Christopher Hitchens on Aliens

Given some recent news events, such as the pentagon officially releasing a statement that confirms that some recent UFO videos (not necessarily aliens) are real, we thought we would check the record to see what Christopher Hitchens thinks of aliens. Being a famous skeptic, whom the topic of UFOs can be a sensitive issue, it’s not surprising that Hitch panned the idea of UFOs.

If the huge number of ‘contacts’ and abductees are telling even a particle of truth, then it follows that their alien friends are not attempting to keep their own existence a secret. Well, in that case, why do they never stay still for anything more than a  single-shot photo?

Now this is perhaps not one of his better quotes as it hasn’t exactly aged very well in light of recent events (such as the before mentioned tic. That said, when the piece was written, the 2004 Navy video had not been released to the public. In fact, it was not until a private company pushed for its release in 2017 that the video came about, ultimately to be officially confirmed by the Pentagon in subsequent months.

In fairness to the Hitch, most of the ‘evidence’ for UFO sightings prior to the advent of smart phones and sophisticated radar technology, were at home cameras that required the objects to be still for an inordinate amount of time. This, in turn with what we’d think of today as comically bad image editing technology, lead to a great deal of fraudulent reports of UFOs or what we call a hoax. 

Second reference, however, changes the view a little, this is from God is Not Great, and appears on roughly the same page (depending on the reader you may be reading). In general, page 144 is where this discussion goes on. For copyright concerns, this will be the last quote from the book but we encourage readers to check out this link to the google book free preview, which covers most of the alien references.

I have interviewed some of the hundreds of thousands of people who claim to have had direct encounters with spacecraft, or the crew of spacecraft, from another galaxy. Some of these are so vivid and detailed (and so comparable with other depositions from other people who cannot have compared notes) that a few impressionable academics have proposed that we grant them the presumption of truth. But here is the obvious Ockhamist reason why it would be utterly wrong to do so. If the huge number of "contacts" and abductees are telling even a particle of truth, then it follows that their alien friends are not attempting to keep their existence a secret. Well, in that case, why do they never stay still for anything more than a single-shot photo? There has never been an uncut roll of film offered, let alone a small piece of a metal unavailable on earth, or a tiny sample of tissue. And sketches of the being have a consistent anthropomorphic resemblance to those offered in science fiction comics. Since travel from Alpha Centauri (the preferred origin) would involve some bending of the laws of physics, even the smallest particle of matter would be of enormous use, and would have a literally earth-shattering effect. Instead of which — nothing. Nothing, that is, except texts and shards that are available only to a favored few.