I recommend you pick up The Bad Astronomer’s book Bad Astronomy and look for the anecdote about the ducks.
For the purposes of this poll, ‘UFO’ means an extraterrestrial craft.
… Do you believe UFOs exist and are visiting the Earth?
I take the question to be about UFOs that are piloted by extraterrestrial intelligence. Then my answer is no. These extraterrestrial crafts may be flying all over the universe, but IMHO they haven’t been here yet. But there’s no doubt that there are lots of UFOs in the sense of stuff in the sky that we can’t explain. Now if the question is just about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, then my answer is maybe. I used to feel that the chances for extraterrestrial intelligence is 100%, given the vastness of the universe and my distaste for the arrogant belief that we Earthlings are somehow unique. But I’m not so sure now. Things have to be just right for life such as ours to sprout and maybe, just maybe, we are indeed alone in the universe at this exact point in time. And even if we’re not alone at the moment, the other sentient beings are so far away that we are effectively alone.
I beleive in the possibility (probability) of ET life, but have not seen any credible evidence that we have been visited by UFOs. I think the popularity of UFOs was more of a cultural phenomena and a need to believe in something. I do not have a cite, but I think that the volume of UFO sitings have gone down in the past decade. This at a time when the amount of video cameras have gone way up. This does not make sense if we are having regular visits by UFOs.
Also I do not think many people take into account how long the galaxy has existed. If an advanced civilization lasted for on average of 50,000 years (pulling a number out of my ass), then over billions of years the odds of two intelligent civilizations existing within light years of each other at the same time is very small.
Possible alien types who would want to come here:
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Explorers. They were lured here by some wobble effect we have on our sun, or some kind of astronomical weirdness they just happened to notice. Given that light takes hundreds of years to travel from our solar system to neighboring stars, I don’t see how anything we’ve done recently has attracted their attention, like inventing radio and television. The gift package spacecraft we sent back out in the 70s has only recently left our solar system. It might find another SS in a couple of thousand years.
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Gold Panners. They were there when the exploratory reports came back to their home world, and decided that the colored light waves they saw in their telescopes indicates some sort of precious element in our atmosphere that can be collected, brought back to their planet, and utilized. Given the cost of time and resources it would take to get here, it has to be something they REALLY want. They’re not going to care if a few million indigenous life forms get squashed along the way.
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Immigrants. They moved away from their native planet because they can’t stand it there anymore. They heard that ours has the same living conditions more or less. They’re going to come here, fell our skyscrapers, and make log cabins out of them. They’ll give us at most the same level of repect we gave to natives when we moved to their countries. Which means, they’ll give us some trinkets to make us go WOW, then next thing we know we’re on our way to a reservation on planet Oklahoma. They don’t plan on going back to their home world.
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Military Operations. Our planet makes a good base for their intergalactic war. The natives will work for next to nothing, and will accept beads as payment. We’ll be the equivalent of sheepherders to their planetkillers.
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Corporations. We have resources they can exploit for their own personal gain. They’ll stay here till the planet is effectively strip-mined, then move somewhere else.
This of course implies that aliens have a reason they’re willing to spend fortunes in resources, fuel, personnel, and time to get to this planet specifically. If they were relatively nearby, they’d only be sending expendable machinery to study us, which we would have noticed by now. And maybe have. Since they’re REALLY far away, the aliens are not likely to come unless they mean to stay.
That’s why any alien that comes here, I’m taking a shotgun after his ass.
Civilizations capable of interstellar flight would possess the technology to conceal themselves and have no inclination to reveal themselves to a planet of volatile, superstitious savages. I’d expect wholly professional behavior on their part, as they catalog their findings, check appropriate boxes, and move on, undetected. What do you expect, a 300-meter boombox in the sky? 
I think the more fitting analogy would be a scientist peering through a microscope at a virus. The virus’ inability to understand what is transpiring doesn’t negate it actually happening.
And why should we have “overheard” anything “by now”? By now, of course, I suppose you mean our having spent 30 or so years radioing for intelligent companionship using what is tantamount to our beating a stone against a log.
… But I’m not so sure now. Things have to be just right for life such as ours to sprout and maybe, just maybe, we are indeed alone in the universe at this exact point in time. And even if we’re not alone at the moment, the other sentient beings are so far away that we are effectively alone.
“Just right” conditions? There are upward of 200 billion suns in our galaxy. How large a statistical universe do you need?
I’ve described it as looking like the saucer in a certain scene of The Day The Earth Stood Still. To be clear, this is how it looked: Imagine an ellipse. Now imagine the ellipse is a very bright flourescent light. Being bright, the edges cannot be made out. It’s just a light. I viewed it through a thin cloud cover at about ten in the morning in the early-'70s. Since there was a bit of haze, it was even more indistinct. Interestingly, I’d seen it before – in a photograph.
When my dad was in the Navy a helicopter (a Kaman Sea Sprite, FWIW) ran out of fuel before it could make it to the ship. One photo I have shows the helicopter on its side in the ocean, being supported by one of its inflatable pontoons. Dad is in his swimming trunks, and is helping to attach a line to it. The same elliptical shape is seen on the surface of the water in the photograph. Obviously, it’s not a UFO. It’s either a strange reflection from the film of jet fuel, or it’s a flaw in the Polaroid.
Anyway, even though I was a kid with an active imagination, I could imagine any number of ‘reasonable explanations’ for what I saw that did not rely on alien intelligence. Pulling out Occam’s Razor, the simplest answer is that what I saw was the sun reflecting off of a Goodyear blimp or that it was some other trick of the light/refraction.
I had an elderly neighbour when I moved up here who swore he saw newsreel footage of UFOs flying over Washington D.C. I told him about Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, and he admitted that they may have made a movie about it; but he saw an actual newsreel.
Can you share the anecdote here?
Maybe we haven’t made it to sentience yet.
I previously posted it here. (The full story is on pages 202-204 of Phil Plait’s book.) The whole thread in which that single post appears, incidentally, is recommended reading for anyone who wonders where I and other UFO “non-believers” are coming from, in terms of our overall worldview, and why we find the evidence so far offered, particularly the testimony of eyewitnesses, so uncompelling.
I believe in UFO’s. I just don’t believe they are alien spacecraft.
I also that there are tacos that look like the virgin mary. I just don’t believe that it’s a sign of God.
Good anecdote, Cervaise. Sometimes a flock of ducks is just a flock of ducks.
I live near a landing approach path for a large airport, and I have noticed the following in the evening: You can see the lights from commercial airliners for what must be a hundred miles away (they’re VERY bright), and especially if the plane is moving nearly in your line of sight, all you see is a very bright light that doesn’t move perceptibly for a couple of minutes. Then when it finally gets near you, then the light seems to start moving all of a sudden; it’s very hard to judge the postition of something so far away that you have zero perspective.
I’d like to raise another question however: exactly how do we know that UFO=spacecraft? Says who? The UFO stories I’ve heard seem to break down into the following categories:
-lights in the sky
-objects in the sky
-an artificial object in the sky, (or more rarely, on the ground)
-an artificial object with bizarre beings inside
-a bizarre being who announces “I am Drxzlpt from the star you call Epsilon Erindi”
That last category, communication with non-human beings, is the rarest and the least reliable; the reports most likely to be hoaxes, crackpots or bad science fiction. Yet those reports seem to have imprinted the entire UFO=Spacecraft concept into the popular conciousness.
There are two entirely different concepts of extraterrestrial life: the astronomers’ concept and the UFO enthusiasts’ concept; and they’re as different as whether you consider what’s up in the sky to be Outer Space or Heaven. The UFO-alien concept is so unlikely from what we know so far about science and the universe that I could as easily believe that UFOs are angels or demons as I could believe that they’re aliens.
So my final answer? I believe that something inadequately explained is going on, but I have no idea what.
Here’s what I’ve seen as a workable list of sighting types. (No, I don’t believe ET is here, see my other posts. This just helps people talk about what they think they encountered.)
**Classifications of Sightings **
[ul]
[li]Nocturnal lights - unexplained lights in the sky at night, 500 yards or more away.[/li][li]Daylight disks - unexplained objects seen in daylight, 500 yards or more away. [/li][li]Radar visuals - any unexplained sighting on radar.[/li][li]Close encounter I - unexplained lights or objects within 300 yards.[/li][li]Close encounter II - a sighting that leaves physical evidence.[/li][li]Close encounter III - physical contact with aliens.[/li][li]Close encounter IV - abduction by aliens.[/li][/ul]
NOCLUEBOY: There are also reports of “ships” and/or lights on the ground that they fly off … as well.
I am agnostic on UFOs (but not on other Intelligent Life in the Universe which I believe in).
I have seen no strong evidence of Earth visting UFOs (or at least didn’t recognize it as such) but if NASA announced that "UFO"s *were * surveying earth and they weren’t sure ewhy/what for, I wouldn’t join the riot, money shredding and church burnings some speculate would follow.
"Cool, I hope they land some day" would be about all I would say as I went back to work Monday morning