Extraterrestrial life Intelligent Design

At Mind Matters News: What if the UAP (UFOs) are much simpler life forms than we think?

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Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon asks us to consider the possibility that the UABs (UFOs) are something like a life form, drawn to Earth, but not very smart.

Instead of wholly rejecting this view, consider two things:

First, 150 years ago, no one had heard of viruses. Perhaps the very idea might have been, for various reasons, dismissed. But less than two years ago, a virus of only 900 bytes of information shut down most of the world. We would have thought that something very advanced would be needed to do that. But apparently not.

Second, ET has never tried to contact us. Many hypotheses worth considering have been advanced as to why that is so. The theorists tend to assume that ET is more advanced than we are.

But what if, as Sheldon suggests, the exact opposite is true? What if they are so simple that they could survive in space, perhaps generating energy via available elements?

Don’t laugh. One earthly extremophile eats radioactive waste. 

If they are attracted to Earth by our high energy use, they could be generating unexplained phenomena. And they are not contacting us for the same reasons that viruses do not. They have no minds.

News, “What if the UAP (UFOs) are much simpler than we think?” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Why assume, if the Pentagon’s now admittedly unexplained phenomena are ET, that they are more advanced than we are? What if the opposite is true? Might that not be a possibility to explore?

You may also wish to read: The Pentagon’s UAP (UFO) report signals a sharp attitude change. The brass have committed themselves to going “wherever the data takes us.” No, they didn’t report UFOs. But they reported enough mysteries to stop merely debunking and discrediting… and follow the evidence.


COVID-19: When 900 bytes shut down the world. A great physicist warned us, information precedes matter and energy: Bit before it.

25 Replies to “At Mind Matters News: What if the UAP (UFOs) are much simpler life forms than we think?

  1. 1
    Seversky says:

    Anybody read Fred Hoyle’s 1957 novel The Black Cloud? Maybe the UAPs are a Dark Matter intelligence seduced by the Dark Side of The Force. I was going to say the possibilities are endless but then I remembered we don’t like infinities.

  2. 2
    zweston says:

    sev…ignore all the other stuff, sweep in for the tabloid stories and speculation… I guess that is the language of the darwinist/many worlds crowd.

  3. 3
    doubter says:

    This is getting tiresome. There are simply far too many high quality sightings of structured technological vehicles of some kind (some with electromagnetic interaction on radars and one with ELINT gear), to plausibly claim that the phenomenon is of some sort of space creatures. At the risk of becoming repetitive, again a (very partial) list of cases. If it weren’t for lack of space the list could be extended to twice this length.

    – The RB-47 UFO Incident

    Location: Mississippi through Louisiana and Texas and into Oklahoma
    July 1957

    An Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) RB-47 jet on a training mission repeatedly encountered a maneuvering radar-transmitting UFO (detected by the equipment on the RB-47), which correlated with visual observations of a brilliant white-red light tracked at 10 nautical miles from the RB-47 by the Dallas/Duncanville AFS air defense FPS-10 radar, with simultaneous blink outs on the Duncanville radar, ELINT monitors, visually and on the RB-47 airborne navigation radar.

    – The 1976 Tehran Incident

    Location: Tehran, Iran
    September 1976

    Two Iranian F-4 interceptor aircraft reported their equipment jammed as they approached a star-shaped UFO over the areas surrounding the Iranian capital, Tehran. Ground control equipment at Mehrabad International Airport was also reportedly affected by the strange craft. Speaking at a pilot’s conference in 2007, pilot Parviz Jafari said he attempted to fire on the UFO but was unable to cause any damage. “My weapons jammed and my radio communications garbled,” he said, according to the Irish Independent.

    – Coyne, Mansfield Helicopter Incident

    Location: Mansfield, Ohio
    October 1973

    Four crew members of an Army Reserve helicopter recorded a near collision with a UFO near Charles Mill Lake. The incident was corroborated by witnesses in Richland and Ashland counties who described an object or a ball of light moving in a manner not consistent with human flight. The crew on the helicopter, piloted by Lawrence Coyne (for whom the sighting is named), reported seeing a 60-foot-long, cigar-shaped object with a bright green light, according to the Mansfield News Journal.

    – Nancy, France Sighting

    Location: Nancy, Grand Est, France
    October 1982

    According to an investigation by GEPAN, a unit of France’s national aerospace agency tasked with investigating UFO sightings, a biologist, identified as M. Henri, and his wife observed an unidentified object that hovered for 20 minutes over their garden. The ovoid vessel had a shiny metallic appearance. M. Henri attempted to photograph the craft but found his camera had jammed. After the UFO regained altitude it moved at a speed and trajectory impossible for man-made aircraft.

    – Japan Airlines Flight 1628 Incident

    Location: Alaska
    November 1986

    The pilot and crew of a Japan Airlines cargo flight from Paris to Tokyo reported seeing strange flashing colorful lights that followed their aircraft over Alaska. The New York Times reported during an FAA investigation into the sighting that the yellow, amber and green lights were spotted on a clear evening by pilot Kenji Terauchi. The pilot reported that the lights appeared to be part of a huge object. The lights appeared as the flight crossed into Alaska from Canada, while the plane cruised at 35,000 feet. The FAA later came to no definitive conclusion about the sighting .

    – Chicago O’Hare Airport Sighting

    Location: Chicago, Illinois
    November 2006

    United Airlines staff and pilots at Chicago O’Hare Airport reported seeing a flying saucer hovering over the airport terminal on an overcast day. The vessel then shot up into the air so quickly that it punched a hole in the clouds. The FAA told The Chicago Tribune that the sighting had likely been caused by “weather phenomenon” and did not further investigate the incident.

  4. 4
    polistra says:


  5. 5
    Sandy says:


    :))) yep…if you believe that a cell can appear from dumb chemicals why not UFOs .

  6. 6
    ET says:

    The virus didn’t shut down the world. The chicken-little leaders did that. And if ET’s traveled here from lightyears away then yes, they are obviously more advanced than we are

  7. 7
    News says:

    People, calm down. It’s quite possible that ET didn’t need to be smart to travel this far. That’s assuming the need for high tech and intention. If ET is an artifact of nature with no intentions other than seeking energy, the picture changes. Why couldn’t that be true?

  8. 8
    Jack says:

    Hopefully, ETs are as simple as possible. But no simpler.

  9. 9
    doubter says:

    Aside from the extensive evidence I have gone into a little in the form of excellent quality UFO incidents with good or expert observers, where the sightings have been of structured apparently technological verhicles of some kind (some with radar and even ELINT (Electronic Intelligence) interactions), another dimension of this issue is the clearly great unlikelihood of such proposed simple space lifeforms ever arising at all.

    It would seem to me that the space environment is so very harsh and exacting that it is exceedingly unlikely that life could ever arise in it, even more astronomically unlikely than the abiogenic OOL of carbon-based life on Earth.

    Life of any kind presumably requires stable complex molecules and complex stable chemical transformations to arise, with a huge different range of molecular shapes and functions required for the minimum multiple basic functions of metabolism, protection, interface with the environment, reproduction, etc. etc.

    To my knowledge carbon-based lifeforms in liquid water has been the only theoretical system found to have these requisite characteristics. Silicon has some of these characteristics but is a far trailer in capability to form a huge stable of complex molecules with different functions.

    Could space-based simple lifeforms ever arise at all much less abiogenically? I don’t think so. For them to survive they would have to be very complex already when they arose in order to withstand the very hostile space conditions. But the problem is, an abiogenic spontaneous origin would be with simple forms arising first, which would require a very friendly environment, not vacuum with a range of very low to very high temperatures, and absence of liquid water, and so on. This is aside from the probablistic barriers to abiogenic OOL that have been well explored by people like James Tour.

  10. 10
    doubter says:

    Not to beat a dead horse, but here for your edification is one more excellent quality UFO incident, of structured vehicles of some kind. These cases cumulatively establish beyond much reasonable doubt that at least some UFOs are somebody else’s hardware.

    The Nash-Fortenberry UFO sighting

    Location: Over Chesapeake Bay, VA
    July 1952

    The Nash-Fortenberry UFO sighting was an unidentified flying object sighting that occurred on July 14, 1952, when two experienced commercial pilots (William B. Nash and William H. Fortenberry) saw eight UFOs flying in a tight echelon formation over Chesapeake Bay in the state of Virginia. Though the encounter lasted only twelve to fifteen seconds, Nash and Fortenberry were able to offer a detailed moment-by-moment chronology of events, and a relatively accurate measurement of the objects’ motion and size when compared to well-known attractions. Both pilots were World War II U.S. Navy veterans, and had been trained in identification of enemy aircraft — Nash was a Naval Air Transport veteran who specialized in anti-submarine patrols, while Fortenberry worked with the Navy’s air experimental wing.

    Nash stated that the sighting consisted of “six bright objects streaking towards us at tremendous speed…They had the fiery aspect of hot coals, but of a much greater glow…Their shape was clearly outlined and evidently circular!” He would go on to state that this color was the same on each craft, which themselves glowed around “twenty times” brighter than the city lights below them.

    A little more of the extensive detailed sighting by two expert observers, from https://www.ufoinsight.com/ufos/sightings/nash-fortenberry-ufo :

    The closer the objects got to the airliner the clearer the two men could see they were in a purposeful “narrow echelon formation”. The leader, according to Nash, was the “lowest” in the formation, with “each following craft slightly higher”. Then, the leader appeared to attempt to slow suddenly. Nash would continue:

    “We received this impression because the second and third wavered slightly and seemed almost to overrun the leader, so that for a brief moment during the remainder of their approach the positions of these three varied. It looked very much as if an element of “human” or “intelligence” error had been introduced in so far as the following two did not react soon enough when the leader began to slow down and so almost overran him!”

    As the two men continued to observe the row of glowing circular objects, they suddenly and with lightning speed changed their direction. They would “flip” on their edges with the glowing surface facing the pilots’ right. As they did so, the bottoms of the craft were “not clearly visible”.

    This would lead the pilots to believe that the bottoms of the craft were, in fact, unlighted. The same appeared true for the edge of the objects. Nash would describe their overall appearance as being “much like coins”.

    The encounter was corroborated by several groups of independent ground witnesses. The case has been recorded in the United States Air Force Blue book project as “unknown”. Major Dewey Fournet, who was involved with the Project Blue Book project years later, indicated that the incident was “one of the most detailed and reliable cases” of the times.

    An even more extensive and detailed recounting of the incident is at https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/48002340/nash-fortenberry-case-ufo-casebook .

  11. 11
    Seversky says:

    Travelling between stars is going to require much more advanced science and technology than we currently possess and the commitment of far more resources than we can afford at this time. I love the gleaming spaceships, space station and Moonbase in 2001 but the cost of building vehicles and facilities on that scale would be horrendous and far beyond the capacity of any company or state and possibly the entire planet.

    To travel to even the nearest star we will either have to be able to propel the ship to a significant fraction of the speed of light or have generations of people live and die in the space between the stars in a ship that takes hundreds or even thousands of years to get to its destination at a much slower speed.

    Either option is pushing current science, technology and economics beyond their limits.

    If we look at the faster option, in The Physics of Star Trek Lawrence Krauss assumed the use of the “impulse engines” which are supposed to work on the principle of hydrogen fusion. Short of matter-antimatter reactions, that gives us the biggest bang for our buck in terms of energy. Krauss calculated that, to accelerate the USS Enterprise to just half the speed of light, would take 81 times the mass of the entire ship in hydrogen. To slow it down at the other end would take the same amount. That’s a lot of hydrogen and that’s also assuming we can get controlled hydrogen fusion to work reliably.

    Most science-fiction doesn’t make clear the huge amounts of energy required to do these things. You don’t just hop in your little X-wing fighter for a short trip to the Dagobah system unless you have access to science and technology far beyond anything we know.

    Generation ships are not necessarily an easier option. You are taking about building a giant machine that will function reliably for centuries, possibly millennia. How many machines we make today can run for that long? How many buildings even stand for that long? Remember, there are no garages out there where you can pull in to make repairs. There are no stores out there where you can buy spare parts. You are way too far away from any stars for solar power to work so you are going to have to rely on nuclear. Except even current nuclear will not last that long, either in terms of fuel or maintenance and repairs. Such ships would have to be an entirely self-contained and very long-lasting habitat. And, again, horrendously expensive.

    Any aliens that may have got here would have to have solved all those problems, which would put them way ahead of us scientifically and technologically.

    Like I say, they may already be here walking amongst us and we have no means of detecting them, unless one of their cloaking devices has a glitch.

  12. 12
    Jack says:

    Given the fact of entangled particles, delayed choice, quantum eraser, etc., something “sub-space” is going on that is making this all happen and it “knows” about everything, everywhere, all the time. Our understanding of physics is not complete. If there are more dimensions than three (or four depending on how one views gravity), instant travel between any part of the universe may be possible. It is certainly a logical possibily. Time will tell (maybe.)

    Just ask Q, he knows.

  13. 13
    EDTA says:

    UAP is as good a name for them as anything, because we still, after all this time, don’t have a physical craft that we can to go a museum and see for ourselves. Until real people can examine real hardware, I’m not even going to call them “objects”. Phenomena, yes. Objects? Not yet.

  14. 14
    doubter says:


    That’s true – there are no crashed UFOs in museums. However, the data I have given a sample of stands on its own merits. If not ETIs, what are they, that is, what is the nature of whatever it was that created these observations? It seems to me the extraterrestrial intelligence hypothesis is the simplest and most direct one that can plausibly account for the data. With the cases I have summarized and others in the same category, the simplest and most direct explanation is that they are simply what they look like – manufactured technological vehicles from alien cultures very extremely in advance of our own. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it probably really is a duck, not a swan in disguise. The swan in disguise hypothesis requires another entire array of assumptions and complications. Could be the case despite this, but Occam’s Razor militates against it.

  15. 15
    ET says:

    We do have at least one physical craft that people have seen and have studied. You people can’t really believe that the Army confused a weather balloon for a space craft.

  16. 16
    ET says:



    How can anything be simpler than possible? “A flute without holes is a stick.”

  17. 17
    EDTA says:

    If “they” have an actual captured craft, I really don’t understand why they cannot let the world see it. It would not cause panic. People would be fascinated by it. And it would give the governments of the world an excuse to take even more power from their people, something they do any time they get an opportunity. But not with _this_ opportunity!

    It is frustrating not knowing what the phenomenon(a) is (are). And the ETI hypothesis _does_ explain what we see. But the “objects” violate laws of physics, which militates against them being solid and/or “manned” objects. Only purely optical phenomena (or physical phenomena that can affect matter across distances) can do the sorts of sudden movements these things do.

    The other objection I have is due to a fellow on another website (whose name escapes me at the moment–sorry): Despite having better optics and ubiquitous cameras today, the putative (and non-faked) UFO photos and videos we get are no clearer today than 50 years ago. The simplest explanation is that most images captured today, while of better quality, only show mundane things, and are thus rejected as UFOs. Photos that are at the extreme end of what we can capture today, and hence which are still blurry, become today’s UFO photos/videos. But it is unlikely that aliens are adjusting their proximity to us based on _our_ technology. It’s simplest to think the photos are still of mundane things.

    But as always, I remain open to evidence that I can actually verify…get me a pass to look at that alleged craft, and you might make a believer out of me.

  18. 18
    Sandy says:

    Yep…aliens blur any picture/video recording them. Man , they are good!! Hahahaha! Tens of millions of cams on world . There is a study saying people became dumber .

  19. 19
    Jack says:


    A take off on an alleged Einstein pun (that he probably didn’t quite utter as reported.)


  20. 20
    ET says:

    Jack, it sounds like something the 3 stooges would say.

  21. 21
    doubter says:


    Violate the laws of physics? Maybe so, but our physics is maybe 300 years old at the most, whereas ETIs could have been around millions of years. They may have learned something or other. Secondly, this is a lesson in the primacy of empirical evidence over theory. An example of this in another entire category of existence is the overwhelming body of evidence for the reality of paranormal and psychical phenomena (of course you can disagree), even though many scientistic skeptics, unable to challenge the experimental and observational evidence, closed-mindedly insist that they are impossible because they violate the Standard Model of physics. That’s the old David Hume philosophical argument for the impossibility of “miracles” regardless of evidence. Obviously if certain psychical or paranormal events did in fact happen as overwhelmingly showed by numerous careful experiments and investigations, then the Standard Model is not the last word in physics.

    And I might remind you of the interesting details of the Nash-Fortenberry sighting, where the trained observers noted that the UFOs were definitely coin-shaped as revealed by their maneuvers (similar to the famous Kenneth Arnold sighting), and when the lead objects in the formation suddenly slowed down the trailing saucers momentarily hesitated before responding and almost overran the lead UFO. This demonstrated both intelligent control and apparent inertial behavior.

  22. 22
    EDTA says:

    As far as the trailing saucers hesitating, two alternative explanations would be 1) observer bias, as in perceiving that they moved like physical objects would, just because we expect that sort of behaivor; but they really didn’t move that way. Remember, no video. And 2) inanimate but electrically-charged phenomena, such that those following were repelled by the lead object/phenomenon once they got too close.

    I know, I know…not enough imagination.

  23. 23
    doubter says:

    That’s really quite a stretch. If you’re going to challenge the accounts of their experience by these trained observers you might as well claim that they made up the entire story out of their imagination fuelled by the UFO craze. Or claim that they had a shared hallucination. Pure speculation.

    I prefer to go by their actual report, which has significant parallels to the famous 1947 Kenneth Arnold sighting.

    Except for the WWII “foo fighters”, this began the modern era of UFOs. A good analysis is at http://www.martinshough.com/ae.....lysis2.pdf . There do not seem to be any valid optical, geometric, geographical, psychological or other reasons to doubt the major features of Arnold’s sighting as reported and they are internally consistent. The analysis results in a range of 16-20 miles, a minimum length of 70-90 feet, and a speed of 890 to 1200 mph. Arnold described the objects as trimmed-off in the rear thin shiny “saucer-like” discoids reflecting sunlight blindingly like metal at certain angles.

    Of course you can also discount this sighting as observer bias or some sort of psychological illusion, but that tactic gets old pretty fast when you have to use it too many times.

  24. 24
    EDTA says:


    Yes, and I don’t like citing observer bias or psych illusion and so on. I want to think that these people (pilots with big responsibilities) are in possession of their full faculties when they see these things. But behaviors such as making sharp (multi-G) turns, accelerations, and supersonic travel with no sonic booms (in most cases) doesn’t make any sense either. I really don’t like _any_ of the explanations: inanimate phenomena, man-made objects, mental/visual illusions, or ETs. Each has problems. We’ll just keep watching I guess.

  25. 25
    KRock says:

    Instead of representing simpler life forms, as Rob Sheldon proposes, perhaps the so-called UAP phenomenon has more to do with some level of consciousness—one that remains outside of our scientific understanding! In fact, two of the most prolific researchers in this subject (Dr Jacques Vallee and Dr J Allen Hynek) believed this to be the case.

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