The big “what-if”

We’re always reading something about flying saucers these days! We’re told they are intelligent beings from another part of the universe, they have come here to find out how we live, and then they beam up members of the human race for experiments.

There have been so many reported sightings, I can’t believe they’re all from idiots. And for all those who have spoken, there must be hundreds who have said nothing, to avoid ridicule. Who could blame them?

But visitors from outer space?

Unless these ‘travellers’ have some form of propulsion completely unknown to the best scientists on earth, it would take them a long time to get here, from even the nearest star, which I believe is Alpha Centauri, two and a half light years away.

There really is no proof of any ‘visitors’ actually landing either; photographs always show the objects in the sky. So the major question is, why would they come all this way if they’re just going to fly about over our heads for a few minutes before skittering off into space again? And why, when they get here do they seem to be interested in such nondescript landmarks? You’d think they’d want to look at our cities, or some of our military establishments wouldn’t you?

Now here’s where some ‘old-man’s-meanderings’ come in…

Let’s just suppose that these craft haven’t come from outer space at all – hold on to that idea for a moment.

Now let’s go, in our imagination, two hundred years into the future, or even more. A great deal can happen in two hundred years, and it’s happening faster all the time, so on our journey into the future we should expect changes at least as great as have happened before, however stupid they may seem to us today.

So here are a few “what-if’s” to conjure with…

What if, by the year 2222 the secret of time-travel has been discovered? What if, in order to time-travel, it is necessary to ride in, and stay in a special vehicle, made for the purpose, with death being the immediate result of trying to get out of its protective shell? What if time travel journeys can only last for a very short period of time, perhaps fifteen minutes, before killing the occupant? And what if these time travellers, rather than wanting to visit famous places, tend generally to want to visit apparently unimportant sites?

I believe all these ‘what-if’s, when added together, present us with a very reasonable hypothesis, certainly no more outlandish than travellers arriving from stars light years away.

The special machines, which could quite easily be disc shaped for some reason, are the flying saucers so many people see. The fact that getting out of these vehicles results in death, explains why they never land. The trip having to be for short periods of time, due to the limitations of their technology accounts for the fleeting moments hovering over us. And finally, they often come to out-of-the-way places to look at, simply because that is where their ancestors happen to have lived. I’d certainly be more interested in seeing my ancestors, even if only from a distance, rather than examining big cities just for the sake of it! And don’t forget, in two hundred years time these travellers will most likely have with them, all sorts of exotic electronic equipment so that can see them really well, from above.

So, a perfectly reasonable explanation of the flying saucer phenomenon, if you can accept a few simple leaps of faith regarding the technological capabilities of our descendants! To me, this idea makes just as much sense as the notion of space travellers, whether small and green or not.

It’s amazing the silly ideas in the mind of an old man isn’t it?

Do you ever think about the “what-ifs”? What are your thoughts about unidentified flying objects?