I’m probably kind of unusual here on the Straight Dope boards, in that one of my major interests is UFOs and the unexplained. Like most people here, I think I could be accurately described as an intelligent and rational individual, which apparently makes my interest seem all the more odd.
Now, it is important to note that I am not what one would traditionally call a “believer”; that is, I don’t claim to have some religious-like faith that extraterrestrials are visiting the Earth. I simply think that there is a good chance that some of the many UFO sightings are not fabrications or misidentifications, and are in fact something unusual, whether it be secret government aircraft, unknown natural phenomena, some kind of “otherworldly” visitation, or most likely some combination of several of the above.
Essentially, while I am not a “believer”, I am also not a “debunker” (someone who insists on supporting questionable explanations when no good one can readily be found), but prefer to remain open to investigating many possibilities and collecting information about UFOs and related topics. I think that is the truly scientific way of going about studying the unexplained.
So, what I want to know is, how many people here think like me? Are you convinced that the UFO phenomenon is complete nonsense and need not be investigated, or do you feel that there may be something interesting to be discovered? I’m not trying to start a “Great Debate” here; I’m not planning to argue with everyone who sees things differently (unless, of course, they WANT to debate with me :)). I’m just trying to get a feel for how many people understand/support my approach to this.
Show me one tool. One tool accidentally left behind.
One tissue sample that has amino acids that are not of terrestrial origin.
And they don’t just land on the White House lawn?
Why would somebody travel light-years of distance, & then play hide & go seek?
And if they do exist, & theyare hiding–why cover their ships in brilliant lights? Why not paint 'em black?
Travelling interstellar distances requires the investment of huge resources just to power the damn ship, not to speak of building it. Why so damn coy?!?
The late Dr. Isaac Asimov once pointed out, in one of his Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction essays, that most people who use the term UFO have already identified the object in question as an extraterristial spaceship.
I see UFOs all the time. I see a plane in the sky at night and I cannot tell whether it is a Lear jet, a Boeing 747, a Piper Cub, or an ultraflight operating out of the local airport. What I am sure of is that the craft in question does not come from Sirius VIII and has a crew of aliens dying to give me an anal probe.
I don’t think an alien race is going to surmount the enormous scientific, engineering, and economic hurdles of crossing space merely to play peek-a-boo in our skies.
In short, I don’t believe we are being visited by flying saucers (my preferred term).
I’m open to the possibility that folks are seein’ something. I tend to think that there is a higher likelihood that these are covert military operations rather than extraterrestrials.
However, I don’t think that just because they haven’t landed on the White House lawn that they’re trying to hide. If there are extraterrestrials buzzing the Earth, maybe they don’t even recognize that there are lifeforms here. We may be so alien to them that it would never occur to them that we’re “in charge”, and thus they should contact our leaders.
I’ve had a couple of encounters. Not alone either.
First time I was in middle school, late 70’s. Neighbor knocks on the door and asks me to bring my telescope outside. there are two very bright lights in the sky, near each other but they are moving independently. They were too bright to look at through my little cheap telescope (probably less magnification than a decent set of binoculars). There were at least 5, maybe 10 people. the lights would move extremely fast from one point to another, and stop on a dime, then move again. the folks that were out there before me said they moved slowly over our neighborhood before moving out to where we were looking at them, and that they were very bright, couldnt see the actual craft at all. We watched them for possibly a half hour before they zoomed off. Military helicopters were seen in the area over the next few days but there was never any official report.
Next time was a year or so later. Me and a couple of friends had snuck out in the middle of the night to goof around. It was probably 3 am or so. We saw an orangish ball of light pass over the trees (no idea how high) going VERY fast. We looked at each other as to say “WTF?” When another came over, then another, then more, and more, and more. They didn’t appear to be at high altitude, but higher than tree level, and they didn’t make a sound. It was like seeing the exhaust from a rocket or something. It was really creepy. What was also interesting about that is one night my wife and I were out for a walk when visiting her mother, and she told me about an experience almost exactly like the second one I described. Not only did she and her friends she was with see it, but a few minutes later they ran into some other kids they knew who sw it too and were completely freaked by it. Of course, neither me in my sighting, or my wife in hers, could tell anyone without busting ourselves for sneaking out at night. We were living in totally different parts of the country when we had our individual sightings, and they were probably 6 or 7 years apart as well.
In order for a mythology to survive, the first requirement is that it must not be susceptible to proof either way. In this manner, the argumentative to and fro can persist indefinitely, which is what tends to happen (God, Jesus rising from the dead, JFK, UFOs, psychic power, Brian Wilson still has one brilliant album left inside him).
So with UFOs, as with any of the above and many more, the real truth is this: they are as real as you want them to be. Believers slce and dice the evidence one way, and non-believers do it another way, and everyone else has better things to think about.
Personally, I don’t think any conjecture that UFOs equate to non-Earth life and/or intelligence stacks up. If they are here to contact us, why don’t they do just that? If they are here to hide, they don’t seem to be going about it very well. If they want to just observe, why the need to frighten farmhands in Kansas?
There are some assumptions being made that aren’t necessarily true, such as the amount of time, resources, and financial commitment involved in sending a ship from there to here.
From what we know about space travel, it would be an enormous investment. However, we don’t know enough to travel very far in space. To a race of beings that had developed an effective means of space travel, it may not seem very difficult at all.
Early humans may have thought that making fire was impossible. “How are we going to get lightning to strike when and where we need it to?” Some few thousand years later, it was as easy as rubbing two sticks together.
I don’t assume that nobody can do something just because I lack the knowledge to do it.
I don’t believe space aliens or the like have ever visited the Earth. I believe that all UFO sightings are simply errors or naturally explained phenomena of some kind.
I don’t believe that ETs are visiting Earth. Perhaps some ET has been here before, in the course of billions of years of the Earth’s age, but so far I’ve seen no reputable evidence for this.
If these ETs, are of course actually visiting, why is it they can travel great distances, use stealth technology, and do all that just fine, but they have to brutally mutilate basic mammals- i.e. cows? Or, why do they abducte so many people for their sperm and ova–haven’t these superior beings cracked the homo Sapien genome?
On the other hand, I have seen some strange aircraft before (which I’m too lazy to retell). Nothing alien, though.
If this is really how you feel, you should read Carl Sagan’s book The Demon Haunted World. Sagan was well known as an enthusiast (for want of a better word) of extraterrestrial life. He said many times that he would be overjoyed to find evidence for extraterrestrial life. It would be the greatest discovery humanity has ever made. He was one of the originators of SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence using radio telescopes (which is ongoing). In the book, he presents some very strong arguments against the claims of alien visitation. Read it. You won’t be disapointed.
Do I belive in UFOs? Yes. The term just means unidentified flying object, there are plenty of those around.
Do I belive they are ET’s buzzing Earth in spaceships? No. Of course if one was decided to use me as an [intergalatic sex slave](intergalatic sex slave) , I’d have to change my mind.
Now just because I don’t belive doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I just haven’t seen any evidence that convinced me. There has to be life someplace else in the unvierse. But that doesn’t mean they are human, human like, reptilians that are looking for us, maybe they don’t know we exist. It could just be slime mold with no IQ and no means of travel.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never read Sagan, though I’ve heard a lot about him. I read the excerpt on Amazon.com and it looked very interesting; I will have to pick up that book sometime.
I have read stuff from all sides of the UFO issue, from die-hard debunkings to rantings of fervent believers, and I’ve learned not to let any one book become my gospel. I find that a lot of people make that mistake…they take the first book they read to be the “UFO Bible” and won’t listen to any other arguments. I just keep a mental bank of all the different opinions that are out there, because I believe that many of them have potential to be correct.
One of my favorite UFO books so far is “The UFO Experience” by J. Allen Hynek, who was the chief scientific consultant to the USAF Project Blue Book, as well as a professor of astronomy. He has a very interesting take on the issue after having experienced all facets of it in his tenure at Blue Book.
As for my comment about debunkers, I’m talking about the types of people who, when confronted with a case where they really don’t know what the answer is, will make up some nonsense in order to avoid admitting that it’s unidentified. A prime example of this is Donald H. Menzel, who is worse than some of the wackiest believers in terms of making up “evidence” to support his points. A lot of people really hate Philip Klass too, but I think he has made some good points as well as some questionable ones. Perhaps he’s a bit overzealous, but I wouldn’t call him unscientific, as his ideas usually have at least some basis in reality.
It’s nice to see so many responses to this thread, from all sides of the debate. Hudley, your sighting reports were interesting. The second one sounds like it might have been some kind of debris reentry; that’s what the “fireball” types usually turn out to be. The first one is more of a puzzle. Interesting stuff.
I have plenty of personal-experience stories regarding all manner of UFO and other unusual incidents. My “full story” is too long to post here; in fact, I’ve never even written it all down, just told a few friends who were willing to sit and listen to me talk all night. I will say that many of my experiences point more toward UFOs having a government or other earthbound scientific origin than an extraterrestrial source. But you never know. Keep the comments coming.
OK lets assume that there is life on another planet right now, and that they have the ability for interstellar travel that they have force field, ray guns, tracker beams, Art, music, great science, History. They are going to use all there acquired abilities to come all the way across the known universe to come to earth TOO
Feck with some corn??? Turn cows inside out??? Stick a probe up some poor dirt farmers butt in Ohio???
as for the poll I would have to vote NO!!!
While I love the idea of aliens visiting Earth (MiB; X-Files) and I believe that Earth probably isn’t the only populated planet in the universe, I don’t think we’re frequently visited by otherworldly visitors. Maybe the occasional reckless alien teenager steals his/her dad’s craft for a visit (bonus points for id’ing the movie) but other than that…<shrug>
Oh! Oh! I saw that movie, I liked it when I was a kid. What was it…Explorers? I don’t remember! Those kids made a spaceship thing out of the back of an old carnival ride, using that forcefield bubble thing and a computer. They were watching War of the Worlds at some point in the movie…Nuts! I haven’t seen that in forever…
I believe in life on other planets. Are they visiting? Who knows? We’ve been to the moon, and will go to Mars if that ever becomes a possibility. So why not? Wouldn’t they be as curious as we are about the universe?
Anyway, I’ve had a weird fascination with UFOs since I was a little kid. It’s really a long and weird story, that I have been sort of working on an essay about for the last few months. I actually had an episode last year where I saw one of the greys, and while it was pretty spooky, my knowledge of sleep paralysis made for a pretty interesting experiment. (I managed to stay pretty calm at the beginning, though I did want it to end!)
I do believe that there are unidentified objects, most likely man-made, floating around the skies and not being readily explained to us. They might be military craft… who knows. I could even accept that they might be extra-terrestrial, as it would be impossible to get inside and alien’s head and know or understand what their motives for their actions and choices would be.
However, I do not believe the Greys (the most common alien “race”) nor the reptilian races or any others are more than a modern adaptation of demons and nasties which have haunted our nights for thousands of years. They are psychological phenomena and simply a bit more palatable manifestation of various fears than succubi or goblins. The idea of extra-terrestrials does not sound absurd to our scientifically advanced society, especially to generations that are growing up to accept rapid technological advancement as a very natural thing. With advancements in cloning, travel, exploration and all other fields of science (I have even read legitimate articles about the very beginnings of possible methods of teleportation and time travel), we are being led to think that perhaps nothing is technically impossible. So instead of the boogie-man haunting us, it is a far-advanced rage with knowledge that we just haven’t discovered yet.
Anyway, that’s just part of my theory for my paper that I’m working on. Take it as you will.
I use the scientific method myself.
Let’s test some theories.
‘There is an invisible force by which masses attract each other’.
Sounds weird, but gravity has been successfully demonstrated, so I’ll go with that.
‘There is life elsewhere in the Universe’.
Well, we know life exists on one planet.
We also can observe there are truly vast numbers of planets.
Therefore, mathematically, it is likely. (Of course such life doesn’t have to be nearby).
‘UFO’s are aliens’.
No evidence to support that. Yes, people see ‘lights’ in the sky. There is no logical path to ‘alien visitors’ from those observations.
‘Crop circles show aliens have visited Earth’.
Hoaxers have come forward and explained how these were made. Despite this, many UFO believers still claim aliens did it. This suggests that UFO believers want to believe, despite having no evidence.
‘Psychic powers exist’.
Thank goodness for James Randi! No dowser, psychic, astrologer or spoonbender has ever suceeded under scientific conditions in doing anything paranormal. Apparently the real ‘psychics’ don’t want the £1,000,000 - or :eek: psychic powers don’t exist.
Just like crop circles, dowsers who fail every dowsing test still believe passionately in their ‘power’.
First of all, I want to say that a UFO isn’t an alien spacecraft, it is simply an Unidentified Flying Object. If I through a tissue in the air and someone saw it and couldn’t identify it, it’s a UFO.
I’m not a believer. I’ve seen all kinds of shows and documentaries on them, and all they ever end in is a dead end. There is no proof that there even are single-celled organisms on another planet. I’m not saying that there is no possibility of alien life, nor that there is any possibility, just that when you can stick on small fragment of proof, true tested unarguable proof, in front of me, I’ll believe you.
