That’s exactly the point I want north et al. to grasp. I recognize in myself the strong tendency toward True Believerhood on this issue. I feel so strongly, so intuitively, that the odds of the universe being populated only by us are so vanishingly small as to not be worth consideration. But I also know that I have no hard evidence on which to base this belief, so I must be careful to leave it in the “unproven” box.
Otherwise, just like you say, my brain falls out.
That’s the distinction I’m hoping north and others can recognize. There are very good reasons for thinking that there must be intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos, and it’s not completely impossible that we may meet said life at some point in the future, but neither of these hypotheticals has the benefit of anything like hard evidence. I want to believe, but it would be irresponsible to actually cross that line and decide that there is what I want there to be.
It is my hope that north appreciates the subtle yet critical difference in the two points of view.
I like the mathematical odds (based on the vastness of the Universe and the fact there is life on our planet) that there is indeed alien life out there somewhere.
However it may well not have reached us yet (based on those vast distances and the pesky nature of nothing solid travelling faster than light).
I also believe that there is an invisible permanent force that pulls masses together, that properly organised light can burn through metal and that pressing keys on my computer can send my words around the World.
Because there is verifiable evidence for all these claims.
I don’t know of any evidence for aliens having visited Earth.
I’m satisfied with all the above, but let me try a different viewpoint.
Suppose everything claimed is true:
an alien ship landed at Roswell over 50 years ago
there were aliens and autopsies
the evidence is all held at Area 51
aliens constantly visit us (presumably looking for the crashed ship),
and all this is being suppressed by the US Government.
Well just how many people would be in the know?
Presumably (since 1947) every President , every senior White House staffer, all the top military brass, all the intelligence community and all the scientists and technicians at Area 51.
Now it’s pretty difficult to keep things secret for that long, with that many people involved. After all, didn’t the atom bomb leak to the Soviets?
How come nobody has gone for the publicity, with fame and fortune following?
How come nobody has tried to make political capital out of it?
How come no investigative journalist has got even a whiff of the story?
When will the American public be ready for the news?
The volume of space that our radio broadcasts have flooded into has become pretty darn large, but as you get out of our solar system, the power level is so low, buried in the cosmic background radiation, that they would be completely undetectable to anyone even as close as Proxima Centauri.
I’ve heard that life, as we know it, couldn’t have arisen too much closer to the galactic center because of the radiation from the other stars. So maybe that alien craft should have to look at only 300 billion stars or so to find us, each separated by years and years of exceedingly dangerous and costly space travel.
To me too, but that doesn’t make me go around saying there’s evidence that aliens are visiting the Earth.
There is evidence availible that suggests to very clear thinking people that this is a distinct possibility. Also “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Then what’s your beef with Cecil saying there isn’t any?
My beef is with people who whole-heartedly dismiss, scorn or ridicule the subject without taking a serious look at the evidence available.
Seriously, you should drop this attitude; it won’t help you. Pretending that anyone who opposes you has a closed mind and couldn’t be convinced by anything isn’t a good debate technique.
Now who’s getting snippy? For the record I don’t think that anyone who opposes me has a closed mind. I do think however, that people who call serious UFO researchers loony or crazy are well on their way to being close minded or are already firmly there. What is worse they are wrongly influencing other people to think this way.
Why not? Are you just dismissing the possibility out of hand? (Re: Goat people)
Post a topic on Goat people living under Stonehenge and see if I show up.
So now it’s a 50/50? A moment ago, it was “clear”. By the way, this is your cue to say that you merely claimed they hid something, which they did: Project Mogul.
You seem to deliberately misunderstand or misstate my words so you can score points later. What I mean by 50/50 is whether you believe or not the information officer was badly informed. It’s clear that the government hid something and lied about it more than once. Here’s a brief chronology of their claims about what crashed there that day:
A flying saucer
A radar reflector and weather balloon
A Mogul balloon train over 500 feet long with 23 balloons, sonobuoys, etc.
And most recently, a Mogul balloon train plus crash test dummies dropped at least six years AFTER the 1947 crashes Southeast of Corona and West of Magdalena.
As for the information officer who released the original press release it was Lt. Walter Haut; the Roswell AAF Base Public Relations Officer. He issued the press release because he was ordered to do so by Colonel William Blanchard, Commander of the 509th and of Roswell Army Air Field. In case you think Haut was a dummy he was a member of the West Point All Star class of 1938, became a four-star general by the time he was 48 and was Vice Chief of Staff of the USAF when he died of a massive heart attack at the Pentagon in 1966. Incidentally the 509th bomber squadron was one of the most elite military groups in the world at the time, consisting of hand picked officers and men as well as ultra-high security. It was the 509th that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the two tested in the Pacific Ocean in July, 1946, during Operation Crossroads.
It’s not a case of “explaining away”. It’s a case of finding one incident where the best, as in most likely, explanation is aliens visiting Earth.
First do some serious research into the evidence and then make your own conclusions instead of assuming there is no one “best incident” because you haven’t seen it on the nightly news.
So the conclusion opposes yours, and therefore it’s disinformation? Any evidence that it’s not legit?
No. I said most people involved in the UFO field. I didn’t say that it was my opinion. Project Blue Book concluded that out of 12,618 UFO reports 701 or 18% were unknowns. To me this is a significant number however the accuracy and method of Project Blue Books “explained” findings has been opposed in many books and papers (and therefore admittedly it’s “unexplained” sightings as well). Read up on it from a variety of sources and make your own conclusions.
*Before I run around finding cites that the Earth revolves around the sun, something you should have learned a long time ago, first tell me which of the following two propositions it is you’re subscribing to:
The Earth doesn’t revolve around the sun.
Galileo didn’t have any evidence, he just guessed.*
I was kidding. Your snippiness seems to be getting worse however. When you accused me of snippiness I apologized.
Please post a pointer to some of this evidence. As of yet, I haven’t seen anything that could be called evidence. You have handwaving and fairly farfetched conjecture, but nothing to support it.
For example, there is no physical evidence from Roswell, just testimony and press releases. While this is something, it falls well below the threashold for any type of extraordinary claim. If you can provide some physical evidence you would go a long way towards giving support to your (as yet) unsupported conjecture.
aliens constantly visit us (presumably looking for the crashed ship),
and there are many claims that these aliens have been seen.
What are the aliens attempting?
They are trying to contact us.
All we know about them is that they can cross space. This demands advanced technology, organisation and communication skills. Yet somehow the best they can manage is to fly past briefly. If crop circles are aliens communicating, then they are astonishingly inept.
We humans train dogs to guide blind people, find drugs and herd sheep.
We send messages using pigeons and teach rats to cope with mazes.
How come these aliens can’t communicate with us?
They are trying to remain concealed.
Once again the aliens don’t seem to be very good at things. Can’t they monitor our communications and find out what we can detect? Why don’t they stage a swift raid on Area 51, recover their spaceship and nip off home?
Bear in mind that these aliens have had over 50 years to plan a strategy. In that time, our puny (by comparison) technology has invented computers, the Internet, lasers, space flight and cracked our genetic code. What have these aliens been doing?
Indeed, as we have absolutely no clue about how likely it is that life could appear. For instance, some believe that without the moon, earth orbit wouldn’t be stable enough on the long term to allow life to evolove. Since the moon is the result of a collision between two celestial bodies, it would strongly reduce the likehood of finding another planet where life could appear.
Similarily, what is the likehood of life appearing on a planet with ideal conditions. Maybe it’s a vanishingly small chance. Maybe one chance on one thousand billions of billions, for all we know. Assuming that life does appear, it tells nothing about the likehood that sentience will appear. After all, there was no sentient life on earth for 4 billions years, and I’ve no reason to assume that, if the hominoids had been wipped out, another sentient specie would have appeared during the 4 billions next years left before the sun kiss us bye bye.
As pointed out by someone else, there could be at the contrary millions of sentient races in our galaxy and we could be unable to detect them, and them to detect us, because the signals we’re sending or searching for is for them the equivalent of smoke signals, something that nobody apart us is using anymore or would search for.
IOW, there’s absolutely no way to know. I would say I’m “agnostic” regarding the existence of extraterrestial life. Not only we don’t know, but currently, we can’t know, not even make an educated guess.
Even if the chances were that low, we wouldn’t be alone in the Universe. We know that the Universe is at least hundreds of billions of lightyears across. By my back-of-the envelope estimation, that would still leave tens of millions of life-bearing planets. And the current cosmological evidence seems to suggest that the Universe is, in fact, infinite. In that case, even if the odds of life forming were one in a googol, or whatever the numbers spouted by the creationists are, there would be an infinite number of intelligent civilizations in the Universe. No, it’s not very reasonable to suppose that we’re all that’s going in the entire shebang.
However, even if there are aliens out there, it’s ludicrous to suggest that they’re in any way connected with the Roswell incident, Area 51, or anything in Blue Book. Let’s go the other way with our assumptions, and assume that the Universe is filled to the brim with sentient beings. The closest they could be would be the star epsilon Eridani, about ten lightyears away. Now, I don’t know about what level of technology the Eridanians would have, but I find it hard to believe they could embark on a 10 ly trip as a casual jaunt. In any event, if they wanted to contact us, it would be far, far easier and safer to do so by radio, or other forms of light, than to come here personally. Even if they have some hypothetical better form of communication, they must have the technology for something as simple as a radio, which a moderately skilled second-grader can build out of a piece of rock and some bits of copper. If they wanted to study us, they would be able to do so completely unnoticed: We have a hard time even spotting asteroids, much less an alien ship trying to avoid being noticed, much less realizing that such a ship is not an asteroid. They would have no motive for invading us: Any resource they could hope to get from Earth, they could get more easily from asteroids and comets in their own system. In short, even if there were aliens relatively nearby, and even if they were interested in us for some reason, we wouldn’t be seeing glimpses of their ships and fragments of their materials.
Geeze Bosda I’m still trying to formulate (with the time I have) a decent reply to Miller, Cervaise, and Chronos who have made some good points and are making me think hard before I reply. But anyway since you insist here goes…
But you can get a much, much better view of the wonders of the Universe by studying Astronomy.
I agree with you that you can get a wonderful view of the Universe through Astronomy. I love Astronomy and have been infatuated with the night sky ever since my dad taught me the constellations when I was a young boy. I’m no expert, but I believe science to be an open-ended process of discovery. Just because Astronomy gives me a fantastic (but limited) view of the Universe does not lead me to believe that all the mysteries of said Universe are solved, or that the laws of the Universe actually conform to what Astronomy or other sciences believe them to be at this time. Like Dr. J. Allen Hynek, former Chairman of the Dept. of Astronomy at North Western University and scientific advisor to Project Bluebook from 1952-1969 once said on science and UFO’s: “It reminds me of the days of Galileo when he was trying to get people to look at the sun spots. They would say that the sun is a symbol of God; God is perfect; therefore the sun is perfect; therefore spots cannot exist: therefore there is no point in looking.” Newsweek, Nov. 21, 1977, p. 97
Here are some thoughts of a noted astronomer on the subject of UFO’s (not that I think quoting astonomers will sway you, but it is fun to note that respected scientists often have something interesting to say on the debate):
Peter A. Sturrock: “The definitive resolution of the UFO enigma will not come about unless and until the problem is subjected to open and extensive scientific study by the normal procedures of established science. This requires a change in attitude primarily on the part of scientists and administrators in universities.” Sturrock, Peter A., Report on a Survey of the American Astronomical Society concerning the UFO Phenomenon, Stanford University Report SUIPR 68IR, 1977.
“Although… the scientific community has tended to minimize the significance of the UFO phenomenon, certain individual scientists have argued that the phenomenon is both real and significant. Such views have been presented in the Hearings of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics [and elsewhere]. It is also notable that one major national scientific society, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, set up a subcommittee in 1967 to ‘gain a fresh and objective perspective on the UFO phenomenon.’ In their public statements (but not necessarily in their private statements), scientists express a generally negative attitude towards the UFO problem, and it is interesting to try to understand this attitude. Most scientists have never had the occasion to confront evidence concerning the UFO phenomenon. To a scientist, the main source of hard information (other than his own experiments’ observations) is provided by the scientific journals. With rare exceptions, scientific journals do not publish reports of UFO observations. The decision not to publish is made by the editor acting on the advice of reviewers. This process is self-reinforcing: the apparent lack of data confirms the view that there is nothing to the UFO phenomenon, and this view works against the presentation of relevant data.” “An Analysis of the Condon Report on the Colorado UFO Project”, Sturrock, Peter A., Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1987.
Dr. Sturrock was Professor of Space Science and Astrophysics Deputy Director of the Center for Space Sciences and Astrophysics at Stanford University, and Director of the Skylab Workshop on Solar Flares in 1977.
You said: A clearer view, unobstructed by con-artists, faked photos, and hustling “experts” who cite sources debunked as frauds decades ago.
I’m not sure if I understand you correctly but are you saying that the study of Ufology is solely comprised of the elements you cite above (con-artists, faked photos, and hustling “experts”)? If that’s what you are saying, I’m not sure what we have left to discuss (is it what you are saying?). If it is, it seems you’ve already made up your mind on the situation. I would add however, that stating that all sources involved with Ufology have been debunked as frauds decades ago is blindingly optimistic (on your part) at best. Like any controversial area of research you are apt to find some or all of those elements you list above in Ufology. To state that all of Ufology is composed of these elements and that all credible researchers have been “debunked as frauds” is flat out irresponsible however, and I dare say betrays nothing more than a superficial knowledge of the field.
And yet here we still wait for you to post some evidence.
People here (and in the real world) are perfectly willing to examine evidence with an open mind. But, so far, all that has been presented has been worthless as evidence. No one argues that a closed mind isn’t useful in science, but until you have evidence it’s pretty hard to conduct science.
For example, there is no physical evidence from Roswell, just testimony and press releases. While this is something, it falls well below the threashold for any type of extraordinary claim. If you can provide some physical evidence you would go a long way towards giving support to your (as yet) unsupported conjecture.
RE: Roswell “physical evidence”: I’m not sure what you expect me to post as evidence. Do you expect me to send a flat-bed truck to your door with the Roswell UFO and it’s dead crew on it as evidence? Even if I could do that, I’d probably be having my buddies over for a beer to show it off and poke the dead aliens with a stick instead. If you want physical evidence of a crashed UFO in Roswell (as in a piece of the saucer or a dead alien) I don’t have that kind of evidence and you must know that very well (plus how would I “post” it anyway?). There is however, ample evidence to suggest that a cover-up of a crashed UFO did occur after the initial official press release stating that a crashed flying saucer occurred. This includes eye-witness testimony, declassified military documents, photos, press releases, etc. Where you fall on the matter, after you’ve reviewed what is available and pieced both sides of the story together, is up to you.
I’ll tell you one thing, whatever your conclusions, it’ll be an interesting ride.
As for “posting” evidence I can only refer you to papers, studies, web-pages, and books. Is that what you mean? I’m having a hard time figuring out your motives here. Are you asking me to post “physical evidence” knowing full well that it’s impossible for me to actually “post” physical evidence so that I have to say “I can’t” and you can then shout “Ah-ha I have you, you B$@#%!” and feel superior in your knowledge that no physical evidence of UFO’s exist because I couldn’t post it?
If that’s not where you are coming from then try this web-page for starters: UFO's: General / Overview - UFO Evidence
If it’s not already a foregone conclusion, let me know how it works out for you.
Of course you don’t have to post physical evidence online. But a pointer to a website that goes through the available physical evidence would go a long way.
The link you provided (I may have missed it early) is a good start. Having just read part of that site so far I have to say that the evidence they have provided is very weak. No one doubts that pilots and eyewitnesses have seen things that they can’t identify. In that manner, UFOs exist. But most eventually get explained quite easily without resorting to aliens.
The remaining few might be aliens, but they might be other ordinary things that we haven’t yet gotten to the bottom of yet, and may never due to lack of available evidence. All that is presented is eyewitness accounts that don’t yet have full and complete explanations. You can get eyewitness accounts for dragons, bigfoot, and pink elephants as well, but you’d wait until you found a body before you would conclude that they exist.
I think the problem is that there is some evidence, but it’s not very convincing evidence for aliens. Most people who review the eyewitness accounts can easily dismiss them as faulty because there is no coraborating physical evidence. Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable, and even if you take them as true the conclusions of the witnesses isn’t necessarily correct.
Well see the thing is Tele-baby, you’re talking to an eyewitness. It was a UFO sighting that got me interested in all of this stuff in the first place. What I saw certainly defied the laws of physics as we know them. Now I can’t be 100% sure that that craft was powered by aliens or alien technology, nobody waved at me from saucer portholes, and as far as I know I don’t have any probes in any unmentionable places or anything but the best way I can describe it is that it was a pretty “alien” experience (also, a very competent friend sitting beside me saw the same object so I know I’m not completely bonkers). It was no known aircraft that we have today (and trust me I know aircraft very, very well), although it is possible it could have been some ultra-advanced military flying saucer-shaped thingy. Whatever it was, we couldn’t come up with any other explanation for it (and sure maybe we have been biased by media to think of aliens from outer space, I mean, who hasn’t seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind?).
I tell you this not because I expect you to conclude that saucers are real and aliens are visiting earth based on my story, I tell you simply so that you may understand where I’m coming from on the subject. I know that saucers are real. I don’t know what they are, and I don’t know that aliens are visiting earth in them for sure, but if I tend to lean in that direction I am completely comfortable with that based on my experience and subsequent years of studies on the subject. I also respect the opinion of anyone else that examines the available evidence and concludes that there is no proof to suggest that aliens from another planet are visiting earth, without of course, resorting to mocking those that happen to believe the opposite.
Flying saucers are real. Unfortunately the majority of the scientific community acts as though the tabloids are the only possible sources of UFO data. There are at least six large scale scientific studies, more than ten PhD Theses, and many dozens of published professional papers by professional scientists. These are all almost always ignored and even worse, the tabloid stink has stuck to the subject like ultra-superglue. Unfortunately, this is probably not going to change anytime soon. Someday however, I believe we will feel foolish for thinking that we were alone in the universe and the only life-form that had the technology to explore it. We’ll feel foolish for being naïve enough to think that our knowledge of the laws that govern our universe was absolute too.
Sorry for the hand-waving, but that’s just the way I feel.
North
Ps: I do have some missing time by the way, but it involves Mexico, a bottle or two of tequila, and a strip joint (not the time I saw the UFO either).
