Rejecting ideas without evidence is not silly or closeminded - it is rational. The moment real, convincing evidence is presented for alien life, I’ll be the first in line to board the spaceship and take some samples.
Poorly staged photos of garbage can lids stuck to a tree don’t count as “real, convincing evidence”.
Feel free to apply this concept to the linked photographs.
Seriously, they look like Ed Wood grade special effects. The only reason you don’t see a wire is because the UFO is sitting on a garbage can, or stuck in a fake tree.
If you’re having trouble deciding whether to believe Meier when he claims that the Men In Black changed his photographs to make them look like Dean Martin’s dancers, and they were able to manipulate his mind so that even he didn’t notice the change, then I would say that any trouble you are having with us is taking place on your side of the monitor, not ours.
Not that I don’t take the Billy Meier thing with a grain of salt, but I would rather have an active curiosity driving me to learn then to dismiss anything on face value. Maybe I’m wrong…who knows.
Then why give us his account to deal with if even you take it with a grain of salt? If you want to stimulate conversation, give us your best example, not your worst.
Actually the Billy Meier thing is most likely b.s, but I’ve read plenty of comments from plenty of other sites with the same clicks of pseudo-intellectuals sitting on their pedestals. Cecil Adams articles are fantastic, but this is the dredges of intellectual pursuits.
Why comment if you’ve never read or know nothing of the subject? How are you being subjective?
That’s quite a dismissive assumption you’ve made there.
I would LOVE it if somebody proved extraterrestrials or beings from another dimension were visiting us. It would be horrifying and fabulous.
But, I have yet to see any proof of such visitation.
Re Billy Meier
As a wise man once said “If I shove a hundred reindeer off of a cliff, I have not proven that reindeer cannot fly. All I’ve proven is none of THOSE reindeer could fly.”
Based on the evidence, I can only conclude that Billy Meier is a hoaxer. If you have other evidence, please present it.
How much evidence do we need? How many astronauts need to come forward? How many international new coverages of closed airports due to Unidentified flying objects? How many statesmen need to come forward? What constitutes as evidence? I guess its all relative… Anyway here’s a few good links that might make us ask the hard questions…Though I doubt your closed mind will let you watch for any length of time.
Everybody say it with me “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
A few. I haven’t heard of one.
An unidentified flying object is just that. It cannot be identified. It does not mean it is alien craft.
That depends on what kind of evidence they have. I personally do not give much weight to the word of a politician.
It is relative and depends on the claim being made.
My mind will let me watch them. It’s this ancient and slow dial-up connection that prevents me. Can you summarize them?
No maybe about it. You are wrong.
Just so you know I’ve been looking at the “evidence” for much longer than you’ve been alive. I’ve read the original articles from 1947 and the stories in Fate magazine that started explaining the sighting as “aliens” and the believer books and the government reports and tons more. It’s junk. That’s not the opinion of a closed mind. It’s the opinion of someone who has done a whole lot more than look at a couple of Youtube videos and thinks that Billy Meier is someone to bring up without laughing. You’re giving us the same kind of “evidence” that birthers and truthers and moonhoaxers use. That’s embarrassing company to be in.
Yes, my mind is too closed to be convinced by a few links to a few youtube videos. Show me some evidence.
Atronaughts that have come foward about UFOs…and I’d take their word over many people including Exapno…
Major Gordon Cooper
Donald Slayton
Major Robert White
Joseph A. Walker
Commander Eugene Cernan
Ed White & James McDivitt
James Lovell and Frank Borman
Neil Armstrong & Edwin Aldrin
Maurice Chatelain
Scott Carpenter
Moderator Note
TheBodhi, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board. The General Questions forum is for questions with factual answers. While your original post is perfectly acceptable here, your subsequent criticism of the board and its members does not fall within the scope of this forum. Please focus on the topic rather than your opinion of the responders.
I think that at least some of what you are perceiving as a lack of tolerance for open minds is actually just this forum’s focus on facts and cites over opinion and speculation. The In My Humble Opinion forum is for questions involving speculation and opinion if you seek those kinds of responses. There is also the Great Debates forum which would be more appropriate if you wish to debate the existence of things like aliens, UFOs, etc. Each of these forums has its own rules and culture. I would recommend reading each forum’s descriptions, FAQs, and rules before posting further. You may also benefit from reading through other General Questions posts to get a better feel for what is accepted here and not.
I guess I couldn’t convince you of atoms or of other planets. I only have videos to show…
I can see other planets- and their moons- using instruments I own or can build.
I can deduce and measure, though not see, atoms, using materials and resources I have available.
Now show me some aliens.
Look at this from another perspective. The whole “UFO” field is rife with fraud - much of it completely ludicrous, bare-faced, crazy nutso type of fraud.
You’re hanging out with a group of people and somebody says “What if even a fraction of those stories are true, like John Smith’s book?”
You don’t know who John Smith is so you take a few minutes to look him up and discover that he claims to have proof of a brave Earth woman fighting off ravenous star beasts from planet Murgatroyd, and here’s the evidence:
And then you read that when it was pointed out to John Smith that this was just a still from a popular movie he said “Well the Murgatroidians used retrograde mental alteration to replace the REAL photos with those, I don’t know how that made it into my book!”
And he goes on to claim that he’s got photos of a flying saucer hovering between the Empire State Building and the Sears Tower. Somebody points out that his flying saucer looks amazingly like an Aerobie painted silver and that the ESB and the Sears Tower are nowhere near each other, to which he replies that the Murgatroidians tell him that they actually moved the Sears Tower to Chicago and then went back and modified everybody’s memory so they just THINK that the Sears Tower was always in Chicago. And that Aerobie means “Murgatroidian Scout Ship” in their native hieroglyphics.
Now I’ll assume that you and your friends are just as interested in the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence as I am, or frankly as many folks here at the SDMB are, but if somebody tries to start the conversation off with that kind of dreck (as opposed to talking about the Drake Equation, or “What do you think would happen if SETI discovers a clearly artificial pattern?”) don’t you think that would kind of be getting off on the wrong foot? Wouldn’t you find the whole thing so ludicrous that you’d just be laughing at the sheer lunacy of John Smith? If I want to start a conversation about current events and I pull out a newspaper, it better not be the Weekly World News, right? It doesn’t make everyone who rolls their eyes at that “evidence” a snobby pseudo-intellectual.
Pretty sure humanity figured out atoms and planets before Youtube was created.