Opinion: Alien contact? Yes, according to Apollo 14 astronaut Mitchell

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The Daily Telegraph, quoting Mitchell’s interview on Kerrang! radio:

"It's been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it's leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.

"I've been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it's been happening quite a bit."

The interviewer said that Mitchell “seemed absolutely serious” about his statements.

On the positive side he also said they weren't hostile, and if they were, "we'd be gone by now".

NASA said it didn’t agree with Mitchell, and wasn’t in the business of looking for aliens.

A bit of history:

The whole idea of alien contact has had a lot of scrutiny from people with actual brains, not just pedants. One school of thought says we should be extremely careful in any sort of contact, because we don't know what the risks are. The other says we've been broadcasting our presence for 80 years, and we wouldn't be hard to find, so we're worrying after the fact.

The cover up idea is much less clear cut. A lot has happened in those 60 years, and the global culture is now very different.

The cover up approach is based on a few premises, which were widely debated in the 50s and 60s. The believers in UFO and alien visitations were skeptical, to euphemize total disbelief, of government denials about aliens and UFOs.

The arguments for a cover up run like this:

1. Culture shock. If aliens are so much more advanced, we’d be like the indigenous peoples in the colonial period, our civilization would fall to pieces. That'd be a shame...
2. Panic was another argument. After Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, the fear was of civil disruption. Several generations since, which have had the option of being obliterated by good ‘ol nukes, have been asking what there is to panic about. But what would they know?
3. Technological advantages. Finding bits of UFO, and all sorts of secret information. Not unreasonable, but in terms of leaking like a thousand sieves, technology is hard to hide, when used.
4. Sheer abuse of the right of the public to information, based on an arbitrary decision from someone 60 years ago. Denial is next to Godliness, Little Green Men Are Communists, God Hates Aliens, other sputum, McCarthy era thinking, etc. This is the lower end of the cover up spectrum, the part that serves no useful purpose.

Points 1-3 would have made some sort of sense 60 years ago. Point 4 is pretty much the power broker motif. That tends to annoy so many people so much that anyone with enough information, if confronted with that motif, would have done everything they could to release all the data they could.

The argument against a cover up is basically that nobody elected anyone to keep them in the dark about something that affects the future of the entire human race.

That's legally true, and the Official Secrets Act in any democracy isn't really supposed to be a license to withhold information which of itself the public has a legitimate right to know.

The public could reasonably claim that if they found a few million hitherto non-existent aliens wandering around, they should know how to deal with the situation.

Then there's those reactionary people who feel that they shouldn't be vilified and called crazy for reporting what they saw, when the government was in a position to prove them to be telling the truth. The need to know is sometimes based on a real need.

It's an abuse of the Act to willfully withhold information without a better reason than "we felt like it". There would need to be a very good reason within the powers of the authority exercising its powers under the Act.

So Mitchell’s very much lower key approach may well have some sort of basis in fact, if, and I emphasize the “if”, here, any rational thought has ever been applied to the subject since 1940-something. A cover up, however useless it may appear to us, might have had some sort of working logic, then. Now, it’s flying in the face of science and observation.

Never mind hoaxes, Revelations from Roswell, (they looked like store dummies to me, no muscular differentiation) and transparent debunking missions from people with documentaries production companies and a lack of ethics.

Denial means very little. Most criminals deny committing crimes. That doesn’t make them innocent, it just means someone has to discover the facts.

It only takes one authenticated, verifiable, incident, to prove intelligent life on other worlds. Tens of thousands of people have seen things which they continue to claim, despite actual abuse and threats, were real UFOs.

I’ll reserve judgment on Mitchell’s comments. He’s in a position to make statements like that with some authority from his career, which is where the credibility cuts in.

Science requires verification of any statement, however, which is where the data has to start proving itself.

The most unusual thing about this information is how the Daily Telegraph handles its survey. They’ve gone from the normal Yes/No about Do You Believe In Aliens? to a three tier question, with two Yes options, based on a cover up or no cover up, and a No option.

Has plausibility reared its frightful head in tabloid media?

We wait, agog.