Aliens may already be here, but how would we know?

Question: Why are the white men standing before us wearing clothes? Answer: Because they have extraordinarily long penises – so long, in fact, that to keep them out of the way, they must be spiralled around their bodies and hidden by head-to-toe clothing.

It was impeccable logic, by a group of Papua New Guinean highlanders when they first saw white men, according to the documentary maker Bob Connolly. After all, the highlanders wore very little, apart from lap-laps covering their midsections, and so it made perfect sense that these white beings’ clothes probably served the same purpose.

I love the story because it shows a great weakness of our logic: to understand the new, we naturally start with what we know and extrapolate from it. But when confronted with something so far from our experience that it’s incomprehensible, logic fails miserably. Those Papuans had in effect seen aliens – the pale beings even arrived in giant metal birds from the skies.

I think we face the same logic failures when even just even thinking about actual aliens. Take all the buzz around UFOs at the moment.

The US government has recently released an inquiry into them and NASA has now committed money to see if they can get to the bottom of the enigmatic sightings. How things have changed! I reckon only five years ago, if you’d brought up the topic of alien visitation, you’d likely be told you’d put your tinfoil hat on too tight and gone bonkers.

But can we really use science and logic to determine if aliens are here? Given ET and its tech will almost certainly be well beyond our comprehension, our misguided arguments are probably doomed to failure, just as the Papuans were.

Let’s be clear, it’s absolutely possible that ETs could be here. The argument I was fed as a young man, based on the learned opinion of the day, was that the stars were simply too far away for any travellers to ever be able to make the trip. That’s definitely based on flawed logic.

The mistake comes from assuming that extraterrestrials will be a bit like us, perhaps with greyer skin, bigger eyes – and a mysterious fondness for probing corn farmers from Iowa, apparently. In reality, they are likely to be dramatically different – probably not beings at all, but a form of technology.