So What Are They?

Everyone has probably heard by now about the Unidentified Flying Objects that have perplexed those who've viewed videos of these encounters taken by military pilots. The Today Show did a segment on it the other day:

Jim Geraghty at National Review offers four possible explanations for these phenomena and rules out the first three. He posits that they are either:

1. secret U.S. government or military technology,
2. secret private sector technology,
3. secret technology from a foreign country, or
4. aliens.

You'll have to go to the link to see why Geraghty rules out the first three possibilities, but I think he should rule out all four.

Andrew Follett, also at NRO, insists, contra much popular opinion, that these are not sightings of aliens and that they each have "an obvious terrestrial explanation." He argues that each of the controversial videos taken of these phenomena can be more plausibly explained by such mundane things as geese, planes, balloons or space debris.

Again, check out the link to see his reasoning. It's not as crazy as it sounds.

I'm certainly not in any position to venture an opinion on the identity of these strange phenomena except to say that I think visitors from some other planet in some other part of the galaxy is by far the least likely explanation for them. I say this because I'm very skeptical that intelligent life exists anywhere else in the universe, let alone in our galaxy.

Astronomer Hugh Ross in his book Why the Universe Is the Way it Is states that there are at least 816 parameters which have to be met by any planet for complex, intelligent life to be possible on it. Here are just a few of the 816:

A life-sustaining planet must:

• be located in the habitable zone of a suitable galaxy and must orbit in the habitable zone of a star of the proper age, size and luminosity.
• have a certain mass, period of rotation, plate tectonics, a magnetic field and a stable axis tilt.
• have ample liquid surface water and sufficient amounts of other specific elements and compounds.
• have an atmosphere of the proper chemical composition and transparency, and not too much nor too little oxygen.
• have a moon of the proper size and distance from the earth.

Ross calculates that there's less than 1 chance in 10^1032 that even one planet possessing all 816 criteria would occur anywhere in the universe apart from the intentional agency of a transcendent Creator.

Even if there are a trillion galaxies in the universe, each with a trillion planets, that would only be 10^24 planets. It requires an incredible exertion of blind faith to believe that despite such enormous odds not only does another planet exist somewhere in the universe that can support life, but that despite the additional enormous odds against life actually arising on this hypothetical planet, it nevertheless did.

Moreover, one must believe that despite the additional enormous odds against it, the life on that planet actually reached a level of intelligence that enabled it to develop technology that could defy the known laws of physics and travel across thousands, or even billions, of light years of space to reach earth.

I don't know what those pilots are seeing, and I'm reluctant to say that overcoming the astronomical probability barriers mentioned above is impossible, but in my opinion, unless God put life there, it's all but impossible.