UFO Research: Findings vs. Facts

Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
SPACE.com Thu Jun 22, 7:00 AM ET

For decades now, eyes and sky have met to witness the buzzing of our world by Unidentified Flying Objects, termed UFOs or simply flying saucers. Extraterrestrials have come a long way to purportedly share the friendly skies with us.

UFOs and alien visitors are part of our culture—a far-out phenomenon when judged against those "low life" wonders Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster.

And after all those years, as the saying goes, UFOs remain a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Why so? For one, the field is fraught with hucksterism. It's also replete with blurry photos and awful video. But then there are also well-intentioned and puzzled witnesses .

Scientifically speaking, are UFOs worth keeping an eye on?

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More here.

Something in 1982.

A huge disc floating about 500 feet over the ground. Silent. It had three glowing lights on the bottom, each a different color. It hovered for about 30 seconds, and then, whoosh it was gone, almost instantly.

I have no idea what it was, so, in fact, it was an unidentified flying object!

EDIT: I should stress that I had just gotten out of school for the day, and had not ingested, or consumed in any way, mind-altering substances.

He was having a birthday sleep-over, about 20-22 years ago, when he was 12 (I think). They were looking at stars and they noticed a light that was moving, first one direction, then another direction, very far away... it looked like a very bright star. It was moving fairly slowly... they could follow it easily. Then all of the sudden it just streaked off, faster than anything he had seen before.
We star-gazed a lot as kids (living out in the country there wasn't much else to do at night) and this was definitely unusual.. whatever it was.

But the one I posted about above was by far the most interesting thing I've ever seen in my life.

It was in broad daylight about 3:30 in the afternoon. I was dropping my girlfriend off at her house. She saw it too. I asked her to run in and get her dad, because he was interested in weird stuff (he had a great big stack of Edgar Cayce books, for example), but by the time they got back (only about a minute later), the "object" was long gone.

I guess I'll never really know what it was. Sigh.

I even gave him hell for a few years after that, teased him about seeing UFOs.

Don't tell him, but I think they exist. Why should we be the most advanced of all beings? It's entirely possible that we are not alone.

There's definitely a lot of weird stuff out there. I recently read a book on quantum physics, and to be honest, I really didn't understand much of it. But my jaw dropped a lot while reading it. :)

Oh, I meant to put in my previous post, that the "object" kind of resembled that old toy/game, I think it was called "Simon Says," that they used to advertise a lot on TV. Except that it was inverted. And the lights were circular, instead of triangular.

I used to carry a camera around a lot in those days. I wish I had it with me that day. I might be sitting on my own private island typing this post. ;)

not particularly. I mean, if evidence were to come to light, or the aliens were to introduce themselves, fantastic, wonderful! But take a loooong look at blurry alien videos, and get one glimpse of self-similarity in chaos or DNA twisting by that chloro-platinum chemotherapy drug, and UFO's will look pretty freaking uninteresting by comparison.

Facts are few, and I like facts.

Of course, if someone wants to pursue it... well, why not. To each their own.

My $0.05 :)

its almost a no-brainer in my mind.

Having said that:

1. its very very hard to get here from wherever there is
2. if they have the ability to get here from there, why dont they have the ability to cloak or otherwise do so unobserved by us? I mean we have stealth and we are already working on a real cloaking device that bends all light.
3. corrollary to 2, if they have the ability, what in the world is interesting about us being soooo far behind?
4. why abductions? why not abduct just a few people and clone or mate them? why not simply harvest sperm and eggs from people as they sleep, you can create your own people to study?

Alien visitations as currently constituted seems to me to suppose that aliens are simultaneously stupendously intelligent and pretty dumb.

Here is what the pro UFO people would answer.

1. maybe they use wormholes to cross dimentsions.

2. not sure about this one, perhaps they have it but it can't be continuous for some reason

3. they are studying us just like anthropologists now study indigenous people and/or we have something they need, you know DNA from cattle mutilations and crap like that

4. okay this is really why I answered this. i get very entertained listening to pro UFO people and they would say, definitely this is done......a lot. it comes out in abductees hypnotic regressions. some people even claim to see their hybrid offspring.

weird stuff, ordinarily not discussed in this forum. i guess the source matters.

(go figure)

I have no answers for your questions, though. I suppose if I did, I'd be very famous right now. You make very good points, though. I've been thinking about that for many years myself.

First and foremost, if Aliens were able to cross space and be on Earth right now then they would look upon us in the same way we look at a monkey. "Look, it uses tools!"

Second, every alien photo I've seen has made them out to be almost human looking. What are the statistical possibilities that something on another planet would evolve to look Human-like? Something like one in a few billion, I'd imagine... then of course you have to factor in the possibility that in the whole wide universe that species then finds another species that looks similar. (Probably is once again one in a few billion.) Then you see how unlikely it is.

However, has anyone ever given any thought that *IF* people are being truthful about what they believe they've seen... that they might not actually be aliens at all? I wonder if anyone has considered the possibility that they are just advanced Humans who have somehow mastered time travel and have come back to study their past. I know if given the opportunity I'd certainly like to go back in time and check things out. It would explain why they looked so similar to us - they may be genetic modified Humans from the future, or Humans after a million years of evolution. Who can say?

At the end of the day, if they do exist then they do not seem hostile toward us and for that, we should be thankful.

a race from the Vilmoran system seeded humanoids on different planets. Duh!


:evilgrin:

We shouldn't judge their existence by how we think they should act. For example, thinking that there can't be alien visitations because humans aren't interesting, or they're not acting like we think they should makes no sense. Also the "they can't get here from there" argument is probably one of the weakest as well. How the hell do we know what a civilization far more advanced can or can't do. It's like people 200 years ago saying humans will never fly or go to the moon. What would their scientists think of the idea that humans would be hurtling in metal tubes 40,000 feet high at 500 mph. Not as extreme as crossing the interstellar void but similar.

The UFO field is full of hoaxes and fuzzy thinking and this has pretty much made it impossible to make any sense out of the phenomenon. Of course there are organizations that will go to ridiculolus lengths to discount the phenomenon and ridicule those who research it. Bleh...it's a mess really. But I think that even if 99.9999 percent of UFO sightings are bullshit, it still just takes one of those unexplained sightings to be real to validate continued study.

and the "they cant get there from here" is the strongest argument there is. The idea that advanced civs can do "anything" that you seem to be advocating is rather weak. We dont know everything, but we know enough to know that travelling faster than light is very very very hard.

People 200 years ago werent all saying humans will never fly, Da Vinci designed a flying maching after all, and Verne wrote a story about us landing on the moon.

Travelling faster than light is impossible. I never advocated that they could. There are several potential ways of crossing interstellar space, some that involve going "around" the speed of light, advocated by mainstream scientists. Even if those ways aren't feasable, there's always the "slow" method. Aliens might not be as impatient as us. Not that they'd need to be patient since people tend to convienently forget that time slows down for you as you get closer to the speed of light. If you got fairly close to c, what seems like an impoossibly long journey for us becomes a few months for someone in the spaceship.

And as for the flying thing, I think you understood my point. Those people imagining manned flight were the equivalent of Gene Roddenbery and other sci-fi authors today.

you get a whole host of new problems such as the power requirements to shield your ship either physically or electromagnetically from the specks of matter that now hit with the force of a nuke because you are travelling so fast.

Every possible method requires a whole host of problems. And even if we assume that a culture would send such a ship, that would mean the ship would not return for centuries, nor would any information return for centuries, all on the guess that somewhere along the way they would run into an intelligent lifeform.

There are just too many issues and problems with interstellar space flight to believe that alien visitation is anything more than a 1% chance of happening right now. Certainly not as currently constituted, where the aliens appear to be as incompetent as we are and not as bright in many ways.

... far higher odds than each lottery winner thanks when receiving
his or her cheque ... just thought I'd mention it ...

The power requirements for EM shielding at that speed is nothing
compared to the power requirements to get the ship *up to* that speed!

Why did people ride a horse into the mid-West? Why did they walk with
packs on their backs into the jungle? If that proportion of "our people"
can be explorers in unknown lands, what makes you think that humans
are unique?

I wasnt making a scientific statement with 1% but making a rhetorical point. I'd suspect you have a much greater chance of winning the lottery than alien visitation ever happening.

The power requirements for EM shielding could very well actually be MORE problematic than getting a ship up to light speed. A solar sail could reach an appreciable degree of the speed of light just with light pressure, all it requires is a constant acceleration, no matter how small, to eventually get fairly close to C.

The shielding against cosmic rays for the crew and against particles for the ship and crew is one of the many issues to be faced.

There is a HUGE difference between riding a horse into the mid-West and riding a ship into the void. People went into the West in search of profit and to make a living. People do the same for going into the solar system. Both are quite doable.

The technology required to move through the galaxy begins to reach the level that those reasons no longer are as likely. The power and effort required makes it less likely that a race would do it merely to very inefficiently and poorly spy on a relatively backwards race.

... you're not the only one making rhetorical points rather than
scientific ones!
:hi:

As you say, a solar sail is a "simple" power solution that merely
requires time rather than power. A large volume of rock is an
equally "simple" shielding solution (e.g., a rocky keel on a 'ship'
that goes bum-first into the void) that requires no power to maintain
(but obviously much more to accelerate in the first place).

> There is a HUGE difference between riding a horse into the mid-West
> and riding a ship into the void.

Only for a short-lived, unstable & fragile human. The difference is
in comparison to our lifetime, our current technological level and
our priorities. It is so far beyond our normal experience that it falls
into the "impossible" bucket.

> The power and effort required makes it less likely that a race
> would do it merely to very inefficiently and poorly spy on a
> relatively backwards race.

Agreed but, there again, I have never been so human-centric as to
think that we are the reason/justification for such a voyage ...
we just happen to be an interesting rock by the roadside that most
travellers speed past and ignore, only a very rare few who happen
to stop in the vicinity (stretching their legs, fixing a flat tyre,
or taking a pee-break) would notice the rock, much less pay any
attention to it (other than as a target if the visitor was anything
like most male drivers ...).

If earth is visited by ETs in space craft, and there is perceptible evidence for it, then sooner or later we'll run in to the evidence. But so far it doesn't look like we have.

I highly recommend this movie. It contains some incredible crop circles (at 1:15) of a Mayan calendar, molecules, faces and a huge disk with a binary coded message. Even if these are fake, they are still worth a look because they are extremely beautiful.
Oh, halfway the movie there are some pictures of aliens – those seem to be fake.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6295641198174571593&q=ufo+mexican

Amazing stuff!

life anywhere in the 'verse.

Just my two cents. :-)