Today a UFO was sighted?
America’s first unidentified flying object was sighted over Boston Harbor on this day in 1644 (or evening, more accurately); three witnesses saw two lights rise out of the water over the spot where a pirate ship loaded with ammo had sunk more than a week earlier; the lights then merged to form the shape of a man or a swine and whiz around in the sky for about 15 minutes before disappearing. Rumors abounded at the time that the ship had been sunk by a necromancer, so dark arts were suspected instead of alien visitation, though in weeks prior and then again the following week, other witnesses claimed to see lights in the night time sky merge into “an illuminated disk.”
We human beings have been seeing strange stuff since time began. The Greek’s had their Eleusinian Mysteries, and some of the greats in the Catholic Church were either blessed or cursed with vivid visions. Angelic or demonic sightings were fairly common among the common folk for much of the first millennia, and once the Renaissance got rolling toward the Enlightenment they were replaced with more morally-neutral ghosts, fairies, and other phenomena, so much so that neo-Victorians like William James could set out to study them scientifically (his Society for Psychical Research proved that spirits of the dead were within earshot, if not eyesight, though it found that the test results had been corrupted by telepathy). Once the Soviets launched the Space Race, lights in the sky were renamed UFOs, piloted by luminescent dwarves, and similarities in their steering behavior were rediscovered going back to a dark 17th century night in Boston Harbor.
So no amount of certitude about subjective perception, however many people might agree with it, is the same thing as objective fact, is it? Wait, what’s that in the sky?
