What Is Stars?
The weather being what it is (fine), at around 11 o’clock in the evening after watching football I like to sit on my balcony with a calvados and maybe coffee to hand, smell the jasmine and contemplate some of the unsolved mysteries of the universe. As Sean O’Casey put it in Juno And The Paycock, «what is stars?».
My thoughts have
been given sharper focus by the release a couple of days ago of the
US government report on UFOs (or UAPs as they prefer to call them:
Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon). I’ll stick to UFOs because one
thing the report confirms is that these are objects, not tricks of
the light: radar and other sensors have detected their solid
prescence. Not only that but, as the report also confirms, their
oberved movement defies anything we know about locomotion today. The
compelling question then is not where they came from or whether they
contain little green men but how the hell did they get here? Time dilation, wormholes between parallel universes or something we've not even been able to imagine? Who knows? Because
to do so they would apparently have to defy our current standard
model of physics; Einstein eat your heart out. We do currently know
that Einstein was wrong in some aspect of his theories of relativity
but not in what aspect. The report quite rightly refuses to speculate.
The other aspect of the report I found interesting (and the published report is only the cdelassified version) is that it takes account only of sightings confirmed by military personnel. There have been some 140 of these in the past two years, about one a week, disregarding any other reports by civilians. So someone or something out there has got something like CCTV on the Earth. A great aspect of the report is that it legitimises reports of UFOs and indeed, suggests that the fear of appearing foolish has suppressed many more reports. That suggests that much more relevant information (as well as wacky fantasies) should become available in the near future. As wacky fantasies go I can foresee a headline in The Sun newspaper(?) «Will Aliens Intervene In The Euros? If England lose to Germany that must surely be the case. I’ve no idea what else to make of the report but it poses enough fundamental questions to fuel many more nights with a calvados on my balcony.
