UFOs
February 9, 2010Henry Baum No Comments »I excised this from the introduction to The American Book of the Dead because I thought it was a little too on-topic. Reads more like a blog entry than fiction, so I’m posting it here. Read and download the introduction, as well as the rest of the novel, here.
Call it paranoia, obsession, or revelation, but at this time I started thinking about some fringe subjects. I always had a faint interest in UFOs. I mean, doesn’t everybody? Turns out, no, which is why I kept reading. Emphasis on “reading” because I’d never seen a UFO. The more I read about the subject, the more I thought it was suspicious that no one took the subject seriously. There were far more sightings from credible people than hicks in their trailer backyard. The truly credible–scientists, astronomers, military–wouldn’t come forward for fear not only that they would be ridiculed, but fired. The story of UFO suppression was one of staid science once again triumphing over faith. A lot of scientific research has gone forward on a theory–that is, a lot less evidence than there was for UFOs. So there are no great pictures (as far as we know), so there’s no craft in the Smithsonian. It seemed to tragically undervalue people’s sense of perception that thousands of eyewitnesses could be discounted.
All in all, it was suspicious that the subject had been pushed under the rug. Either the government debunkers had done their job thoroughly or all scientists are morons. Once again, a new, controversial, highly-ridiculed, theory (see Galileo, Einstein, Stravinsky) comes along and the scientific establishment is afraid of it. In the early twenty-first century, people thought nothing about UFOs. They were concerned with war, health care, and television. Humans are mostly an unambitious race.
The more I read about UFOs, the more I found it a fascinating and legitimate subject. What if they were real? It started to seem absurd that the subject had been banished to the tabloids. It was potentially the most exciting, spiritually uplifting discovery to ever hit mankind. And increasingly possible: when there’s enough stars for every grain of sand on earth, when the earth is young at 4.5 billion years old, when an alien race could be a million years more evolved than the human race. Entire races of aliens could be invisible, sitting next to you right now. Everything was possible. Maybe they were a kind of expanded consciousness that we could only see as aliens and craft. The amazing story may have been not that UFOs were real, but that people didn’t believe in them. To me, they were like a God that’s provable.
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