I’d never call anyone on this board a moron.
North.
How do you know if the evidence wouldn’t be very convincing? Have you seriously looked at even a shred of it (never mind the whole)? How do you know the evidence is “shoddy” What experience do you base this conclusion on?
Look, Ace, none of us here on the SDMB grew up in a cultural vacuum.
None of us (unfortunately) have escaped the pseudo-documentaries about UFOs on TV.
Most of us, as adolescents or adults, have read books on this subject.
And we can and do understand both the arguments and allure of UFO lore.
After all, everybody here is a professional smartypants. 
The attraction is the wonder of the Universe, & the secret glee that one gets when one has access to Secret “Knowledge”.
But you can get a much, much better view of the wonders of the Universe by studying Astronomy. A clearer view, unobstructed by con-artists, faked photos, and hustling “experts” who cite sources debunked as frauds decades ago. (BTW–this is a very common failing in books on the paranormal, in everything from Nessie to UFOs to assassination conspiracy buffs. Look for a bibliography, check sources over the WWW, cross check with debunkers. You’d be suprised how careless these alleged experts are!)
As for the “Secret Knowledge”–it isn’t worth a toss!
Actually I used to be very into the whole UFO crazy. I genuinely believed that the government was suppressing information and the whole deal. I read several books written by believers (including ‘above top secret’ and the John Mack one).
The fact is, UFO evidence is based on memory or blurry pictures. Memory which can be faulty and blurry pictures, well, are blurry pictures.
Considering how easy it is to fake these sorts of things, I think the evidence needs to be a lot better.
Why don’t you?
No, testimony from Jesse Marcel Sr. about the debris he personally saw, presumably in broad daylight, in the field. That page I cited gives both Marcel Sr. and Marcel Jr.'s testimony. Look near the bottom of the left hand column - section 5.1 - that’s where I quoted from.
Fair enough. 
Nonetheless, according to him it was quite thin and extremely resilient. Unless he’s lying, or delusional, (and he didn’t seem to be either on the footage they used for the documentary) there was something there that appeared to be beyond Earthly technology in 1947, and probably even today.
Note: I am not saying it has to be alien, just that it has not been adequately explained.
Are you explaining the testimony or the artifact?
Since we have no artifact, is it possible (probable?) that his testimony was mistaken, faulty, confused, wrong, invented, or otherwise not correct? Any of them seem to be better explanations at this time, without further evidence than to worry about some possible super-thin, super-strong metal.
It could also be argued that the evidence so far is anecdotal, incomplete and largely based on speculation and inappropriate conclusions.
Don’t forget, public opinion at one time was that the gods on Olympus were real and ran the universe. That didn’t make it correct.
i was implying that I think he’s goung way overboard in his examinations.
Perhaps we should re-assess his accuracy in the balance of his description?
Well sure, but then AFAIK we have no evidence to suggest that any of the above are true unless we can do as Bosda suggested:
Are you suggesting that since he says he did not actually see the metal being hit with a sledgehammer, he may have misunderstood what the GI told him?
Absolutely- that is a Top-TOP-Secret site and has been so for a while (well, they recently mostly moved out) and there have been lost of secret stuff going on there that the Air Force either isn’t going to say anything about or is going to lie their asses off about. So? In fact, they have let us in on a few of the Sectrets well after the fact, such as “they weren’t* just* weather baloons”.
A couple of things you seem to be confused about, north.
First, not believing that aliens have visited the Earth does not constitute having a “closed mind.” An open mind weighs all available evidence, takes into consideration factors such as the fallibility of human memory, the character and possible motives of people on both sides of the issue, and the availability of hard evidence. Note that it is entirely possible to weigh those factors fairly and honestly and come to the conclusion that aliens have likely never visited the Earth, or at least not left any evidence that they have done so. An open mind does not mean one cannot rule out unlikely or impossible scenarios. All it means is that you approach the issue without forgone conclusions, and remain open to new evidence after the fact. The vast majority of posters on this board are very open-minded. The vast majority are also not fools, and recognize the difference between what they want to be true, and what is verifiably true.
Second, there’s a vast gulf between “not believing that aliens have visited the Earth” and “not believing that aliens exsist.” The first proposition is exceedingly unlikely, for reason I’ll get to in a minute. The second proposition, while not provable, is almost certainly true, and you’ll find precious few informed people who believe we’re alone among the stars. Considering the size of the universe, the number of galaxies it contains, and the number of star systems in each galaxy, it’s almost certain that there is alien life out there somewhere. Possibly even intelligence. Have they ever visited the Earth? Probably not. For a couple of reasons.
For starters, how would they find us? We’re on an outer spiral arm of this galaxy. Basically, we’re a backwater. There aren’t many stars out here, compared with the galactic heart. And, someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but our earliest broadcast communications have barely had time to escape our own solar system, let alone reach our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, whom we know to be uninhabited. Unless an alien ship just happened to stop by this star system, there’s no way for any other race to even know we exsist. Which is probably a good thing.
In addition to that, you have to deal with the fact that faster-than-light travel violates our most fundamental understandings of physics. It’s not a matter of “really, really hard,” or “we just don’t know how.” Nothing goes faster than light. Nothing. Now, certainly, we don’t know everything about everything. But we’ve been testing these theories about physics for almost a century now, and while our earliest theories had a lot of misconceptions and errors, the evidence for the light barrier being unbreakable is re-enforced at every turn. Someday, we might find a way around it. I really, really, really hope that we do. But at this point,hopes for faster than light travel has more in common with religious belief than scientific fact. We can hope it’s true, but we have to contend with the absolute and utter lack of evidence that it’s even theoretically possible.
What does this mean for our hypothetical alien visitors? It means that coming here is most likely a one-way trip. Even if there is a space-faring civilization on Alpha Centauri, it’s somthing like a hundred and fifty year trip at sub-light speeds. And, like I said, we’re pretty sure AC is uninhabitable. Realistically, we’re talking about a journey of hundreds, maybe thousands, of years, minimum. Now, it’s possible that the aliens in question might be extraordinarily long lived, or posses some form of natural or aritificial hibernation that would allow them to survive the trip. But that leads to the question: why? What does Earth have to offer that couldn’t be found closer to the alien’s homeworld? The only answer that makes any kind of sense is “humans,” and that’s still pretty absurd. Any alien race that could make the journey to this planet would, by definition, be so far in advance of our own that there’s nothing they could conceivably learn from us except in the strictest zoological sense. And travelling all this way to fill out their taxnomy charts seems like quite a waste of time.
Sure, you can come up with all sorts of conjecture to answer all these questions. But that’s not evidence, no more than “God moves in mysterious ways” is evidence of a compassionate, interventionist deity. It’s fun to talk about, in a sort of college dorm-room bongsmoke session, but it’s not convincing.
Bottom line: I have an open mind, and my open mind has looked at the evidence and concluded there’s nothing there to see. The military is secretive. This is not evidence of aliens. Some people fifty years ago near a top secret military base saw things they couldn’t explain. This is not evidence of aliens. People around the globe claim to have seen UFOs. They also claim to have seen ghosts, bigfoot, pixies, the Loch Ness monster, black helicopters, and evidence of an international Zionist banking conspiracy. People don’t like mysteries, they like solved mysteries. And in the absence of explanations for events, they will go to great lengths to invent something, anything, that fits the facts as they observed them.
I’m not stating, as an absolute, 100%, beyond any shadow of a doubt fact that aliens have never visited the Earth. That sort of certainty simply does not exsist. But once you get up past 99%, and you keep adding more nines to the right-hand side of the decimal point, you get to a point where you can safely say “It never happened” without having to add any caveats. Looking at the evidence for alien visitation, reading the accounts of people who have had UFO experiences, reading the available official government reports, I have to say, that’s a hell of a lot of nines. Maybe it happened. It’s possible, in the sense that absolutely anythng is possible, but there’s simply not enough reliable evidence out there to warrant re-writing my entire worldview.
Of course, as in everything (and on this topic more than any other) I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong.
Miller, thanks for the most excellent reply. It will be a challenge to do the same in kind, and although I obviously won’t be changing your wordlview with mine, I may just be able to entertain you for 45 seconds or so.
Alas, it will have to wait untill Tuesday as we have a long weekend here on alp…ahhhh here. I’m off for the inlaws tomorrow morning and right now my wife is looking at me wondering why the hell I’m writing about UFO’s on the internet when I could be going to bed with her. So that’s it, I’m off.
Have a good weekend everybody and I’ll be back to engage you all again on Tuesday. Stay tuned.
North
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As an old fisherman, I know damn well that the fish gets bigger the more often the tale is told.
I am in complete agreement with you on this. I am a layman, but I read all the lay material, and a small amount of fairly technical material, on the subject of astronomy that I can get my hands on. The more you know about the universe, and just how freakin’ huge it is, the more you agree with Ellie Arroway’s dad, that for there not to be life, and intelligent life more specifically, somewhere out there would be an awful waste of space.
I want to believe there are intelligent extraterrestrials. I want even more to believe that they can come visit us. But like several others who have offered their views in this thread, despite aggressive review of the available evidence, the only intellectually responsible conclusion is that there’s no proof of life off Earth, let alone smart ETs with flying saucers.
You keep talking about an open mind. Man, my mind is so completely open to the notion you wouldn’t believe it. If Independence Day happened, I’d be one of the koo-koos on top of the skyscrapers in point-blank range of the death rays.
But I also know I have to be intellectually rigorous lest I fall victim to the hucksters and con artists who want to sell me video and audio tapes purporting to be of extraterrestrial craft and the testimonials of abductees. Serious evidence will stand up to serious analysis. So far, zippo.
Because, the thing is, the more you actually study the real facts of the field, as Miller and others suggested, the more you recognize just how well we really understand the physical makeup and operation of the cosmos. We know how big space is: really, really, really, really, really big, so big it’s virtually impossible to truly wrap your brain around it. We know the speed of light is a physical limit, and while we have some abstract hypotheses to get around it (e.g. the Einstein-Rosen bridge), none of them has proved practicable in the real world. We know how organic chemistry works, and thus we have a pretty solid basis for believing that life requires carbon and water as environmental prerequisites. Are any of these provisional truths set in stone and impossible to violate? Of course not. Is there any reason to believe that they will or can be violated? Not yet.
I would be blown away if tomorrow the SETI researchers announced they had unimpeachable proof of an information-containing radio signal from space. But to be honest, I am similarly blown away by the simple physical reality of the cosmos, the question of life aside. Look at nebulae as stellar nurseries; the physics there are staggering. And yet, we on our isolated little rock are able to apply our amazing intelligence and make predictions, and those predictions are regularly borne out. I recently saw a Science Channel program that showed images of things Hubble had found in (IIRC) the Crab Nebula, rotating accretion disks around young stars, an observation which matches up quite closely with the current accepted theories about the formation of our solar system. That is utterly astonishing, if you really, honestly, think about it. We’re hyper-advanced hairless apes, we’ve never been further away than the moon, and yet we can grasp the structure and operation of massive formations billions and billions of miles away.
And there’s lots of places we can continue looking to increase our already amazing understanding of How Stuff Works. I’m looking forward with great anticipation to the return of the Stardust mission, which sent a collector through a comet’s corona and will be returning to Earth in a few months with its precious cargo. There are important hypotheses about the pristine material contained in comets that visit our neighborhood from the outer reaches, and about the organic compounds that might be found therein. If that experiment pans out the way some people think it will, it’s possible that we’ll find out that we, in fact, are the aliens. But other results are quite possible as well: we may be completely surprised by what Stardust brings back.
That’s the thing about our ongoing exploration: we’re regularly surprised every time we think we know what we’ll find. When the first pictures of Mars came back from the Mariner flyby, just about every planetary scientist slapped himself on the forehead and said, “Craters! Of course, why didn’t we think of that!” When Voyager flew by Jupiter in the mid-1970s, conventional wisdom said the moons would be dead rocks not worth much more than a glance; but of course Io and Europa by themselves turned out to be possibly more interesting than the planet itself. That is what keeping an open mind is about, not deciding in advance what will be interesting and then looking for things to support it. The responsible scientist does everything he can to disprove his results before going public, because he knows the more interesting and unique his conclusion, the more embarrassed he’ll be if it gets shot down by a better experiment. UFO believers don’t do this, and they are not doing responsible science. Keep an open mind, but be honest with yourself about what it is you’re actually looking at.
I don’t need aliens to think the universe is amazing. They’ll just be a bonus, if and when we ever find them.
north writes:
> You’ll have to settle for internet links…
. . .
> books would be too expensive to mail sorry.
You misunderstand what a cite is. When we ask for a cite for a fact, we expect people to offer either a website in which evidence for that fact is given, or else something in a book or newspaper or magazine article or an article in a journal in which evidence is given. A link is sufficient for a website. The name of the book, newspaper, magazine, or journal and the page on which the evidence is given is sufficient in those cases. It’s also good to summarize the evidence. No one expects you to send us books.
Once we have read the website, book, article, etc., we can then evaluate the evidence in the ordinary way that you check any evidence. The things we look for are what sort of evidence the person gives, what their expertise is in evaluating this sort of evidence, what other experts have said on the issue, how well this fits in with the rest of our knowledge of the universe, etc. Telling us that someone, somewhere has asserted something doesn’t convince any of us. Someone, somewhere has asserted just about any theory you can think of. You’re telling us that many people have asserted that UFO’s are clearly evidence of alien visits. We’re asking you to give us cites for the evidence that has convinced you.
While I’m with you all the way, this part is significantly wrong. AC is roughly 4.5 light years away so would have received our first radio signals over 100 years ago. As seen in the film Contact, the first TV signals would now be roughly 65 LY out. The volume of space that knows of our presence is getting respectably large and includes hundreds of stars by now. But this all helps your argument: the fact we have no yet heard any response shows that if there is life out there, it cannot be close and thus cannot have travelled here.
Actually, no. If there were another civilization comparable to ours, we could not, at present, detect it at that distance. (That’s SETI’s own evaluation.)
Thanks for the tips Wendell. I’ll do just that later this week when I get the time.
Alternatively, one hypothesis (entirely unproven) regarding the deafening radio silence is that there is some as-yet-unknown communications technology that will upon discovery supplant standard broadcast techniques and make civilizations using it effectively invisible in that part of the EM spectrum. In other words, there may be only a narrow sliver of time in a civilization’s history, effectively an eyeblink on the cosmic scale, during which the civilization can be detected with radio-based instruments. According to this idea, whenever we stumble across this technological breakthrough, whatever it is, we may hook up our sets and find ourselves awash in an ocean of transmissions we simply couldn’t see or hear before.
Naturally, this is completely speculative, since we have neither the evidence of an invisible civilization nor anything resembling a candidate for this new non-radio communications medium to support the hypothesis. It does, however, fit the available data, which is to say, none: when you’ve got no information, any explanation is as good as any other. 
One might even say your mind is so open that your brain is in danger of falling out.