First, one slid to the left and veered right, gaining speed and distance until it was far out to sea. Meanwhile, three more flew in from left field, moving in a tight V formation. A sharp laser-like beam of light emanated from the foremost light. More flew in, some projecting lights, others with blinking signals of different colours.

They were certainly not aircraft, with their erratic movements. Neither could they be weather balloons, they were far too agile for that. Their acceleration and brightness indicated they were not very large. Perhaps as big as a car or a truck.

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I counted nearly 25 of these playful lights that evening. They moved without strategy, speeding up, slowing down, hanging still for long minutes and then disappearing at high speed within seconds.

Was I witnessing the beginnings of an alien invasion? Were we heading for a close encounter of the third kind? Would we be abducted and our bodies impregnated against our will with alien spawn? 

If you had been there with me, how would you have explained these mysterious lights?

We’re not supposed to call them UFOs, or Unidentified Flying Objects. They’re now UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. I met my first UAP, or at least its footprint, when I was 23 in a Meghalaya village called Mawsinram. I was shown a circular patch of flattened grass and told that a flying saucer had landed there.

Other countries have reported them too, but none more than the United States, which is apparently a beloved fly-by zone for aliens from every corner of the galaxy.

That alone would make my BS detectors tingle. Why do we get the maximum blarney about aliens and spaceships from the one country that gives us the most movies about aliens and spaceships? 

In those movies, aliens are always drawn to the USA, a country with barely any history and definitely no mythology, where making up superheroes and saving the earth from deadly aliens is a full-fledged industry.

UAP sightings in the US have suddenly begun spiking again, since American fighter jets shot down three flying objects in less than a week—not long after they had brought down a giant Chinese spy balloon. 

A US general refused “to rule out aliens” which immediately started wild speculation that green aliens with many tentacles and large eyeballs on sticks were coming to enslave humans, just like in the movies. We would need the Avengers to fix this, and pronto.

The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence has received 144 UAP reports as of March 2021, and 366 more since then, mostly from US military pilots. They have dismissed nearly half of them as unremarkable—26 were drones, 163 seemed to be balloons and six were “clutter” such as birds and airborne plastic bags. The rest are being studied but the word alien does not come once in the conversation.

Here are some questions to bring you down from your ‘alien’ high:

>> Isn’t it suspicious that aliens seem to somehow prefer America, and the maximum alien reports come from there? Are Americans maybe seeing too many sci-fi movies?

>> Why would an alien civilisation with advanced technology lurk in our skies for centuries, giving us only fleeting glimpses? The earliest UAP-like report was in 1450 BC. In AD 65, the historian Flavius Josephus described chariots “hurtling through the sky”. The Mahabharata and Ramayana have enough UAPs to keep scientists busy for decades.

>> If the UFOs belong to aliens, how come we’ve not detected any radio signals and communication yet? The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme has been ‘listening’ for alien radio signals for decades. Not a beep so far.

I promise you this. You will see things in your sky that you don’t understand. The sky is full of perplexing flying objects that move in bizarre ways, darting hither and yon, disappearing here and reappearing elsewhere. Their number is growing and their purposes multiplying.

In Hua Hin, back on that summer day when the night sky looked like something from a Steven Spielberg movie, I sat stunned by my own vacuity. I could not think of one reasonable explanation.

But later, as I left, I asked the concierge about the lights. 

“Oh, those!” he said. “Many people in Hua Hin have drones now. On clear nights, they come to the beach and send their drones on test flights. One night, we counted 62.”

I have a theory. The aliens arrived centuries ago, and have been living peacefully among us for millennia. They have multiplied and today there are 10 quadrillion of them. Unfortunately, they are rather small and private, so they don’t fit our image of aliens.

We call them termites.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.