If UFOs do turn out to be real, there will be some very, very happy musicians
[This was my weekly column for GlobalNews.ca. – AC]
I’ve always dreamed of seeing a genuine honest-to-God UFO. Like Fox Mulder of The X-Files, I really want to believe there’s something Out There in the maybe two trillion galaxies in the observable universe.
My grandparents lived just a few miles from the location of the infamous Falcon Lake Incident in 1967. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by the prospect of some kind of close encounter. I’m hoping that Star Trek will once again be prescient, and a Zefram Cochrane-like pioneer will launch the first warp drive flight (scheduled for April 5, 2061, a Borg invasion notwithstanding), attracting the attention of a passing Vulcan ship and thereby initiate First Contact.
I want there to be a black monolith with perfect proportions buried under my hydrangeas in the backyard that warns me to leave Europa alone. I dream of picking up an Alan Freed broadcast from 1955 on my little transistor radio, reflected back to us by a civilization somewhere within a 35-light-year radius (I’d prefer that to the Hitler stuff they had to deal with in Contact.) And those fast radio bursts? They’d better be actual interstellar/intergalactic WOW signals — especially this one. That would be a lot more fun than looking for hydroxyl emissions.
But alas, even though I keep watching the skies, I’ve never seen anymore more than shootings stars and passing satellites and space stations.
Lately, though, I’ve become more optimistic. First came the New York Times reports on US Navy pilots dealing with UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, the new re-branding for UFOs). Additional reporting piled up so high that this past week, whistleblowers testified under oath in front of the House Oversight Congressional Committee regarding an alleged massive coverup, claiming that “non-human” bodies and extraterrestrial technologies have been recovered from crashed vehicles.
Millions of us await the truth, including a number of high-profile musicians.
