UFO's

[KmH]

UFO's are unidentified, naturally occuring Earth phenomena, like ball lighting.
UFO's are spaceships populated with beings from other planets/moons from within our Solar System.
UFO's are spaceships populated with beings from other planets/moons from outside our Solar System.
UFO's are unmanned probes from other planets/moons sent here by intelligent beings.
UFO's are here to help us.
UFO's are here to learn how to take over our planet.
I have met beings from another planet/moon.
I have willingly been inside a spaceship from another planet/moon.
I have unwillingly been inside a spaceship from another planet/moon.
I have been to another planet/moon (willingly/unwillingly), but have never been a NASA astronaut.
I have had sex (willingly/unwillingly) with a being from another planet, who wasn't my spouse.
I am a being from another planet, stranded here because my spaceship crashed in New Mexico back in 1948.

Which of the above do you subscribe to?

I know that space is aptly named.
There is a lot of it, and stars are not to close to each other if we guage travel time by the speed of light. We need to remember that Einstein's equation E=MC² has been proven many times over. The equation means energy and mass are equivelent. At the speed of light - 299,792,458 meters per second, mass becomes energy.

That the human race came to be, was more accident than anything, making it difficult to assume that intelligent life is rampant in the Universe.

So I subscribe to the first precept - UFO's are unidentified, naturally occuring Earth phenomena, like ball lighting.

 

[c.cloudwalker]

I am from the same planet as Jimi Hendrix but I am not stranded here. And yes, I have met beings from another planet, I have met earthlings.

 

[Derrel]

UFO's are spaceships populated with beings from other planets/moons from within our Solar System.
UFO's are spaceships populated with beings from other planets/moons from outside our Solar System.

Those two sound good to me.

 

[pgriz]

UFO's are unidentified, naturally occuring Earth phenomena, like ball lighting.
80% probability.

UFO's are spaceships populated with beings from other planets/moons from within our Solar System. 0.01% probability

UFO's are spaceships populated with beings from other planets/moons from outside our Solar System. 0.1% probability

UFO's are unmanned probes from other planets/moons sent here by intelligent beings.
1% probability

UFO's are here to help us. No evidence either way.


UFO's are here to learn how to take over our planet. No evidence either way.

I have met beings from another planet/moon. Yes, but they were not animate.

I have willingly been inside a spaceship from another planet/moon. No. But exogenous amnesia can’t be ruled out.
I have unwillingly been inside a spaceship from another planet/moon. No. But (same answer as above).

I have been to another planet/moon (willingly/unwillingly), but have never been a NASA astronaut. 100% sure about the NASA astronaut, <0.001% probability even with exogenous amnesia.

I have had sex (willingly/unwillingly) with a being from another planet, who wasn't my spouse. Hey, given that we spend up to 30% of our life being unconscious, who knows&#8230;

I am a being from another planet, stranded here because my spaceship crashed in New Mexico back in 1948. 0% probability. Cosmozoic interplanetary transmission &#8211; 0.1%

Other options not discussed: UFO's are inadvertent leakages into 4-space from higher level space fields.

Thank for a laugh, Keith!

 

[Derrel]

What if they are just lost space men, driving around the galaxy on the way to some big event, repeatedly insisting to their wives that, "We are NOT lost, damnit! I know where I'm driving!"???

Huh? What if that's what they are?

 

[pgriz]

What if they are just lost space men, driving around the galaxy on the way to some big event, repeatedly insisting to their wives that, "We are NOT lost, damnit! I know where I'm driving!"???

Huh? What if that's what they are?

Well, that would fit with the pattern that they don't stop and ask for direction... But I cannot imagine any spouse waiting for millenia to have the "wrong turn" corrected. The earthly ones I'm familiar with have rather short patience spans, measured in tens of minutes, if that. Nah - interesting theory, but fails on the spousal front.

 

[KmH]

Well current dogma, String theory, suggests that our universe has 14 dimensions though we humans can only detect 4 of them - 3 spatial dimensions and time.

String theory posits that the smallest particle of matter is a vibrating string, so small that even at sub-atomic scales a string appears point-like.

String theories also include objects more general than strings, objects called branes, which come in different varities like D-brans, black p-branes, (and my favorite) Neveu-Schwarz 5-branes or NS5-branes for short.

Strings vibrate in all 14 of the dimensions mentioned above. The modality of those vibrations determines our perception of the strings properties and we describe those point-like strings as particles : muons, k-mesons, prions, neutrinos, etc.

I case you were wondering.

I should add, when we hear of some poor guy in an especially low populated area of west Texas, Arizona, or New Mexico being harassed by a UFO as he drives along a dirt road, we should consider that like us, aliens beings probably have teenagers too.

 

[meccalli]

I think bigfoot is gonna be found and he's not of alien origin. :3

 

[Josh66]

LOL, none of the 'UFO's in the list are 'unidentified'.

I don't know what the hell they are, lol. But a lot of people do see things that they can't explain. I don't think anyone can deny that.

That doesn't necessarily mean anything though. Just because Joe Six-Pack didn't know what it was doesn't make it an alien craft here probe people, lol.

Some of them are probably weird weather phenomena, some are probably not actually there (I know I've seen a few things that weren't really there, lol), some are probably top secret military projects, and some might actually be aliens.

And sometimes people just want to have their 15 minutes on the news.

 

[pgriz]

True, all of that, and some more.

However&#8230;

We need to be careful about our degree of knowledge, or lack of. Ants and humans exist on the same planet, but we occupy entirely different spheres of awareness. How much awareness does an ant have of our existence? And if it (they?) is aware, to what extent does that awareness lead to any degree of understanding? Probably extremely little by our standards.

Now if there are beings that can bridge the distance of space, they could be to us what we are to ants, and we would have as much ability to understand these beings as ants have in understanding us. Again, if such beings exist, then their intrusion into our consciousness may be the same as our intrusion into the awareness of the ants. I have no insight as to their motivation to come to our corner of the galaxy &#8211; we are a small rocky planet orbiting a rather ordinary G2 star. The water envelope we have may be an anomaly, but we just don&#8217;t know, as we have only a few data points (all local to the solar system). As well, over the aeons, the evolution of Earth through various eras would have presented very different appearances and degree of interest to visitors (whoever they were).

Certainly, as humans, we possess the desire for knowledge, and to know what&#8217;s going on elsewhere, whether it is on the other side of the hill, the ocean, or the planet. Other beings &#8220;may&#8221; have the same motivation, or then again, their purpose may be beyond our comprehension. And if the gap in intelligence is so vast, they can do whatever they want and we aren&#8217;t going to be able to do swat about it, Hollywood notwithstanding. For all we know, we may be an intergalactic experiment in progress, with a &#8220;Do not Disturb&#8221; sign hanging off some appropriate celestial doorknob. Of course, as with any experiment, &#8220;they&#8221; send in occasional probes to see what the bugs are now up to, but if that&#8217;s the level at which we are located relative to &#8220;them&#8221; then there is probably not much reason for &#8220;them&#8221; to want to have a conversation with us.

In any case, sentient beings don&#8217;t have to interact with their test subjects. We can only hope that their sense of ethics is better developed than ours, and when &#8220;they&#8221; decide that the experiment is over, they will NOT run us through the sterilizer to restart the experiment. For all we know, &#8220;they&#8221; may have been the ones that &#8220;reset&#8221; the evolutionary clock in Permian times, the Triassic period, and the Cretacous period. Following each such event, a burst of new evolution happened, on a completely different track than was prevalent before the extinction event. Then again, it could have all been a cosmic fluke, with no inherent meaning to any of it. That option seems pretty depressing to me. Perhaps, we exist to give meaning. In which case, let&#8217;s take great photographs and rejoice in our ability to create beauty!

 

[KmH]

Then again, it could have all been a cosmic fluke, with no inherent meaning to any of it.

Yep. This gets my vote.

 

[Mitica100]

Having seen a ball lightning some years ago, I compare it to the footage seen, maybe way too often, on TV. There is no resemblance. I'm not saying there are/aren't aliens around and/or UFOs, just making an observation.

Perhaps all the unidentified stuff is something that has been invented by humans, albeit is so secret that not even the highest in ranks know about it. Case in point, the Phoenix Lights, March 1997. There were many reports of a huge triangle wedge shaped object floating Northbound in the skies of Phoenix, AZ. Reports followed coming from the I-17 area, as if the pilots of the craft were following the freeway to move in the desired direction. Alien technology would be far more advanced, wouldn't it?

 

[c.cloudwalker]

In any case, sentient beings don’t have to interact with their test subjects. We can only hope that their sense of ethics is better developed than ours, and when “they” decide that the experiment is over, they will NOT run us through the sterilizer to restart the experiment. For all we know, “they” may have been the ones that “reset” the evolutionary clock in Permian times, the Triassic period, and the Cretacous period.

Very interesting post pgriz. Although I played the funny card in my own post, I am and have been very interested in the subject for a long time. There are quite a few things that point to the possibility of aliens having been here and maybe even having made themselves known to the locals once upon a time.

For the sake of brevity, I will just mention two which are closely related: sculptures of planes (or plane looking objects) dating from civilizations that are way, way older than the age of flight as we think of it today and giant drawings in/on the earth that only make sense seen from the sky although they were created at a time when flying machines didn't exist...

Of course, "didn't exist" doesn't really mean they didn't. Any serious historian will tell you that history is long in possibilities and short in actual facts. Especially when the sociological aspect of history is computed in. Anyone who has read "Lies My Teacher Told Me" will know what I'm talking about. So will anyone who can read a language other than english.

Take a book about WW2 from France and one from the US and you get two different stories. Why is that? The sociology of history, period. John Quincy Adams said "The historian must have no country" and he was quite right. But it rarely is the case and therefore our history is twisted by politics, by stupid feel good sentiments and other special interest problems.

All that to say that maybe there were planes in a much earlier civilization. Or maybe there were aliens who visited us...

 

[pez]

Good post, c.cloudwalker.
Super skeptics, the mainstream press, and official government sources (perhaps excepting France, Brazil and a few others) invariably invoke the cosmic giggle factor upon the mere mention of this subject. The assumption is that we humans are all-knowing and likely the only truly intelligent life in this universe. Why, any "others" could never get here with their chemical or plasma rockets, anyway, so therefore all UFOs are either natural phenomena or secret military craft or hoaxes, period. Possible other more advanced means of travel (synthetic worm holes, etc) is dismissed because, well, WE can't do that (yet). Comically, these same skeptics still point out the relatively small number of radar lock cases, even though we have radar stealth nowadays (optical stealth soon or already). A thorough examination of the available UFO evidence, once separated from all the disinformation (a mouthful, I know), can only lead to the knowledgeable conclusion that some UFOs are unknown craft.

 

[oldmacman]

Hmm... I'm not sure if this is a thread about the existence of UFOs or the existence of sentient life outside the third rock. There are a few things that give me pause:
- contemplating the infinite of space. I like Douglas Adams description of how big space is.
- contemplating a universe without us in it. It's a little sad thinking about what a small portion of the universe we occupy. I have often thought how depressing it would be for no one, anywhere, to be contemplating the wonders of existence and the mysteries that the universe holds. If something happened tomorrow that wiped us out, would the galaxy keep spinning unaware of the loss? If life is so fragile, how is it that it keeps reviving itself on earth? Not that dinosaurs were sentient.
- considering chance, and the factors that led to life here, what is the likelihood of life on other planets given the almost infinite number of stars and galaxies? Carl Sagan has an interesting take on the mathematical side of chance in the universe.