Whenever I show doubt about the aliens, someone inevitably cites all kinds of anecdotes about abductions, sightings and so on, and asks “what else could it be?”
I hate that question. That’s how stupid ideas without any basis in reality held on for centuries. Milky way was made because someone spilled milk in the sky, because what else could it be? The planets are Gods moving in the sky, because what else could it be? The stars are the hearths of ancestors in heaven because what else could it be? The constellations are heavenly homes of the spirit totems, because what else could it be? The plague was caused by the Jews poisoning the wells, because what else could it be? So, now it’s the aliens, because what else could it be?
“What else could it be?” is a sentence that should be punished by public ridicule, because everyone who ever used it was an idiot. It’s like answering every single question in science with “Jesus did it”.
It’s obvious that stupid people hate having question marks in their worldview, and they prefer whatever answer to statement of ignorance, but I don’t. I have no problem with stating ignorance. I don’t know what caused all sorts of things and I’ll tell you I don’t know, but then a stupid idiot with lots of confidence will state he knows the answer, because what else could it be?
Let me cite something that has absolutely no basis in evidence or knowledge of any kind, and is purely a hypothesis, but it provides an alternative to aliens – and, also, to the alternative claim that it must be demons, or nonphysical entities of some kind. It’s called the Silurian Hypothesis.
It goes like this. The dinosaurs evolved into a sapient species at some particular part of the world. This species had a habit of burrowing into the ground, and had whole underground settlements. Whether it was for growing/storing food, or for mining some resource, or for protection against big predators, or all of the above, I can’t tell you, but let’s say they were technologically in an early bronze age, 65 MY ago when the asteroid struck. Since they were dug into rock like Dwarves into Moria, they managed to survive the impact and its aftermath, and if they grew mushrooms or something underground as a food source, they could have survived just fine. Let’s say that the aftermath of the disaster put evolutionary pressure on them, and they evolved both intelligence and technology, and 65 MY is a very long time, mind you. Humans stretch some 200-300 KY into the past. 70 KY ago the Neanderthals ruled Europe. Civilization goes back some 5 KY. 11 KY ago we were in an ice age. So, 65 MY is enough for continents to shift, let alone for a species to evolve intelligence and technology that’s so far ahead of ours that it looks like visitors from another star system, because “what else could it be?”. What else could it be, the Fairies could be fucking in the sky, you fucking idiots. But let’s keep with the Silurian hypothesis. The objections would be as following: a civilization would strip Earth for mineral resources, leaving nothing for the early humans, who on the contrary managed to find things like copper, gold, zinc and iron all over the place, without having to dig into the mountains. Well, as I said, 65 MY is a long time, long enough for the mountains to erode, for the strip-mined sections to be washed away and new, abundant mineral sources to be revealed. One would expect technological signatures of such a civilization to be obvious; not really. Our signature was very obvious when we were broadcasting TV and radio all over the place, but now that we’ve transitioned to watching YouTube over the Internet, and it’s all transferred via fibre-optics and focused microwave beams, it’s pretty much undetectable. Extend this for a thousand years, and it’s the difference between the age of an ox cart and the age of iPhone. Technology of a species that’s been working on it at some pace for a million years in continuity might be something we might not even recognize as technology. I don’t know, using mycelia of fungi as computational devices or communication. Something. Whatever I make up is probably much inferior to what they would think of. They could use either geothermal sources for energy, or they could use nuclear energy, or something even more sophisticated that we wouldn’t even recognize. Let’s say they really like living deep in the mountains because that’s how they were saved from the cataclysm and they worship the mountains on a genetic level and go out only to explore this recent infestation that’s been spreading on the surface. Let’s say they have all kinds of flying saucers and “alien” shit. Let’s say they look generally anthropomorphic, and they are dinosaur-descendants like the birds, only some different branch, so they look more reptilian, so there’s your reptilian “aliens”.
Mind you, I pulled the whole thing out of my arse, mildly inspired by a Dr. Who episode, and I can now say “what else could it be?”.
Fuck you, that’s what it could be.