As to recognizing extraterrestrial technology, I think that a good way would be to look for conventions in part sizes. Many manufactured items are made in various standard sizes, especially items that have fit other items, like nuts and bolts. Their sizes are usually some nice multiple or fraction of some unit of measurement. You can find parts in both English-unit sizes and metric-unit sizes. Screw direction may also help -- some ET ones could be left-handed instead of right-handed, what most of ours are.
TWILIGHT OF THE GULLIBLE | More Intelligent Life
There used to be many reported sightings of UFOs, but modern life has not been kind to them. Charles Nevin finds out why
At a conference organized by the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP), UFO skeptic Ian Ridpath noted a great variety of things that have been reported as Unidentified Flying Objects: Venus, garbage-bag balloons, blurred birds, meteorites, ...
The ASSAP has noted not only a sharp drop of claimed UFO sightings, but also a fall-off in the popularity of UFO-investigation groups.
Ridpath gave an assured performance, received with applause. He stressed that there had been no classic UFO sightings since the advent of the new generation of technology, and, especially, the mobile-phone camera, whose ubiquity, it might have been thought, should almost have guaranteed convincing photographic evidence of the inquisitive green men and their conveyances.
But could there also be other factors, like the rise of the organized skeptic movement and a decline in gullibility? Charles Nevin finds neither hypothesis very convincing.
It would be interesting to see if something similar happens to cryptids like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.
There's another aspect of UFOlogy that I find interesting. Some UFOlogists have compared their field to meteoritics, claiming that skepticism about Unidentified Flying Objects is just like skepticism about Unidentified Falling Objects, that skepticism about extraterrestrial spaceships is just like skepticism about extraterrestrial rocks. Not surprisingly, they expect a parallel sort of vindication.
Back in the 18th century, mainstream scientists were very skeptical about the hypothesis of extraterrestrial rocks, preferring various other hypotheses, like
- Rocks struck by lightning
- Rocks ejected by volcanoes
- Rocks picked up by windstorms
- Condensations in the upper atmosphere, sort of like hailstones
But in 1803, there was a report of a meteorite fall in L'Aigle, France, and the French Academy of Sciences sent Jean-Baptiste Biot out to investigate. He found oodles of evidence in two categories:
- Physical evidence: the sudden appearance of many identical stones similar to other stones fallen from the sky in other places
- Moral evidence: a large number of witnesses who saw a "rain of stones thrown by the meteor"
JBB wrote about his findings in a lively style, and his report became very popular, overshadowing the work of an earlier advocate of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni.
UFOlogists have argued that "real UFO's" are like meteorite falls, manifesting themselves briefly in out-of-the-way places, and thus making it difficult for the scientific community to study them. Like ball lightning and will-o'-the-wisps.
But UFOlogy has yet to have its L'Aigle moment. In fact, my linked article suggests that the proliferation of smartphones and the like has been a sort of anti L'Aigle for them.
