Aliens are not visiting Earth.
OK, let’s temper that slightly: there’s no evidence that aliens have visited Earth, and evidence that things are there are usually pretty easy to find. This is why we can be pretty sure that elephants exist and that Bigfeet do not.
This lack of evidence has not stopped former Blink-182 guitarist, Angels and Airwaves guitarist and alien-in-believer Tom DeLonge making a new TV series arguing that flying saucers are living and working among us.
That series is Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation™ (and yes, that trademark symbol is part of the title). It’s the sort of conspiracy theory garbage which used to be reserved for the internet but is now apparently the a nifty idea that makes History go “yeah, a six part series about what you reckon the US government is hiding, let’s do that.”
The show draws heavily on To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, DeLonge’s foundation for looking at the spaceships and martians, and reportedly involves interviewing a bunch of people from its staff about what they reckon is a secret government conspiracy to hide the existence of UFOs and the shady (read: largely fictitious) history of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
And sure, shows about how the US government are in cahoots with the space martians is hardly new. But honestly, is there anyone on the planet who thinks that Donald Trump wouldn’t announce the government have had alien contact – especially if he could point out that Barack Obama kept it secret? It’s amazing he hasn’t made that claim regardless, now we think about it.
Mind you, DeLonge could do with the exposure: reportedly his To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science is in the red to the tune of over US$37 million. Maybe they should get into more serious work, like mermaid wellness.
And look, contempt for this sort of silliness aside, it’s entirely likely that there’s life elsewhere in the universe (hell, there might yet be life in our own solar system and we should therefore be sending probes to Europa and Enceladus ASAP!). After all, the universe is a big place full of the same stuff as made life here on our little blue-green rock.
But given how freakin’ large the distances between stars are, the hard limit that physics puts on how fast anything can go, the sheer vastness of cosmic time and the fact that sophisticated life forms that have evolved on planets are wildly unsuited to living in space (as we keep discovering with the many things that go wrong with humans when we send them off-planet), the idea that there are things sneakily visiting a hard to get to planet deep in a star’s gravity well seems like the fantasies of a man who grew up thinking the Mos Eisley Cantina scene in Star Wars was shot on location.
Stop encouraging him, History Channel. You used to be better than that.