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#1
08-27-2003, 11:53 AM
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If UFO's are real, how come virtually no mention of them until the mid 20th century
IIRC the first flying saucer report was by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 in Washington state and even that was misconstrued as Arnold didn't claim to see saucer shaped objects, but rather gleaming silver objects, which I believe turned out to be military aircraft.
It just seems highly suspicious to me that there is little or no mention of UFO's until humanity takes to the skies, and even then it takes up until the age of jet aircraft for sightings to start, not to mention the whole "alien abduction" phenomena. Plus there was all the paranoia of the Cold War. Or am I missing something? 
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#2
08-27-2003, 11:59 AM
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Yes, actually you are missing a lot. There are 1000's of ancient pictures from every known civilization depicting what people have presumed as flying saucers.
In fact the Sumerians have the entire solar system carved into ancient tablets and believe in an alien race known as the Anunnaki. Furthermore the History channel runs UFO episodes every now and then. When they do they show the pictures that I mentioned.
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#4
08-27-2003, 12:15 PM
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I think UFO sightings reflect a secular interpretation of the same sort of psychological (or even phenomenological, if you insist,) events that wer previously perceived as sightings of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or sucubi/incubi, or visitation by faeries, etc.
The core event is the same, there are only superficial differences.
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#5
08-27-2003, 12:17 PM
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But Kewk, that's completely different. The belief in aliens from other worlds coming in spaceships is a new phenomenon. Part of that new phenomenon is that a few people are presuming that old carvings etc. are of space aliens. Or are you saying that you really have the opinion that ancient people were actually trying to represent space aliens?
A hundred years ago, the idea of aliens from space hadn't occurred to people, so when they would see something they didn't understand, they'd attribute it to something other than spaceships.
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#6
08-27-2003, 12:24 PM
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__________________
SnUgGLypuPpY -- TakE BaCk tHe PiT!
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#7
08-27-2003, 12:35 PM
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Well, if you're a skeptical type like me, you say that it's because there aren't any flying saucers now, and the whole mythology grew up since 1947. Kenneth Arnold didn't report flying saucers in his first report -- he said they were boomerang-shaped, and they moved "like a saucer skipping over the water". That the news reports could take this and twist it into "flying saucers" and have it stick says a lot about the credibility of the phenomenon.
But the truth is that there were reports of flying saucer-like things before 1947. In the latter half of the 19th century there were reports of "phantom airships" (possibly inspred in part by Jules Verne's "Robur the Conqueror"). See Phillip Klass' book UFOs Explained http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...glance&s=books , where he devotes an entire chapter to this. One report from the 19th century even has the mysterious airship populated by extraterrestrials, and crashing in Aurora, Texas. They even made a movie about this incident.
__________________
"You know nothing, Sergeant Schultz"
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#8
08-27-2003, 12:36 PM
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Im not saying that they believed that they were UFO's. You pointed out quite correctly that it is a new classification. They saw, painted, and we take it for what we believe it is now. Quote:
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#9
08-27-2003, 12:36 PM
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Around the turn of the 20th century, there was an increase in sightings of Airships, often with pilots speaking strange languages (and, of course, sometimes not). There was some confusion whether these 'airships' were from other regions of Earth, or from different planets (I guess nobody had their stories straight)
There was a particular publicized one in a small town in Texas (I think - probably turn out to be Dallas or something) where the Airship supposedly crashed, and consequently the pilot was buried in the local graveyard... (yes, I think it was an elaborate hoax)
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#10
08-27-2003, 12:40 PM
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#12
08-27-2003, 12:48 PM
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If you are interested in actually researching it check out anything written by Zecharia Sitchin. His writings is where I get my information from. However the best I can come up with site wise is this: http://www.xfacts.com/sumerian.html
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#13
08-27-2003, 01:04 PM
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Well, that object shows eleven objects around what might loosly be called the sun. So, that's not quite right, either. I'd be interested in hearing your hypothesis of how the ancient Sumerians were supposed to have come by their knowledge of the solar system long before optics were invented.
And I found Sitchin's website. Quote like this: Quote:
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#15
08-27-2003, 01:48 PM
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#16
08-27-2003, 02:15 PM
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The first documented UFO was in the Book of Ezekiel. A chap named Josef Blumrich did an entire book on the subject, "The Spaceships of Ezekiel," including a reconstruction of what the UFO looked like, which, IIRC, looked sorta like Kronos.
And, I have to disagree with this "Holy Trinity" of pseudohistorians. How one can include Sitchin and omit Robert Charroux is puzzling.
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#17
08-27-2003, 02:24 PM
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__________________
"You know nothing, Sergeant Schultz"
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#18
08-27-2003, 02:34 PM
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also from the website...
"Nicknamed “Metuselah planet,” the newly discovered planet is “almost three times as old as Earth.” It is the oldest extra solar planet so far discovered; it is almost as old as the Universe itself; and its discovery unsettles current theories about how and when planets could form around stars (suns)." 3 times as old as the Earth = almost as old as the Universe
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#19
08-27-2003, 02:35 PM
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what Kewk said : http://www.ufoartwork.com/
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#20
08-27-2003, 02:40 PM
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#21
08-27-2003, 03:00 PM
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Paintings on the walls of Pyramids clearly depict 'crafts' coming down from the skies.
Many passages in the bible mention beings 'descending down from the heavens'. And there are more, too busy to go into detail. The point being: Just because someone in 10 BC didn't say 'ooh look that's a UFO' doesn't mean they didn't recall stories about things and/or people that mysteriously came out of the sky. Back before the birth of flight and before we had airplanes no one really KNEW or could CONCIEVE the fact that what they were seeing were flying craft. So how would they call them Unidentified Flying Object when back then the idea of 'flying object' didn't even exist as we know it today?
__________________
--------------------------------------------- John Edwards for President 2004 http://www.johnedwards2004.com
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#22
08-27-2003, 03:18 PM
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__________________
A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour. ~Elbert Hubbard 
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#23
08-27-2003, 03:18 PM
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Holy crap, they're invading.
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Burden of proof doesn't rest on the disprover in these cases. Otherwise I could say that your head is full of Quantum Chee-TosTM, and when you say, "Nuh-uh," I give you a hatchet and say, "Prove it." It don't work that way. Sorry, "Dr." Bauval, you'll need to go elsewhere to find a credulous audience for your claims. We don't play that game here.
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#24
08-27-2003, 03:24 PM
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#25
08-27-2003, 03:27 PM
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#26
08-27-2003, 03:32 PM
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Lack of any 1920's style "Death Rays", that's why.
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#27
08-27-2003, 03:34 PM
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#28
08-27-2003, 03:48 PM
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I have seen lots of old painting or carving of what appear to be aliens or space ships too but I am not jumping to conclusions that they were actually witnessed by anyone. Couldn't have the painter or arthor of such images just have had a vivid imagination?
Previous poster CurtC said "A hundred years ago, the idea of aliens from space hadn't occurred to people, so when they would see something they didn't understand, they'd attribute it to something other than spaceships." Why do you assume they would associate something strange as something other than something from another world? What if someone saw something strange and wrote about it or made a drawing of it with the assumption is was from another world? What if someone or thing from the distant future found drawings, books or movies that we see and read today. They would think monsters, beasts and aliens were common in 2003. And another thing...I can only think of one thing that we do not have a live video of...a good video of a UFO. We have live footage of murders, airplane crashes, tornados, explosions but no decent UFO...I wonder why?
__________________
If a man is talking in the woods and no woman hears him…is he still wrong?
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#29
08-27-2003, 03:49 PM
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Sounds like tomato/tomahto quibbling to me, QED (or perhaps "boomstick"/"rifle"). Ancient people, steeped in the lore of their era, claimed to see things in the sky and called them gods. Modern people, steeped in the lore of our technical society, claim to see things in the sky and call them aliens. What's the diff?
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#31
08-27-2003, 03:59 PM
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__________________
If a man is talking in the woods and no woman hears him…is he still wrong?
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#32
08-27-2003, 04:32 PM
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Not saying you, Q.E.D, do not believe in aliens or god... but I cannot see how a person can believe in one and not the other. It is one in the same to me regardless. If there is a god he/she/it is not of this planet. He/she/it had to originate somewhere or somehow. I honestly don't have a strong belief in either. I do believe in the possibility of them both. There is strong evidence for both. Some people need a higher power to look up to. i tend to believe in myself and it seems to have worked thus far Even if I wanted to believe in “god” there are too damn many to choose from.
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#33
08-27-2003, 04:32 PM
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#34
08-27-2003, 05:18 PM
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#35
08-27-2003, 05:36 PM
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The possibility of intelligent life on other planets has been a subject for speculation for a very long time.
As noted above, there was considerable excitement in the 1890s over sightings of a mysterious "airship" over the United States. Such reports appear to have started in California and then worked their way progressively eastward. Numerous stories were published at the time of how the ship had been revealed to be the invention of a mysterious genius, or of a secret society of inventors. Other stories said that it conveyed visitors from another world. Still others identified individual sightings as simple phenomena such as the planet Venus during an unusually bright appearance or as hoaxes. Daniel Cohen wrote a very good survey of the phenomenon called The Great Airship Mystery. He concluded that the sightings were divided among honest mistakes of natural phenomena and hoaxes. While Cohen suggested that Jules Verne's two novels about Robur could have had an influence on people, he admits that the books had been published in a previous decade. An even more likely influence, I suspect, is Mark Twain's little-remembered novel Tom Sawyer Abroad. It was still being serialized in the children's magazine St. Nicholas when the sightings started. This story tells how Tom, Huck and Jim go to St. Louis to see an airship being displayed there by its inventor. It takes off accidentally after they sneak on board. The story was profusely illustrated, and many of the drawings show a fantastic craft which looks to be part tall-masted ship and part blimp. In the years leading up to World War I there were a series of airship sightings over Scotland. It has been suggested that war anxieties could help account for these. During World War II a number of Allied flight crews over Europe reported seeing "Foo Fighters". This name derives from the nonsense language of the then-polular comic strip Smokey Stover. These "fighters' were glowing shapes which seemed to pace aircraft. Many of them are believed to have been natural phenomena such as St. Elmo's Fire. During the early 1930s there were a number of sightings of an airship over Canada. Shortly before his disappearance, W. D. Fard, founder of The Nation of Islam, announced that this was "The Mother Ship", a secret weapon of the Japanese which was going to lay waste to The United States until only 144,000 people were left. Following World War II there were numerous sightings of "phantom rockets" over Sweden. War anxieties could again be a cause, as the rockets seem to have always have come from the direction of The Soviet Union. And then, of course, came Kenneth Arnold's classic sighting. As noted above, he said that the things he saw seemed to move like saucers skipped on water. A wire service editor in a hurry had written the phrase "flying saucers" in a story which was sent out. While UFO spotting is largely a modern phenomenon, the possibility of life on other worlds has been speculated about for a very long time. In the late 19th Century a number of Spritualist mediums claimed to have obtained information about life on Mars and other planets while in trances. In the early 19th Century a New York paper published the notorious "Moon Hoax". Starting with some fairly innocuous stories about a powerful new telescope built by a real-life English astronomer, the paper published stories about how life could be observed on the Moon. There were people there with bat wings. In the 18th Century Voltaire wrote a story called Micromegas. In it two giants from space visit Earth. They are so large that when one of them picks up a whale, it is in his hand like a tadpole is in the hand of a man. This story, incidentally, discusses (and spoofs) an attempt by some astronomers to use "geometric logic" to demonstrate that Mars "should" have two moons. Jonathan Swift aludes to this idea in Gulliver's Travels, saying that the people of the scientifically advanced country of Laputa have found that Mars has two moons. Erich Von Danniken cites this in Chariots of the Gods but does so to know apparent purpose except to get readers to say "ooooh.....spooky". One can trace the belief in extraterrestrial life much farther back than this. Comedian George Carlin used to observe that the idea of reincarnation doesn't make much sense, as the world's population keeps growing, so that something must be happening beyond the mere recycling of former inhabitants of this planet. In fact, Hindus have since ancient times speculated that there is life on other planets, and that spirits from such planets can be reincarnated here. Nevertheless, sightings of exraterrestrial spacecraft has largely been a phenomenon of the late 19th Century and after. Writers on UFOs, especialy in the 1950s and 60s, attempted to demonstrate that it was a longstanding phenomenon. Two stories related by Frank Edwards in his book Flying Saucers: Serious Business, are prime illustrations. One story concerned some monks in England during the Middle Ages who saw a ship hovering over their monastery. An alien creature wearing a space helmet descended to the ground via a ladder. The other story was the one about a craft crashing in Aurora, Texas. The Aurora story was published during the great Airship scare of the mid-1890s. Numerous writers have demonstrated that details in the story do not match up with facts about the town as it was at that time, and have shown that the town was anxious to draw attention to itself. IIRC, Aurora had been passed over in favor of a neighboring community for a railroad station, and the economy was declining. The story of the monks was first published in England in the 1950s. It was a pure hoax; some schoolboys simply made it up and sent a letter about it to a paper. Many other efforts to prove that UFOs were sighted in earlier appear to be similarly bogus; often they consist of interpreting an artifact without providing any historical or cultural context. One I have found particularly interesting is the claim that flying saucers can be seen in the Bayeaux Tapestry. They look remarkably like clouds. Although belief in life on other planets is of longstanding, the OP is correct: the vast majority of UFO sightings have occured since the time of Kenneth Arnold. There once was a vogue for suggesting that this was because we had only recently become interesting to the aliens; possibly they were drawn here by television and radio broadcasts, or by the invention of the atomic bomb. This latter idea featured in the classic film The Day the Earth Stood Still. As it became apparent that nearby planets do not support intelligent life, and as people became more sophisiticated about the tremendous distances between objects in space, this idea has lost popularity. A more likely explanation is that it is only in relatively recent times that a great many people have been actively disposed to believe in the possibility of spaceships. Frank Edwards noted that descriptions of craft in early UFO sightings were greatly different than in more recent sightings, and suggested this was proof that the aliens were advancing technically. In fact, the early airships resembled the blimps and dirigibles people were soon able to perfect. And flying saucers? They had already been depicted in pulp magazines for years before a wire service editor misintrepreted what Kenneth Arnold said.
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#36
08-27-2003, 05:37 PM
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Non Smartass answer: Because a great number of UFO sightings convieniently seem to take place in very deserted places/in the middle of the woods/very late at night, when people aren't likely to be carrying around video cameras.
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#37
08-27-2003, 05:51 PM
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And the real answer is, because UFOs as alien spacecraft don't exist. We have plenty of video of UFOs, but I'm > 99.9999% certain that not one of them is a spacecraft built by intelligent beings from some place other than Earth. The vast majority are fakes, and the rest is divided among unusual atmospheric phenomena, conventional aircraft, astronomical objects and film/videotape glitches.
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#38
08-27-2003, 06:05 PM
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I notice that Von Däniken was mentioned.
Just to show how "respectable" a "scholar" he is go here-- http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/169_daniken.shtml He's building a "Theme Park Of The Gods" based on his so-called "scholarship". 
__________________
There's an Initiation Ceremony. It involves a Squid and a Goat. You're gonna be good friends with that Goat. The Squid will not exactly be a stranger, either. ~~Me, on the SDMB Initiation
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#39
08-27-2003, 06:10 PM
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#40
08-27-2003, 06:10 PM
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To add on the video taped UFO encounters...
I have seen a lot on of them on the various UFO TV shows on scifi and all variations of the history channel. While there are plenty that look authentic none of them are anywhere near as compelling, to me, as the Arizona sitting about (and im making a very vague guess) 5 years ago. If I remember correctly there were 6 glowing lights in the sky and were there for quite sometime. Everyone saw them, period. All the various news channels covered including local and national. Possibly worldwide. It was dismissed as military. lol. From all the video shown of the event there is no way I can believe that. I will try to find some sites with more info on this particular event.
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#41
08-27-2003, 06:17 PM
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http://www.ufocasebook.com/phoenix31397.mpeg
This video sucks but here is the Arizona video I spoke of. "March 13, 1997, Phoenix, Arizona, USA. One of the most celebrated, yet controversial events of the 1990s was the fly over of anomalous objects in Phoenix, Arizona. Seen by literally thousands of residents in the metropolis, the film taken at that time is almost indisputable proof of UFOs. Debunkers have offered every imaginable explanation for the bright, circular object or objects that stirred the imagination of onlookers, but nothing short of UFO will do." http://ufocasebook.com/bestufovideos2.html
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#42
08-27-2003, 06:46 PM
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I can't say as I find that video particularly compelling. It's just some lights in the sky that could really be anything from hot-air balloons with lights to a large meteor breaking up. It ain't aliens, I'll tell you that much.
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#43
08-27-2003, 06:56 PM
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#44
08-27-2003, 07:16 PM
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I think you guys are missing the obvious answer here. There's virually no mention of UFOs visiting Earth before the mid 20th century because that's when they started visiting us. Duh!
 Barry
__________________
Licensed Member of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and Other Professional Thinking Persons. "godzillatemple, I think I think as clearly as you...I just have trouble matching your clarity of expression." - Somnambulist "Same here. It sounds so much BETTER when YOU think it!" - Kalhoun
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#45
08-27-2003, 09:17 PM
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Common sense is subject to ones upbringing, culture, gender, and race even. I doubt the validity of a common sense at all. No such thing exists to me really. Point being: What is common to you and your people is not common to the next.
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#46
08-27-2003, 09:45 PM
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Meatros! I didn't even notice you had posted. Some people think you've disappeared
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#47
08-27-2003, 10:38 PM
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But the Discovery Channel, TLC, or one of those networks, did a show in which they took one of the tapes, which seemed to show the lights suddenly blinking out one at a time, and superimposed on it a daylight shot, from the same location, of the mountain range in the distance (not visible in the nighttime tape with the lights, of course.) Every time a light went out, it was exactly as it passed behind the line of the remote mountains. QED. The flares were extremely bright and human vision has a hard time accurately placing very bright light sources in a dark sky with no other frame of reference. Hence the many reports of meteors hundreds of miles away as nearby UFOs. IIRC, the waters were also muddied by an early (incorrect) denial by the Air Force that military planes were flying in the area at the time.
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#48
08-28-2003, 12:25 AM
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Not to mention it being the best time to be under the influence of the product of said still. Having partaken of such produced by the Appalachian side of my family…HoooWeeee! Blind ain’t the only thing it can make ya.
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#49
08-28-2003, 08:07 AM
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Re: If UFO's are real, how come virtually no mention of them until the mid 20th century
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#50
08-28-2003, 10:52 AM
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The hamsters were looking up in the sky at some bright lights over Chicago the last time I tried to do this, so let's try it again:
Off to Great Debates. bibliophage moderator GQ
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