I think at this point that there are (somewhat simplistically) two opposing camps in this debate. The first believes that UFOs are entirely the result of terrestrial phenomena, and take the Sagan/de Grasse Tyson view. The other viewpoint is that there is sufficient evidence to point to some sort of extraordinary phenomena which belies common explanation.
Now, this is obviously a simplistic breakdown. Broadly speaking, however, this is usually what we see in such debates. (With typically much ridicule being thrown about by both sides.) Files like these, though, give even the most hardened skeptics room for wonder. While I do not doubt the logical validity of the skeptics positions, there is nevertheless a large body of evidence (circumstantial though it may be) which becomes difficult to deny when taken in the aggregate.
These files are, unfortunately, just more in the circumstantial category. Although they have the "official" seal of approval they are still, at root, not hard evidence. It is frustrating to those of us who are curious about this that nothing beyond eyewitness reports ever seems to surface, no matter the source. I think most people at least pay attention to these news items, but do not know what to make of them beyond raising more questions.
>While I do not doubt the logical validity of the skeptics positions, there is nevertheless a large body of evidence (circumstantial though it may be) which becomes difficult to deny when taken in the aggregate.
I think it's incredibly important to remember that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
Well, roughly and someone may have a better answer. Data is collected in a structured, systematic way, and the sample is carefully chosen. Anecdotes are not structured or collected in a systematic way, but worst of all the sample you've taken is the people who've chosen to speak up.
If we assume that the readings are actually showing a physical phenomena and are not technical errors or forgeries, they are still just that: an unexplained radar recording and an unexplained radioactive soil sample. There is no reason to jump to the conclusion that ETs are responsible.
Also, we will never know if accounts that would be considered hard evidence were not simply destroyed and not included in any surviving record.
While I am personally on the fence about believing the accounts any gov has - clearly we know basically nothing of the universe relative to its size and existence.... so I will withhold judgement in any form - but lets look at the examples through history:
The earth is flat.
The Sun revolves around the earth.
Germs dont exist.
What is this radiation malarky?
There are no other planets in the universe.
There are no other solar systems like ours in the universe.
Lets kill eachother over imaginary rulers and their rules.
etc etc etc
People are STUPID.
So, are there UFOs? No idea - but I have sen weird stuff and I will never let another human tell me what the limits to the universe are. I'd prefer to just keep seeking, keep experiencing life and the wonders of all that is.
The fact that Humans exist proves there is some intelligence in the Universe, lets just hope we are not the pinnacle as that would be rather sad.
The fact that humans exist proves no such thing and don't ever let anyone tell you THAT. The government can't stop 9/11, how are they going to prevent people from knowing about hyper intelligent (well at least magically powerful) aliens?
Let's say you're proto-L. Ron Hubbard from the Marcab planet. You're a racecar driver, things are going great. Bang. You get recruited into Super Crush All Known Physics Astronaut Troope. You're commander, Xenu (ok I'm playing loose with Scientology fiction), decides "Hey, we rock and can travel at (speed of light)^1000000000 in our massless spaceships (not DC-10s, for those playing at home), so why don't we travel Earth (can't spell the Tegeeak word), and camoflauge as either several little balls of light, or 1950s inspired discs and just fly around at Subsonic speeds in Earth's atmosphere and just invite wide speculation as to what we are and maybe let the little creature's weird "government system" scurry around to hide all the evidence that we exist to the other the little creatures."
Does this even make sense? If you were proto-L. Ron Hubbard, wouldn't you say "Hey Xenu, we're the freaking masters of the universe, we can fold all of space time into our cool PDAs and play mega awesome Minecraft like games with, why would we do something stupid like that?"
Trying to make sense of why or why not an advanced species that has mastered space and time, would want to do something so pointless as visiting planet earth, is the weakest argument one can make against this. Just because you cannot understand their motives, and it sound implausible, hence it cannot be true, is like a caveman trying to understand why modern humans stare at flat luminicent screens while tapping and clicking away randomly in front of it for hours.
No, totally incorrect. It's not the visitation that is pointless. It's the lack of any "actual" visitation. But it's worse than that. It's like "open secret" visitation. You can play your "One cannot divine the mind of God" game all you want but your argument is still ridiculous. No one said coming to Earth in itself is ridiculous, but it's this whole other game you want to play with it that is just too much.
"...but I have sen weird stuff and I will never let another human tell me what the limits to the universe are"
I would suggest rather than depend on personal observation and anecdotal evidence you listen to groups of others who are actively seeking out information.
We no longer believe the earth is flat because of a consistent and large amount of data has told as otherwise.
I wasn't really meaning I was going to only rely on personal observation per se, I am just saying that humans are intrinsicly historically wrong about everything. Thus I will not just say "those people told me that there are no other sentient beings capable of anything such as flying through space to visit a remot planet, so they must be correct!"
We have already sent probes beyond our system and to many planets within our system and we only discovered FLIGHT 100 years ago.
I wasn't really meaning I was going to only rely on personal observation per se, I am just saying that humans are intrinsicly historically wrong about everything.
We have already sent probes beyond our system and to many planets within our system and we only discovered FLIGHT 100 years ago.
Just imagine 1,000 years from now.
I think it's just as likely that technological development will follow an S curve as remain exponential. Look at Moore's Law -- the laws of physics provide a hard ceiling for certain kinds of technological progress.
No doubt, if you talk about unrecognized flying objects which can be anything—from weather baloons to weird clouds.
Were ther aliens? I don't think so. Yes, there may be another intelligent life in the universe, but even so I think it is too far away even for the signal from it to reach another one within the lifetime of their exsistance.
Physical visit is even many many orders of magnitude less likely.
I think that speed of human evolution speaks to the contrary of your point.
Think about it. 500 years we were not even able to push something called electricity through a cable; today we push gigabits of data through the air using wi-fi.
Just thinking where we will stand technologically in next 1000 years just blows my mind. If you have a thinking organisms similar to human that were left alone to evolve in timeframe of 500 million years, its unimaginable what those creatures could come up with. Unimaginable!
Nope. Our technological advancements were not of the kind that categorically violate principles of physics as we come to describe since we have started doing "science." you could say "but people thought geocentricity was true," but that's not interesting because they didn't come to that conclusion using science or math, at best protoscientific Aristotelian speculation.
The very idea that there are these EVIDENTALLY POINTLESS light shows or bumbling crafts in the sky that very clearly look like 1950s SciFi is emanating from some supposed hyper intelligent species that can travel many, many orders of magnitude faster than light or vaguely somehow travels through wormholes, or comes from some other dimension, just play little games of hide and seek is just ludicrous. I find solipsism less fantastic than that. The scale of the universe is incomprehendible. These "speeds" tales about go way beyond "space debris." I don't want to ve a kill joy, but really look at the physics of this stuff. It's very satisfying to say "ya but people used to think fire was made of phlogiston," but I claim that are scientific knowledge is of a fundamental different quality than previous. It's the difference between believing babies come from storks versus detailed biological blah blah knowledge.
Having presidents and the like pay lip service to these ideas is not really a big. I mean, Sarah Palin of all things, was almost VP. Also, there is something called the Nobel Syndrome, where even Nobel prize winners believe the stupidest things you can imagine, such as homeopathy, and the like (also MD disease for people like Dr. Oz).
For c3d, I could have stopped your response at the beginning. I claim what was done in 1512 was not physics. It was proto-science. The crux of that point was the science of today is qualitatively different from that of 1500s so arguments like "Well we thought fire was made of phlogiston" don't work. I even cited that one so not sure why you gave those examples.
Nope. Our technological advancements were not of the kind that categorically violate principles of physics as we come to describe since we have started doing "science."
Do you really state that modern science does not violate any principle of what was considered the best of physics knowledge 500 years ago? We are talking about 1512 here, the year Copernicus started writing what would turn into De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. It would take practically another 150 years for people to start thinking about explaining the motion of planets with an inverse square law.
For the record, the classical period of witch hunt was 1480-1750, and many of the things that are part of our daily life would have sent us directly to be burnt at the stake back in 1512:
- Creating light without fire
- Driving vehicles that move without being drawn by an animal, in a devilish smell
- Watching talking heads in a box
- Speaking to people who are over a mile away
- Resurrecting dead people (at least, "dead" as far as 1512 physicians could tell)
The problem with your reasoning is that you filter ancient "science" according to today's knowledge, instead of considering what was considered knowledge back then. As a result, you don't see a contradiction between what we know today and what was known back then, when there really is one.
Here is a great example. Isaac Newton today is considered as a great scientist. Yet to him, his physics work was secondary to his alchemy work. Do you think Newton was stupid not to know that alchemy was a "pseudo science"? Or does that indicate that back then, alchemy was as valid a field of research as the motion of planets? For that reason alone, I claim that our current technological advancements "categorically violate principles of physics" as they were known at the time of Newton.
A more recent example is the theory of aether, which was considered perfectly legitimate less than 150 years ago. And let's not even talk about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which even Einstein had trouble digesting, or Goedel's theorem, which was the exact opposite of what leading 1900-era mathematicians like Poincarre were expecting.
Science is a belief system. What makes it strong is that it changes over time. Unfortunately, some take science as a complete and eternal belief system, i.e. what is not scientific provable cannot be taken seriously, and what we know today constrains what we will know tomorrow. Both arguments are often used by "skeptics" as a "rationale" against God or UFOs. The truth is that science is not complete: what we cannot experiment with is not scientific. That includes, in the current state of know-how, both God and UFOs. Self-proclaimed "skeptics" should take a hard look at past "knowledgeable people" who fought Pasteur, Einstein, Galileo or other revolutionaries based on established knowledge.
Let me finish with the fact that UFO observations do not violate known physics laws. Some people observe what appears to be devices traveling at high velocity, with very high accelerations and often without emitting (much) sound, and with an intent (if not an intelligence). Often, observations are made by a sufficiently large body of people and correlated with enough physical evidence to make it as solid as the advance of Mercury's perihelion. Occam's razor recommends that we take the simplest explanation. If it flies like an alien spaceship and quacks like an alien spaceship, then it is likely to be an alien spaceship.
While we do not know how to build such devices, there is no theoretical impossibility that I'm aware of. Even assuming an intelligent extraterrestrial origin does not violate laws of physics. We observe that we are the third most intelligent species on this planet, but nothing dictates that we have to be even in the top 10 in the universe. At worst, faster-than-light travel violates special relativity, which is an outdated understanding of the structure of space-time by today's standards. Many serious physicists have proposed ways to travel faster than light. And even if there is no practical way to travel faster than light, there's nothing to say that extraterrestrial don't have extremely long lifespans.
In short, deciding to dismiss UFOs out of hand is highly non-scientific. It seems to be little more than a deep-rooted fear of the unknown. There is evidence for UFOs, not just sociological, but also a few rare leftovers (e.g. radar recording, radioactivity in the soil, etc). It's not enough data to be able to build solid science yet, but then, that was the case for planetary motion data 500 years ago.
> It's not enough data to be able to build solid science yet
And thus you shouldn't believe it. The fact that you add the yet at the end of your sentence shows that you have already made up your mind and believe that there are ETs and you are looking for the evidence to prove it, instead of looking at the evidence coming to a conclusion from the available evidence.
Also you have to think in probabilities: what is more likely - that a radars fail and people misinterpret readings or that there is actually faster-than-light travel and ETs are almost stealthily looking at us, trying not to be seen but still failing? The available evidence strongly converges to the first hypothesis.
I find it odd that a crazy-advanced civilization would do such boring and mundane thing like hovering in the sky and sometimes land on earth. What would be the agenda?
Eyewitness reports contains facts that can be checked objectively. I.e witness reports powerlines oscillating in opposite phase in presence of UFO. There are also photographs showing strange things like a fuzzy dark mass beneath the UFO or multiple dark rings around the UFO. This can be explained as light polarisation in presence of intense magnetic field. It is even possible to estimate the strength of the magnetic field. This is something eyewitness can't make up. There are also reports of rotating compass. This can be explained and can only happen if precise conditions are met i.e oscillating intense magnetic field. By knowing the properties of the compass it is possible to determine the frequency of the magnetic field.
If there is some reality in this phenomenon, it is possible to find evidences in the testimonies that can be indirectly objectively checked. This is science process.
Let's say I flipped a coin a million times. Now lets assume multiple witnesses saw me flip the coin so that heads came up twice in a row. There may be hundreds of such reports. Maybe even thousands. Would you conclude from that group of reports that I can, on demand, always flip the coin so that it comes up heads twice in a row? Or even that every time I flip the coin it comes up heads? Before taking a group of reports as evidence, keep in mind that this is selection bias.
I don't think there is anything difficult to deny for skeptics. There are fundamental, and very serious problems with the whole ET visitation thing that make the whole thing just untenable. Where are they? I mean this would be a "big freakin' deal". The idea that the government could cover this up is ridiculous. World governments can barely keep secrets from eachother. You'd have to believe in basically MIB and neurolyzers. The physics of this ... is basically an appeal to magic in the guise of "advanced technology"
(and don't give me the whole "any sufficiently advanced technology ... line). Now, it seems to be a big coincidence that there are many, many definitive hoaxes, I
mean admitted by the perpetrators, but yet that the phenomena is still exists ("Sure we have faked this thing a million times, but it just so happens that it's real, I promise").
So we have to believe 1) ET doesn't want us to know about him and 2) ET is mega advanced but is so stupid that a bunch of rednecks and believers in woo/psi have discovered him (not that every "believer" is like that but clearly Joe Bob has discovered, so ET is evidently a mega physicist but sucks at basic hide and seek even with dimension traveling technology?). It's just too much nonsense.
I don't think tenants of the ET hypothesis all assume a MIB-style government cover-up. We don't have to believe your 1) or 2) either. Here are a few more likely explanations:
1) ET doesn't know how to communicate with us. We don't know how to communicate with most animals on the planet, yet they share most of our DNA. How would you communicate with a being that has no notion of sound, has a sense of smell based on silicon biology, can't touch you without dying or killing you, and has a vision only in deep infrared?
2) Interstellar travel, while possible, is very expensive, so scientific expeditions behave like our own expensive scientific expeditions say, to the moon: touch, collect samples, and go.
3) There's a sort of prime directive or at least an attempt at letting us evolve in our own way.
As for the faking argument, it's like saying that because there's been a few Titanic movies, the Titanic didn't exist... It's the opposite: there's interest in faking it only because there is something. Otherwise, we'd also routinely see fake witches, fake angels and daemons, fake faeries, fake invisible people and fake ghosts.
Interesting; I had always taken Sagan's opinion as gospel, but I suppose there is room for questions. A bit of googling shows both Jimmy Carter and Dennis Kucinich have seen a UFO, and they're honest people. That certainly doesn't make me a believer, but it's nice to see there's at least a small possibility.
Keep in mind that UFO just means that it is unidentified and not necessarily from another galaxy. In my opinion Sagan and Hawking are right and that actual visitation from an alien species would be really unlikely given the size of the universe.
Not necessarily -- a fact alone that they could visit Earth implies that their technology is sophisticated enough to fight gravity, travel at speed of light (or faster) and do plenty of other things that may not even been covered by science-fiction just yet.
Now, before you say it doesnt matter whether you travel at the speed of light, faster or slower, the moment you catch up with space debris, you become a crashed and burnt debris yourself. If all physical objects vibrate at some rate, then as wild as my imagination can go, it may be possible to speed up this rotation of a physical object so much that would eventually become... a wave.
It's not sufficient for the aliens to be sophisticated. They would also have to exist in exactly the right time frame.
Consider the age of the universe: 14.6 billion years. Earth was formed about 10 billion years after the universe, and it took 5.4 billion years for the Earth to see the emergence of a civilized species, which has existed for an absolutely microscopic amount of time compared to those enormous intervals.
How long does a species last, realistically? Counting from its "space age", would a species survive a thousand years, ten thousand? Extinction from natural disasters, epidemics, war and the like could be averted by scattering oneself across a solar system or wider. How many civilizations could reach that stage?
I have absolutely no doubt that a myriad of alien life exists. But I think the chances that there exists alien species that:
* has evolved before us or roughly at the same time,
* has not driven themselves to extinction
* achieved the technological capability for crossing galaxies, and
* is willing to do so
…is exceedingly slim. Even if a species develops space-faring tech needed to visit Earth, I think it's extremely unlikely that their existence will coincidence with us. They are either all dead by now, or they will be dead before we/they develop the tech to visit, or they don't exist yet, and we will all be dead first.
Yes, I did leave time out of it for the purpose. Our civilization is so young, but we already can easily replace almost every body part we have, not to mention better ways of getting new ones [1].
In the near future, not only we will continue to stretch average life expectancy, but we will continue to mesh technology with living tissue. Today we can have metal bones, joints, metal plates in human brain, porcelain teeth, all sort of signal strengtheners (fake eye, hearing devices, etc), nothing tells we will stop developing those more in the future. No, we have a long way before we could live forever, but definitely mechanical devices that can least 500 years (fake heart, lever, lungs, etc etc) will stretch our lives X-fold. I would assume if some civilization flies UFO crafts, they most likely advanced on other fields as well.
It's a very good read. Also, in all UFO threads there should be a disclaimer that you are not making a point by pointing out that UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object not Alien Spaceship; most people when referring to the truly unexplainable cases use them interchangeably since extraterrestrial origin is one of the few hypotheses that are consistent with the evidence, though it's never obviously conclusive.
It covers the intersection of military/governmental organizations and the phenomenon, mostly in the latter half of the 20th century. The short version would be to search YouTube for Richard Dolan. He's a great speaker and presents the information in a way that should be palatable for even the hardest skeptic.
Yes, I have read that book and several others on the subject and have been blown away. As both an open-minded and scientifically minded skeptic, it would be intellectually dishonest - even foolish - to deny that something extraordinary is going on that is worthy of investigation by science. While most cases can be explained away, about 5% of the cases deserve further study. For example, there are well documented cases of objects spotted moving at speeds of 20 or 30,000 miles per hour and making right angle turns and other impossible maneuvers, backed by both air and ground radar readings, and dozens of eyewitnesses. Or of massive objects the size of a football field gliding at low speeds, with no sound at all, over an entire city, and observed by hundreds of people. Something strange is going on in our skies, and sadly mainstream science and media are dismissing it, even ridiculing it.
Read any of the books above or watch this Yotube documentary http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vyVe-6YdUk where hundreds of high ranking officials in Govt, military, aviation etc. are willing to go on the record and testify under oath, of some of these events.
That is not documentation. That is eye-witness testimony.
Edit: I won't sit through 2hrs of slow-talking elderly men reminiscing about that time they see some unexplained lights in the sky. It is difficult to take proponents of the ET-hypothesis serious if they always point to such bad evidence.
Wow to accept that anytime someone says UFO they actually mean alien spacecraft is ridiculous. Do you think that military testing, misinformation, hallucinations, psychological projections and t.v entertainment do not exist?
No, you misunderstand my point. My point is simply that in modern day slang and often in discussion forums (outside of military/aviation documents) UFO means "I think I saw an alien spaceship or something equally unexplainable, here's why there isn't a good explanation." In UFO related threads someone will inevitably post a non-reply that is 'argument by acronym' where a person makes a claim as to why they think the UFO they saw is unexplainable (however unlikely that may be) and the 'counter-argument' is a reading of the definition of UFO. This proves nothing and reveals just how much the replying person looks down upon the person making the claim, as if they were too stupid to understand the definition and history of the acronym and as if knowing that changes what they saw.
I will say that I agree that it gets cumbersome when people make the old joke "I saw a UFO. I mean I saw an Unidentified Flying Object because I say an Object that was Flying that I could identify." Probably for a younger crowd that sort of response is appropriate because maybe they are unfamiliar with this. But if you are old hat to this UFO poppycock business, it's more interesting to get down to the meat and potatoes of how ridiculous the ET visitation stuff is and bypass the acronym discussion. :)
Absurdity of it is subjective, but it being consistent with the evidence is not. It's highly unlikely, but it's certainly more likely than explanations that have zero likelihood. In the past the government has put forth explanations of events that are patently false (read: lied) and never re-examined, so the extraterrestrial hypothesis is more likely than their explanations in those cases.
Edit: To be honest, I'm surprised the extraterrestrial hypothesis is considered so absurd by scientifically minded people. Clearly it's absurd to assume that we're the only 'advanced' civilization in the universe, the place where it's a grey area is if a much more advanced civilization would have the means or the interest to visit our planet, and if they did, if the phenomenon of UFOs jives with what we'd expect to see if they did. This is up for debate, obviously, but I am not sure why logic doesn't dictate that the odds are reasonable that such a scenario could exist. Fermi's paradox makes you wonder.
The problem with any hypothesis that involves Earth being visited by extraterrestrials isn't the almost unthinkably large distances involved, it's the timescales involved.
For any two given planets in the galaxy that could support intelligent life, in all likelihood the technological progress of those lifeforms will not align, and it won't be close. Imagine one civilization encountering another, except the first is 50,000 years more technologically advanced. Or 500,000 years. Or 5 million years. What would happen?
The more advanced civilization wouldn't be playing games to keep from being discovered, that's for sure. They wouldn't care. Even visiting the planet would be a total waste of time since with that level of technology they could certainly observe from afar.
I don't think you can dismiss the possibility of an as-yet-undiscovered end-run around these limits. The problem with a critique of a hypothetically more technologically advanced civilization than our own which is based on modern understandings of physics is problematic at best.
There are larger problems with the ET hypothesis, though, and that is why generally, descriptions of beings associated with lights in the sky, although also often associated with knowledge of new technology and with kidnapping, are described in physical details differently by different cultures. Even in somewhere as narrow 10th century Europe, you have at least three different, if you will, species of entity associated with this sort of thing.
So this leaves the ET hypothesis with two bad choices, which are either we are more observant than our ancestors which is patently false, or else there is some intersteller convention somewhere which divvies up cultures for observation and follows them as they move around, and stops when the culture changes sufficiently. That starts to sound very implausible.
What about: a scientific expedition to earth is expensive, so when it arrives here, the ship takes shore for a while, sends scouts, gathers data, and then moves on until another one arrives, possibly from another planet? Is it so far-fetched?
Also, things are always described in a sociological context. What we would call "automobiles" would have been called "chariots of fire" by our elders.
You still have near-exact boundaries between culture and portrayal of the entities involved. If you are in Continental Europe in the 8th Century, these are demons or even Satan himself. If you are in Sweden at the same time, it's the dwarves and they are the best metalworkers in the 9 worlds. Folk religion in England at the time still talked about elfs being associated with this sort of thing, and folk religion in Ireland was different yet.
I don't think you can have regional stability and such variation between regions with that hypothesis. I think an anthropological one makes more sense.
Making hypothetical statments about the motivations of an alien mind that may be millions of years ahead of us, and then using the implausibility of it as an argument to dismiss any contrary evidence, is the weakest argument against this phenomenon. But it is always repeated in every single discussion about this topic by someone!
An interview with Stephen Hawking was recently posted to HN. In the interview he states that UFOs are only witnessed by crackpots and that the laws of the universe prevent interstellar travel.
The "crackpot" statement aside, I think it's incredibly disturbing that a scientist of his stature makes absolute predictions like we'll never travel to another star. I believe he is pretty good at his job, but saying something is impossible -- based on our current understanding of physics -- seems silly. No one in the physics community could say that our understanding of the universe is complete. The most prevalent theme in physics today is still the incompleteness of our understanding. We can't reconcile our understanding of the largest things in the universe with our understanding of the smallest. Although we can measure gravity, predict and observe its effects, we have no consistent explanation for it.
I'd say that thousands of years of fiction (speculative or otherwise) remain largely unaffected by hundreds of years of physics. Our understanding of the universe is still in its infancy.
We also have a history of having our deepest beliefs overturned by progress. Why would the beliefs of the late 20th century be any different?
[Edited for language use]
[Edit]
He dismissed the idea of time travel in that article, not interstellar travel. My criticism still applies.
It won't be the first of the last time, that a famous scientist has made a statement or prediction that proved to be false. At the close of the 19th century, Lord Kelvin the most reputed scientist of that era, boldly stated, "heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible". This was in 1895, just 10 years prior to the Wright brothers proving him dead wrong. Those who advance the "seems impossble so it cannot be true" argument, need to remember this and all previously considered impossible stuff that became possible. These include airplanes, meteorites (yes, once considered impossible by scientists), analysing stars, existence of black holes, nuclear energy, space flight, and teleportation using quantum entaglement....
'by using "matter/antimatter annihilation," velocities just below the speed of light could be reached, making it possible to reach the next star in about six years.
"It wouldn't seem so long for those on board," [Hawking] said.'
I find the crackpot statement a bit problematic too. Basically he is suggesting that if you witness a UFO, you are a crackpot. I don't see any reason to think that. Indeed I have seen plenty of things I can't account for scientifically (no UFO's though), and I have had outright hallucinations induced by mystical experiences and meditation (those are terrifying believe it or not).
BTW, I don't accept the extraterrestrial explanation. I think when you look even over the last 50 years, descriptions and portrayals of UFO's have evolved with the times, and phenomena which are generally comparable in the outlines go way back, but are very culturally dependent.
The problem with the extraterrestrial hypothesis is actually remarkably simple and that is that one has to account why non-human entities which are reported to kidnap people, and have advanced technology, and are associated with lights in the sky, are so fundamentally culturally portrayed? Is it reasonable to think, really, that there is some great ET convention where they divvy up our cultures and follow them? That doesn't sound reasonable to me. I think it is more likely that there are multiple components to the sightings, some of which we may not know what they represent yet, and some of which may be our projection and making sense of what we see.
Just because it is seems unreasonable to you in human terms, is precisely why it may be perfectly reasonable to (what you admit) to be non-human entities! And just because it is unreasonale or implausible to you or anyone else does not mean it is not real or not happening. Quantum physics seems very implausible to me but that has no bearing on it being true.
I'm not familiar with Hawking saying we'll never travel to a star (well hopefully not in a star). I doubt he said that. We could build a space ark and travel for about 50,000 years and hit proxima centauri, no big deal. :)
but yeah, most are either crackpots or reasonable but naive people.
Since when are ad-hom's acceptable responses on HN? I never said I was sure such things were true, but like most true hackers, I'm curious and want to know more when things seem like they don't make sense. You're not very well read if you think UFOs are an open and shut case for all people who don't "need to see a psychologist."
Since at least 1303 days ago (for gfodor). Not that that's important, but just to dispel the "HN is declining" people. Your ad hominem response/insult is actually the kind of thing that could bring about HN's decline honestly.
I found gfodor's comments to be reasonable, though I have no idea if they're backed by real evidence. I wouldn't jump to conclusions myself unless I had more thoroughly looked at it.
Yes, sadly most people who dismiss UFOs, have not viewed or read - let alone examined the mountain of data and evidence that exist. Yes, evidence does exist - often as multiple cross-referenced radar readings, abnormal radiation levels, and even physical traces where UFOs have been observed. The true skeptic would not dismiss this out of hand, without some actual personal investigation into the subject.
Where are the aliens? There's apparently so many of them that there's "mountains" of data yet no definitive proof. Why is this the only sort of thing on history for which we have "mountains" of data but no definitive proof? I mean, come on.
While it does sound absurd, it should not be ruled out. Absurdity is a frame of reference and relative to our own knowledge and advancement. So a jumbo jet or even an LCD TV would seem absurd to someone living as recently as 200 years ago. So what could a species that is millions of years ahead of us, do is hard to fathom, let alone put limits on. The funny thing is most scientists on the one hand do accept that the universe must be teeming with life. What they just cannot accept is that it maybe be visiting planet earth. Why not? The standard argument is that the speed of light places limits on how far one can travel, the nearest star being 4 light years, it would take thousands or millions of years to travel the distance (the FTL argument). And yet the very same scientists, advance theories of wormholes, 10-dimemsional space-time, alternate universes that may exist right next to us. All of which may be harnessed by a species millions of years ahead of us to permit them to jump across space-time or even dimensions.
No, your "mind of God" argument just don't work. Intelligence and understanding of intelligible motivation has not changed dramatically. Reading any ancient story, we see all the same motivations, humor etc as today. I don't think Homer or Plato would be unable to understand why we do things today. He may not know how a Mac works but he could guess at why it was built. This is not the case for aliens and EVIDENTALLY POINTLESS visitations. Ok, these crafts contradictory with FTL or 10 dimensional technologies. It doesn't make sense. They travel through 10 dimensions but don't land?? Or maybe you do believe in the MIB universe, where Chinese restaurants are filled with aliens (totally serious)?
"I am afraid we have a slight political problem. This ufologist is of course the Earl of Clancart, with whom HMG exchanged views in the Lords Debate. I feel our political masters would think it improper if the RAF News should be too rude about him. I suggest the problem could be resolved without altering any of the text from "Brinsley ...." to ".....interior of the earth" but toning down the faintly derisory setting and letting the idiocy of the Earl's ideas speak for themselves."
Having seen a UFO myself I can safely say that there _are_ aircraft with capabilities far above that what I would expect from our own air force in our skies.
A friend and I witnessed formations of lights sweeping across the horizon making 90 degree turns in the blink of an eye.
There are a myriad of natural phenomena, optical illusions and - dare I say - mental aberrations that could account for one seeing lights in the sky.
I've seen several objects in the sky that I've not been able to immediately explain. Having been 'tricked' in this way and later realising the 'natural' explanations the idea of UFOs being explained as extra-terrestrial is not at all surprising to me.
I once saw what I at first thought was light from a helicopter one night, then it turned a tight angle and shot off toward space. I thought for a second that maybe UFOs were real, then I realized I was close to a military base. There is probably technology in the armed forces so advanced that most people do not know about it.
Doesn't Bayesian statistics solve this pretty easily? I have a lot of priors for weird aeronautical and weather phenomenon (e.g., St. Elmo's fire/ball lightning), meteoroids, missiles, balloons, and secret prototype aircraft.
I have no priors for technologically advanced alien life.
I love the idea that governments, so incompetent in oh-so-many ways, are capable of a multiple-decade coverup involving one of the most fantastic discoveries possible, somehow managing to prevent leaks of any meaningful data, including any mention whatsoever in data dumps such as, e.g. WikiLeaks.
And yet still people choose to focus their energies on UFO conspiracies, despite releases like these showing the true meaning behind the term UFO: stuff that looks weird in the sky and can't be identified by the viewer.
Now, this is obviously a simplistic breakdown. Broadly speaking, however, this is usually what we see in such debates. (With typically much ridicule being thrown about by both sides.) Files like these, though, give even the most hardened skeptics room for wonder. While I do not doubt the logical validity of the skeptics positions, there is nevertheless a large body of evidence (circumstantial though it may be) which becomes difficult to deny when taken in the aggregate.
These files are, unfortunately, just more in the circumstantial category. Although they have the "official" seal of approval they are still, at root, not hard evidence. It is frustrating to those of us who are curious about this that nothing beyond eyewitness reports ever seems to surface, no matter the source. I think most people at least pay attention to these news items, but do not know what to make of them beyond raising more questions.