A young elementary school student of mine saw a UFO last week, late Tuesday afternoon, during an unusual Fall thunderstorm. He was driving home from his hagwon in a car with his mom in Bomun (here in Gyeongju), near a small temple called 백률사 (Baeknyoolsa), and for about five minutes they saw four brightly-lit objects dancing around under the clouds in the usual erratic way that alien pilots appear to enjoy. Three of them were triangles and one was more of a traditional flying saucer. As you can see in the picture, they were colored differently; at one point the red light approached their car and then returned to the group. My student managed to snap several pictures on his cellphone camera, but when he tried to film them with a camcorder they disappeared.

One of the more interesting things about this event is that we had been talking about aliens and UFOs in our class together several days before (thanks to our textbook), and the student told me that he had had a conversation with a different student at his hagwon on the same subject before leaving to go home. His mom saw the same things, however, and so far as I know she had not been discussing the phenomena with anyone beforehand.

I’ve been interested in UFOs since I was a child, but I’ve never really seen one and I’ve never met anyone who had seen one so close to home and so recently. About a year ago this interest led me to the work of a Harvard psychologist named John E. Mack, who studied the alien abduction phenomena extensively and determined that while he could not say for sure whether people were actually being abducted by aliens, he could definitely say that these people had experienced as-yet unexplained phenomena that deserve more scrutiny from the scientific community. This is turn led me to a search on the google, which picked up a video about a rather bizarre sighting in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, in which about sixty schoolchildren playing outside saw some crazy shit. I am not aware of any other sighting in which so many people witnessed the appearance of alien beings. None of these kids, unfortunately, took any pictures.

I don’t think these people in the video are lying, and I don’t think my student was lying, either. They all saw something that, for lack of a better phrase, is really fucking disturbing.

But I’ve given a lot of thought to the possibility that these lights my students saw were alien ships, and I don’t think that it makes much sense. Let’s say they were aliens and that they came from another planet or another dimension, and that their ships are usually invisible except if they run into a thunderstorm. Given that the aliens possess technology that is thousands or even millions of years in advance of our own, one would think that they would be able to avoid such lightning storms and preserve their privacy. Or in the case of the schoolchildren in Zimbabwe: if their ship had broken down, why would they even need to go outside to repair it, especially during recess right next to a school? Wouldn’t it be better to wait until dark? Or to send out a robot or something?

I’m not saying these kids all got together and concocted some sort of ridiculous lie. I’m saying that their explanation of what they say doesn’t make sense, and that there must be a more logical reason for the appearance of this stuff.

According to John E. Mack, the aliens abduct people in secret, bring them into their ships, check out their bodies (sometimes in terrifying or humiliating ways), and then reveal that they are concerned about the environmental state of the planet. The abductees are henceforth returned to their homes and sometimes forget the encounters completely unless they are hypnotized. Hundreds or even thousands of normal people report what would seem to be the same bizarre story.

Now put yourselves in the shoes of these aliens. If you are concerned with the environmental state of the planet—and anyone should be—what is the best way to voice that concern? You can,

(A.) Land a ship on the White House lawn and talk with the leaders of the United States (or whatever country you prefer).
(B.) Broadcast your concerns into everyone’s televisions or computer screens until they get the picture.
(C.) Abduct people at random, humiliate them inside your ships, and then release them back into the wild with their memories partially erased.

Apparently the aliens have picked (C.), and despite the amazing technology and accumulated wisdom they possess, they have made no difference in slowing or halting the environmental degradation of the planet. One would think a policy change would be in order.

These people are experiencing something, but I don’t think they are encountering alien beings. I suspect that the phenomena has a different explanation. I can’t say what it is—perhaps some sort of rare electrical activity (the dancing lights?) in the earth triggers hallucinations in the brain—but I can say that the traditional explanation, that these are aliens, does not make sense.