Extraterrestrial Revisited
There are hundreds of internet videos of people giving testimonies of personal encounters with beings from beyond earth. Are all these people being untruthful?
Some believe our government and NASA have known for some time that the earth has been and continues to be visited by intelligent alien beings, and have been engaged in a massive cover up. Some ET believers go so far as to name several different alien species. According to these people, some aliens are reptilian in appearance. Some are pale and short with large eyes, some tall and grey. Some are hostile to humans, some are merely observers and some come with a beneficial message.
Much of the time that message is one of attempting to help a troubled human race. But the reptilian aliens are said to be mean and hostile. There seems to be a direct correlation between what these aliens are said to look like and their attitude toward humans. The bad ones are the ugly ones, while the kind looking ones are the good ones. This prejudice toward what we view as good and evil pervades our myths and legends. For example, the ugly wicked witch and the beautiful fairy godmother. We have a prejudice to believe outward attractiveness and inner beauty go hand in hand. In the imaginations of some, this prejudice comes through loud and clear in ET, and therefore casts suspicion on the credibility of their accounts.
No one would be more thrilled than scientists if someone discovered physical evidence of extraterrestrial life. They would be satisfied with a single-celled organism that did not originate on earth. Personal testimonials of ET encounters do not count as physical proof. What a person believes to be true, even in the most sincere way, does not automatically make it so. There could be dreams, visions, the effects of medications, wishful thinking or other mental processes at work.
With the aid of our imaginations, there is no end to the possibilities. But most do not fulfill the basic requirements of factual reality. They fall in the same category as legends, myths and imagination-based belief systems. The fact that there are UFOs doesn’t mean they are spaceships from beyond our solar system. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We tend to explain the unknown with the accepted reality of the time. This is the basis of the gods of old. Science has not so much disproved the existence of these mythical figures as it has provided a fact-based alternative.
Yet for many people the factual nature of science is nowhere near as exciting or comforting as the imaginative realm of myth and superstition. Science eliminates the need for a mighty being wielding thunderbolts, yet many would find such a mythical character more interesting than atoms rubbing together to form static electricity in an ionized atmosphere. The dozens of Greek and Roman gods offered explanations and provided some degree of comfort for a people with little understanding of the natural world.
Science, then, becomes the spoiler for many when they do not have the inclination or education to appreciate the vastly complicated and beautiful natural realm. It is much easier to believe a myth to explain a natural phenomenon, whether that’s a UFO or lightning or the evolution of life, than to put in the dedicated time to learn a fact-based explanation.
A life-long resident of northern Minnesota, Terry Mejdrich is a former math teacher and farmer turned mystery author and freelance writer.
