So where are the aliens hiding?

It was a balmy summer eveningrsquos dusk in Hua Hin the seaside resort town south of Bangkok I was sipping a vodka and tonic on the seafacing porch of a quiet local hotel swatting mosquitoes and looking out into the gloom The airquality index was good as was visibility and I recognised many constellationsThen the stars began to moveFirst one slid to the left and veered right gaining speed and distance until it was far out to sea Meanwhile three more flew in from left field moving in a tight V formation A sharp laserlike beam of light emanated from the foremost light More flew in some projecting lights others with blinking signals of different coloursThey were certainly not aircraft with their erratic movements Neither could they be weather balloons they were far too agile for that Their acceleration and brightness indicated they were not very large Perhaps as big as a car or a truckI counted nearly 25 of these playful lights that evening They moved without strategy speeding up slowing down hanging still for long minutes and then disappearing at high speed within secondsWas I witnessing the beginnings of an alien invasion Were we heading for a close encounter of the third kind Would we be abducted and our bodies impregnated against our will with alien spawnIf you had been there with me how would you have explained these mysterious lightsWersquore not supposed to call them UFOs or Unidentified Flying Objects Theyrsquore now UAPs Unidentified Aerial Phenomena I met my first UAP or at least its footprint when I was 23 in a Meghalaya village called Mawsinram I was shown a circular patch of flattened grass and told that a flying saucer had landed thereOther countries have reported them too but none more than the United States which is apparently a beloved flyby zone for aliens from every corner of the galaxyThat alone would make my BS detectors tingle Why do we get the maximum blarney about aliens and spaceships from the one country that gives us the most movies about aliens and spaceshipsIn those movies aliens are always drawn to the USA a country with barely any history and definitely no mythology where making up superheroes and saving the earth from deadly aliens is a fullfledged industryUAP sightings in the US have suddenly begun spiking again since American fighter jets shot down three flying objects in less than a weekmdashnot long after they had brought down a giant Chinese spy balloonA US general refused ldquoto rule out aliensrdquo which immediately started wild speculation that green aliens with many tentacles and large eyeballs on sticks were coming to enslave humans just like in the movies We would need the Avengers to fix this and prontoThe US Office of the Director of National Intelligence has received 144 UAP reports as of March 2021 and 366 more since then mostly from US military pilots They have dismissed nearly half of them as unremarkablemdash26 were drones 163 seemed to be balloons and six were ldquoclutterrdquo such as birds and airborne plastic bags The rest are being studied but the word alien does not come once in the conversationHere are some questions to bring you down from your lsquoalienrsquo highgtgt Isnrsquot it suspicious that aliens seem to somehow prefer America and the maximum alien reports come from there Are Americans maybe seeing too many scifi moviesgtgt Why would an alien civilisation with advanced technology lurk in our skies for centuries giving us only fleeting glimpses The earliest UAPlike report was in 1450 BC In AD 65 the historian Flavius Josephus described chariots ldquohurtling through the skyrdquo The Mahabharata and Ramayana have enough UAPs to keep scientists busy for decadesgtgt If the UFOs belong to aliens how come wersquove not detected any radio signals and communication yet The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence SETI programme has been lsquolisteningrsquo for alien radio signals for decades Not a beep so farI promise you this You will see things in your sky that you donrsquot understand The sky is full of perplexing flying objects that move in bizarre ways darting hither and yon disappearing here and reappearing elsewhere Their number is growing and their purposes multiplyingIn Hua Hin back on that summer day when the night sky looked like something from a Steven Spielberg movie I sat stunned by my own vacuity I could not think of one reasonable explanationBut later as I left I asked the concierge about the lightsldquoOh thoserdquo he said ldquoMany people in Hua Hin have drones now On clear nights they come to the beach and send their drones on test flights One night we counted 62rdquoI have a theory The aliens arrived centuries ago and have been living peacefully among us for millennia They have multiplied and today there are 10 quadrillion of them Unfortunately they are rather small and private so they donrsquot fit our image of aliensWe call them termitesYou can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper