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.
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.
Is Jacques Vallée 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.
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?
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.
All terrestrial life that we know of definitely comes from one source.
Evidence-starved pure speculation of this sort is not a reasonable basis for holding forth that abiogenesis occurs on Earth with “regular frequency”.
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.
One century has not been long enough to answer a single question about the process of abiogenesis, including the odds of its appearance.
I do not understand this ungrammatical sentence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :
