The Alien Hypothesis

Steven Boldeman

© Steven Boldeman

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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Author: Boldeman, Steven

Title: The Alien Hypothesis

ISBN: 978-0-6483093-7-6

For Vivian

Forward

Well here it is! I finally have had the chance to sit down and write this book. I have been planning to write it for years, and the time has finally come! This has been a very difficult book to write and took a long time. In writing this book my opinions on the matter have changed considerably, and completely from where they started. I have learnt a lot in writing this book, and it was a fascinating exercise.

I’m a curious person, and I have been fascinated with UFO sightings since a young age. I’ve always needed to have an explanation for what is going on, and searching for an answer. My initial motivation in writing the book was to fully explore the answer I felt I knew was correct, but this changed completely during writing. In many ways the creation of this book was a journey of discovery.

An attempt has been made to analyse what is occurring, as I see it. Much of the information available on UFO’s is strange and contradictory, which does make things difficult. I have attempted to construct some kind of meaningful narrative around what is going on, although if we are honest this was not easy. There is relatively little guidance from other sources, or pre-existing penetrating theories, so that does makes things difficult.

What I’ve really tried to do it get everything to line up; UFO’s abductions, animal mutilations, and many others. They key was to get some sort of working hypothesis where all of this had some sort of rudimentary explanation, and at least have something to work with. I took the view that the best approach was to explain as many unexplained phenomena as possible, where this seemed to be reasonable. Getting everything lining up doesn’t make any hypothesis right, rather it just makes it interesting.

The evidence that was used for creating the book was drawn from a wide variety of sources. Much of the available information is poor quality, or difficult to understand or follow. This is particularly the case with abductions, which are a very complex area and hard to understand or characterise.

There are many television shows reporting on a huge array of strange phenomena. These are loaded online on a variety of different websites. As mentioned above, much of this is poorly reported and contradictory, and so making any sense out of this is not easy. I’ve tried to put together something that makes about as much sense as I can, and it’s not an easy task. What I was looking for was some sort of common theme, as there may hopefully be some truth to those.

The catalyst for writing this book was a chance encounter I had with someone who claimed to be abducted. She was very passionate about her experiences, and I had a number of long talks with her about what she remembered. She was utterly convinced of the truth of what she was saying, initially I didn’t believe her, and to be honest it is still a little difficult to decide what to think. Our long talks certainly spurred my interest in the topic.

What this book offers is a hypothesis, which is a suggestion or supposition. It might be a wild explanation, but at least it has one. I approached the task of writing the book as being judged as successful if any kind of theory was generated. Unlike the vast majority of different UFO experiences and narrative, which tend to lack much information, and be very short, the Alien Hypothesis presented here is large and detailed. It’s nice to have something to work with, even if it is largely based on hunches and speculation (which it is).

I think some of the ideas in this book are really good. I particularly like the idea that the cattle mutilations could have the purpose of culturing virus. It’s a neat little idea, and has a certain appeal to it. As a theory it has the attributes of being able to explain a lot about the phenomena, which is nice.

And finally, overall the intention behind the creation of the book was to not have too many wild and unsubstantiated theories. This might seem a little strange as the book is filled with these, but keeping them to a minimum seemed important. There are always more potential theories, and many could be based on the flimsiest of speculation or reasoning. Staying sane and rational was the goal, not sure if it was achieved.

Table of Contents

Forward

Introduction

A Silent Universe

Moving Around the Galaxy

Lights in the Sky

Animal Mutilations

Abductions

The US Government

The Standard Alien Model

Other Interesting Phenomena

Rules Against Direct Contact

Viruses

Some Practical Considerations

Summary of the Alien Hypothesis

Chapter 1

Introduction

There is one key question that burns away in the hearts of many of those interested in UFO’s; are they real, and are there really aliens out there? This question is one of the most important ever posed, and its answer will have the most deep and profound meaning to humanity. Many of us have heard the stories about UFO encounters, seen TV specials, and heard whispers and other third hand reports about possible alien encounters. Many people think they have been abducted. There are many movies about aliens, books, stories and they are a significant part of our modern culture, but is there anything to it?

No one really seems to know. No one even seems to have any kind of meaningful theory. Are UFO’s alien spaceships? Or are they weather balloons or some kind of strange weather event?. The sceptics would claim that there is a logical explanation for all UFO sightings, and this explanation always seems a little thin and unimaginative, but perhaps correct. A boring and uninteresting explanation is perhaps the correct one, and being boring doesn’t make it wrong.

The author has always been fascinated with different unexplained phenomena, was an avid consumer of all sorts of documentaries, Youtube videos, and books. There is certainly plenty of material to consume, and lots of peculiar different phenomena and events. And whilst there is a lot going on, it’s very hard to make any kind of sense of it. Many of the bizarre occurrences seem to defy explanation.

The author has developed a hypothesis, strange perhaps, of any potential remaining explanations once we thing about what is going on. Perhaps any kind of hypothesis is better than nothing, which is what we have at the moment. The purpose of this book is to share the theory, rightly or wrongly, with everyone. Hopefully this intention won’t be misinterpreted, and this hypothesises may potentially have some merit. I guess we will see.

The reality is that many of the experiences and observations about UFOs and abductions are so outside of the normal every day experience that any hypothesis to explain it will be similarly outside this experience. There just doesn’t seem to be anyway around this.

This book has a lot of discussions on scientific topics. These are not intended to be a thorough review, more like a high level review. This book is not intended to be a deep and dedicated review of the scientific material, but rather a review that is accessible to all. A deep review would be difficult for the lay person to follow, so this has not been done.

For those readers who have seen something, or are a bit more open to something a bit different then this book represents a run through of many of the bizarre different occurrences, in something hopefully resembling a logical order. The different aspects of UFOs are summarised in a sufficiently brief way to not be boring, but also to have enough information to make draw some meaningful conclusions.

Nothing in this book should suggest that the hypothesis or any reasoning behind this must be right, but it is interesting to consider them at least. The title of this book is Alien hypothesis, and not The Facts about Aliens, so the propositions contained in this book are simply that, propositions, which means that they are more like hunches than anything else. The reality is many of the claims are just suppositions more than anything else.

In writing this book it has become clear that there are a large number of false reports of aliens and UFOs. People frequently jump to conclusions or just outright lie, and this has presented a real problem in the creation of this book. Many of the reports that have been created are clearly outright lies or fabrications, and initially the author was shocked at how brazen some of these stories are, but without a meaningful narrative or paradigm on what UFO’s are, it’s difficult to separate out fact from fiction.

The author’s initial plan was to assume that most of the reports about UFOs were true, and that people were being unfairly critical and nasty, out of fear. The author had this belief for decades, and it was based on a very strong observation that fear is a very powerful motivator, leading to false allegations of fakery and lying. It appears however that many of the stories and reports are clearly false, and more is needed to separate out fact from fiction. The author was very disappointed to see so many reports of different phenomena being fabricated in a relatively easy to spot way.

The reason why so many reports are fabricated seems to be that most reports of UFOs and other phenomena are confusing, difficult to understand, and full of strange occurrences that seemingly make no sense. Whilst people see things that they know are out of the ordinary, they cannot explain what happened, or even make any kind of sense of the observations they made. A good example of this is the Rendlesham Forest incident, where multiple UFOs floated outside of a military base in the UK. This story is full of mysteries, and really makes no sense at all, which is why it is accepted as true for the purposes of this book. UFO incidents are like that, bizarre, and unexplainable, and do not fit into a neat and tidy categories. The best incidents perhaps are the ones where people relate things that almost seem like nonsense, and events occur in a senseless order.

We should remember that books about UFOs sell, and are popular. There is a great interest in the topic, notwithstanding the Scientifics’ community entirely understandable disgust with the topic. Someone who invents a story about UFOs is in a strong position to sell a lot of something, or get a lot of attention at the very least. That’s a lot of potential motivation, and we need to proceed cautiously.

There are plenty of unexplained phenomena to have a look at, for the purposes of the hypothesis presented here. This book does not confine itself to a discussion of UFO’s, and then list them, and then say something vague such as investigations are continuing, although there is a list of UFO sightings. This book looks at a broad range of different phenomena, and then tries to explain them in a complete narrative. For example, much is made of cattle mutilations, and this topic is covered in detail. Other topics, such as the appearance of floating cities, a topic that is occasionally mentioned in the paranormal, also gets a go.

So, the filter that has been applied in this book to try to separate out fact from fiction, particularly in terms of reported phenomena that are contentious. We don’t know if it works, but for what it is worth here is it. So here are the rules:

1/ any reports generated by someone who gained a personal benefit from making the report will be ignored. This includes writing books or making television appearances. Where their books contain reports of other incidents by people (i.e. not the author) making observations, then maybe this can be accepted more readily.

2/ Anyone who claims to have seen multiple UFOs, unless the circumstances are very special, will be ignored. There are some books where authors have claimed to have seen aliens several times. Different ones, in different places. Very unlikely.

3/ reports or observations that contain clear narratives, with convenient explanations, will be ignored. The author particularly dislikes reports which are a self contained story line, where all the different elements are there, such as the abduction, the aliens, the spacecraft, etc. These elements are never all there in the same story.

4/ any story where people do battle with aliens, and beat them off with a great show of force are clearly rubbish. Aliens that can travel across galaxies are not at any threat from farmers with shotguns.

5/ reports where the number of witnesses are large are a higher quality than those with only one or two witnesses.

6/ UFO accounts from pilots, or military officers, are favoured over those of the general public.

So what’s the best type of report, or phenomena? Well, the author’s view is the very best are the reports that are consistent, across many different observers, with a high degree of repetition. Cattle mutilations are an excellent example; it happens frequently, lots of reports, photos, and its being going on for decades. There’s no real dispute that it happens, and the photos clearly show what people attending on the site have seen. It’s that common theme that really makes the incident more believable. Fortunately, there are common themes to many of the phenomena that have been witnessed. As we proceed through the book, we will identify these and see if we can make any sense of it all.

So, some of the rules that will be used here to separate out rubbish from truth will be motivated by the rule that the same incident must have occurred many times. A good example of this is the very common experience that there is interference with electrical equipment in and around UFOs. This effect seems to occur a lot, around crop circles, the Bermuda Triangle, and some others. One book even identified something called electronic fog, where a fog causes problems with electronic equipment. The author likes these stories, as they have elements in common, and usually are reported at the correct times in the UFO narrative. The author has taken a report of electronic interference in any story to be a mark of truthfulness, rightly or wrongly.

The book starts with the Rare Earth Hypothesis, which is relatively uncontroversial, and easy to explain. It’s a good place to start, sets the scene well, and important to understand for later parts of the book. The Rare Earth Hypothesis effectively states that habitable worlds are extremely rare, and that the rise of intelligent species is an extremely rare event. Many authors