The Discovery of O.I.L. (Some Thoughts on Finding Other Intelligent Life)

From the dawn of the modern age of UFOs in June 1947, the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) has been the dominant explanatory framework for the provenance of the devices and their presumably intelligent occupants. In more recent decades, however, students of the phenomenon have begun to think that it has nothing to do with off-worlders. Instead, the UFOnauts may very well be non-human locals. This essay presents one possible explanation for how this might be, weaving together insights from science, observations from religion, and our best collective evidence-to-date about the nature of UFOs. It concludes with an appeal for a dimension of inquiry that might shed further light on the UFO phenomenon to be added to the field of religious studies and a suggestion that science return to its roots and tweak some of its foundational assumptions in ways that could make the study of UFO phenomena not only more productive, but possible at all.