I met my friend, Dr. Kerry Joels ( ), when we were both working on launching the Challenger Center for Space Science for NASA shortly after the tragic accident. Kerry is a brilliant scientist, who also happens to be a pretty fair Country Music songwriter as well. He's been the Curator for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Consultant on Distance Learning to Congress, has worked for numerous bipartisan Administrations and wrote The Space Shuttle Operators Manual and Mars One Mission Manual. He was a technical consultant on Star Trek movies and in fact, a child TV star, himself. In other words, he should know something about Outer Space.
So, when I asked him what he thought about the subject of UFOs and Extraterrestrial Contact, I thought I might get the usual cynical response to be expected from a science professional. In particular, I asked about the kind of purported close encounter represented by the infamous Roswell Crash in 1947. He said that he believed that it was highly unlikely that with the requisite advanced technology interplanetary tourists would use, such crashes were likely--especially given the low annual statistics for conventional, terrestrial airline crashes. That said, he continued that if there were crashes of discs and the like that have occurred, that he believed the likelihood was that the vehicles were commandeered by earthlings from the future.
Kerry has what you might call a Big Point as opposed to just "a point".
Why is it that we have a tendency toward projection as a species when it comes to our capabilities? It reminds me of the Erik Von Daniken, "Chariots of the Gods" thesis, which posited that monuments such as the Great Pyramid could never have been completed by human beings and therefore, had to have been constructed and left by aliens for human kings like Cheops to brand in their own image. A Japanese documentary crew tried to recreate the Great Pyramid by using means that they said were originally used by human crews. They failed miserably and ended up with a Mini-Me version that was lost in the great shadow cast by the original. Does the lack of Japanese architectural prowess supports the extraterrestrial origin theory?
It actually begs another question which is why can't we conceive that it is possible that previous civilizations and cultures were more advanced in some ways than our own? Given the cultural breakthroughs of the Upper Paleolithic some 20,000 years ago which witnessed the creation of art among other things, the advances of the last millennia pale in comparison to the discovery of fire and evolution of language.
So, why couldn't all these badly videotaped and photographed UFOs have come from our future? Or as Dave Thomas ( ) once said to me, "In the fifties, we thought that the future would bring the flying car. Instead, all we got was the P.T. Cruiser."
Perhaps, if we follow Kerry's perspective, we'll upgrade from flying cars and all get to drive flying saucers instead.
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