While debunking the alleged alien body displayed in Mexico a few days ago, Satyen K. Bordoloi – in this two-part series – still claims that the existence of aliens is both a scientific inevitability and a social, cultural and psychological necessity for humans.
In the 2011 comedy Paul, two British nerds visiting Area 51 – long believed to be the site of a secret government alien research facility – encounter an actual alien. This foul-mouthed, cigarette-smoking, bus-driving alien had been living on Earth for decades (even consulted Spielberg for his films in the 70s). As the three make a run from authorities, the two earthlings realise to their utter surprise how ‘human’ this E.T. phoning home had become.
Last week, interest in aliens reached an all-time high globally because of two related news events. On September 13, journalist Jaime Maussan who calls himself a UFO researcher, testified under oath in an event in Mexico City and claimed he had found the remains of an alien body one-third of whose DNA is allegedly of an unknown origin and does not fit our terrestrial evolution. He even showed two tiny alien bodies as proof.
The next day, NASA held a press conference to give conclusions from its highly anticipated year-long $100,000 study into Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (NASA does not call them UFOs). The study was conducted to try and understand hundreds of reports of UAPs. NASA concludes that most of these sightings have been explained away yet there are a few that can’t be as they are not “known human-made or natural phenomena”. Though NASA says that this does not mean they are necessarily extra-terrestrial, this can’t be entirely ruled out either.
When told about the press conference a day prior in Mexico, Dan Evans – assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA, said, “One of the main things we’re trying to do here today is to move conjecture and conspiracy towards science and sanity, and you do that with data.” Sanity, and scientific inquiry against faith and conspiracy theories? Guess who wins?
DEBUNKING MEXICO’S ALIEN CLAIM:
As you can see, of the two news, the one from Mexico is far more exciting. After all, it came with two alien bodies whose photos and videos appeared in every media across the world. There’s just a minor problem. Mr. Maussan who presented these ‘findings’, had tried pulling a similar stunt in 2015 when he claimed that a mummified body was of an alien. It was later proven to be a human child. Even now, he claims that the Autonomous National University of Mexico had studied the specimen, but ANUM clarified that they had only carbon-dated a specimen and not analysed its origins. Maussan also had with him US Navy pilot Ryan Graves who claimed to have seen and reported a UAP phenomenon in 2014 creating excitement in the community. But Graves wasn’t happy with what Maussan said and later called the alleged UFO researcher’s claims in a tweet, an “unsubstantiated stunt.”
Also, what does Mr. Maussan mean by only one-third of DNA in them being of unknown origin? Shouldn’t the entire DNA be of unknown origin if those two bodies were indeed aliens? And to whom is a third of DNA unknown? Mr. Maussan himself or science. Scientifically speaking, we haven’t yet managed to map out the genome of even a fraction of all the species on the planet. So having one-third of DNA being unknown to science is not a big deal as genetic science – despite coming a long way – is still in its infancy.
The other problem I find is that the two mummies shown could be of children suffering from some genetic disease (would he have called even the Elephant Man an alien) and look eerily similar to the alien in E.T. Is it possible that Mr. Maussan in his enthusiasm, grabbed two mummies that look similar to the creature in E.T. and called them out as aliens? And secondly, if they are that old, what is it doing in the hands of a private citizen when it is the domain of governments to keep and study them?
Also, as the various debunking of Mr Maussan’s previous claims have shown, he is an expert forger who uses body parts of different animals and actual human mummies to create these elaborate hoaxes.
Most importantly, think about this: here is a species that is from another world entirely – perhaps many light years away – that has had no connection to the earth and its people, where life grew in entirely different circumstances than found on Earth. Yet even the basis of this ‘alien’ life is DNA just like that on Earth? Doesn’t the fact that 2 parts of its DNA are of known origin, confirm that the two bodies are from Earth and are not alien because every life on the planet is a scaleup from the same basic life that emerged in the primordial soup billions of years ago?
Even if you say the aliens mated with earthlings, the big question would be, how? It’s nearly impossible for different species to mate on Earth unless their genomes are close like between the now extinct Denisovans and Neanderthals thousands of years ago. And here we are implying that a creature from another world entirely with no connection to us, mated with creatures on earth? Is that what the aliens are always trying to do with alleged anal probes during human abductions?
These are not the only things that put alien sightings into dubious repute.
TRUTH ABOUT ALIENS:
I don’t want to go into the history of alien sightings, abductions, probes etc. But a few ‘facts’ spiring to surface that are important to put this whole thing into perspective. First and foremost is the fact that most of the sightings of aliens and flying saucers, are in North America. That is one of the most absurd facts about alien sightings: why are aliens only interested in North America? Is it some form of Alien-racism against the planet?
The second most absurd fact to me is that all the aliens mentioned by those who have seen them – including the ones in Mexico – always describe them as humanoid. It is as if those people are creating those aliens in their image. The reason why I say that is because evolutionarily speaking, humans don’t have the best possible shape for an apex creature. It is a quirk of nature that our species finds ourselves here at the peak of the intellectual pyramid. But physiologically, we are not best suited for long survival as a species. Which form could be superior to humans? For starters one that had more than two eyes and eyes at the back of the head so they could have a 360-degree view. And why limit evolution to only 2 hands or hands that fold and work only on the front and not the back? Four hands and eight brain hemispheres could do a better job. Yet, all these sightings are of aliens that look and move like humans.
The reason we see only humanoid-looking aliens is sadly our imaginations, despite their capacities, are limited. We even imagine ghosts to be humanoid pointing to the fact that it is a creature of our imagination and not our surrounding reality.
Another reason cited by anthropologists for so many sightings in North America is the lack of ancient myths specific to that subcontinent. Every other part of the rest of the world has its myths and stories. The Indians, Chinese, Africans, Middle-Easterners and Europeans have so many myths and stories of gods and magical creatures that could pass off as aliens that people of these regions do not need to create more. Indeed, even if an actual alien visited these places, people would chill with those extraterrestrials, thinking them to be gods.
(Image Credit: Amazon / Rakuten Kobo)
The Americans have no such mythos of their own to go by. The ones that did have them – like the Red Indians – the whites have long been discrediting as stories of ‘savages’. Thus, they have to have their original myths and they fill that void with aliens and comic book superheroes that do superhuman stuff that gods and ghosts do in the mythos of the rest of the world. Indeed, if you look at it, post-World War II America has been the myth factory of the world, thanks to Hollywood, and one of its prized and money-making creations has been aliens and UFOs, or UAPs as NASA would have it.
This could also be down to confirmation bias. If you believe in something deeply enough and go out seeking proof of the same – as Erich von Däniken did – you will find them everywhere you see. As proof, I present ‘belief’ in god. No one person alive has seen god, but 84% of humans – as per 2010 research – believe in god. Surely, it’ll be easier, not harder to believe in aliens considering that you can even show ‘bodies’ as proof?
HOW A MISTAKE BIRTHED FLYING SAUCERS:
On June 24, 1947, amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying over Mount Rainier in, where else – USA, when he says he saw 9 sudden flashes of light that to him looked like aircrafts moving at – what he calculated – was twice the speed of sound, unheard of at that time. Describing it to reporters he explained that these things were gliding like a saucer would over water. A journalist misquoted him to call it a flying saucer and that’s how this term was born. Since then, endless similar sightings of ‘flying saucers’ have been reported – almost all of whom have been debunked as clouds. That hasn’t stopped Hollywood from making films on them, turning aliens and flying saucers into a multi-billion-dollar industry. No one ever comments on the fact that today, actual planes fly multiple times the speed of the speed that Kenneth calculated.
The 2011 comedy Paul is not just a spoof on alien films. In a way, it is a spoof on everyone who believes in them. Does that, and all the proof I presented above, mean that aliens are a figment of our collective imagination, aided and abetted by cinema? Quite the contrary. In most likelihood alien life exists and we will have conclusive proof of it within a decade. That, we will discuss in the next part of this piece.
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