tsvetoslav shalev

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

Growing up in a small, tight-knit community, I constantly craved to know about the world beyond. Movies like Contact (based on Carl Sagan’s writing), encyclopaedias on science and space exploration, as well as kids’ TV shows – all of this stirred the bubbling cauldron that was my psyche and instilled in me an undying fascination with what NASA and the Russian Space Agency had to show and tell about their works.

Oblivious to the immense amount of resources, both physical and mental, which go into the planning, preparation, and execution of every space mission, I grew impatient with what seemed to me a lack of progress (ah, the ignorance of youth). I began to think that, surely, given the size of the universe and the space-time that has passed since its beginning, there must be other civilizations out there, so advanced that they probably feel as comfortable navigating intergalactic travel, like their human counterparts, navigating freight ships or airplanes. The pyramids, the giant granite walls in South America, some of the hints behind the technology we’re using, the transition from primates to thinking beings – aliens must’ve been responsible for some of it, surely! I began reading and watching obsessively about the ancient civilizations and their claims of alien origin, watching testimonials about the Roswell UFO incident, staring at my hometown’s starlight night sky looking for a sign, a proof that we are not alone (that somehow, this would’ve helped with my own crippling loneliness and tendency to isolate from others). But we grow older, throwing most of our life force at the workplace, minds totally occupied by nonessentials (majority of the cases), observing some of our fellow human beings’ obsession with warmongering, destruction, and power-grabbing. I saw right through the ancient aliens’ theory – dreamers’ causa perduta, a collection of fables and hearsays, straight from the minds of predecessors who firmly believed that a solar eclipse is a good enough reason to sacrifice another of their kind. The resignation which was manifesting in me was (fortunately) replaced by scepticism, surely was replaced by maybe, a firm belief in the anecdotal by the necessity for tangible proof. These days, I too share in the understanding, that for all intents and purposes, intellectually, we may be alone in the entire observable universe. Some of my friends hate me for it, but I see their want to believe in the purely philosophical and unproven, as a perfectly normal/human reaction to the vastness, the messiness of it all. Hell, I feel pity for people who seem to think the Earth is flat, but I’m also not surprised – look at the enormous amounts of information (as well as misinformation) we’re literally flooded with on a moment-to-moment basis! To be able to sift through it all, distil the essence from the whole – not only is not easy, it’s downright impossible at times.

I want to believe Bob Lazar – I really do. I want to see what he’s seen during his youth, I want a piece of high-definition footage of alien activity and admittance by the governments of the world – I do! I am even willing to accept an alien ancestry if only evidence existed in support of these notions. I want to believe… but for now, and until the day I see proof, I will continue to wear the cape of scepticism.