ET Is Still At Home

Alien encounters are the latest nonsense rocketing across Twitter and agitating all my fellow under-evolved monkeys.¹

For the short-attention-span crowd: There are no alien spaceships on Earth. Nada, zilch, bupkis, squat.

Unless you believe Tucker Carlson, the dude who once hosted a special recommending that you shine light on your balls for more manliness. Seriously, he did. Today, instead of testicle tanning, he’s selling government coverups of alien visitations. Click “play,” if you don’t believe me. Or skip to my recap and avoid his whining voice.²

This clip³ is a mound of steaming yak turds.⁴

Tucker opens up with a greatest-hits list of conspiracy theories. Who instigated “those BLM riots?” “What exactly happened at 9/11?” (What happened? My city got slammed, and 3000 people died, you ass. As a New Yorker, 9/11 conspiracy nutters piss me off like nothing else.) “How about JFK?” (He’s not kidding.) Or Jeffrey Epstein? (Of course.)

According to Tucker, the media is interested in none of these stories. Why? Because “in journalism, curiosity is the greatest crime.” Or maybe, Tucker, it’s because they care about a little thing called “accuracy”?

This is all Tucker’s lead-in to his big story that a former Air Force officer and intelligence agency whistleblower has claimed the American government “has physical evidence of crashed non-human made aircraft,” as well as the bodies of the alien pilots. Yep, that’s right. The government has had aliens under wraps for decades. Area 51 is real. And after listing the officer’s allegations (“the Pentagon has spent decades studying these otherworldly remains in order to build more technologically advanced weapons systems”), Tucker tells us with a confident toss of his head, “It was clear he was telling the truth.”

What? Did I miss any evidence beyond “this guy said so”? How was it “clear” he was telling the truth? Because it sounds like a good story? Because Tucker looked in his eye and got a sense of his soul? Or because Tucker knows his audience will swallow whatever he feeds them? I’m going with number three. If this level of fact-checking is how Tucker Carlson et al. are going to replace mainstream journalism, we are well and truly fucked.

“Is the alien in the room with us right now?”

It all began, as Tucker said, on The Debrief, a seemingly reputable tech site. Their June 5 article’s headline says it all: “Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft Of Non-Human Origin.” The article’s subject is a 36-year-old former intelligence official and would-be whistleblower named David Grusch. The Debrief adds that “other intelligence officials” “have independently provided similar, corroborating information, both on and off the record.” The government has found alien spaceships and has been hiding it all from the American people!

That same day, there was a follow-up interview with Grusch on NewsNation, where he talked about how trustworthy he was and yeah, there are totally dead alien pilot corpses, for real, no kidding. (Go to the video and watch the section where he talks about the pilots. It’s the place where he seems most nervous that people won’t buy his tall tale.)

Tucker was not the first conspiracy monger on the job. The same day The Debrief’s article came out, conservative Christian provocateur Matt Walsh was breathlessly tweeting about first contact. He’s tired of asking, “What is a Woman?” and is branching out to, “What is an Alien?”

A day later, on June 6 (and a few hours before Tucker), Eric Weinstein tweeted a Guardian article on the brouhaha—because, of course, he did.

[Edit: To be fair to Weinstein, he’s not saying it IS aliens; he’s saying it’s something “huge,” and it could mean aliens or gaslighting, which would involve a different kind of unbelievable government conspiracy.]

It was more than a little freaky that Scott Adams replied to Weinstein playing the voice of reason.

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This is all nonsense

Obviously, I can’t say with 100% confidence that this is all nonsense, but it’s all nonsense.⁵ The Debrief article reads like a gushing love letter to a teenage crush rather than a hard-hitting report by serious journalists. “For many decades, the Air Force carried out a disinformation campaign to discredit reported sightings of unexplained objects.” “But some insiders are now willing to take the risk of coming forward for the first time with knowledge of these recovery programs.” A skeptical article it is not.

One thing from the article that struck me is how many people supposedly have known about this alien menace.

Grusch asserted that UFO “legacy programs” have long been concealed within “multiple agencies.”

He said he reported to Congress on the existence of a decades-long “publicly unknown Cold War for recovered and exploited physical material – a competition with near-peer adversaries over the years to identify UAP crashes/landings and retrieve the material for exploitation/reverse engineering to garner asymmetric national defense advantages.”

Grusch said that the craft recovery operations are ongoing at various levels of activity and that he knows the specific individuals, current and former, who are involved.

Multiple agencies. Near-peer adversaries. Reverse engineering. Recovery operations are ongoing at various levels. Decades. Think about how many people would have to be involved in all that information gathering and physical recovery, and some of them supposedly from "near-peer adversaries.” (China? Russia?) And all those people have kept quiet all this time? Imagine a single recovery operation of a single alien craft. That would necessarily involve who knows how many ships and salvage experts. And there were supposedly “quite a number” of these alien spacecraft. To manage all this we’re talking at least hundreds (and thousands seems more likely) of regular sailors, mechanics, and technicians who presumably were all sworn to secrecy afterward. And that’s just for craft recovery. What about all those Pentagon experts spending decades on the technology? And the coverup teams? And base security for the alien craft storage site? And Maria, who cleans the floors at the site? This is a huge project!

I don’t have a clue what kind of humans you know, but the ones I hang with gossip like grandmothers at a church social. Perhaps all the sailors and workmen involved in these multiple operations are now ensconced in forever quarantine at some South Pacific island CIA black site, but what about all the high-level Pentagon guys? The base guys? Maria? Fuggedaboutit. I don’t think the US government, or any government, has that level of keeping things secret competence.

If my number two reason for doubting this is how inconceivable it is that so many people in multiple countries could keep their mouths shut for decades, my number one reason is just how unlikely it all seems from the aliens’ POV.

First, I’m going to assume there is intelligent life out there somewhere. Partly this is a science fiction fan’s optimism (c’mon, it’d be so cool!), and partly it’s because the universe is so darn huge! There are an estimated 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy and 2 trillion galaxies. That’s 200 billion trillion stars! Even if the odds of life forming at any particular star are only one in ten billion, that’s still twenty trillion planets with life.

Yes, there’s probably life out there, but that life is sitting on its own planet snorting squaric-acid sodas up its fifteen nostrils, not here on ours downing 7-Eleven Strawberry Kiwi Big Gulps. The odds of any life getting from there to here are pretty, well, astronomical.

Space is big. Really really damn big. The star closest to our solar system is Proxima Centauri (also known as Alpha Centauri C), about 4 light-years from our Sun. Apollo 10, the fastest manned vehicle ever created, briefly reached a speed of 25,000 mph. Given that speed, brainiacs at MIT calculated that it would take over 100,000 years for us to reach Proxima Centauri. Obviously, we can build faster stuff, but we’re still talking a journey of thousands of years.⁶ And that’s for a trip to one of our near neighbors. What if the nearest alien life is 1000 light-years away? The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years wide.

This gives our hypothetical aliens two options. Either develop faster-than-light travel—which current physics seems to say is impossible⁷—or spend a long time getting here, perhaps in some kind of frozen sleep or generation ship. Passenger quarters and life support for such a lengthy journey would necessarily be huge. Add the kind of fuel and engines that would be required for such a journey, and you’d have yourself one ginormous spaceship. Or ships, because Grusch said “quite a number” of ships have been recovered.

So one of these Imperial Star Cruiser sized ships, with technology way beyond ours, piloted by little blue creatures, just shows up and is entirely missed by any observers not under the control of our suddenly amazingly competent government? And then, after traveling a few hundred parsecs, these brilliant blue guys crash on Earth? You spend 10,000 years getting here but can’t manage to park? And then the next guys do the same thing? And the guys after that? And so on? And after all those crashes, we manage to cover it all up? I’m not buying it.

Don’t forget all those UAP sightings that extraterrestrial mavens believe represent alien ships. (“UAP,” unidentified anomalous phenomena, is the government’s replacement term for “UFO,” unidentified flying objects.) Those little blue guys zip past our best fighter jets, moon some farmers in Cloverfield, Kansas, and then—after they’ve done enough physics-defying joyriding—they get bored and crash into a field. There’s a fricking convention of drunken exhibitionist aliens in the troposphere, and our notoriously leaky government has managed to (mostly) keep it under wraps! Again, nope.

Finally, why bother? Why would you spend thousands of years traveling to visit Earth? The reason we send probes to other planets is to get information. Jupiter is less than a light-hour away. The probes we’ve sent there have given us amazing pictures and data. Unless you posit faster-than-light travel, there is no point in sending a ship to another solar system. Any data you acquire will take centuries, millennia, to get back to your people.⁸

Image of Jupiter and its moon Europa taken by the Hubble Telescope (2020).

Life around other stars seems quite possible, but it's likely so far away we’ll never get radio signals, much less visitors. The effort to cross the interstellar void is just too overwhelming. And if they do show up, it’ll be either a small Voyager 1 style space probe or a hulking starship captained by an alien Jean Luc Picard. Neither possibility fits what Grusch described.

For now, I’m going to trust the April 2023 testimony of Dr. Sean M. Kirkpatrick, director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, who are the guys who are supposed to make sure we aren’t covering up the fact that we’ve found any aliens. (Or, at least, it’s their job to lay to rest the more persistent conspiracy theories.)

“I also state clearly for the record that in our research, AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known law of physics.”

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Now look into the bright light and stop worrying about aliens.

1. Yes, pedants, I know humans are actually apes. “Monkeys” just sounds funnier to me.

2. Please don’t think I was biased against Tucker. I barely paid attention to him before watching this video. In a mere 10 minutes, however, it turned me into a full-on hater. NOW I’m biased against Tucker.

3. The clip is from the first episode of his new “Tucker on Twitter” show.

4. No disrespect meant to any of my readers who are yaks.

5. Of course, this is an incredibly safe thing for me to say. If it ends up that the cosmic roulette wheel of chaos lands on that 1-in-a-trillion result where the alien visitation is not utter poppycock; everyone will be too busy worrying about the Tau Cetian invasion to give me grief for getting it wrong!

6. The Voyager I space probe, launched in 1977, and chugging along at about 37,000 miles an hour, only managed to leave the solar system in 2012. It’s currently 159 au (astronomical units) from the sun, or about 1/400th of a light-year. It’s not headed towards any particular star, but in FORTY THOUSAND YEARS, it will pass near Gliese 445, which is only 17 light-years from Earth, a near neighbor. If you find any math errors in this footnote, you are a very persistent reader.

7. Darn that Albert Einstein and his Special Theory of Relativity!

8. I realize a probe visiting Proxima Centauri could get data back to us in 4.2 years, but it would have taken that probe hundreds or thousands of years to reach our neighbor.