All about ALIENS! A new blog series

If you've known me for long, you'll have noticed that I develop weird obsessions from time to time and research them endlessly, more or less until I run out of new material.

OK sometimes it's normal obsessions, like covid or politics, and I'll be citing the latest research papers and poll results for every tiny thing that plays out. (Some friends call me "Professor" due to this tendency!) But this new one, the one that my family and several friends have probably grown sick of hearing me talk about lately, is: ALIENS.

Friends, I have restarted this blog in part so I can tell more people about aliens!

It all started because I learned that the term "UFO" has been deprecated in favor of "UAP" (unidentified aerial phenomenon) and got to wondering how modern UFO thinking has changed over the years. My previous background in the topic had been a steady diet of science fiction and reading some Erich von Däniken books in the 10th grade.

You guys, YOU GUYS. I have not had this much fun since that time in the late 90s when I decided to learn about Scientology, and I regret that you can only learn about Xenu once.

I'm going to have to break this into several installments because there's a whole lot of material to cover. But I'll get started with a few basic observations, so you can start to see the dynamics at work here.

First, certain physicists I know get annoyed whenever aliens come up, because it is wackadoo pseudoscience. But military people I know are absolutely 100% convinced that we are being visited by non-human UFOs all the time, and that the US military knows and has been in on it basically forever. Hmmm.

Second, more science-minded types begin with the Drake equation, and point out that the odds of randomly encountering another alien civilization are incomprehensibly low because the universe is so vast. Believers insist this is irrelevant, and that aliens were not drawn to signs of our civilization — that in fact, the aliens have been here all along, and indeed we may be here because of them, rather than the other way around. (Or they believe that it's not actually aliens at all. But we'll get to that much later.)

Third, this is going to be wild and go places you absolutely never expected. Our adventure will involve such points of interest as antique German paintings, Blink 182's Tom Delonge, and FOIA documents of formerly top-secret CIA programs.

We're gonna have such a great time. Get ready.