Are aliens visiting Earth? It’s the topic of lots of science fiction, and a lot of the “Weekly World News” genre of journalism. But now, the UFO crowd has a U.S. Senator buying in.

More whistleblowers in the Pentagon have come forward with ‘first-hand knowledge’ of secret UFO crash retrieval programs, US Senator Marco Rubio has revealed.

The Republican Florida Sen said officials with ‘very high clearances’ who have occupied ‘high positions within our government’ have come forward with ‘first-hand knowledge or first-hand claims’ of top secret Government programs.

Ex-Air Force officer David Grusch made worldwide news earlier this month when he claimed alien craft and bodies had been recovered and back-engineered by US officials.

Grusch noted that these beings are cautiously described as ‘non-human intelligences’ by insiders within these highly classified programs, because even experts can’t say for sure where these beings really come from.

Sen. Rubio said that some of these witnesses who spoke with the Senate Intelligence Committee — where Rubio is vice chairman — were likely some of the same individuals referenced by Grusch.

Uh huh.

To say I’m skeptical about this is the grossest of understatements. UFO claims always seem to turn out to be something else, and the stories of Bat-Boy aside, there’s just not any real evidence—just a lot of talk. I’m likewise skeptical that, given the hundreds or thousands of people who would have to have been in on the cover-up, not one of them has come forward with some pieces of an alien ship, or some tissue samples, or parts of a ship, or even an unambiguous, verifiable video or photograph.

The issue recently got a boost from Harvard’s Dr. Avi Loeb, who makes the case that an actual, verified interstellar object, Oumuamua, was in fact an alien probe. He has written a book on the topic, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.  I’ve read it and didn’t find it convincing, but then, I’m not an astronomer. Dr. Loeb is looking at other indications now.

The IM1 meteor — which erupted into an airborne fireball before impact on January 8, 2014 — has been an object of fascination for Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb since 2019, when he and student Amir Siraj first determined its interstellar origins.

Loeb has courted controversy, as well as millions in independent financing, over his quest to identify outer space materials that could be evidence or artifacts of alien civilizations probing our solar system.

He has not dismissed the notion that the mysterious iron remnants of IM1 could be the first hard evidence of a ‘spacecraft’ from an ‘extraterrestrial technological civilization’ to crash land on our planet.

‘We want to answer the question,’ Loeb said this week, ”Are we alone?”

Let me offer an answer: Yes, we’re alone.

As I said earlier, I’m not an astronomer, but I do read a lot, and I’ve even written a fair amount of science fiction. Interstellar distances are hard to wrap your brain around, and what’s even more difficult to comprehend is the times involved in transiting these distances. As far as we know now, superluminal speeds are not attainable, and even at a significant fraction of the speed of light, interstellar travel would require decades, even centuries. That in itself makes the likelihood of interstellar visitors unlikely in the extreme.

What about unmanned (unaliened?) probes? That is, after all, what Dr. Loeb is proposing that Oumuamua was. That’s somewhat more likely, but only somewhat, and only because the aliens wouldn’t be counting on a living being surviving the journey. A robotic probe would still have to survive millions and millions of miles of radiation, high-speed impacts from dust particles, and any number of unknown hazards. And if these hypothetical aliens were advanced enough to send such a probe, why would they be interested in us? We could offer them nothing technology-wise. Resources? The gas giants and asteroid belt have plenty of volatiles (oxygen, water, methane, etc.) and other raw materials, which an alien race could harvest without having to mess about with annoyed locals.

The likelihood of alien visitors isn’t really the issue, though. The issue is simple: There isn’t any real evidence, at least, not that the general public has seen.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There just isn’t any. Not for UFOs, any more than there is for Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster, or chupacabras.

In conclusion, I’ll leave you with this compelling piece of scientific research.