The second time I observed an aerial object that I could not identify was in the evening of August 3, 2009, on the Mall about four blocks from the Capitol building in Washington, DC. I was camped out with friends, part of the crowd attending the weekly “Screen on the Green,” and this evening the movie On the Waterfront was playing. Probably around 9:15, just about 20 minutes after the movie started, I saw a single bright light move from due North to due South, almost straight overhead and thus seemingly directly over the Capitol (although without knowing its altitude there is no way of verifying that). I watched it for about 10 seconds, and then it faded out.

Had it been a clear star-filled night away from the city, in the mountains, and had the light been far dimmer, I would have identified it as a satellite with a polar orbit (i.e., carrying it straight North to South). I’ve never seen a straight North-South satellite before, but I’m sure they exist. But in this case there was far too much light pollution for it to be a satellite. Only one bright planet and the moon were visible at that hour, and this object was as bright as that planet. As I said, the sighting lasted maybe ten seconds in all. I did not see it first appear, so I don’t know if it came into view over the skyline or faded into view somewhere overhead.

I didn’t say anything to anybody, and I suspect I was probably the only person on the Mall looking up at the gray sky and not at the movie at that moment. I had viewed my first “UFO” only a month before, in similar circumstances (camped out on a park in a city in the evening) so I was particularly attuned to the sky, and I even admit I had a very clear sense of expectation, that I might see something anomalous if I paid attention. So I was not really watching the movie. And as I said, that expectation paid off literally within 15 to 20 minutes of the start of the film.

I saw nothing else strange the rest of the night, although I was constantly watching. At one point I saw a helicopter low over the skyline, which was not out of the ordinary, but it did provide a base of comparison. It also reminded me that the airspace over Washington, DC is highly restricted. Planes aren’t allowed to fly over it. But what I saw did not resemble a plane.

I won’t deny that this light in the sky probably had a very prosaic explanation—I’m not assuming it was an alien probe or anything so exotic. But at the time, an idea arose that will seem paranoid: As I was watching this light, I wondered if it could also see me, and see that I alone, among all the people on the Mall right then, perhaps even among all people out at night in the city that evening (because people actually don’t look up very much), was watching it fly over. If the light were somehow an observation device observing the Capitol and the people gathered near it, and if it were the product of super-advanced technology (a lot of ifs, obviously), then might it not possess optical capabilities of vastly greater scope and resolution than what we would envision? Even our own satellites can now discern objects on the ground at a size of under a meter. What if an advanced alien probe had effectively an optical “skin,” viewing at high resolution in all directions, and with the image-processing, analytical, and recognition power to match its information-gathering sensitivity?

What if, to that probe flying high over the capitol, the faces and the eyes and even the pores on the skin of the hundreds of people camped out on the lawn, dimly illuminated by the light of the screen and the gray evening sky, were clearly viewed and registered and recorded? What if it could recognize those individuals? What if it could independently note and record what each of those individuals were doing?

So, what if that UFO saw me seeing it, saw me, alone among the throng, track it across the sky, registered my silently satisfied yet surprised expression, and immediately knew who I was from the fine-grained data it and its fellow probes had gathered on the city and the country and the species? What if it added such knowledge (“observed by Eric Wargo”) to its memory, and made a “mental note” that I was among the witnesses to its presence, and marked me for possible future added surveillance?

What if it even dimmed its lights (faded out) because it detected that it was being seen?

The baboon sees the biologist crouching behind the tree on yonder hill. The human has never hurt her, indeed has never come near, but out of instinctive cautiousness she picks up her baby and moves under the cover of trees, where she sits and continues pulling up roots from the ground. Never does it enter her baboon mind that that human, to her just a distant colorful shape, is watching her through binoculars, can see up close her every facial expression and tic of behavior, knows her identity and her whole history, when she was born, her rank in the troupe, etc., and even at that moment is taking notes on a laptop computer, adding her current activities to a database.

It’s not absurd to think that a remote witness to advanced surveillance technology would reciprocally be witnessed, would be seen seeing it, and that that piece of technology would be able to see and know more about the witness than the witness could possibly fathom. There are probably no limits to the watching and knowing capabilities of a piece of technology thousands or millions of years in advance of our own and having “deep anthropology” as its raison d’etre.

There are also no limits to the paranoia of the human mind, once it goes down the kind of slippery slope that UFOs and other paranormal phenomena encourage.

The time has come for a new Copernican Revolution. Such a revolution would be, not merely a realization and understanding of our place in the order of things, but a true coming-to-grips which painfully and profoundly reorders our thinking. The realization must be this: Humans are not the apex of sentience or consciousness or intelligence or evolution. We are not forerunners in our universe, but latecomers. I’m hardly the first to say this, but it bugs me that even people who agree with this view “intellectually” still don’t bother to seriously grapple with its existential implications.

As I’ve written here, many sensible, scientifically minded people are persuaded of the validity of thousands of well-documented UFO encounters throughout the latter part of the 20th century (and even before). But it is not necessary to accept this evidence to still accept the likelihood that we have been visited by advanced ETs. Statistics alone—i.e., the Drake equation and its variants—dictates that this state of affairs is highly likely, even if “they” have never shown themselves or sent us radio signals. ET neighbors (or their machines) will have had ample time—millions or billions of years—to master interstellar flight that approaches or exceeds the speed of light; there has been ample time for they or their probes to propogate across the galaxy; incredibly advanced technology ensures that such beings or their machines will have the ability to manufacture new probes from local materials and that such probes would be inconspicuous if they wish to be. If we have near or more distant neighbors that are thousands or millions of years in advance of us, it only makes sense that our existence and our progress as a species would be monitored.

Besides the statistics of the matter, I do accept the UFO “best evidence.” Of course, the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is not the only legitimate explanation for UFOs. Other speculations include that “UFO pilots” come from other dimensions, from our own future, or that they are more-advanced hominids, “cryptoterrestrials” as Mac Tonnies called them, that live secretly on earth. (It’s not an absurd proposition: If isolated pockets of “slightly less advanced” hominids like Sasquatch exist—and it is surely at least possible—why not “more advanced” ones that have already mastered space travel and choose to remain hidden?) These are all possibilities, but it is hard not to find the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis most parsimonious, and the one that best fits with our current understanding of physics and astronomy. And in any case, other explanations would not alter my fundamental point here: We are not assuredly and perpetually, and perhaps not even now, masters of our fate. Homo sapiens is not the only game in town, and we’re way behind the curve in terms of the level of our civilization and our technology.

In speculating about “their” motives, whoever they are, I think the most parsimonious line of thinking is, again, simply to extrapolate from the present—in this case, what we know about our own scientific and security motives. Long-term monitoring of human affairs—what could be called “deep anthropology”—would most plausibly be motivated by the likelihood that humans will one day be astropolitically relevant or even a potential threat. If they are ETs, that time is surely long in the future—hundreds or thousands of years from now—yet deep anthropology would be a totally sensible insurance policy. In a millennium or so, our spacefaring descendents’ every move will be totally predictable due to the vast amounts of data on our species already accumulated and stored and analyzed. (Analyzed for patterns of which, in our commitment to a belief in free autonomous will—human unpredictability—most nonscientists would prefer to deny the existence.) Many of the best-attested UFO reports, having occurred near political centers and military bases, near space flights and missile launches, and in the context of air warfare and maneuvers, bear out such an interest in our military development and behavior.

I know the view I’m expressing will seem paranoid, although on the paranoia scale I consider myself only about a middling 5 or 6. I think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone; I don’t think the Knights Templars have any modern relevance. And as a very minor blogger, I’m not so paranoid as to think I actually have more than about one or two readers. Again, I base my “extraterrestentialist” argument partly on the simple statistics about what most probably is the state of affairs in our galaxy.

The lack of radio evidence, cited by SETI proponents, is no counterargument: Why would advanced civilizations necessarily still communicate in the radio band? Highly directional lasers (or something else we don’t even know about yet) are more likely. Civilizations like ours that do go through a “radio phase” probably do so for just a few hundred years, or less, and the probability of “radio simultaneity” (adjusting for the speed of light, of course) is infinitesimal—precisely the lack of technological parity that dictates at least some of our interstellar neighbors are going to be wildly in advance of us. What the standard Drake equation fails to factor in is the certainty that civilizations will not arise contemporaneously. And obviously the Fermi Paradox—“if there are so many of them out there, why haven’t they gotten in touch”—a priori denies the validity of the substantial UFO evidence that they are already here. They simply have no interest in actually contacting us. Why would they?

Radio is relevant, though, in the opposite direction: If UFOs really did begin to visit in droves only in the forties (and thus that it wasn’t merely an artifact of increased air travel or Cold War paranoia), radio explains it: This is about the time it would have taken for our first radio transmissions to have reached the nearest star systems and whatever listening posts may exist in our immediate stellar neighborhood, and then for the first visitors or probes to arrive here to investigate.

I am paranoid enough to accept that “the government” has more knowledge of ET visitation than the general public, and has done its best to cover up what it knows. The intense interest in UFOs by at all levels of the government and military since the 1940s has been extensively documented by Richard Dolan (UFOs and the National Security State). The reasons for such a coverup are perfectly sensible, and they are even a matter of public record. In a report commissioned by NASA in 1961, the Brookings Institution warned that awareness of more advanced civilizations  would possibly undermine social cohesion. The report consequently suggested that government should consider maintaining secrecy about extraterrestrials should their existence become evident. The recommendation was based in part on the advice of no less an authority on intercultural contact than the anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Homo sapiens really is in the position similar to that of the stone-age tribes of Melanesia and Polynesia when the metal birds of the White men first visited them early in this century. Like those tribes, many people nowadays have developed harmful beliefs in the beneficence of extraterrestrial visitors—expecting ETs to bring us boons, as in Close Encounters, or (as in 2001) to be interested in our protection from ourselves or in our elevation to a higher consciousness. In Melanesia, such widespread expectations took the form of cargo cults; in his book Messengers of Deception, the eminent astronomer-cum-UFOlogist Jacques Vallee (the basis for the Lacombe character in Spielberg’s film) writes about such beliefs, and such movements, as they already exist on the fringes of American and European society. He worries that such beliefs could be used by very earthly groups for purposes of manipulation.

As I’ve suggested, it is much more likely that extraterrestrials (or their automated machines, if that’s what most UFOs turn out to be) are as indifferent to our affairs as biologists are to the animals they study, or as CIA analysts are even to the most backward societies they monitor. Even tribal people in Pakistan could pose a threat if they acquired weapons of mass destruction, so our analysts study them with an eye to our nation’s long-term security interests. Advanced civilizations will, similarly and sensibly, always be planning for their long-term safety, preparing for any long-term contingency. Any “latecoming” civilization’s acquisition of spacefaring and destructive technology would be such a contingency.

And lest we think we’re special in posing a future threat, statistics also dictates that we are probably only one of hundreds or thousands of civilizations in our galaxy in the same less-than-enviable situation of being monitored indifferently for “future relevance.”

I think it behooves us to really think about this likelihood, and thus ponder anew our place in the universe. Because of our almost-certain lateness on the galactic scene, humans will likely always find ourselves in a position of deference to far more advanced beings. Should this depress us? Only if we continue our present beliefs about our (high) place in the order of things. Despite the sense of insecurity it may engender, realization and acceptance of this reality should supplant willful ignorance or denial. It will have to happen sooner or later that we accept we are not the center of “God’s creation,” any more than the sun or the earth are such a center. We withstood the latter realization in the Middle Ages, and will likely do so again. We are resilient, after all. I suggest that only the humbling (yet also sublime) realization of our relative insignificance in the order of things will allow our further development and evolution as a species.

ETs aren’t about to contact us, and they have zero interest in lifting us to a higher plane of consciousness so we can be their friends. It’s up to us to lift ourselves. But acknowledgement that ETs really exist, right in our own backyard, can help us do that. Coming to grips with the reality that our species is not only cosmologically insignificant but also “exoanthropologically” backward is itself an incentive to get our collective act together, get serious, and evolve.