What’s all this lately about UFO’s and aliens? Why do so many people believe we are being visited, threatened, abducted, etc.? Why is this belief so prevelent now? What happened? I just can’t believe this stuff and it seems like there are so many more gullible people in the world. Is this the result of the “Jerry Springer” attitude or what?
*Originally posted by eveelynn *
What’s all this lately about UFO’s and aliens?
Lately? Where have you been for the last 3,000 years…or at least since 1947?
**Why do so many people believe we are being visited, threatened, abducted, etc.? Why is this belief so prevelent now? What happened?
Those are three questions. Do you have a few years to discuss human psychology?
I just can’t believe this stuff and it seems like there are so many more gullible people in the world.
Believe it, Tootsie. There’s another one born every minute according to Phineas T. Barnum, but a more accurate estimate is one every second. For some background on this see :organized religion.
Is this the result of the “Jerry Springer” attitude or what?
It’s mostly Jerry Springer although sailor and Chronos are at least partially responsible.
Do yourself a favour and read Carl Sagan’s book The Demon Haunted World - Science as a candle in the darkness. This book clearly debunks many of the pseudo-science myths that currently abound, including UFO’s and alien abductions.
It’s interesting to note that neither were reported prior to the twentieth century, and that the description of any UFO’s and aliens from “witness reports” usually reflected the Hollywood depiction of aliens that was current at the time. Hence “sightings” of little grey aliens with big heads and almond shaped eyes did not become prevalent until after the advent of movies like Close Encounters.
The book is well researched and the argument undeniable, but it starts to get repetitive after a few chapters.
And why did those aliens only start using anal probes after Whitley Streiber published Communion? Unless the aliens read the book and wanted to have a little fun at our expense, of course.
I can’t say for certain if there are aliens or not as I have not personally encountered them. The thing is that there is so much documented evidence from centuries back to support the theory that they do exist and have been visiting us. Could all of these people have been seeing things or have over active imaginations? Most likely not. It is not a new phenomenon but just seems to hit the headlines from time to time.
I personally beleive that we are not alone in this universe and that somewhere out there an answer lies. Till that time we can only but speculate.
yes.
People want something to believe in, and the truth isn’t always interesting. The thought that the nearest forms of high-level life outside of earth are myriads of lightyears away and have no resemblance to humans means nothing when X-Files is airing. My grandmother, mid-seventies, adamantly believes that the world is controlled and monitored by aliens…and she’s far from senile (but she is a Sylvia Brown fanatic). Alien life, much like religion, is a field that requires people to ignore facts. Once one can ignore facts, anything is feasible.
Tisme said:
And that would be…?
Quoth Tisme:
You forgot about a third possibility, Tisme: That they’re just plain lying. I know plenty of folks who would say they saw a UFO if they thought it’d get them on the news.
Oh, yeah, and let’s not forget about the mind control rays that sailor and I have been testing… Usually, though, we manage to keep our test subjects under control, and stop the media leaks.
Well, maybe not “documented” evidence for thousands of years, but 50 million Elvis fans can’t be wrong. Or can they? Well, I guess they can. Nevermind. Still, it’s interesting to me that people come down so hard on one side or the other of this debate. Either there are aliens in flying saucers that look just so and probe people anally OR these people are just a bunch of nutcases and there’s nothing going on at all. Bah! It would be nice to see everybody, skeptics new agers alike, join hands and say, “There’s just a lot of stuff out there we don’t have an answer for.” That’s it. Just a simple statement of fact: we don’t know everything. None of us. Not even Cecil <waiting for lighting to strike>.
People love to use the “why didn’t anybody see anything before 1947” argument, but to me, you can argue it either way. People have been seeing things in the sky for millennia, or at least they’ve been writing stories about it for that long. It seems obvious that around the time that space travel became a realistic idea, so (to many) did aliens. They weren’t gods or sprites or nymphs or leprechauns or winged serpents anymore. Our paradigm expanded–and so did our ideas about the unknown. Of course movies about this were made at the same time, and that fed into those ideas–but it’s absurd to think Hollywood created the notion of aliens. It’s circumstantial either way.
Also, ufo observers would argue the 1940’s rash of sightings and the phenomenon which continues to this day came about as a result of a singular advancement in human technology: the atom bomb. And the revolution in our understanding of physics and the universe. Now I’m not saying this is the case, only that the argument is a plausible one–if you’re an advanced civilization, you probably wouldn’t take notice of us savages until we managed to do something really big and ugly that was outside the box for our level of evolution.
People are seeing something. They have been for sometime. Perhaps grey humanoids with big black eyes are simply our latest and best myth for explaining something that actually does exist. Our best studies of Mars, just one planet, have already left us knocking on the door of extraterrestrial life. You can scoff all you want, but even after you explain away 99% of everything out there, are you really willing to believe that human understanding has progressed to the point where there is no mystery left?
Sequent:
People have always been seeing things, but that just means that humans have always gotten bored enough to hallucinate, or tired enough to fall asleep and not realize it and have strange dreams, or have sharp enough eyes to pick out things like novae, or have had enough to drink or smoke to really get some effects, etc. I don’t think that anything as complex as a spacecraft has ever come across space to Earth. I do think that aliens exist, perhaps many different species, but dispersed, and not yet aware of a species that has barely been broadcasting for a single century. Lights in the sky can be so many different things. Even if natural explanations can be completely ruled out (in most cases they can’t be) there are still a lot of aircraft up there, and plenty of human spacecraft with lights bright enough to be seen from the ground. Not all of them are publicly known, either, especially in the deserts alien sighters seem to frequent. I think the 1940s was a watershed era because it was then secret government research really took off. The Manhattan Project had just produced the nuclear bomb and the government was riding high on secret funds and a public that, when told to shut up and look the other way, would. Anyway, there is evidence to say that more than nuclear weapons testing was going on in the desert southwest around that time. The Roswell Craft was a research project into some balloon-based weapons (Cite, please? I know I found it somewhere.) and lights can be explained by aircraft or missiles. In any case, there is plenty of reason to believe that more prosaic explanations are at the root of UFO sightings (as much as you can say secret research is prosaic). And, Sequent, the wonder of exploration and discovery far outweighs the benefits of having ‘mysteries’ left.
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*Originally posted by Chronos *
**Quoth Tisme:
I managed to get away from them. Then, luckily, my friends the ‘Greys’ hid me in an undisclosed location at Area51. But I found out the secret:
Chronos is actually …ARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHH
Do you really think so? It’s interesting you say that, because I would look at the exact mirror of that perspective: the wonder (and benefit) of having mysteries left far outweighs the benefits reaped from centuries of exploration and discovery. After all, the mysteries are what inspired the discoveries and explorations in the first place. The mysteries have driven us to explore and discover, and thus benefit from our endeavours. Mystery, implausibility, particularly impossibility, have driven us all along. The greatest leaps in our undertstanding/technology/evolution have come from those willing to think outside the box, outside the paradigms already established. We toil away, armed with all our knowledge, and make increments of progress, then someone like Newton or da Vinci or Tesla comes along and initiates a quantum leap–usually to the initial ridicule (and subsequent praise) of the surrounding community. Humans depend on their knowledge, their discoveries. This leads to a refinement of our understanding. I would argue that when we contemplate/examine/confront the mysteries, it leads to an expansion of our understanding. To me, there is no greater benefit.
Let’s throw away 99% of all UFO sightings/encounters to imagination, hallucination, substance abuse, natural phenomena, manmade objects (including thousands of Earth-orbiting objects, many of which are commonly visible). We are still talking about thousands of sightings left. 99.9% we throw out? Still hundreds left. Is it really so implausible to say that among these could be some bona-fide observations of objects/phenomena that are extra-terrestrial? Not spaceships, even. Just something we could not even begin to explain. Something that defies logic or phsyics.
There are high-profile instances of this. Belgian air-force jets chased a UFO in the early 1990’s; its movements were tracked and recorded on radar and monitored from both air and ground. As far as I know, we have no explanation nor description of any object or phenomenon which could even begin to account for the activity observed that night.
Then–and here’s the problem–you have one group of people that come out and say they know exactly what it is. Aliens. Spaceships. Anal probes. And then you have this whole other group that come out and say they know it isn’t that. People smoking something, maverick weather balloons, irridescent balls of natural gas–the second group will throw out any explanation in order to defeat the theory of the first group. Even if group number two is right most of the time (and they are–skeptics win by default), there are still plenty of specific cases where neither group can back up what they say with evidence, and both groups are limited to their own preconceived notions.
I’m not saying spaceships are real. I’m saying that the mystery remains a mystery because people can’t esape their own ideas of what “it” is. We think it has to be x. OR it can’t be x, but it’s definitely either y or z. What’s wrong with just not knowing? Why is that so bad? People thought manned flight was impossible just 150 years ago. They say hundreds of years of people trying to make flying machines and falling on their asses. Impossibility was established by frequency of failure. Then–all that changed.
The project was called “Mogul,” and was an attempt to use balloon-borne microphones to monitor nuclear testing in the Soviet Union. It consisted of multiple balloons connected in line, with big radar reflectors and other funny-looking equipment thrown in. I found a detailed article at http://www.csicop.org/si/9507/roswell.html .
I agree, in this century there have been many more things in the sky that can be mistaken for UFOs. In addition, before this century not many people even thought about the possibility of space travel, and therefore the possibility of alien visitors. Now that we can (or used to) go to the moon, it suddenly became plausible to everyone on earth that other people elsewhere may be doing the same thing.
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- Looking for UFO info on the net can be a real time-waster, I have found.
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- I think the idea of ETs is pretty unlikely, but many of the people who worked for the US gov’t - who for years went around “investigating” reports and who always explained them away, quit and turned around and said the opposite. Such as that the most obvious instances of explainable sightings were widely publicized while the unexplainable ones were abandoned, more or less. People who had actually handled the infamous wrecked flying saucers, who for years kept their silences, admitted past retirement that the real pieces were switched out with regular weather balloon crap. Very few of these people tried to cash in on their former positions in any significant ways; they were simply stating the facts as they saw them firsthand. They couldn’t all have been crazy. After he quit, the one guy formed S.E.T.I., and for years he was one of the two G-men that went around telling witnesses and news reporters that people were hallucinating when they saw UFO’s. What would you suppose he knew, that changed his mind completely around? - MC
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No less likely than our own existence.
SETI was not founded by an ex government spook. see: http://www.seti.org
or
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/about_seti/
If the G-man to whom you refer actually had factual knowledge of a contact, forming SETI would be step backwards, don’t you think?
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*Originally posted by scr4 *
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http://www.tje.net/para/projects/mogul.htm
http://www.iufomrc.com/mogul.htm
http://www.ufomind.com/place/us/nm/roswell/afreport/mogul
http://www.ufomind.com/people/m/mogul
There are many more. search for Project+Mogul
Or you could just check with the repository of all worthwhile human knowledge.
Check with Cecil on his own homepage? What a concept!
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- Doh! Wasn’t SETI, may Haynek/CISCOP? (Haynek was a civie consultant, not a G-man, but still) -In which capacity he went on bebunking sightings, but didn’t debunk them all. If he’d have thought that they were all fake or false, why bother at all? ----- I saw some show on Discovery that showed a few different old men who were soldiers in various positions involved in this stuff years ago, who said (now) that any real evidence was replaced with fake stuff, and detailed & unexplainable sightings were ignored or covered up. The TV show also showed the space shuttle video (the one where the UFO gets “shot” at), which was real clear on TV but looks like crap on the few different net sources I found. For that matter, most of the net photos/videos look like crap (as in “fake”). A few look convincing, but many photos have at least one problem: no ground details in view, inconsistent depth of fields or no surfaces visible on the alleged UFO. Many have all of those problems. The videos tend to exhibit a typical blurrng of the subject.
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- I ain’t ever seen one. A few were sighted a couple years back in my area, by several different people in a couple different towns who described pretty much the same thing. A co-worker of mine [at the time] was one of the people who saw them. A lady came around to interview everybody for some “UFO investigation group”. We later found out that she was the owner of a local astrology/palm reading parlor. -I give up.- MC