The interstellar civilization hypothesis (“aliens”) does not exhaust the possibilities for the paranormal sightings of UFOs now having been witnessed by thousands of people for generations on this planet. There are other contenders, which I list below. Note that many of these are only fuzzily distinct. And also note that few of these are more comforting than “aliens.”

Some of the names, below, are standard, while others are my coinages:

  1. The Niburu Hypothesis — the civilization responsible for UFOs is off-planet but from our solar system. Named for Zecheriah Sitchen’s specific theory, but the originary planet could be Venus or Mars or some Jovian moon, obviously, not “Niburu” — and the asteroid belt suggests almost a smoking gun.
  2. The Silurian Hypothesis — the civilization responsible is millions, perhaps billions of years old, but from Earth, and from (perhaps) a non-hominoid genetic line.
  3. The Atlantean Hypothesis — the culpable civilization is human or at least hominid, but from the last or some earlier Ice Age, or interglacial period, with said civilization’s chief structures perhaps buried, dead, under water, and remaining outposts deep underground or on the far side of the Moon.
  4. The Secret Society Hypothesis — the civilization is a breakaway group from a past advanced Holocene efflorescence, but remained underground (perhaps quite literally) or off-planet.
  5. The Secret Society Hypothesis 2 — the breakaway civilization in question developed in more recent centuries, perhaps from Freemasonry or German nationalism (or Nazism), or the American Deep State. See Walter Bosley’s work.
  6. The Heavenly Host Hypothesis — the craft and beings witnessed are from some angelology or pantheon of ancient myth, and perhaps to be understood in a quite religiously orthodox manner. Literally “angels and devils.” We could call this the Principality and Powers Hypothesis.
  7. The Parallel World Hypothesis — the civilization(s) is (are) Terran but from a parallel universe(s) with radically different timelines.
  8. The Perpendicular World Hypothesis — we are dealing with extra-dimensional beings, and the other reality/universe/what-have-you is not Terran or even much at all like our physical reality.
  9. The Perpendicular World Hypothesis 2 — popularly known as the Simulation. It appears to me that this explanation would likely make us NPCs and the UFOs the actual players/controllers.
  10. Time Travelers — with the UFOs run by descendants of ours, possibly machine-based or otherwise artificial.
  11. The Emanationist Hypothesis — with UFOs being projections of a world or solar-system intelligence, perhaps based on electromagnetic fields and solar/planetary interactions.
  12. The Stefnal Fraud Hypothesis — the whole subject area is a fraud perpetrated by the Government, leveraging science fiction ideas in a vast psy-op campaign.

I consider that last one the least likely and the most disturbing.

What have I missed?

Well, perhaps the weirdest idea . . . that paranormal phenomena in the UFO general category fall into several of these categories.

twv