Aliens [ETs] and aesthetic values

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

I've written often about the lack of art, literature, or music showing up in UFO reports where witnesses claim to have contact with humanoids or think they have been inside a UFO where they would see (or hear), if it were evident, something akin to that which we call culture.

But no UFO account I’ve read has ever indicated a piece of art, or a book, or music-like sounds.

I’ve noted that human military airplanes, and rocket ships on a mission, have drawings or art on them or an American or Russian flag attached or prominent.

And the International Space Station has music for its encapsulated astronauts.

And mission books or maps are rather prevalent in Earthian vehicles.

(Yes, I know, Betty Hill saw a “star map” and almost grabbed a book. Both give credence to her delusion or real event, but hers is a rare episode in UFO lore.)

The absence of any form of art (except in the Socorro incident where a symbol was allegedly seen by Police Office Zamora, which makes his UFO account more interesting than most) is problematical. Why?

It either tells us that ETs are space traveling philistines or their alleged visitations are reported, hallucinatingly, by human lowbrows (which is my view).

But let’s assume ETs, should they be traversing the galaxy or universe, willy-nilly, as Ancient Astronaut enthusiasts and UFO buffs enamored of the ETH would have it, are without cultural artifacts or interest, then what do we have?

An advanced species would have to think of, design, and create spaceships capable of traveling extremely vast distances, and such engineering endeavors involve formulae and mathematics that are themselves of an aesthetic kind, math often aligned with music composition (classical) or the production of art pieces.

So there’s that.

But what of a spaceship’s design? Does that have to have the same attention to math as the innards, the working parts?

Suppose that another living, intelligent species are reconnoitering the cosmos and occasionally stumble upon Earth and show up in its skies or even land sometimes.

Would their traveling device likely have the aesthetic design that often is reported by UFO witnesses: smooth, saucer shaped craft or cigar-shaped rockets not unlike our own space bound vehicles?

(I’ve dealt with before, as some of you know.)

Or might they be clutzy, unpleasant-to-the-eye vehicles (ships)?

My pal, Bryan Sentes (see his blog: https://skunkworksblog.com) thinks, like Jacques Vallee, that UFO entities are too human. (I happen to agree.)

And their “sighted” craft are too human also, but what about intrusions of things that don’t look like spacecraft, such as the oumuamua “asteroid” that came into view recently:

What if an alien species built their civilization and appurtenances according to what they see, not what they can creatively imagine?

And if they visited Earth earlier, would they have seen our ships and changed their configurations accordingly, which would explain the evolution of UFO shapes over the years, from rough-hewn craft in ancient times, to airships in the 1890s and rocket ships after World War II and then saucer-shaped craft, but where did those flying disk visualizations come from?

My bedraggled point is that we’d have no idea if an alien species were visiting us, as we have no idea what their spacecraft would resemble.

But if the farfetchery of alien visitation is true, where is the refinement that earmarks humankind? Where are the aesthetic underpinnings that make humans unique among known species and indicate intelligence of a very special kind, advanced intelligence?

Without those aesthetic values, we’d have space visitors as brutish as the barbaric hordes that took down the Roman Empire. 

Or we only have “space visitors” from the human id.

RR