Jon Podhoretz said, correctly, that if any Republican candidate had said this, it would be screaming news all over every dial and website -- a perfect Otherizing story illustrating the strange, anti-scientific beliefs of Republicans.
You remember how much play Ben Carson's speculations about pyramid granaries got.
But Hillary Clinton says it, so it's just a story about a politician interested in citizen concerns.
| Hillary Clinton says that aliens may have already visited humanity. "I think we may have been [visited already]. We don't know for sure," the Democratic presidential front-runner told The Conway Daily Sun during a campaign stop in New Hampshire last week.
Her comment came after being asked about her husband Bill Clinton's comments during an appearance on late-night show "Jimmy Kimmel Live" in 2014, when he suggested that extraterrestrial life could exist.
"I just hope it's not like 'Independence Day,'" said Clinton, referring to the film where aliens attack earth.
Hillary Clinton told a Sun reporter that she would "get to the bottom" of UFOs. The reporter said the two spoke before, in 2007, when Hillary Clinton said the top open-records request her husband receive at his library involved UFOs. She also noted that campaign chairman John Podesta, who served as White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton and in Barack Obama's White House, is a major fan of UFO theories. "He has made me personally pledge we are going to get the information out," Clinton said. "One way or another. Maybe we could have, like, a task force to go to Area 51." |
Whether extraterrestrial life exists, and whether extraterrestrial life has visited us, are too very, very different questions.
Based on probabilities -- assuming that no godlike miracle is required for life, and further assuming that even if a godlike miracle is required for life, this miracle didn't occur only on earth -- it is extremely likely, bordering on certain, that extraterrestrial life exists, or has existed.
Based on the fact that there is absolutely no evidence of any visitations to earth by such life, apart from stray sightings of something in the sky (which are more easily explainable as metereological effects), the answer to the question whether the earth has been visited is a "almost certainly not."
Add into that the famous question asked by Fermi -- "If aliens exist: Then where are they?," i.e., why does evidence of them not abound, why are we not picking up radio signals from their past communications (and certainly they would have gone through a radio age, just as we did, even if they then moved on to something more clever) -- and the apparently impossibility of FTL travel and so forth.
Add into that that the only explanation for why we don't know about alien visitations is a massive and vicious government conspiracy to keep us ignorant, which is a strange position to take for someone who was once, in her own telling, co-president of the US.
But you know -- They Love science.
Just ask 'em.
They'll tell you.
