Greg Eghgian
speaker
51 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Greg Eghgian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I think a lot of people are surprised by that, but even the ancients were debating, at least debating the issue. about whether we are alone. And even really by the 17th century, I think most educated people in the world would have assumed that human beings aren't the only sentient beings out there in the universe. What's different is this idea that they are visiting us.
that they are coming here and they are looking at us or they're communicating with us, that is, in fact, a very new idea. The first science fiction authors, the most famous probably being H.G. Wells in the 1890s, are really the first to imagine that in sort of a concrete way. But this idea that they are visiting us is really going to only take off With the UFO phenomenon.
Other people had set up the ducks already, but it's going to be the UFO thing that says, no, no, no, I know what this all adds up to, and they are here, and they are here now.
Right. It's often referred to as the great airship scare or airship mystery of the 1890s. What's interesting about it is the term airship scare doesn't really quite capture what went on because most people weren't scared. The airships that were being described in newspapers at the time described people mostly being really fascinated with it, not terribly disturbed.
really interested in sort of getting to the bottom of what they were and who was behind them. The Shaw case is also interesting because in many ways it really is an outlier too. Most of these incidents that get described don't involve the idea of strange beings from possibly other worlds. Most people who said they caught
sight of or even communicated with the people piloting these strange aircraft, which most of the time, by the way, looked like balloons or dirigibles. Yeah. Most of them described the pilots as being human beings. They were oftentimes foreigners. They spoke Spanish or they spoke German or something. So the most common scenario at that time was that these things were really the work of...
of a kind of an eccentric tinkerer, a kind of a Thomas Edison, right, savant of some kind who was behind it all. You get a little of this stuff that Shaw describes of aliens. But again, that line of argument tends to be an outlier.
The idea of beings, Martians, on the planet Mars, right, is one, again, not entirely distinctive or unique to the 19th century, but it really accelerates in the 19th century when you have Some astronomers, you mentioned Percival Lowell being one of the prominent people, who using their telescopes, they see what they believe to be canals.
Canals is a neat term to use because if there's canals, it implies engineering. And then you've got to explain, well, who's engineering them and why are they there? And, you know... An elaborate story gets concocted that if you notice them, they seem to come from the polar caps. And that means that it probably is the way in which Martians are getting water to dried out desert areas on the planet.
It's an idea that really has some legs around the turn of the century. By the 1920s, it's pretty clear from astronomers that the problem was that these canals were really just artifacts of bad telescopes. that with more refined telescopes, you could find out that these were just mistaken shapes due to the kind of inaccuracies of the instruments themselves.
So by the 20s and 30s, most serious scientists don't believe there's any sentient life on the planet Mars or any planet really in our solar system.
The thing about the UFO, right, is that no matter who's behind it, if they are real, these devices are advanced technologies. These are beyond what we are used to seeing, meaning that therefore whoever is behind it
has access to knowledge that most of us don't have, have abilities to create things using scientific and technological understanding that is beyond anything that we typically recognize in the present. In that sense, what the UFO thing has been as a phenomenon socially is a way to imagine not only the present, but the future, right? Particularly if it's aliens, right?
The idea of aliens are here visiting us in these spaceships that can do these really remarkable things. This offers us a glimpse of our potential future, right? And raises all sorts of questions about whether or not we will ever have those capabilities. Can we achieve these self-same things? But even if it's not the aliens, Then what you get is, as you do today with the U.S.
government, there are worries about, oh, are we behind in a new arms race, right? Do the Russians or do the Chinese have now these advanced drones or hologram devices or something, right? This becomes the worry. So always there's been this kind of interaction with existing technologies and the kind of just sort of the cultural infrastructure surrounding those technologies.
It's interesting. I mean, the renewed interest of people within the US government, again, it's not an entirely unusual phenomenon. It has happened in the past. But it is something that requires a kind of critical mass. Because there's always been a politician here and there who's been interested in UFOs, tried to put it on the national agenda, the federal agenda. Harry Reid.
Yeah, Harry Reid did it back then. There were people back in the 50s and 60s trying to do it. What you need, however, is you need usually a combination of some access to media. You usually need some compelling lobbyists behind it. And then you need to have some pivotal political figures who chime in. You get people like Gillibrand in New York. You get Rubio involved.
You got now Chuck Schumer in New York. You get certain people with some real clout. who get on board, so to speak, and run with this. And once you get that, once you have that kind of energy, if you will, you've got enough there to make this something that can't just go away overnight. And so that's where we are. We've reached this point where you've got a certain critical mass.
The question is for them and the people who pursue this politically, is this sustainable? In the past, this kind of interest has usually been a passing fancy. Other things usually take over. And this stuff usually then sort of moves on and they move on with their interests. So that will be the question. Is this going to be sustained over a lengthy period of time or not?
I came down on this, my approach to this that I make very clear at the beginning is I'm not going to be writing a book that gives the definitive answer, are they really, are they here or not? I wasn't going to be advancing anybody's pet theory one way or the other. I also was not going to be a debunker. I felt all along that we were not being served well
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