Take Back The "U"

  In the middle of an interesting report on the aftermath of the Texas UFO sightings, Sam Ogden of Skepchick.org reports this little tidbit.

"I sat across the aisle from some fellow Texans on the plane ride home from Florida who were very vocal that the reversal by the air force was proof that the government is covering something up."

  This, my friends, is the definition of ambivalence. I love to be right; I hate the credulity. It's a powerful sensation, akin to choking myself to death with delicious cookie dough.

  Folks, it's time we did something ridiculously pedantic as we paddle upstream in the flood of blind belief. We've got to take back the word "unidentified." We've got to stop letting true believers conflate the term with “alien.”

  Here's how we do it. If someone observes a UFO, and then either attempts to gather evidence and make a determination of what it was, or calmly accepts that it can't be precisely identified, then they can call it unidentified. If they’re going to leap to an otherwise unsupported conclusion as to the object's outer spaciness, we have to insist that they use a word like alien or extraterrestrial that clearly indicates the (desperately crazy) conclusion they’ve drawn.

  I'm not nearly so delusional as to think that this semantic quibbling will change the minds of anyone in the woo-niverse, but it might just rescue an innocent word from misappropriation by the tinfoil hat crowd. That's a worthy enough goal all by itself.

Question #118: Unidentified ≠ Alien

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Do you think those people down in Texas really saw a UFO?
- Scott Baio Gave Me Pinkeye

Dear Scott Baio Gave Me Pinkeye,
  I have absolutely no doubt that people in Stephenville, Texas did see several UFOs on the night of January 8th. I am, however, just as certain that they didn't see a spaceship full of aliens out for a night of "probe the redneck."

  The key is the U in "UFO." To belabor the point just a bit, it stands for "unidentified." I'll spare you the dictionary definition, but it's worth pointing out that any object or light in the sky that the viewer can't place is a UFO. I'd bet that the nearly every person in the industrialized world has, at some point, seen something in the sky and not been quite clear as to what that something was. Yet there has never been any compelling evidence of extraterrestrial visitation.

  It's a pet peeve of mine that "unidentified" has become popular shorthand for "alien." Despite the squawking of true believers, nobody has ever produced evidence for alien origin of UFOs. Read up on any major UFO sighting, and you'll find a perfectly rational, and entirely mundane, explanation. Lo and behold, the Air Force Reserve has confirmed that ten F-16 fighter jets from the 301st Fighter Wing at the Naval Air Station Fort Worth Joint Reserve were conducting training flights over North Central Texas that night.

  It's unfortunate that the Air Force Reserve initially disclaimed any military aircraft activity in the area. Doubtless the conspiracy theorists will seize on this revision as "evidence" that the government is covering up something it doesn't want us to know about. This might seem odd to you, the rational reader, but I promise it will happen. It takes a special kind of crazy to believe in a government conspiracy to cover up the truth about alien visitors. National governments are large, unwieldy organizations. They employ multitudes of personnel who rate at all levels of incompetence. The idea that even the most ruthlessly efficient national government could successfully suppress such a sensational revelation is just silly. The idea that the same government which brought you Watergate, Filegate and countless other -gate suffixed scandals could keep a lid on such big news is unfathomably absurd.

  Supposed extraterrestrial hijinks always make a little sad, and a lot purple-faced with rage. I'm a sci-fi geeeeek. I want so hard for intelligent alien life to be real, and for interstellar travel to be practical. To my continued frustration, we've found no evidence to suggest that either of these things is true. Whenever I read about a kerfluffle involving odd lights in the sky, a small part of me dares to hope that this will be the time when it turns out to be something truly exciting. 'Tis a small hope, repeatedly dashed. It's annoying that credulous assbaskets can't stop setting me up for disappointment. It's infuriating that paranoid nutbags retreat to insane theories about covert shenanigans, rather than dealing with the woe like the rest of us. I can only hope that, if the aliens ever show up and start handing out anal probes, they start with this guy.