14 SEPTEMBER 2023 UFOs

I rarely watch television series; however I used to enjoy watching X Files, which aired between 1993 and 2002. I mostly watched it because the main characters drew me in, throughout the ongoing sagas. I believe that we love reading stories and watching movies because we can relate to the heroes and heroines of them. Storytelling in many forms has remained a mainstay in human cultures, often passed down verbally or through songs and ballads. The more scientific minded try to pass off myths and faery tales as fiction. Our government, too, has dismissed unusual sightings as natural phenomena.

Until recently, I had never heard the term ufologist – a person who investigates unidentified flying objects that might possibly be proof of extraterrestrial, alien beings. In my book, Question Everything, I emphasize the importance of questioning absolutely everything that we have assumed or accepted as true. The more questions we ask, the more questions we have. Life is a mystery that we are always uncovering. During the airing of the X Files, I passed it off as the wild imaginings of its creator, Chris Carter. In this week’s news I learned that a ufologist has exhumed alien corpses, which he presented as proof that we have had alien visitors. Our governmental agencies, like the CIA, the FBI, and the military have denied the existence of and kept classified documents, about UFO sightings and unusual objects that have been discovered.

In the past decade, we have been bombarded with news – even fake news – and we must each decide for ourselves what to believe and what not to believe. I cannot help thinking that all of the stories that have endured through the centuries, have had some truth at their core. We are naive to believe that there are not alien life forms – beings just as intelligent as we are, from other planets or galaxies. After all, there are literally billions of stars, billions of possibilities. The more we learn about species here on our planet, about their intelligence and their strangeness (octopus, for example) the easier it is to see how much we do not know. Extinct civilizations that have left behind mysteries for us to solve, like Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids, remain a mystery to us. Clearly, these things are illustrative of great intelligence, whether native or alien. Perhaps the characters of folklore – mermaids, dwarves, elves, unicorns, dragons, and other mythical characters, actually existed. To deny their existence is a kind of judgment, based on our own limited perception. To deny the existence of aliens is foolishness; or to believe that alien life, should they make themselves known, is peaceful and friendly, is wishful thinking. We must simply remain open to all possibilities and to question everything we hear. We must do our best to separate fact from fiction and to trust our intuition.