UFOs: It's all about the swag

I'm back, everyone.  Anything cool happen while I was gone?  Didn't think so.

I asked a question of my students today and in dwelling upon it, I thought it might come about to make a decent post on UFOs.  My question was basic yet rather deep: "what do humans want?"

After a volley of the usuals (e.g. food, shelter, love), one student attempted to answer the question quite succinctly: "swag." We're all about the further accumulation of swag.  This led me to ask myself, "What do UFOs want?" I've posited numerous theories on the matter before with most of them being from the perspective of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis.  I am in the process of greatly reconsidering my stance on that hypothesis so when I've given things more thought, I will elaborate.  For now, I'm just thinking.

So what do other people think UFOs want?  I mean, why are they here?  Well a quick spin about Google tells me that aside from a pervy interest in our butts, there are many who agree with my student: "The aliens are out for swag."

Michael Salla is one of many UFO proponents who asserts there is an alien presence on our moon.  In fact, he goes so far as to argue that both Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were threatened with death should they reveal their own UFO experiences from the Moon landing.  After all, a whole two minutes of video footage is missing from the Apollo 11 mission, an incident that NASA attributes to "an overheated camera."  But what were the UFOs doing there in the first place?  Mining Helium-3...a stable isotope of helium that is in abundance on the Moon and has the potential to be an incredible energy source.

I could go into much about Dr. Salla and the whole "exopolitics" scene, but Paul Kimball really took care of it quite handily several years ago.

Still, the "swaggers" (as I have taken to calling them) persist.  They point to the Karnes City incident of 1971.  This is where a UFO appeared over a uranium mine in Texas.  A report from an eyewitness alleges that the UFO shined "hundreds of penlight size lightbeams that alternated in all colors of the spectrum" into the mine.  The uranium ore was turned to a white, chalky substance.  "Many a night I have laid in my bed thinking about what happened," states the witness. "I think the UFO needed the uranium for some reason."

Furthering this line of thinking, supporters of the "aliens are here to plunder our swag" theory point to UFO incidents at military nuclear facilities such as Malmstrom AFB and Rendlesham Forest as well as sightings over nuclear power plants that led witnesses to suspect that the craft were "recharging" over the cooling towers.

While I am still very intrigued by the sightings at the aforementioned military bases, the rest of this really doesn't add up.  In fact it flies in the face of logic.  Elements such as uranium and helium-3 are readily available across the universe.  Why come all the way here for them when you could get them from an asteroid?  On that subject, asteroids would contain many minerals found here on Earth.  Why muck about with an inhabited planet if you just want mineral swag?  Oh wait, what's that you say?  They want our nuclear power?

Again, why?

If such aliens really are behind these sightings, then they must be considerably more advanced than we are and therefore our crude nuclear facilities would hold little value to them (weapons systems, however, might be another story.)  When you're an advanced civilization, why frivol about with such things?  Yet more reason I find their alleged interest in uranium to be laughable.

So I'd say the coveted swag of humanity is safe for the time being.  

At least from aliens.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets