronomers – 4.6 percent – reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena. This rate is similar to the approximately 5 percent of UFO sightings that are never explained.
The countries of Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008. The French Committee for In-Depth Studies, or COMETA, was an unofficial UFO study group comprised of high-ranking scientists and military officials that studied UFOs in the late 1990s. They released the COMETA Report, which summarized their findings. They concluded that 5 percent of the encounters were reliable yet inexplicable: The best hypothesis available was that the observed craft were extraterrestrial. They also accused the United States of covering up evidence of UFOs. (https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/do-aliens-exist-are-they-real-national-ufo-day-13033434.php)
We might not yet have what would be considered incontrovertible proof of extraterrestrial life visiting Earth, but we certainly have enough evidence to warrant open minds and serious scientific study.
Live long and prosper…and dream big.
You might also like to visit:
https://www.theufochronicles.com/2018/07/scientists-revisit-question-of-aliens.html
https://wgnradio.com/2018/06/25/world-ufo-day-and-ufo-sighting-phenomenon/
