Finally, in 2008, Scripps News Service polled Americans about their belief in UFOs. They found that 8 percent of the population had seen a UFO but 20 percent know someone who has seen a UFO. About 30 percent believe aliens from space have visited Earth.
All these polls show that about half the population believes UFOs are real, although what that means is a matter of debate. More significantly, about 10 percent of all North Americans believe they have seen a UFO.
The term flying saucer is very liberally applied to UFOs by news media and most laypeople. The term was first coined in 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed he had seen silver disc-like objects flying near Mt. Rainier in Washington State. When asked by a reporter to describe what he had seen, Arnold replied that the appearance of the objects’ flight was that they moved as if they were plates or saucers skimming across water. A headline writer quickly took the analogy as flying saucers, and the name stuck in the public mind.
Arnold’s objects were in a special category of what are called today daylight discs. These are in the minority when compared with the bulk of UFO reports; most UFO sightings are of objects known as nocturnal lights. Such objects are simply lights in the night sky that behave in ways that seem mysterious to their observers. Many of these turn out to have explanations such as an aircraft, satellite, star, planet or meteor.
What kind of people see UFOs? While some skeptics might answer that UFO witnesses are delusional, gullible, or uneducated, the reality is that the demographics of UFO witnesses cuts across all ages, socioeconomic statuses, educational backgrounds, occupations, and cultures. Furthermore, many witnesses are people with significant training in observation and judgment. Unfortunately, many UFO witnesses are reluctant to tell others of their sightings for fear of being ridiculed by skeptics. This attitude is changing, thankfully, and it appears that society as a whole is becoming more accepting of those who have had remarkable experiences.
DID YOU KNOW?
UFOs have
been reported by astronomers, pilots,
and air traffic controllers.
Let’s start with the sun, but let’s make it a bit smaller. Imagine that it is the size of a pea held in the palm of your hand. On this scale, the Earth is actually invisible, but would be about 1.2 metres away from the pea. But where would the next nearest pea be? That is, where, using this scale model of size and distance in our local astronomical neighbourhood, would the next nearest star be located? In front of your home, a block away? Farther downtown?
The answer is that if our star, the sun, was as small as a pea in your hand, the next nearest pea (Proxima Centuari) would be almost 320 kilometres away.
That’s how vast the space between stars is, and how far away we are from even the nearest one. However, the nearest star may not harbour life. In fact, statistics tell us that intelligent life and extraterrestrial civilizations may be relatively rare in our universe. Some astronomers believe that we are completely unique in our Solar System, although most think that there are other civilizations out there, somewhere.
Most readers will have grown up with science fiction TV shows such as Star Trek and movies like Star Wars, in which interstellar travel is commonplace and apparently simple. We live in the Steven Spielberg generation, in which science fiction concepts are accepted as reality or at least seem probable. But while present-day science is making advances in these areas, we’re still a long way from even sending manned spacecraft to other planets within our own local Solar System. The fastest space vehicle launched from Earth to date will take thousands of years to reach the distance of even the nearest star.
The first spacecraft to leave our Solar System was Pioneer 10. It was launched in 1972 and reached the orbit of Jupiter in 1973, after which it continued on, but stopped transmitting signals to Earth in 2003 when its power source stopped functioning. It is heading in the direction of the constellation Taurus and will pass close to the star Aldebaran in about two million years.
DID YOU KNOW?
The belief
that life exists elsewhere in the universe
can be traced back to the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, who
in the fifth century B.C. wrote that the universe is teeming with life.
He coined the term panspermia, which literally means “seeds of life everywhere.”
Pioneer 10’s twin is Pioneer 11. It made a flyby of Saturn in 1979 and is heading in a different direction, this time for the constellation Aquila. It will reach it in about four million years. Both Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 had plaques attached to their sides upon which was inscribed a message to anyone or anything that might find the spacecraft some day. The plaques have pictures of a man and a woman, the Pioneer spacecraft, and instructions on how to find Earth based on navigating between pulsars in our galaxy.
Two spacecraft that were launched after the Pioneers but which will reach nearby stars sooner are Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. The first also went by Jupiter and is heading towards the constellation Camelopardalis, which it will reach in 300,000 years. Its twin, Voyager 2, is going in the direction of Sirius, the Dog Star, and will get there in “only” 150,000 years.
The fastest moving of these four spacecraft is Voyager 1, which is travelling at about 63,000 kilometres per hour. If you could drive a car that fast, you could go around the entire Earth in 45 minutes, assuming that someone built a road around the equator.
Despite what may seem to be a pessimistic view of travel times in outer space, it’s theoretically possible for us to build spacecraft today that could reach a planet orbiting a nearby star within the lifetime of an astronaut on board. Einstein showed that a spacecraft moving fast enough would have time slow down on board the spacecraft while to an observer, on Earth, time would pass normally and it would seem that the spaceship was gone a very long time, perhaps many decades. To the astronaut, time would move more quickly and he or she would age at a much slower rate, reaching the destination in only a relative handful of years.
This is still a long way from “Warp Factor Three,” but it shows that space travel is possible even with our present technology. But here’s the single fact that could change science fiction into science fact: not all stars are the same.
The Milky Way has about 100 billion stars. Some are hotter than our Sun; some are cooler than our Sun. Some are larger; some are smaller. Some are younger; some are older. In fact, some are much older — even billions of years older. What this means is that some stars with planets that can support life have had much longer to nurture and advance the life into highly evolved and technological civilizations. It is reasonable to think that some of these civilizations may have advanced so far technologically that they have discovered a way to travel between the stars like in the TV show Star Trek or at least have lifetimes that allow long journeys between stars. Maybe they have found ways to use sleep chambers to prevent aging on long voyages.
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