### Author:  [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)
#### Post date: [August 22, 2015, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/21 "2015-08-22T21:05:11Z")
> [@GusNSpot](#):
>
> I can give you a list of about 100 FBO’s I dare you to walk in with that ‘tude’ and say they are just a **service station** with the implication that your apparent attitude ( tude ) suggests. \
>
> Nice to see proof that you really are smart because you used the word **Virtually** at the start of your post.
>
> Great weasel word. I bow to your superior intellect. 😃
I’m not sure what your point of contention is one either question. FBOs are authorized service operators at airports, providing fuel, maintenance services, catering supply, et cetera. I suppose larger commercial airports (whether they have a customs entry or not) also have FBOs or some equivalent to supply commercial carriers but I’ve only had experience with them at s smaller airports where they are relatively autonomous and are used by private pilots and charters.
Erich von Däniken is responsible for nearly all of the ancient aliens ‘theories’ you see uncritically regurgitated on television despite the fact that many have been thoroughly debunked and von Däniken himself has been convicted of financial and commercial fraud. If you’d prefer to suggest otherwise, please provide something more substantial than snarky commentary.
Stranger
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### Author:  [@Morgenstern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morgenstern)
#### Post date: [August 22, 2015, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/22 "2015-08-22T21:41:00Z")
FBOs also operate flight schools (offer flight training) as well as rent and sell aircraft and flight supplies. In fact, that’s what they basically do.
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### Author:  [@GusNSpot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GusNSpot)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 12:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/23 "2015-08-23T00:02:02Z")
**SOAT**.
Sir.
I have seen some of the things that are on the net and TV in person. They exist.
In my mind there is not much doubt as to what is depicted.
I don’t subscribe to **EVD** ’s explanations but I don’t read & study them one at a time either. ( **ever** sounds about right )
If you want to say that they are not in existence, we will never agree on that. ( silly )
If you want to say they are done by humans, fine by me, But to claim that **EVD** is responsible for all thoughts, beliefs and ideas about them, please explain how people without TV or the ability to read were influenced by him. ( that is silly too )
Lead the charge, pick one little nuance, to be able to have the correct answer for all intelligent people. ( silly once a gain )
Oh, if you are that uneducated about aviation, try to remedy that before making flat statements.
I know so little about so many things that when I do get to “Pee” on the pillar of science, I try to get’er done. The top is always the target. Did you not know that?
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### Author:  [@Astroboy14](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Astroboy14)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 1:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/24 "2015-08-23T01:00:18Z")
Not a pilot, but an amateur astronomer for 40 + years (my cite is my user name).
You spend enough time looking at the night sky, you _ **will** _ see weird shit. I’ve seen many “UFOs”… most I was able to explain after a few minutes, but a few I have no idea what they were. At no point have I thought that what I saw was alien at all. Just weird, unusual stuff. Ask if you wanna hear.
Someone unused to looking at the night sky could easily be fooled into thinking that what they were seeing was an intelligently controlled vehicle of some sort. Doesn’t mean that they were aliens.
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### Author:  [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 1:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/25 "2015-08-23T01:20:59Z")
The nut cases who believe UFOs are alien spacecraft are completely ignorant of physics. In particular, of how long it could possibly take to travel such vast distances. And to what purpose? They outfit a ship able to hold generations of aliens, because the original ancestors will be long dead by the time the ship gets here even if it traveled at the speed of light, and then they don’t reveal themselves? Maybe after a look around, they turn around and head back, with generations in the far distant future being the ones to arrive back to a home lost in the mists of time? Preposterous.
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### Author:  [@GusNSpot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GusNSpot)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/26 "2015-08-23T05:14:05Z")
Back up and look at the whole **universe**. As much as you like to imagine anyway.
Now if that ain’t **Preposterous** , nothing is.
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### Author:  [@Morgenstern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morgenstern)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/27 "2015-08-23T05:28:17Z")
I expect with the increase of drones, we’re going to see an increase in UFO reports. At least we have an answer to “I wonder what that was” from now on.
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### Author:  [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 10:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/28 "2015-08-23T10:42:24Z")
> [@Siam\_Sam](#):
>
> The nut cases who believe UFOs are alien spacecraft are completely ignorant of physics. In particular, of how long it could possibly take to travel such vast distances. And to what purpose? They outfit a ship able to hold generations of aliens, because the original ancestors will be long dead by the time the ship gets here even if it traveled at the speed of light, and then they don’t reveal themselves? Maybe after a look around, they turn around and head back, with generations in the far distant future being the ones to arrive back to a home lost in the mists of time? Preposterous.
At Einsteinian speeds, relative time slows down.
Fast enough, and the crew doesn’t age.
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### Author:  [@Nelson\_Pike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nelson_Pike)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/29 "2015-08-23T18:06:06Z")
> [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](#):
>
> …Fast enough, and the crew doesn’t age.
IANA physicist, but I think the speed needed to stop aging would be the speed of light, and that is not allowed!
Also IIRC mass increases with speed, and hence the amount of energy required for propulsion increases, and at c an object would possess infinite mass and would require infinite energy to move.
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### Author:  [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/30 "2015-08-23T19:24:12Z")
I’ve seen unusual things over the years. Some of which I didn’t have enough evidence to definitively identify. But for sure I never thought any of them were aliens.
I’ve also seen things that other folks nearby didn’t recognize but I did, simply by the good fortune of having seen them myself before in other circumstances where the origin was obvious. So those folks were truly having a Unknown & Unidentified FO experience whereas I was having an Unusual & Cool FO experience. Over the same actual event / object.
Agree with the posts upthread that said any attempt to ask a lay person about speed, distance or size is worse than useless. Even for skilled sky watchers, you need to assume or recognize one of the three to derive the other two from the only info you have: shape and angular span of the object/light(s) plus its angle rate across the sky.
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### Author:  [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/31 "2015-08-23T19:29:33Z")
> [@Nelson\_Pike](#):
>
> IANA physicist, but I think the speed needed to stop aging would be the speed of light, and that is not allowed!
>
> Also IIRC mass increases with speed, and hence the amount of energy required for propulsion increases, and at c an object would possess infinite mass and would require infinite energy to move.
Actually, the closer to lightspeed you get, the more time slows.
Theoretically, it could slow enough to make the trip do-able.
---
### Author:  [@Nelson\_Pike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nelson_Pike)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/32 "2015-08-23T19:53:21Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#):
>
> While it must be acknowledged that the orogin of life on Earth came from an extraterrestrial source,
No, it need not be acknowledged.
But why do you think so? Because of the discovery of some meteorite remnants with features resembling fossilized terrestrial microbes, or the like?
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#):
>
> it is neither a necessary nor particularly insightful postulate; even if life did 't start on Earth, it was the result of an abiogenesis event somewhere, and unless the conditions for that event were totally unique in the history of the universe, they probably occur on Earth and elsewhere with regular frequency (as measured over the cosmic time scales of many hundreds of millions of years between the nucleosynthesis of carbon and nitrogen (and other elements that are necessary for our DNA-coded life) to the extent that the formation of life is virtually inevitable given any favorable conditions.
All terrestrial life is genetically descended from one ancestral source. One source arising after the planet Earth had existed for several billion years does not make for any kind of “regular frequency”.
---
### Author:  [@Nelson\_Pike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nelson_Pike)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/33 "2015-08-23T20:05:18Z")
> [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](#):
>
> Actually, the closer to lightspeed you get, the more time slows.
>
> Theoretically, it could slow enough to make the trip do-able.
The point I was trying to make was that a superatomic object cannot closely approach c without unobtainable mass-energy requirements.
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### Author:  [@Consensus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Consensus)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/34 "2015-08-23T20:55:21Z")
Because we know so little it’s easy to dismis, but the subject of UFOs is a very powerfull one. Ofcourse most of them are not alien, but that won’t stop us from wondering what could be out there.
Given scientific progress and technology of the last 100 yrs I find it not unthinkable to have FTL capabillities in say 10,000 yrs. Quantum physics have shown us a world with completely different rules and behaviour. Where time and space might not be so relevant as previously assumed.
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### Author:  [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 9:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/35 "2015-08-23T21:02:28Z")
> [@Nelson\_Pike](#):
>
> All terrestrial life is genetically descended from one ancestral source. One source arising after the planet Earth had existed for several billion years does not make for any kind of “regular frequency”.
All terrestial life today comes from one source, as far as we can tell. But that doesn’t mean that other living or proto-living systems could not have arisen previously or even successively, and failed in competition with extant life. Unless the conditions on primordial Earth were unique throughout the universe (which does not appear to be the case) or there is some extra-special property about living matter that cannot be found in ordinary organic compounds (nothing we can find in the nearly a century that molecular biology has been a discipline) the odds are very likely that live has been generated and evolved elsewhere, even if the odds of any particular interaction resulting in a self-organizing system that could evolve into a living organism are slight. Whether the self-organizing system that became the biosphere on Earth today started on Earth or elsewhere in terms of the essential question of whether and how frequently life may form elsewhere. But nor does it provide support for dubious claims of flying saucers, alien abductions and medical procedures, ancient aliens and artifacts, et cetera.
Stranger
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### Author:  [@grude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/grude)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/36 "2015-08-23T21:16:29Z")
> [@GusNSpot](#):
>
> The Green Flash over land.
I saw this at around 3-4am with another person, nearly half the sky turned vivid green for no more than a second or two.
I don’t think it was aliens but was interesting.
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### Author:  [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/37 "2015-08-23T22:52:24Z")
> [@Consensus](#):
>
> Because we know so little it’s easy to dismis, but the subject of UFOs is a very powerfull one. Ofcourse most of them are not alien, but that won’t stop us from wondering what could be out there.
>
> Given scientific progress and technology of the last 100 yrs I find it not unthinkable to have FTL capabillities in say 10,000 yrs. Quantum physics have shown us a world with completely different rules and behaviour. Where time and space might not be so relevant as previously assumed.
We have no proof, or supportable evidence, that **any** UFOs are alien ships.
---
### Author:  [@Claverhouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Claverhouse)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2015, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/38 "2015-08-23T23:02:25Z")
> [@GusNSpot](#):
>
> I have seen a few things, not necessarily a UFO, more like a ‘Your lying, there is no such thing as a 4 winged duck.’ The Green Flash over land. Almost having a fight with a stranger in an Florida FBO in the middle of the night who was insisting I was Kenny Rogers. Coming around a cloud and seeing a million rivets in a rather loose formation.
Was that near the Tannhäuser Gate, by any chance ?
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### Author:  [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 12:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/39 "2015-08-24T00:25:19Z")
What is this “green flash”?
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### Author:  [@Fenris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fenris)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/40 "2015-08-24T01:38:21Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#):
>
> What is this “green flash”?
[Green flash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_flash)
I sorta saw one once…ever…but it was more like a green smudge. I don’t know if the air was hazy or what, but it wasn’t the sharp, crisp thing you’re supposed to see.
Or it could have just been the 'shrooms kicking in. 😉
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