“March 13, 1997, Phoenix, Arizona, USA. One of the most celebrated, yet controversial events of the 1990s was the fly over of anomalous objects in Phoenix, Arizona. Seen by literally thousands of residents in the metropolis, the film taken at that time is almost indisputable proof of UFOs. Debunkers have offered every imaginable explanation for the bright, circular object or objects that stirred the imagination of onlookers, but nothing short of UFO will do.”
I can’t say as I find that video particularly compelling. It’s just some lights in the sky that could really be anything from hot-air balloons with lights to a large meteor breaking up. It ain’t aliens, I’ll tell you that much.
I’d like to see it. As a rationalist, I find strong evidence quite compelling. But so far, what the ufologists have offered can be called strong the same way waving a single ground of coffee at a cup of cold water makes a strong beverage.
I think you guys are missing the obvious answer here. There’s virually no mention of UFOs visiting Earth before the mid 20th century because that’s when they started visiting us. Duh!
Common sense is subject to ones upbringing, culture, gender, and race even. I doubt the validity of a common sense at all. No such thing exists to me really.
Point being: What is common to you and your people is not common to the next.
The official story of this sighting (which Kewk ridicules) is that the lights were flares of some sort dropped on parachutes by a military plane some distance from Phoenix. One reason this was not taken seriously by some people was that many witnesses reported that the lights were directly over the city. Also, the pattern of lights, which from some points of view looked like a wedge, allowed some people to “connect the dots” and imagine a huge solid structure supporting all the lights.
But the Discovery Channel, TLC, or one of those networks, did a show in which they took one of the tapes, which seemed to show the lights suddenly blinking out one at a time, and superimposed on it a daylight shot, from the same location, of the mountain range in the distance (not visible in the nighttime tape with the lights, of course.) Every time a light went out, it was exactly as it passed behind the line of the remote mountains. QED.
The flares were extremely bright and human vision has a hard time accurately placing very bright light sources in a dark sky with no other frame of reference. Hence the many reports of meteors hundreds of miles away as nearby UFOs.
IIRC, the waters were also muddied by an early (incorrect) denial by the Air Force that military planes were flying in the area at the time.
Like godzillatemple said: the aliens visiting us didn’t invent their flying saucers until the period of time we know as the 20th century. Before that, they were driving around in their internal combustion engine cars, flying in their conventional aircraft, and surfing their version of the internet, just like us!
Are some of these UFO believers the same guys who chime in with comments about “Magical Sky Pixies” whenever anyone indicates a beilef in Christianity?
Sure. It’s possible that some time during the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history that a bunch of alien dudes visited in some sort of spacecraft. Unlikely as hell, yes, but still possible.
However, until very recently, there was not live footage of (non-staged) murders, airplane crashes, or car crashes for that matter. For while they may happen hundreds or thousands of times a day, not many people carry video cameras around with them all the time, and they aren’t always on, or pointing in the right direction. Only when we started installing stationary cameras on high-traffic roadways, and it became common for people to carry video cameras to airshows and the like did we start catching regular occurences of these things on film AS they happen.
While, like I said earlier, I don’t believe in UFOS (at least not the whole ‘little green men’ idea, though i will admit that there are often occurances of people seeing something and not knowing what it is, hence the unidentified part); if they do exist, they would be extremely rare (space is pretty big, and the number of species that could possibly even travel interstellar space is pretty small), much rarer than a plane or car crash certainly. And the likelyhood that they would occur where any one person would see them, would be much lower statistically. And the likelihood that one person would have a camera, on, with film, pointed in the right direction, for the few moments it would be around would be much lower. And the likelihood that same person wouldn’t have something in his past to suggest he may have made it all up, even more low.
While your point is noted (and likewise I acknowledge that you are not arguing in favor of the UFO-as-flying-saucer position), it’s worth considering that, of everything we routinely point cameras at, the sky is one of the most-photographed and most-scrutinized subjects, certainly far out of proportion of the number of actual things in it to scrutinize. Meteorologists, air traffic controllers, astronomers, Alfred Stieglitz ;)… Their days are full of looking up.
And yet, the overwhelming majority of flying-saucer reports do not come from these people who spend so much time looking at and recording the sky. They know what Venus looks like and where it’s typically found. They know better than to mistake a V of migrating geese brightly lit from the ground as an edge of lights on a triangular craft. No, the largest fraction of UFO reports comes from people who, based on lack of experience, are the least likely to know what they’re looking at, or to record it accurately with whatever apparatus or device they have at hand.
That’s telling, I think. So while there is something to what you say, I must say I don’t find it the most compelling argument in the advocate’s arsenal.
There have been many mysterious reports of lights in the sky, angels, succubi, night hags, all the modern reports are replicated in mythology and in strange folk tales , or reports gathered by interested parties like Charles Fort;
this basically means that the psychological mechanisms that lead to reports of flying saucers and close encounters today were active then.
Misinterpretation of natural phenomena, sleep paralysis, delusions, lies amd misreporting happened then and they still happen today.
Oh yes, there are aliens on other worlds; that much is almost certain.
They are not here.
IANA UFO believer but this would not necessarily be a contradictory position. Aliens from another planet would at least be a natural phenomenon as opposed to a supernatural belief.
Actually, given the vastness of the universe the evolution of life on at least some other planets would seem to be a mathematical certainty. The notion that life would uniquely arise on one planet, alone among trillions of star systems is actually almost absurd in its unliklihood. It would probably require supernatural intervention for there not to be other life in the universe.
Now, having said that, interstellar travel is a much different proposition and much more unlikely. Whatever intelligent life there is would likely be so sparse and so scattered that it would be virtually impossible to traverse the immense distance between “populated” star systems. It would take hundreds or thousands of years even at the speed of light…and that’s assuming that one species would have some way of even determining that planet X, in a star system 367,000 light years away, has intelligent life on it.
I would certainly hope, given the tremendous expenditure of time, technology and “human” resources it would take to launch such an endeavor, that once the aliens got here they would have some more significant motive than to kidnap hillbillies and ram metal rods up their asses.
Anyway, I don’t think it’s inconsistent to be atheistic or agnostic yet believe that life can arise on other planets. I do think that interstellar travel is next to inconceivable as a practical possibility, regardless of sci-fi inventions like “warp speed.”
