Kaleb Poor
Staff Writer
For as long as there have been people, there have been stories of mysterious things out in the wilderness.
There is the Loch Ness monster and the stories of the Chupacabra. There are stories like the headless horseman, alien ships crashing in New Mexico and hauntings of places where terrible things once happened. Even Laramie has a handful of ghost stories, and sightings of Bigfoot across Wyoming are a dime a dozen.
In fact, there are so many stories of mysterious “others” spread through human culture that it can sometimes be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Which of these stories deserve investigation, and which can be dismissed as nonsense?
Back in Dec. 2017, a pair of videos taken by U.S. Navy pilots appeared online. The videos appeared to show an airborne object gliding over the surface of the ocean, maneuvering in ways no human-made aircraft can hope to achieve. In March 2018, a third was released, seeming to confirm the authenticity of the others.
Then, last September, the authority of the U.S. Navy made its voice heard on the matter.
“The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena,” said Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, thus confirming that U.S. military – the most powerful intelligence-gathering entity in human history – could not explain what its pilots had seen.
And so the question was raised once again: are humans alone in the universe, or have humans been visited by others? One of the highest authorities on Earth had confessed that it had no answer, and so the question then fell to science.
“I think it’s possible,” said Michael Brotherton, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Wyoming. “But I don’t know that it’s likely. There are some really interesting things that seem to have evidence for physical objects that we don’t have the technology to duplicate.”
Brotherton, a quasar specialist and published sci-fi novelist, said people should be neither dismissive nor insistent on the significance of these unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).
“There are a lot of interesting things that we shouldn’t dismiss because we think it’s stupid or impossible,” Brotherton said. “There are sceptics and sceptic groups that think it’s their duty to go point out how stupid other people are, but they’re like pseudo-scientists. If they know there’s nothing to it, then they’re not really being sceptical. They’re just reinforcing their own beliefs and cherry picking their own evidence and arguments.”
While Brotherton said most reports of lights in the sky turn out to be simple tricks of the mind or misunderstandings, he argued many are worth consideration. He once helped with a unidentified flying object (UFO) report that appeared to be a fireball meteor with a bizarre flight path-not a sign of extraterrestrial life, as the reporter may have believed, but an interesting anomaly nonetheless.
But these tall tales do not just influence what we ask from our scientists. Legends and myths can also be a subject of scientific study themselves.
Alexandra Kelly, a professor of anthropological history at UW, said her field has long been influenced by legend and mystery, and not always for the better.
“The whole ‘ancient aliens’ stuff can be really problematic,” Kelly said. “The majority of things that are attributed to ancient aliens or divine beings are in the developing world. And so it sort of becomes a way for the west to undermine the ability of indigenous people elsewhere and non-western people elsewhere to be capable of civilization.”
Studying anthropological history, Kelly said she comes across this sort of inherent racism all the time. Attributing things like the building of the Egyptian pyramids to aliens, she argued, undermines the achievement they represent while making it difficult to have an objective conversation about how they were achieved.
Like Brotherton, Kelly stressed that skepticism is a person’s best defense against pseudoscience, not only when dealing with things of legend like aliens and sasquatch but also in everyday life.
“I think it’s always good to be skeptical,” said Kelly. “Who knows what’s real anymore [when] everything’s potentially manipulated? It’s always good to be skeptical… a lot of pseudo-archaeology, for example, is critiqued by scientists because the scientists or the authors are cherry picking in order to prove their point… that’s not what a good scientist would do.”
So, students can be skeptical, and doubt what is put before them which makes no sense. But instead of dismissing it out of hand, students can take a moment to consider whether it might be possible, and to not be afraid to ask:
What if?
