I have asked this question (second paragraph) of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Marilyn Vos Savant and many other brights, and I would like to address it to anyone on this forum that would care to respond. I am currently writing a monograph on this and other similar events of mass or large group perception of apparently anomalous phenomena - religious visions, conjurors illusions, mass hallucinations or “mass hysteria”, and the like - obviously my focus is not on individual narratives of unusual perceived events regardless of apparent credibility. I welcome your comments. Here is the question.
What is your view (or better, opinion) of The UFO Phenomenon? I do NOT mean anything regarding little grey men, alien abductions, or “encounters” of any kind.
I refer only to the small but significant number of highly documented sightings of UFO aerial or space phenomena as reported by large groups of ordinary people, groups of professional military or police, sightings verified by multiple radar trackings, groups of military pilots or astronauts - sightings that have been thoroughly investigated and remain unexplained. Also those cases thoroughly examined by Condon et al, Project Blue Book, and other Air Force investigations - and NOT rejected as hoax, hallucinatory, or balloons, aircraft, planets, etc.
I’ve heard of ball lightning, microscopic black holes and aliens as some of the explainations. Heck, you might as well as say it was the will of the Almightly Cookie Monster or The Great Arkensneeze - it seems all the proposals has equal merit. Well, actually ball lightning does fit the bill for some of the non-3rd contact sightings and it can be recreated in the lab.
I feel we’ve still got a heck of a lot of learn about our universe before we can start blaming some shadowy behind-the-scene figure/s. Besides, it would make engineering calculations a real bitch.
Umm… why do you have the number of posts in your sig?
My general opinion is: In most cases, there is a reasonably convincing evidence-supported explanation for an unidentified thingy in the sky. In a small number of cases, there is not a reasonably convincing evidence-supported explanation for an unidentified thingy in the sky.
That’s really all that can be said. There simply isn’t a good explanation. “Explanations” involving alien visitors are included in that.
As an intelligent person (stop laughing!) I would tend to leave the question open for further evidence and try to keep an open mind. As a person who has actually had an encounter I know there are unidentified flying things out there but I certainly don’t believe everyone who claims to have seen them so I understand when people don’t believe me.
Landing in Times Square or during the Superbowl would guarantee the first, but so would using our extensive telecommunications web. They haven’t done it. So much for #1.
Their alleged ships are covered in lights. So, only an idiot would travel light years of distance, only to try & hide in a ship covered in lights. So much for #2.
In addition to our choices
these facts should be considered.
Digital camera & CCTV are becoming ubiquitous (sp?). Security cameras are found in every Kwik-E Mart parking lot. We should be getting ever-growing numbers of photos. But the Foretean Society (dedicated to all things weird) claims the number of UFO pics is swiftly declining.
It amazes me that the human race is so egotistical that they will assume, nay demand that they are the only intelligent species in all of the universe.
Of course they are others. I don’t claim to have ever seen one.
Oh, I’m certain there IS intelligent life elsewhere. I’m equally certain none of it has ever visited Earth. Einsteinian limitations pretty much nail that down.
I think I see what the OP is after (though have no answer). I do not believe we have been visited. I am very skeptical of all things UFO. But I have seen pics and videos that were hard to explain and didn’t look like ball lightning.
The Universe is immense; life exists on one planet that we know of; therefore it is reasonable to assume that there probably is life elsewhere.
However we know of no way to travel faster than light, so it is unlikely that any aliens can have reached us.
There are masses of sightings. The vast majority have been explained (aircraft / planets / hoaxes etc). No physical evidence of any alien visit has ever been produced.
There is a thriving industry making money out of books, TV programs, websites and the town of Roswell. Therefore the subject is kept alive, even though nothing worth studying has turned up in the decades since this started.
So my opinion is that people will pay money to hear about “The greatest UFO sightings of all time” and that rumours will persist thought there is no reason to believe anything.
Which, in your opinion, is the single most impressive UFO sighting?
What do you think about the Loch Ness monster?
There have been sightings for hundreds of years, including films. Nobody has ever shown it is a hoax.
Wait, what limitations would prevent aliens from visiting the earth? The closest star is about 4.2 light years away, if you could travel 10% of the speed of light, which is theoretically quite possible, it would only take 42 years to reach the earth. The 50 closest stars are within 160 years of travel time at these speeds. If you REALLY wanted to get here, I don’t see why you couldn’t.
Yeah, but if you went to all that trouble, wouldn’t you do something besides skulk around, abducting the occaisional hillbilly?
I’m willing to believe in UFO’s. I just need some real evidence. All an unexplained sighting means is that a sighting is unexplained. It doesn’t automatically point to flying saucers. Since the claim is so incredible, the evidence needs to be overwhelming, like an actual ship hovering low over a large city. Until then the verdict is “Maybe, but probably not.”
Remember that you also have to accelerate to these incredible speeds, survive the journey (what is your fuel? how do you avoid ruinous collisions?) and slow down + stop when you reach us. Plus you need a plan to get home…
Your signals (both from home and on ship) also have to avoid being detected by SETI.
Whoa there, I was talking about the Einsteinian limitations comment. You don’t need to reach the speed of light to do interstellar travel, was all I was saying. As far as fuel goes, I would assume they had some form of fusion, as we’re pretty close to getting a stable form of that already. If not, solar sails are supposed to be a possibility, the wiki entry says that controlled nuclear explosions can also theoretically propel you to 10% of the speed of light.
You would of course plan your journey, so interplanetary collisions should be out of the question, as for meteoroids and stellar debris, I dunno, 50 foot thick hulls? High powered lasers? Nukes? Parachutes? Probably a few hundred solutions that haven’t already been thought of by man.
I’m not arguing either way for visitation of aliens to our planet, but blindly stating that there has definitely not been visitations is just as wrongheaded as blindly stating that there has.
Well as long as it is your opinion, feel free to believe that, I won’t try to convince you otherwise. But it is theoretically possible to travel intersellarly without traveling at light speeds, there’s no limitations because of that.
