A recent legitimization of reports of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena — commonly called UAPs and formerly referred to as UFOs — has brought more eyeballs to the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
While a long-awaited government report issued earlier this year “found no evidence of aliens or extraterrestrial intelligence,” as reported by the Associated Press, two professors from Harvard University and a colleague at Montana Technological University suggested humanity may just be looking in the wrong places.
Instead, reality could be something similar to science fiction movies like 1988’s “They Live,” in which special glasses allow a man to see the aliens who’ve disguised themselves as humans and live in plain sight.
“UAP may reflect activities of intelligent beings concealed in stealth here on Earth (e.g., underground), and/or its near environs (e.g., the moon), and/or even ‘walking among us’ (e.g., passing as humans),” wrote Tim Lomas and Brendan Case of Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program and biological anthropology professor Michael P. Masters of MTU in a report this month. “Although this idea is likely to be regarded [skeptically] by most scientists, such are the nature of some UAP that we argue this possibility should not be summarily dismissed, and instead deserves genuine consideration in a spirit of epistemic humility and openness.”
Their writing makes “a case for scientific openness to a concealed earthly explanation” for UAPs, argues that too often, scientists and others try to put UAPs into two categories: human-made technology and “extraterrestrial explanation,” something akin to ancient alien civilizations elsewhere in the universe.
While those explanations are probably more likely to be true than a lunar alien civilization, the researchers said, but that’s no reason to discount it entirely.
Such theories “are far-fetched on their face; we entertain them here because some aspects of UAP are strange enough that they seem to call for unconventional explanations,” they said.