# Questions about UFO's (especially for pilots)
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [August 21, 2015, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427 "2015-08-21T13:38:07Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 3
### Author:  [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/41 "2015-08-24T02:48:57Z")
> [@grude](#):
>
> 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.
Was it cloudy? It was most likely a meteorite. Many of them burn green when they burn up in the atmosphere. If it was a bit cloudy, that light would’ve diffused across the sky.
Myself and my friend witnessed such a thing late one night in the 90s looking out the window of a Big Boy’s. A bright green trail that blazed through the cloud layer. Very alien feeling. We jumped in the car hoping to track it, but of course it was dozens of miles away, and experts the next day reported it probably landed in Lake St. Clair or Lake Erie.
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### Author:  [@GusNSpot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GusNSpot)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 4:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/42 "2015-08-24T04:09:48Z")
> [@Claverhouse](#):
>
> Was that near the Tannhäuser Gate, by any chance ?
I wish… “I’ve… seen things… you people wouldn’t believe.” 😃
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### Author:  [@Consensus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Consensus)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 8:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/43 "2015-08-24T08:45:20Z")
> [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](#):
>
> We have no proof, or supportable evidence, that **any** UFOs are alien ships.
Replace ‘alien ships’ with anything you like and the statement still stands. An unknown remains an unknown, no matter what we think it is or is not.
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/44 "2015-08-24T12:13:40Z")
> [@GusNSpot](#):
>
> ‘All that’ from one guy?? Wow!!! Must have worked his ass off to make all those TV shows and books with fake authors names… Impressive…
>
> May I get an explanation of how only one person has reported or written about those things?
>
> I know the History, Science and other channels are all totally wrong according to the scientist of the SDMB, but come on, one guy??? :smack:
To be fair, although Erich van Daniken was probably the most effective spokesman for the Ancient Astronaut idea, and most incarnations of the idea were probably stimulated by his books (as **Stranger** asserts), he was by no means the first or only one promoting the idea. I was already familiar with claims of Ancient Astronauts long before van Daniken. It shows up in the work of Frank Edwards (_Stranger than Science, Strange World, UFOs…Serious Business_, and others). Edwards had apparently been a radio talk show show, but I knew him as the author of multiple books on what would later be called “paranormal phenomena”. In addition to Ancient Astronauts, he was writing about things like the Bermuda Triangle long before Berlitz. The thing is, when I looked deweper into the things Edwards reported, I found an amazing lack of investigative curiosity and skepticism. There was often a simple, rational explanation that Edwards ignored. Competing possibilities were always resolved in favor of the weirdr one. Sometimes, I;m convinced, he simply lied.
There was French author, too, whose name I’ve forgotten, who claimed that astronauts were influencing man’s history as long ago as prehistoric times, and lugged out the same sort of “proofs” that van Daniken did.
Ironically, one of the sourc es of “Ancient Astronauts” might be the UFO skeptics themselves. UFO debunker (and director of the Harvard Smithsonian Observatory) Donald Menzel used to point out in his lectures and books in the 1950s that people have always been seeing unusual things in the skies, and brought up the Visions of Ezekiel as an example. Sure enough, soon UFO enthusiasts were citing Ezekiel’s visions as examples of UFOs (in the sense of Alien Spacecraft, not as Unexplained Phenomena, as Menzel intended). This significantly predates van Daniken.
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### Author:  [@MrAtoz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrAtoz)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 1:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/45 "2015-08-24T13:28:28Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#):
>
> There was French author, too, whose name I’ve forgotten, who claimed that astronauts were influencing man’s history as long ago as prehistoric times, and lugged out the same sort of “proofs” that van Daniken did.
Is [Jacques Vallée](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Vall%C3%A9e) the man you’re thinking of? He proposed a UFO explanation for things like the Miracle of Fatima and the revelations to Joseph Smith. He was reportedly the inspiration for the character played by François Truffaut in _Close Encounters_. Interestingly, he rejected the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” in favor of the “extradimensional hypothesis”–that is, he argued that UFOs were visitations not from other planets, but from parallel dimensions.
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/46 "2015-08-24T13:53:20Z")
> [@MrAtoz](#):
>
> Is [Jacques Vallée](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Vall%C3%A9e) the man you’re thinking of? He proposed a UFO explanation for things like the Miracle of Fatima and the revelations to Joseph Smith. He was reportedly the inspiration for the character played by François Truffaut in _Close Encounters_. Interestingly, he rejected the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” in favor of the “extradimensional hypothesis”–that is, he argued that UFOs were visitations not from other planets, but from parallel dimensions.
Nope. I recall Vallee, who was more of a UFO enthusiast than an Ancient Astronaut guy. The one I;'m thinking of wrote a book called something like “100 million years of Human History”, giving ancient UFOnauts as the source for a lot of human myth, legend, and technology.
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### Author:  [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/47 "2015-08-24T14:52:01Z")
Ever since the US Airforce stopped investigating UFOs (“Project Blue Book”), public interest seems waning. The pople you see (on TV) promoting this stuff look elderly-how long before the true believers all die off?
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### Author:  [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/48 "2015-08-24T15:01:56Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#):
>
> Nope. I recall Vallee, who was more of a UFO enthusiast than an Ancient Astronaut guy. The one I;'m thinking of wrote a book called something like “100 million years of Human History”, giving ancient UFOnauts as the source for a lot of human myth, legend, and technology.
Robert Charroux, who I suspect might have influenced Erich von Daniken, who really brought the Ancient Astronaut genre to the forefront.
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### Author:  [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/49 "2015-08-24T15:08:46Z")
Is the increase in mass due to the Tau equation measured by the guy in the ship, or by an observed outside the spacecraft?
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### Author:  [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/50 "2015-08-24T16:03:58Z")
To the guy on the spaceship everything seems normal, to him it’s the rest of the universe that’s zipping around at ludicrous speed.
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 5:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/51 "2015-08-24T17:31:51Z")
> [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](#):
>
> Robert Charroux, who I suspect might have influenced Erich von Daniken, who really brought the Ancient Astronaut genre to the forefront.
Yes, I believe that’s the guy. But don’t overlook Frank Edwards as an earlier pitchman for Ancient Astronauts. And (unwittingly) Donald Menzel.
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/52 "2015-08-24T17:33:54Z")
> [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](#):
>
> Robert Charroux, who I suspect might have influenced Erich von Daniken, who really brought the Ancient Astronaut genre to the forefront.
That’s the guy. But don’t overlook the influence of Franmk Edwards and (unwittingly) Donald Menzel.
From Charroux’s Wikipedia page:
> [@](#):
>
> Charroux was a pioneer of the theory of ancient astronauts, publishing at least six non-fiction works in this genre in the last decade of his life, including One Hundred Thousand Years of Man’s Unknown History (1963, 1970), Forgotten Worlds (1973), Masters of the World (1974), The Gods Unknown (1974) and Legacy of the Gods (1974).
> **[Robert Charroux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Charroux)**
>
> Robert Charroux was the best-known pen-name of Robert Joseph Grugeau (April 7, 1909 – June 24, 1978). He was a French author known for his writings on the ancient astronaut theme.
> Charroux worked for the French post office and wrote eight works of fiction between 1942 and 1946 using the pseudonym Saint-Saviol. He also wrote the scripts for a French comic strip, Atomas, about an atomic-powered superhero, appearing in the weekly magazine Mon Journal in the late 1940s. For the same magazine Charrou...
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### Author:  [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/53 "2015-08-24T20:14:06Z")
> [@Consensus](#):
>
> > [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](#):
> >
> > We have no proof, or supportable evidence, that **any** UFOs are alien ships.
>
> Replace ‘alien ships’ with anything you like and the statement still stands. An unknown remains an unknown, no matter what we think it is or is not.
I hope you’re not asserting that because something is in fact unknown, then any possibility is as likely as any other, and therefore assuming that some glow in the sky is an alien ship is a completely reasonable thing to do.
Because if you are doing that, it’s simply preposterous thinking.
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### Author:  [@Nelson\_Pike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nelson_Pike)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/54 "2015-08-24T20:19:49Z")
> [@Stranger On A Train](#):
>
> All terrestial life today comes from one source, as far as we can tell.
All terrestrial life that we know of _definitely_ comes from one source.
> [@Stranger On A Train](#):
>
> 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.
Evidence-starved pure speculation of this sort is not a reasonable basis for holding forth that abiogenesis occurs on Earth with “regular frequency”.
> [@Stranger On A Train](#):
>
> Unless the conditions on primordial Earth were unique throughout the universe (which does not appear to be the case)
We do not know enough about primordial Earth to generalize about its uniqueness even if we had closely examined a sufficiently large (i.e. hundreds of billions) representative sample of extra-solar planets to generalize about _them_. And if we could we would surely find that each planet’s primordial fingerprint was unique, just as each human being’s digital fingerprint is unique, and just as each star’s spectral fingerprint is unique.
> [@Stranger On A Train](#):
>
> 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.
One century has not been long enough to answer a single question about the process of abiogenesis, including the odds of its appearance.
> [@Stranger On A Train](#):
>
> 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.
I do not understand this ungrammatical sentence.
> [@Stranger On A Train](#):
>
> But nor does it provide support for dubious claims of flying saucers, alien abductions and medical procedures, ancient aliens and artifacts, et cetera.
Can you do better? For the second time: why do you think that “that the origin of life on Earth came from an extraterrestrial source”?
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### Author:  [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2015, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/55 "2015-08-24T23:43:19Z")
> [@Nelson\_Pike](#):
>
> Can you do better? For the second time: why do you think that “that the origin of life on Earth came from an extraterrestrial source”?
I’m not going to respond to a bunch of fragmented piecemeal hoerseshit, but just to clarify, I didn’t say that life did come from an extraterrestrial source, just that it is plausible that it could have come from an extraterrestrial source. Whether it did develop on Earth or come from elsewhere or not is irrelevant, as in either case the genesis of life is from natural elements and compounds found in interplanetary and even interstellar space, and therefore likely all over the universe, as are the conditions under which it could form and evolve.
This has nothing to do with supposed ancient aliens, unidentified phenomena attributed to alien observers/invaders/abductors, and so forth, which have zero substantiation despite so many supposed observations, alleged crash sites, purported artifacts, et cetera. “Ancient aliens” and alien abduction is on the same level of credibility as the Sasquatch and the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis.
Stranger
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### Author:  [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)
#### Post date: [August 25, 2015, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/56 "2015-08-25T00:11:51Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#):
>
> a bunch of fragmented piecemeal hoerseshit
> Stranger
I do wish that you would not use scientific and technical terms that the rest of us do not understand.
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### Author:  [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)
#### Post date: [August 25, 2015, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/57 "2015-08-25T01:24:12Z")
> [@Fenris](#):
>
> [Green flash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_flash)
[And this](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1086/what-is-green-flash-at-sunset-all-about)
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### Author:  [@Consensus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Consensus)
#### Post date: [August 25, 2015, 8:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/58 "2015-08-25T08:34:29Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#):
>
> I hope you’re not asserting that because something is in fact unknown, then any possibility is as likely as any other, and therefore assuming that some glow in the sky is an alien ship is a completely reasonable thing to do.
>
> Because if you are doing that, it’s simply preposterous thinking.
In our collectieve minds a UFO is linked to alien ship more then it is to any other, much more likely, phenomenon. I’m not saying anything about what it actually is or even what is resonable to assume.
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### Author:  [@Nelson\_Pike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nelson_Pike)
#### Post date: [August 25, 2015, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/59 "2015-08-25T17:24:38Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#):
>
> I’m not going to respond to a bunch of fragmented piecemeal hoerseshit,
What you are referring to is actually a segmented reply, commonplace on boards such as this, and useful in cases where someone crams error into his writing at a rate of more than one per sentence, as you do.
Try thinking of each segment as a nail in the coffin of your error-ridden, evidence-starved speculation.
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#):
>
> but just to clarify, I didn’t say that life did come from an extraterrestrial source, just that it is plausible that it could have come from an extraterrestrial source.
Another error, this time in the interpretation of your own writing. You said (post #12): “it must _(underline added by Nelson Price)_ be acknowledged that the orogin of life on Earth came from an extraterrestrial source.” The word “must” signifies necessity and certainty.
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#):
>
> Whether it did develop on Earth or come from elsewhere or not is irrelevant, as in either case the genesis of life is from natural elements and compounds found in interplanetary and even interstellar space, and therefore likely all over the universe, as are the conditions under which it could form and evolve.
We do not know what elements, compounds and conditions are needed to produce abiogenesis, so we cannot do more than speculate about their cosmic population density.
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### Author:  [@Quercus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quercus)
#### Post date: [August 25, 2015, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-ufos-especially-for-pilots/728427/60 "2015-08-25T18:17:00Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#):
>
> I’m not going to respond to a bunch of fragmented piecemeal hoerseshit, but just to clarify, I didn’t say that life did come from an extraterrestrial source
**Stranger** , just to clarify for you why people are responding like they are, while I don’t think you meant to say it, it appears you accidentally left out a word or two and that is what actually ended up in your post :
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#):
>
> While it must be acknowledged that the orogin of life on Earth came from an extraterrestrial source[…]
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