*Irruption: a sudden, forcible, or violent breaking into a place, a sudden invasion

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This one is more ambitious than most. Let’s see where it goes.

Years ago I read a pair of cosmology books by science author Timothy Ferris, and in one of them (it was either 1988’s Coming of Age in the Milky Way or 1992’s The Mind’s Sky) he made the assertion that interstellar distances are far too immense to permit physical travel from one star system to another, so the idea of exploring the universe in person on the starship Enterprise is only wishful thinking. As hippie rock band Little Feat once sang about “old folks” (although in this scenario it would be all folks): “Your mind makes a promise that your body can’t fill.” Consequently, Ferris doubts that we will ever meet an extraterrestrial “in the flesh.”

Of course, this observation is over thirty years old and made no case for unprecedented access to advanced technologies, including but not limited to faster-than-light warp drives; anti-matter propulsion; solar-wind “sails;” exploitation of wormholes that provide shortcuts across curved space; and “beaming” via teleportation devices, all of which have been proposed in a wealth of speculative tales, beginning with the “Golden Age of Science Fiction” (SF) that flourished between 1940 and 1960 and continuing into the present. Where others see UFOs, Ferris acknowledges only the potential for receiving remote radio transmissions and other “technosignatures” that have been sought by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) research team since 1960.

If I recall correctly, even though Roger Zelazny employed the concept of alternate universes in his Chronicles of Amber series of novels as far back as 1970 (and let’s not forget the seminal visions of Wonderland, Oz, Narnia and the much earlier fictional realms of mythology and theology), Ferris avoids discussing the invisible zones that are theoretically arrayed side-by-side with our own, and the notion that there might be portals between them that preclude having to “go the long way around.”

The recent explosion of hype about unidentified flying objects brought all of this to mind once again, and I’ve also been reading about paranormal phenomena (including UFOs) in Dean Radin’s Supernormal, and Robert Anton Wilson’s quantum-theory-based ramblings in his Schrodinger’s Cat trilogy. Radin’s mention of pilot Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 experience of UFOs as “flying disks performing maneuvers like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water” revived long-forgotten childhood memories.

As an accomplished “stone-skipper” in my preadolescent days, I know exactly what he was talking about and, as a longtime fan of “Golden Age” SF, I immediately thought of UFOs as “skipping” (although “flitting” or “skimming” may be more accurate) in-and-out of our local atmosphere on their way to somewhere else, perhaps interacting with the planet’s gravity well only to pick up speed or change direction in the same way human aerospace engineers apply the solar “slingshot effect” by sending outbound spacecraft around the Sun to increase their velocity and thus their range. In short, Earth may be no more than a “charging station” that just happens to be conveniently located along the route to the space-travelers’ destination.

But given that our solar system is minuscule by cosmic standards, why wouldn’t they have picked a higher-density, and therefore higher-gravity, exoplanet (Earth is the densest “in-system” planet) for their “slingshot?” Maybe their physical constitution and the construction of their ships aren’t robust enough to withstand the gravity load once ensnared (the conventional view is that they do look somewhat fragile), whereas Earth’s “pull” – like Baby Bear’s porridge – is “just right” to sustain their transfer node (or else the decision was entirely about “location” in the first place). Ya think?

If there is any truth to the assumption that the “little green men” have no agenda beyond freeloading off the Earth’s gravitational field, they may not have a reason to care (or even to know) that we’re here unless they meet with an unfortunate accident en route and crash-land in Nevada or are shot down, either of which could have emboldened the Area 51 conspiracy theorists.

It’s also possible that alien vessels are “irrupting” from an adjacent space-time continuum like spontaneous “virtual particles” in quantum field theory and just as quickly “decaying” back into it as they flash through our corner of the cosmos (in other words, intermittent, accidental synchronization is occurring). More realistically, if they have the technological savvy to navigate the multiverse they probably don’t need to stop even briefly at this galactic backwater. I can’t imagine them sightseeing or randomly cataloging our foibles like the slapstick sociologists in the goofy Alien TV cartoons that my grandchildren love, so they are most likely just passing through.

The presence of a multitude of contiguous universes with “doorways” between them would go a long way toward explaining how these elusive visitors can come-and-go without leaving a conclusive footprint by which to track them, except in the minds of paranormal enthusiasts and UFO buffs. I’ve always stuck with Ferris in this debate, but if the multiverse indeed exists and we can figure out how to unlock access to it, that would probably be enough to convince this fence-sitting skeptic to change sides.

After all, as a six-year-old I did once see a panther-sized black feline cross our back yard and disappear mid-stride and I never forgot it, so you could say I’m “primed to believe.” If it proves to be nothing but idle fantasy as Ferris would have us accept, I can always invoke the “Hamlet defense:” There are more things in Heaven and Earth . . . etc.”