“It is possible to make the public believe anything that we want them to believe” – Vannevar Bush, Scientific Advisor to US President Franklin D.Roosevelt, the first head of the Manhattan Project and the founder of the 5th largest defense contractor in the world, Raytheon.

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If one goes back to Aristotle’s time, the belief was that you could sit on a rock and just think and from merely thinking, understand how the universe works.

Thats right, you simply thought it all up, no need to experiment, to test your hypotheses. Maybe they did feel the need to experiment but didn’t have the means.

So, the way that the profound mysteries of the day were explained was by deep thinking.

For example, those ancient thinkers said that in space, light travelled through an invisible medium that they called “ether”. Believe it or not, the ether theory reigned until the early 20th Century, when it was finally discounted by Albert Einstein.

One of the beliefs that all pre-17th Century thinkers and scientists had was that humans were the only intelligent beings in the universe. But as theoretical physics expanded and the age of experimentation began along with research into life sciences, it became apparent that intelligent life could also have evolved elsewhere in the vastness of the universe.

Also growing with science was the conviction that we evolved randomly and not by some divine design. Take a look at how the human species came into being…..

65 million years ago, a random 100 km wide rock swung out of the Oort Cloud 186 billion miles away in a random direction, probably when another rock, an interstellar nomad, bumped into it.

Its path twisting and turning from the pushes and pulls from random planets, moons and asteroids that it passed by, our rock blundered on until it began threading its way between Jupiter and its humongous moon, Ganymede. That’s when the gravitational tug of war between the planet and its giant moon tore the rock apart into small pieces and a random 10 km wide fragment broke free and flew another 365 million miles in yet another random trajectory, until it ended its journey by slamming into the Yucatan Peninsula, randomly wiping out entire species and clearing the path for mammals (and ultimately us, sapiens) to get on top of the food chain.

Everything that has happened to us since then has been completely random.

Think of it for a moment. A random .277 round from a Sig Sauer CROSS zips across a highway in Srebenica at 3000ft/sec, goes over the fence of a park and hits a random baby in a stroller between the eyes during the height of the 1990s Balkans War. The round wasn’t intended for the boy. The sniper’s hand had simply shaken inadvertently while taking aim at his target, when a random beetle had crawled out of the woodwork and across his knuckle causing his finger to tighten on the trigger. The baby was just simply at a random place at a random time.

So was the rock that made our evolution possible – the random effect of a random event. No God involved. Like Aristotle, I simply sat thinking through this (with a Rickard’s Red in hand).

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The 17th Century Dutch astronomer, physicist and thinker, Christian Huygens, was studying the planet Jupiter when a thought came into his mind. He began drawing an analogy between Jupiter and Earth. He said Jupiter had an atmosphere, weather, rains and oceans and so it could have some form of life down there, like we do on earth.

Of course, life as we know it on earth cannot survive the 95% Hydrogen & Helium atmosphere on Jupiter. Huygens probably did too but he correctly surmised that just because we need oxygen, it doesn’t mean that other living beings elsewhere in the universe must also need oxygen. Here on earth itself there are many tiny organisms that do not need oxygen to survive, like anaerobic bacteria. For all we know, creatures on distant exo-planets may like to have crushed kryptonite smoothies and supercooled mercury and cobalt salads.

Within a span of 70 years after Einstein appeared, men were landing on the moon, until it got so mundane that folks stopped watching moon landings live on TV. It became like, “Harrison Schmidt who? Apollo17? Big deal. Golf anyone?”

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The Book of Genesis tries to tell us that we humans are one of a kind, created by God in his image. With the advent of 20th Century science however, it has become clear that we might not be unique.

If there is a God, he is throwing us little crumbs, a century at a time. One of those crumbs is the notion, entirely scientifically logical, that there may well be others in the universe, maybe physically not like us, but intelligent, with analytical abilities like us. Those extraterrestrials may even be a lot smarter and may have even visited us in the past.

Through the 20th Century and especially in the 1960s, there have been multiple instances where Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) were sighted and thought to be intelligent aliens from some distant planet.

Let’s start with a few early instances…..

The first account of a UFO sighting and the panic that followed was in August 1783, after two brothers, Joseph and Etien Montgolfier, secured financial sponsorship from the King of France to design and build something novel – a hot-air balloon. The sponsorship may have been the 18th Century equivalent of a modern-day no-bid defence contract.

During one of the initial test flights, the balloon was caught in a thunderstorm and it crashed in a tiny French village called Gonesse. The peasants there thought it was a monster attacking them from the sky. A watercolour from that period shows them with pitchforks and scythes, ripping the balloon to shreds. Women and children are shown running away, flailing their arms above their heads in panic.

It took a while for life to return to normal there. It became obvious that any new form of flight might seem like an archetypal attack from above.

Fast forward 150 years……

On Halloween eve in 1938, mass hysteria reigned for a while in the US state of New Jersey when CBS Radio broadcast a narration of the Victorian era H.G.Wells novel, “The war of the worlds”. The famed Hollywood actor, Orson Welles, was the narrator and many listeners became convinced that the world was really under attack from Martians who had landed on earth and were butchering millions.

Suddenly, a voice cut in, “We interrupt our program with some news that is very important. A strange meteor has crashed into farmland, near Grovers Mill.”

A reporter, claiming to be on the scene, delivered his report in a panicky voice…”It doesn’t look like a meteor at all. It is definitely artificial, kind of like a metallic cylinder!!”

“Oh my God, something is crawling out of the top! Extraterrestrials are wriggling out, like crabs out of a fisherman’s basket. They are as large as bears but with snake-like tentacles! Barns are catching fire and so are the gas tanks of parked cars!” The reporter sounded hysterical.

Listeners heard wails of panic and then, suddenly silence, suggesting that reporter was now dead. Next, a new voice broke in, introducing himself as the “Secretary of the Interior”…

“Citizens of the nation, I shall not try to conceal the gravity of the situation. Tens of thousands are dead, including our brave soldiers and aviators. New York City is under evacuation orders. Inter-planetary warfare has begun!!”

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Actually, the broadcast had begun with the narrator clearly stating that the story was science fiction, based on the H.G.Wells novel mentioned above. But not even a single listener appeared to have paid attention to the narrator. Millions across America actually believed it was real.

By now other radio stations all across the world began interrupting their broadcasts to announce the catastrophe unfolding. Soon the news, that Martians had arrived and were engaged in a wanton killing spree, had spread all over the world. Switchboards jammed. Hospitals began admitting thousands with anxiety and cardiac problems.

When the authorities realized it was a hoax and desperately tried to tamp down the panic, their efforts failed. This was the era of the Great Depression and anything that Government agencies said was met with complete distrust.

Across America, people loaded up their cars and fled. To many, it was the beginning of the end of the world. All through the night, in churches and synagogues, people prayed for deliverance.

The following morning, the New York Times carried a Page-1, above the fold, story….” Radio listeners in panic, taking war drama as fact…”

Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) openned an investigation of CBS but backed out after a while, mentioning something about First Amendment rights. “The public does not want a spineless radio,” said the FCC Commissioner.

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The CBS broadcast had inadvertently tapped into the nation’s growing agitation. Just two weeks prior, Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia, leaving the security of Europe in tatters.

Rapid advances in technology fuelled by the war – jet aircraft, radar, microwave, nuclear fission – left many depression-hit Americans overwhelmed by how science had affected their future peace and security.

Death rays and murderous Martians may have been pure science fiction in 1938 but fears of annihilation persisted. We humans have always been afraid of being taken by surprise, the sneak attack, something that became apparent at Pearl Harbour.

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The moment it hit the airwaves, the “War of the worlds” broadcast had a profound effect on the American military. To the military analysts listening in, what struck them was the scale of the emotional effect and pandemonium that the broadcast caused.

America’s military thinkers grew seriously concerned that an entire population could be so easily manipulated into thinking that something false was actually true. Americans had let themselves be taken in by something that had been entirely made up.

Totalitarian regimes were known to manipulate their citizens with false news, but America? This mass ‘mind control’, though inadvertent, had never been seen before in America. In Washington, President Roosevelt’s top science advisor, Vannevar Bush, observed the radio broadcast with his Machiavellian eye. He saw an opportunity in the public’s tendency to be so easily swayed.

America was not the only nation that realized that its people could be influenced by something as trivial as a radio broadcast. Adolf Hitler took note as well. His daily broadcasts grew darker. He referred to the hysterical reaction of Americans in a Berlin speech, calling it the “corruption and decadence of democracy”.

In the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin had also been paying attention. He immediately ordered his security chief, Lavrentiy Beria, Director of State Security(NKVD), to start work on mind control experimentation.

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YouTube has a real video of a magpie drinking from an upright bottle of water until the water level drops below the reach of its beak. It then does a curious thing, almost instinctively. It picks up a small pebble and drops it into the bottle, thereby raising the water level and making it possible for it to drink more. The bird continues the routine until its thirst is quenched.

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Every time we study animals, we realize that they are a lot smarter than we thought they were. Isn’t it therefore possible there are life forms that are way smarter than us? Maybe we aren’t “God’s chosen ones”, the BS that Christian evangelists would like to have us believe.

Maybe we really aren’t the hot shit that we think we are.

The 1960s were the age of UFOs and being abducted by aliens became the in thing. Conversations went somewhat like this….

“Oh, I was in my farm, mindin’ mah bizness pluckin’ strawbewwies when aliens swooped down in a great big sawsah and took me away. They then raped me willy nilly and after they had taken turns having their way with me, they dropped me back..”

“Didja take pichchurs?”

“Ah did, but the aliens took my camera away.”

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There are grainy monochromatic photos and film clips from the 1960s of strange crafts flitting this way and that, flying objects shaped like “tic-tacs”, with the ability to scoot and change direction at lightning speed. A number of US Navy pilots have come forward to claim that they had seen such objects.

The encounter in the YouTube video below happened much later (2004) (I couldn’t find a clip for the ‘60s)….

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Commander Fravor appeared before the US Congress (see video below) and gave his testimony of the sighting. Can you imagine something similar to a congressional hearing on UFOs happening anywhere else in the world? Bet you can’t. That is what makes America so unique. If a similar UFO sighting happened in any other country, you could expect a lame press release and that would be that.

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There have been UFO sightings reported all over the world but none with so much frequency as the ones by Americans. Why have most UFO been sighted in the US? In order to answer that question, one has got to view the whole thing more broadly. It is many little things….

One of the ‘little things’ is the innate American conspiracy-theory mindset. It is a product of all those hush-hush Area-51 flights of strange test aircraft such as the B2 Stealth bomber, the U2 and the SR71 Blackbird.

More than most, Americans are vulnerable to being easily swayed by conspiracy theories. In any other country would a Hillary Clinton be accused of running a pedophile ring?

When you are easily taken in by conspiracy theories, it means that you are inquisitive too. Unlike people in other countries, ordinary Americans seem to have a lot of time in their hands, time to fuel their innately inquisitive nature and they won’t let go until they have the answers. That is a good thing when a story is in fact true and not a baseless conspiracy theory. Like in the case of the “Pentagon papers” or “Watergate” or the Jeffery Epstein “client list”.

The other little thing is the propensity for self-aggrandizement. The urge to be in the news, appear on Tik-Tok and be the first to tell the world burns hot in the American psyche. Sometimes it means having to make up events that didn’t really happen.

Steven Spielberg’s “Close encounters of the third kind” was another little thing. It helped fuel the UFO fever in an entertainment-crazy society. Like in the movie, in America there actually are thousands of folks who are prepared to drop everything and go wait by the side of a highway for a UFO sighting. They will even try to make it fun, get their wives and kids with picnic baskets, beer and guitars. Opportunists will arrive with “merch” like T-shirts with flying saucers on them.

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Nowadays, with cellphones and streaming, one would have thought there would be thousands of viral videos of UFOs. There are none. Maybe their 1960s visits to Earth made those aliens realize we were a mediocre species many millennia behind them in enlightenment and not worth further study.

Over the decades, serious mention of the word, “UFO”, has been met with derision. If you are a pilot today and you think you have seen a strange flying craft ahead, chances are you won’t report it. In order not to be laughed at, they have decided to no longer call those objects UFOs. These days the thingamabobs are known as “UAPs” (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena).

It must however be noted that the US Government did begin looking at UFOs quite seriously and appointed agencies to study the phenomenon. One study, now terminated, was Project Blue Book (1952-1969) whose final conclusions were that UFO sightings were a result of……

• A mild form of mass hysteria.
• Individuals deliberately perpetrating a hoax for publicity.
• The rantings of Psychopathological persons.
• Misidentification of conventional aircraft.

Were all those sightings really nothing-burgers as Project Blue Book findings suggested?

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Or are there, somewhere in some distant galaxy, two retired 4-feet tall astronauts with hairless bodies, bulbous heads and three toes, sipping supercooled ionized mercury and chomping crushed kryptonite at a bar and chuckling?