It’s likely that there is intelligent life other than here on Earth (if you’d call that intelligent). That said, given a sighting of something that seems strange and unexplained in the sky, is it more likely to be 1) a visit from aliens, or 2) a figment of someone’s imagination, a misunderstanding of natural phenomena, etc.? I vote for #2.
I do not believe the Earth has ever been visited by intelligent space aliens. I believe all UFO sightings have ordinary astronomical or Earth-based explanations.
AHunter3, you seem to be stuck on the concept that visitors must be following the rules of physics as we understand them. Further, you presume that anything visiting earth must be the exploratory race, themselves. Just because we have yet to overcome light travel, robotics, et al, it simply does not follow that such technologies are impossible. Perhaps you’re not aware that we’ve recently managed to pause photons in flight. We’re learning more every year.
I’m not trying to be deliberately argumentative … I just want to point out that any assertions to X being impossible because the technology at year Y doesn’t support it are immature in nature.
RickJay said
Our Leade…er, uh, Mr. Jay has spoken true words. We, uh, …they are not real. 
Seriously, I agree. If anyone ever comes up with any proof, you’ll be rich. But of course, all we have so far is just hot air. Prove it.
AHunter3 -
Your persistance that we are limited by ‘Einstienien physics’, doesn’t take into account developments in quantum mechanics; which he dismissed on ‘moral’ grounds (for all practical purposes).
“”“Too costly in resources, too time-consuming, distances too permanently intimidating no matter how advanced the culture.”""
Technology is defined as virtualizing/synthesizing resource, and condencing time & space. This has nothing to do with how advanced a ‘culture’ is. chuckle It’s prohibitively expensive to dispose of rocks by using the “rubbing stone technique” with your thumb, fortunately; when expense in a resourse expense is taken into account, we use more efficient tools and methods (technology). I agree with you that it would be almost hopelessly silly to travel 10 billion light-years to a planet (with our current known twechnology) that; though visible from earths veiw, is probably not even there anymore. If they came from a sector of space from that ‘far’ away; you can be rest assured that their ability to condence the qualities I spoke of (what we do every day on this planet) has achieved a level that we have yet to comprehend (or publisize). I will say that if aliens are here, it is very unlikely that they could offer us much in the way of meaning; we’d just use the cheap thrills anyways; not having had the cognitive experience/ ‘maturity’ to envision this particular form of universal outlook. If you think celebrities get stalked, can you imagine aliens??? Who wants to take the time to teach a bunch of idol worshipping retards how to find value within themselves, so that they stop stalking you with that psychotic ‘savior’ motif? One thing that I do take to heart, is that if they are here to study us, or simply to colonize; there is a reasonable chance that they’ve been helpful in warding away large meteors over time - though that’s assuming they can or want to…
I personally don’t think it is difficult to condence the qualities that your brain seems so stuck on… shrug
-Justhink
I believe in them. I mean, the universe is so vast, that there could be life on other planets and we would never know.
Or I have this other theory that there is life on other planets, but they’re all stupider than humans. Like, they dont have flying saucers and what-not, they’re just like animals. So if we want ot find them we have to go to THEIR planet.
LEXX, Season 4: A bioengineered bug/spaceship, big as Manhattan but with the intelligence of a none-too-bright puppy, visits Earth. The captain wants to get laid. The other living crew member wants to get laid. The dead crew member just doesn’t care. After the initial excitement/fear/paranoia wear off, the rest of the Earth doesn’t care much, either, because it’s become infested with alien probes that burrow into one’s anus and also because it’s a Type 13 planet in its final stages of self-destruction…
Hey! It could happen!
Seriously, yes, I believe there’s life on other planets. I’m completely neutral as to whether any have visited us, though.
I have insufficient data as of this time to come to a conclusion either way.
Researching…
I once thought I was being zapped by an alien with a ray gun, but it turned out its one of those sleep phenomena where you are both concious but out of control of your body at the same time (I forget what tis called… Night Terrors?). Which I still have from time to time when I am trying to sleep in an environment not conducive to sleep and am really tired.
IMO If I hadnt been a kid who got freaked out by alien abduction bs I wouldnt have thought that there were aliens with rayguns, maybe I would have thought it was something else, maybe an angel or something.
Well, it would be interesting to hear the astronomical or earth-based explanation for what I saw.
Here’s the story:
This was a few years ago, at my parents house (they live in town), at around 4 in the afternoon. I was sitting on the step of the side porch (which faces south, if anyone cares) waiting for a phone call. My mom was in the kitchen just behind me washing dishes. As I was sitting there I happened to glance up and I saw a strange craft passing almost directly overhead. (I’d say if straight up was 12- this thing was at 1 o’clock.) It was silver and shaped kind of like a pill capsule. It was pretty low to the ground for a flying craft- I estimate about 150 feet up- and I’ll tell you how I got that figure in a moment. It was not travelling fast at all, and I had ample time to observe it. There was no sound coming from it that I could hear. There were no markings, openings, windows, wings, tail, landing gear, or exhaust that I could discern. It appeared to be seamless. The shade of silver was more of a light shade like aluminum or sterling silver, rather than stainless steel or pewter. (And yes, I did think about that at the time.) As for size, I thought at the time it was comparable to two mini-vans backed up against each other. I also wondered who the hell was piloting this odd thing- I mean, what kind of technology was that? Where did it come from, how did it work, where was it going??
After a couple of minutes of watching it I called my mom out to see it. I asked her if she had film in her camera, but she didn’t. If she had some I still would have had time to go in and get it, load it and snap off some shots- it was moving that slowly. My mom didn’t watch it that long, she just didn’t seem that interested, although she did tell me a story about another time she and my dad had seen a saucer shaped craft many years before that.
It was moving in a north east direction and I went around to the front of the house to continue watching it. It went right towards downtown and passed across the face of one of the buildings there. Just so you know, my parents house is about 5 blocks down and 6 blocks across in distance from that building (in town blocks not city blocks). It’s a 17 story building, and when it passed it I could see three floors above it, and that’s how I estimated the height. After that it went out of my sight.
So I don’t really know what it was, but that old Lennon song always pops into my head whenever I think about it- “Nobody told me there’d be days like these- strange days indeed…”
Pray, what structures (and evidence) might these be?
I can explain cattle mutilation in 8 words: "Hey Splirgtegx, do you wanna grab a burger?
But seriously, I’m kinda with the OP on this one, only slightly more pessemistic.
It’s not like when Einstein came around we all stood back and said “whew thank god that’s over, we can stop scientific research. We hit the end. Weeeee.” He has been proven correct repeatedly over the years, but there certainly has been some nibbling at the edges. For each new discovery, new questions are raised and new doors are opened. Our history is littered with theories that were considered at one time to be ironclad, only to be dismantled later.
Since this is IMHO, I’ll toss out that yes, I do believe that the speed of light wil be “broken” not really broken, we all know that isn’t possible, more like circumvented. If we had that kind of technology, it would be human nature to pop around and check shit out. If in our travels we crossed to wake of a noisy blue planet, we’d be inclined to say "whoa, what the hell was THAT? And maybe swing by to check it out. And maybe grab a burger.
I do not think we have ever been visited by life outside this planet. UFO sightings are bunk. There wery well might be life out there somewhere, but it ain’t coming here to do anal probes on us.
Damn! I have forgotten to not become drunken again!
There may be something out there, but until we have proof, we can just wonder.
Personally, I’ve never seen anything flying that I couldn’t identify.
I think it would be kind of exciting, but wouldn’t call the news because I’d think they would think I was some nutcase.
I feel I should comment but it might blow my cover.
your name Go alien, you blew your cover by your name.
I won’t tell anyone.
a couple of thoughts:
(a) first of all, I’m basically skeptical, and I’m convinced that 99.99% of all UFO reports have mundane explanations. In particular, as many others have said, I don’t take cattle mutilations, crop circles or “abductions” even remotely seriously
(b) that said, I also agree with those who say that the technological impediments may not be that serious at all. Who can even remotely imagine what human technology will be like 500 years from now? And if that’s hard to imagine, what about ten thousand years from now? two million years from now? It’s absolutely positively impossible to even meaningfully consider such questions. But I can far more easily believe that there is an alien species capable of, say, building self-replicating nano-technology probes with FTL travel which fly into a solar system, do a quick scan for signs of intelligent life, then park themselves on an asteroid, use the minerals to build 100 copies of themselves, and send them off to all other nearby solar systems. Presto, entire galaxy searched exhaustively, recursively, in a relatively short period of time.
© several people have asked why aliens would come here and then act weird. Or alternatively, who they would come here and then not conquer us. Or whatever. well, imagine that tomorrow, a previously uncharted island was discovered in Melanesia that somehow still had an untouched stone-age culture on it. Would anyone want to conquer that island? Not really… it’s far more interesting as a curiosity than as a source of lumber. Would we want to study that island? Sure. And might various other people attempt to sneak in and look around, even if they weren’t supposed to? Sure. There’s no reason to think that all aliens, should they exist and should they be studying the earth, are members of the very ethical Scientific/Diplomatic corps. Some might be jerks, thrill-seekers, teenagers, etc. (Or, of course, other things with alien motivations we couldn’t possibly understand).
(d) all of that said, I’m still skeptical.
(e) On the other hand, I have no frickin idea what fairblue said.
(f) in my more whimisical moment, I tend to think that all the unexplainable UFOs are not aliens, rather, they are time-travelling humans from the future. Which would certainly explain why they are interested in the earth.
(g) also, (again, I’m playing devil’s advocate here), as to why the aliens are careless enough to let themselves be seen from time to time, you might argue that they have long since realized that an occasional inexplicable sighting is never going to convince anyone of anything.
You have no idea what I said, or do you mean you have no idea what I saw?
If it’s the latter I have no idea either- I just know it was really freakin’ cool.
I believe that extraterrastrials exsist, and one of those E.T. races is probably extremely advance and has developed some sort of interstellar travel. However, whether or not they visited here, I don’t know and I’m pretty skeptical. But, hey, it’s possible.
I heard a guy on a TV show once say that the “sightings” seemed to occur a lot more often after the atomic bombs were dropped. . .maybe their just keeping an eye on us to make sure we don’t do anything too stupid 
OK, so I’ve posted on the pessimistic side. I’m gonna stick to my guns, though.
• If Einsteinian physics is wrong about the speed of light being a constant that defines the maximum attainable speed, a rather huge chunk of what we think we know is in doubt, and an internally consistent picture of the universe that appears to be verified by observation would turn out to be something else instead. That doesn’t mean it can’t be so, but does anyone have any real reason to think so aside from wishful thinking?
• There’s also the “no stepping stone” problem. We tend to think in terms of reaching a bit beyond our current grasp, and then a little more, much as has been the case throughout recorded history. If we can raft over to the little island visible on the horizon, we can make dugout canoes later and explore the archipelago of islands in our region of the sea, and eventually construct sailboats that sail around the world and map the continents. But interstellar space is just a whole different scale of distances. To say “if we can go to the moon and back, and seriously consider doing Mars soon, we’ll be all over the solar system in fairly short order and then it’s off to the stars” is like saying “Wow, my first computer ran at 8 MHz, the next one at 80, and this one at 500, and now they’re on the verge of putting out computers with 4 gigahertz processors. Gee, their project for NEXT year should be to develop an 800 petahertz chip, that would be the next step”
Obviously it would not be the next step with computer chip design. In the case of interstellar space, though, the jump in distances between simple interplanetary travel and interstellar exploration is HUGE and there is no useful in-between place to get to first. Every planet in the solar system is within 8 light-hours of us if I do my math correctly. So once we get to the point we’re popping earthly flags down on Pluto rock with ease and feeling like big bad explorers and we decide we’re ready to send something to the next island out and it’s like 4,500 times as far away as we’ve ever gone before.
Daunting.