UFOs: What evidence would be sufficient?

Great Debates
1

What with Taken being in the news lately, I couldn’t help but wonder what evidence would be sufficient to convince most people that UFOs–those mysterious lights/objects/radar contacts in the sky–are not merely misidentified astronomical phenomena, misidentified known earthly aircraft, unidentified “black” air force craft (they can’t all be black projects, as some of the most documented and serious military responses/investigations date to WWII, when the behavior of such objects would have been inconceivable for any human craft of the day–and, frankly, for craft of our day), as well, odd meterological phenomena, swamp gas, distant headlights, etc.

Clearly, a widespread public sighting is not enough. The Phoenix lights and the UFO seen over Carteret, NJ, last year were each witnessed by hundreds of people. The Carteret sighting was accompanied by multiple objects being spotted on radar WITHOUT transponder signals, which was unheard of. (Can you imagine what would happen today, post 9/11, if a bunch of aircraft that would not ID themselves appeared in the NYC Metro area?) But people just kind of shrug their shoulders and go on about their business.

Even national security issues and concerned, highly experienced witnesses in the military are not enough, as evidenced by incidents involving sightings of UFOs near US ICBM silos, accompanied by system shutdown of the nuclear missiles–pretty serious business, whether its cause was earthly or otherwise. Likewise the UK’s Bentwaters/Rendlesham incident, whose recent FOIA release is receiving a lot of coverage these days.

But what would it take to get most people to acknowledge that something odd, not mundane, is occurring? Would only something a la Independence Day, with a giant flying saucer decimating our cities, be enough?

2

Please. The saucer was obviously a glitch radar signal, and the decimation was clearly caused by a new form of nuclear weapon. :wink:

3

I had an obsession with UFO’s quite a while ago, looked up alot of evidence and even read about bob lazaar, eventually the stories were repetitive and sometimes so fantastically false even some of the ‘abductees’ would have trouble believing it.

4

toadspittle-

“But what would it take to get most people to acknowledge that something odd, not mundane, is occurring?”

I think MOST people do acknowledge that something odd is occurring. But, WHAT is it is the problem. Millions of people believe in UFO’s worldwide. Millions more are open to the idea, but require a personal experience. Millions as well deny the possibility.
Most people probably agree something’s going on that is odd (perhaps extraterrestrial, perhaps not).
What would it take to convince these people just what the phenomenon is that millions of people claim are ET’s/UFO’s alien visitors?

I imagine it would take the leader of a well known nation to publically announce and give evidence of their existence.
OR A scenario similar to the one you’ve presented. A mass worldwide public sighting where actual contact is made…to the media.

5

Rearranging the stars to spell out "I exist!"

(Oops. Wrong fantasy.)

Crop circles were enough to convince me.

6

An actual spaceship that is openly exhibited, or an actual spaceman that comes and is obviously alien.

Not to be confused with tabloid reports or books. I want actual physical evidence that can be closely examined and is freely available.

7

[list=A]
[li]A tool, made of lead-aluminum alloys, which cannot be created in a gravity field, but only in the zero gravity of space.[/li][li]A tool, using advanced technology not found on Earth.[/li][li]Hi Opal. :cool:[/li][li]A dead alien.[/li][li]A captured ship, on public display.[/li][li]A good explaination of how the US Government could cover up UFO evidence in nations where the US is not liked, when we can’t even find a moldy old SOB like Osama bin Ladin.[/li][li]A UFO landing on the White House lawn, or on TV during the Superbowl.[/li][li]Angelina Jolie giving me a hummer in exchange for my unquestioning belief in UFOs.[/li][/list]

That last one is the mostly likely evidence. :o :smiley:

8

A fair answer. Thanks.

Anyone else–Would any aerial sighting ever be enough for people (even if widely witnessed and videotaped–say, a flight of saucers over the next Presidential inauguration)? Or would only physical evidence that could be dissected, disassembled, subjected to mass spectrometry, etc., be enough?

Obviously, as t-keela has pointed out, everyone has a different threshold, just as they currently have different thresholds for believing in God, etc. But what might it take to move these aerial phenomena (leaving aside abduction for the moment) from the realm of God and angels to the realm of, say, rainbows, why the sky is blue, or what the aurora borealis is, all of which have generally agreed-upon scientific explanations?

9

Anomalous UFOs are seen by people, and by radar scopes, because human senses and radar equipment are not infallable.

One night out in front of my house, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a streak of light shoot through the sky low to the horizon, too bright to be a meteor and too fast to be an aircraft. For an instant, I had no idea what this fast-moving light could be.

It turned out to be the reflection of a neighbor’s porchlight off the inside of the glasses I was wearing. When I’d turned my head, the reflection appeared to move lightning-fast.

If I hadn’t noticed the fact that I was wearing glasses and that local lights could be reflected off their interiors, I could easily have thought I’d seen a gigantic UFO several miles away, streaking toward the horizon at thousands of miles per hour. Given the fallability of human memory, I could also easily have thought I saw not just an amorphous streak of light, but something with a definite spherical or disc-like shape to it.
Now, multiply the above kind of experience by a national population of over 300 million people. If 10% of the population saw the same kind of reflection anomaly I did, and 1% of those who saw it mistook it for a UFO, that’s 300,000 UFO sightings! It’s no wonder so many people claim to see strange lights in the sky doing things that no known aircraft is capable of. I’m surprised there aren’t more UFOs reported.

(And as it turns out, UFO sightings tend to happen in “clusters”. When one UFO sighting makes local news, many many more people in the area report seeing a UFO in the next week or two. Not because they’re all seeing the UFO, but because they’re expecting to see a UFO, and that expectation clouds their interpretation of what are probably mundane phenomena.)

10

Kind of a wimp out, but I would also accept anything that convinces the majority of tenured professors in the relevant sciences, which would certianly include A-G on Bosda’s list.

Or a sustained appearence (60 second hovering, etc.) preferably during daylight, observed by 100+ people with no prior contact and with recorded documentation.

i.e. a hovering saucer over Yankee Stadium during a game.

11

Well, good old Occam’s razor cuts most UFO “sightings” to shreds. For example, there have been some odd things happening out in Area 51 or whatever. But being as they were testing Super Duper Top Secret aircraft there, Occams razor say’s that “unidentified Flying Objetcs” would MUCH more likely be some sort of Secret jet or something rather than an Alien Spaceship. And- of course the Military won’t say “gosh darn it, yes, those sightings were our new invisible hovercraft- wanna see the specs?”

None of the OP’s sightings survive the slashing of Occam’s razor. Even 100% proof of “unexplained lights” adds nothing to “they are aliens!”. At the very best - "UFOs’ only show the Military has some toys they ain’t telling us about. No surprize there.

Let me pose this conundrum- either the aliens: A- want to be seen, or B-they don’t care, or C-they don’t want to be seen. If A- then they will land on the Whitehouse lawn. If B, then they wouldn’t be so hard to pin down. If C- why would they appear as glowing lights in the sky? Thus, the UFO sightings- rather than being evidence of aliens- are evidence they ARE NOT aliens.

12

So, what’s the earth’s population now? 6 billion

The US pop~ 300 million, just for example according to the DSM4
http://www.unc.edu/courses/nursing/nurs253/schizophrenia.htm
roughly 1% of the population in industrialized nations suffer from Sx. Add another 1-2% from general psychotic disorders and let’s do the math.

3% of 300million American experience some psychotic disorders.
This is an incredible 9 million people who are subject to delusions and hallucinations at least (in this country alone). I am not at all implying that everyone who claims UFO experience is psychotic. Just trying to reduce the numbers a bit.

I would love to followup on this but I have to go right now…be back later.
Peace

13

Jane Badler circa 1984 in a tight red suit would certainly have me believing in something.

14

Agree with A and B, but not C.

Lets assume right off that 90% of UFO sightings are bogus, made up or imagined.

But it seems very possible to me that aliens might make occasional mistakes and be seen when they didn’t expect to be. They’re flying low over a deserted area when (or because) the stealth frammistan goes on the blink. Since it’s a deserted area, only a hunter out in his pickup sees it. And who’s gonna believe him?

For that matter, say you want to abduct people, do experiments, release them into the wild, but remain largely unknown. You’re going to target people traveling alone, and preferably people who would be deemed as unreliable witnesses (i.e. less-educated and poorer people). Who would they convince?

Well, not me, for sure. But unconvinced does not mean unconvinceable.

15

Well, being taken and either being anal probed or having hot alien sex ala Captain Kirk would definitely convince me. Preferably the latter.

16

What was evidence enough for me was seeing one myself. I wrote about it in a previous thread on the boards- here- it’s the very last post on page one, if you are interested.

I really don’t know what it means, though.

Aliens, top secret government stuff, time travellers, conspiracies, Wookies?? :::shrug::: I don’t know, it could be a combination of all of those…

17

I spent some months associated with a SETI project, and they were annoyed by incessant questions about why they were looking into space for aliens, when there were so many things to investigate, here. For these scientists, who earned their living doing SETI, there ISN’T ANYTHING HERE to investigate.

Most people believe UFOs are alien spaceships, but their reasons aren’t scientifically sound.

Scientific evidence is testable and repeatable. Sufficient evidence for a scientist would be a physical alien space ship that could be subjected to an indefinite number of tests.

18

One of the problems, possibly the biggest, is the conflation of the question with “belief”, as in a faith.

For years, one of the big sticking points in the “exobiology” debates has been the presumed fragility, and thereby the unlikelihood, of life. The Earth is that rarest of the rare, right size, right location, water, all the necessary ingredients to foster the miracle of life.

But lately we have been finding life in the unlikeliest of locations: microbes that live off poison in boiling waters of the volcanic flumes of the ocean. At crushing depths, just for good measure. And total darkness, not a hint of sunlight.

Life, it would seem, is not fragile and unlikely, its damned near unstoppable. I even sincerely doubt it originated here, I think it more likely to have filtered down with the dust from the stars. DNA from some exploded planet, drifting on the silent winds of space.

If life exists throughout space, and my guess is that it does, the question of alien visitors is kind of moot. If they have, they have, if they haven’t, they just haven’t stumbled on to us.

And if, as I suspect, they are born from the same DNA as we, there is another wrinkle: we can eat them. And vice versa.

To Serve Man

19

Very nice, elucidator, and mirrors my thought quite closely.

20

Well, that’s two of us brilliant. (As you may have noticed, some of the other posters are, well, a little slow on the uptake. Rather a pity, that.)

Oh, and let me share a favorite anecdote. Enrico Fermi is quoted as replying to a question about extraterrestial life with the pithy reply “So, where are they?” The brilliant physicist Leo Szilard replied “We are here, Enrico. We’re just disguised as Hungarians”