Today is ‘World UFO Day’ – Do You Believe?

Aliens scare me. Not the black, bitey, acid-blooded ones from the 'Alien' films, but the ones reported to be 'real' aliens: small, gray, with big heads, and big, black, almond shaped eyes. You know, the aliens that abduct Travis Walton and Whitley Strieber... the ones that can come into your home in the middle of the night and there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop them.

I don't think I'm scared of aliens per se, but rather being vulnerable and unsafe in my home. There's something utterly terrifying about alien abduction lore. These small creatures take humans from their beds in the middle of the night, do ungodly experiments on them, and then return them with memory loss and deep emotional and mental scars. There's nothing that makes sense about the abduction scenario, and yet millions of people have reported similar scenarios around the world.

On July 8th, 1947, outside of the sleepy town of Roswell, New Mexico, a UFO reportedly crashed. The Air Force issued a statement to the media that a crashed flying saucer had been recovered by the military, but retracted their statement shortly after. That lead to rumors that the government was covering up the existence of alien life, but what's more likely is that the crashed UFO the Air Force found actually was a weather balloon and they retracted their flying saucer statement to cover up their identification blunder.

It took the United States government almost 50 years to release their 'official' report on the Roswell Incident in which they claimed the crashed alien spacecraft was nothing more than wreckage from a downed weather balloon and crash-test dummies from high-altitude parachute tests.

I have seen a few things in my life that I would classify as an Unidentified Flying Object, but none that I would consider extraterrestrial in origin. However I am a firm believer in extraterrestrial life--it does exist, possibly in our own solar system on one of Jupiter's moons--just not that that would travel the vast interstellar distances to reach our backwater, underdeveloped planet.

Learn more about World UFO Day.