I have studied and listened and written extensively – in fiction and nonfiction, for most of my life – about SETI, METI and life in the cosmos. For decades I have refused to glom onto premature conclusions or “Aha! This must be it!” declarations. Though new information or insights by others can change how I rank-order the possibilities.

In discussing the possibility of alien life, the UK Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, pretty much describes one of the plot lines in my novel Existence in this article: Why Intelligent Extraterrestrials are more likely to be artificial than biological. He notes, “I’d argue it would even be worth looking for traces of aliens in our own solar system. While we can probably rule out visits by human-like species, there are other possibilities. An extraterrestrial civilisation that had mastered nanotechnology may have transferred its intelligence to tiny machines, for example. It could then invade other worlds, or even asteroid belts, with swarms of microscopic probes.”

And yes, I agree with Martin, which is one more reason we should emphasize missions to asteroids over the sterile-poison and almost useless (in the near term) Luna. (That sandbox should mostly be left to the kiddies – with some important exceptions.)

Here’s one explanation for alien behavior, curtesy of Candorville by Darrin Bell. I’ve discussed the “cat laser hypothesis” in my posting: What’s really up with UAPs/UFOs?  Another take can be found in my story Those Eyes.

== They keep getting fuzzier. Why would ‘aliens’ do that? ==

Eray Ozkural shares “UAP” footage he took last June, showing glowing dots dancing over waters near the Princess Islands, darting about and occasionally causing explosion-like airbursts. The latter phenomenon I’ve not seen before and it’s worth a viewing. Still, instead of refuting my “cat laser” scenario, these airbursts only re-double the likelihood of that explanation! 

Alas, zealots keep repeating the fundamental assumption that these are ‘objects’ experiencing ‘propulsion’, and hence, since the movements seem to violate Newton, inertia, and even Einstein, they must be super-advanced alien ships. 

Alas for that scenario (and I have spent my life exploring concepts of the ‘alien’, including many decades involved in SETI), what I see there has NONE of the properties of an actual, physical ‘object’ and all properties of an excited patch of atmosphere! A compact patch (of probably excited plasma) that glows and occasionally causes air detonations. 

What always lingers in the air, after one of these sightings, is one of the several key questions that I ask in my most recent UAP/UFO posting, which is why do these sightings keep getting fuzzier and fuzzier, now that there are approximately a MILLION times as many active cameras as there were in the 1950s?