Do I Believe in UFOs?

Everyone always wants to know if I believe in aliens. They really want to know if I believe in UFOs, which I don t. But do I believe there are no aliens in the whole Universe? Support us at: http://www.patreon.com/universetoday More stories at: http://www.universetoday.com/ Follow us on Twitter: @universetoday Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/universetoday Google+ - https://plus.google.com/+universetoday/ Instagram - http://instagram.com/universetoday Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / frasercain@gmail.com Karla Thompson - @karlaii Chad Weber - weber.chad@gmail.com Whenever I do a new livestream on Instagram (hint hint, @universetoday on Instagram), it’s generally with an audience that doesn’t have a lot of experience with my work here on YouTube or Universe Today. They’re enthusiastic about space, but they haven’t been exposed to a lot of the modern ideas about astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrials. They have, however, seen a lot of TV and movies. And so, the most common question I get, by a long shot is, “do you believe in aliens?” That’s actually a more complicated question. On the one hand, the question could be: do I believe that aliens are visiting Earth, creating crop circles, infiltrating our government, and experimenting on human/alien hybrids for the eventual overthrow of human civilization? The answer to that question, is no. I believe in UFOs, in that, I believe there are unidentified objects flying in the air, which haven’t gotten a definitive categorization. And when they do get an explanation, it’s weather balloons, or Venus, or airplanes, or fireworks, or drones, or a hoax. It’s never aliens. Because if it was aliens, we would have some kind of evidence. There would be something, anything, that gave definitive proof that aliens were here. What I’m talking about is some kind of monument, or machine, or vehicle, or factory. Something that’s been around here on Earth for as long as human history, and has no explanation for how it could have been created. UFO researchers point to things like the pyramids, or the statues on Easter Island, or the Nazca lines, when there’s plenty of evidence these things could be created by humans and their tools of the age. Even when the hoaxers who created crop circles with a plank on a rope and a little planning tried to explain how they did it, people didn’t really believe them. I want to show you a series of amazing visualizations created by Sam Monfort, a data researcher in the Human Factors and Applied Cognition program at George Mason University. Sam pulled in data from the National UFO Reporting Center or NUFORC which has been collecting reports all the way back to 1905. Since its inception, NUFORC has received almost 105,000 UFO reports. And sighting are at an all time high. But what’s really fascinating is how the trends of what people see have changed over time. A century ago, the vast majority of UFOs were spheres or cigar shaped. But then saucers showed up in the 20s, and that’s all anyone saw. Cigars have dropped down to almost nothing, while lights in the sky have grown in prominence to become almost 50% of the UFOs that people see these days. Clearly spaceship design took a turn away from cigars, to saucers to glowing lights. Oh, fickle aliens spacecraft designers, following the latest fashions. The timing is interesting too. There’s a rise in sightings around July 4th in the US every year. Fireworks maybe? The other piece of data that’s pretty interesting is that people in the US are 300 times more likely to report a UFO sighting than any other country in the world. My own Canada is number 2. Here’s the thing. A huge percentage of the population is now carrying around their own personal tricorder, which will record audio, video and take amazing pictures, even in a dimly lit alien spaceship. And yet, there still hasn’t been any definitive, scientifically proven evidence for aliens. Google is watching everywhere I go, and reminds me that I visited Home Depot last week, but you think the occasional trip to an orbital research facility would get picked up. I feel pretty confident when I say, there’s no evidence that aliens are visiting Earth. But the deeper question is a little more unsettling. Do I believe there are aliens in the Universe? The Universe is huge. The very edge of the Universe we can see is known as the observable Universe. The first light in the Universe has been traveling through space for 13.8 billion years to reach our eyes. And because of the expansion of the Universe, those regions are now more than 46 billion light years away from us. That’s just the observable Universe. The actual physical Universe is much larger. Hundreds of billions, trillions, quadrillions or more light years across. Maybe it’s even infinite. Forever is a long way.