Best UFO documentary hands down

[stryder]

I don't buy that the military has some sort of superadvanced secret technology or else we'd be seeing it by now. All we ever see in war are more high speed jets and now drones. The ufo craft witnessed by people otoh are far in advance of these, moving instantaneously at speeds far beyond anything we have and yet never making a single sound. Ufologists claim the military has retro-engineered crash remains of alien spacecraft but I doubt that's the case. We simply don't have the science yet to understand such technology. I mean what would we think if we saw something like a higgs field dampener. We'd have no concept of how it worked. Yet with ufos we are talking about intelligences perhaps millions of years more evolved than we are. Their technology to us is like showing a computer to a caveman.

It's not just the military dabbling though, there is businesses that keep their new technologies under wraps due to concerns of the competitors and then there is individuals that might be hobbyists and build all manner of weird and wonder contraptions. (There's a number of flying cars and disc shaped flying devices that fall into the "more money than sense" category.)

Still it's all part of the fun, either believing in something that nobody truly knows or understands or trying to work out what it actually was/is.

[C C]

Why do you thank it is... that most people thank Aliens are quite likely... but dont seem all that concerned about the ufo acounts from eye witnesses... or those captured in pics an videos.???

There does seem to be a degree of cognitive dissonance there with, say, a group that almost fanatically defends the conclusion that there is other intelligent life in the Milky Way; but then reflexively dismisses the hypothesis of some UFOs being ET-related. But like me, they could be skeptical because of FTL limitations in regard to interstellar travel. [Unlike me, the "rare-earth hypothesis" can't be thrown in there, too, because as aforementioned they believe that complex life (with later intellect as an offshoot) is as thick as fruit in a harvest-time apple tree.]

OTOH, if "space-warp" drives and "hyperspace transistions" are confined eternally to the realm of sci-fi, then the practical alternative would be what the Black Monoliths represented in 2001: A Space Odyssey (minus that apparent leap to another part of the galaxy by artificial "wormhole" at the end). Where a civilization sends out von Neumann machines as explorers to venture and replicate their way slowly over thousands and millions of years from planetary system to planetary system. The addition to that by the 1990s (as the potential of nanotechology became popular) is that these self-repairing / self-replicating missionaries could also carry the DNA or whatever molecular-pattern basis for the alien natural life along with it. Setting up shop on uninhabited worlds, where released nanobots build larger robots who in turn build artificial "wombs", incubators, and nurseries [and become guardians / teachers] for establishing the original species on their new home.

Along the way, however, the machine explorers would encounter an inhabited world around a mundane yellow star and collect data about it. Activities occasionally sighted by the human spectators of the planet.

[Yazata]

The evidence for sightings of ufos is so abundant now that it can no longer be denied.

I don't think that anyone wants to deny the existence of Unidentified Flying Objects. Not every flying object will be identified by whoever is observing it. Many more seeming-UFOs aren't flying objects at all, but rather misidentified astronomical or meteorological phenomena. And many reports are probably psychological in origin, much like the religious visitations and miracles that they so resemble.

What I remain more doubtful about is whether any of them are in fact alien spaceships.

Fact is we DO know how interested the military is in this subject because they keep it so secret.

The fact that they seem uninterested is evidence that they are interested?

It seems to me that if governments around the world really thought that UFOs were extraterrestrial spacecraft, they would show more interest in the phenomenon than they currently do. Every UFO report would attract swarms of investigators and scientists. There would be all kinds of monitoring systems set up everywhere and SETI would be among every government's biggest and most active programs.

I do think that UFOlogy is tremendously fascinating, but I'm more inclined to think of it as a problem for sociology, psychology and religious studies. It seems to me to be an example of modernist quasi-religious folklore, repackaging the age-old traditional visitations of religious transcendence into a new and ostensibly more 'scientific' conceptual vocabulary.

[Yazata]

Why do you thank it is... that most people thank Aliens are quite likely...

The question whether "aliens" are quite likely depends on what words like 'alien' and 'life' mean, on what their range of reference is. Our problem is that we only have knowledge of life on one planet, so we naturally think of everything in terms of ourselves.

My own view is that if life emerged (through some as-yet unknown process) here on Earth, and assuming that similar physical and chemical processes are possible all over the universe, that functionally analogous self-reproducing biochemical systems probably emerged elsewhere as well. There are billions of galaxies out there, each with billions of stars. And evidence seems to be mounting that planets are common. That's lots of powers of ten.

Having said that, I also think that there's a huge fortuitous aspect to life. The precise nature of the early chemical replicators in each place, and the evolutionary pathways they subsequently follow once they exist, is probably going to have almost infinite chaotic variations.

That suggests (to me anyway) that space-aliens aren't likely to be humanoids like ourselves. Aliens will probably be far more... alien... than we currently imagine.

Which has interesting implications for all the many 'contactee' reports in UFOlogy. The aliens described in these reports are almost always humanoids, often very similar anatomically to ourselves. My guess is that the reason for this is that these aliens are the product of human imagination, conceived in our own image.

Another, far less likely possibility is that beings like the so-called 'Greys' are time-travelers, beings that do have some evolutionary connection with ourselves.

but dont seem all that concerned about the ufo acounts from eye witnesses... or those captured in pics an videos.???

I'm inclined to think of them in much the same way that I think of visions of the Virgin Mary or the miracles of the Saints. There's a vast body of reported evidence, but it's always anecdotal and intangible somehow.

How do I make my assumption that there are probably 'living' (in a broad sense) beings out there in the universe, probably even beings with very advanced cognitive abilities, consistent with my doubts about UFOs being extraterrestrial spaceships?

I guess that I'll say that being so fortuitous, I don't think that life is all that common out there. You may have to inspect thousands of planets before finding any. (And then, it might just be something analogous to bacteria.)

The existence of something functionally analogous to life doesn't necessarily imply advanced technological civilization either. The vast majority of the Earth's several billion year history elapsed without the presence of human beings. The scientific revolution was only about 350 years ago. So thinking about other planets, not only would we have to find one where something like life has appeared, we might also have to catch that planet at just the right time.

So my guess is that technological civilizations are likely to be widely separated.
   

[Magical Realist]

Many more seeming-UFOs aren't flying objects at all, but rather misidentified astronomical or meteorological phenomena. And many reports are probably psychological in origin, much like the religious visitations and miracles that they so resemble.

It's hard to write off eyewitness accounts of hovering triangular craft as a religious hallucination. Example: the rash of ufo reports in Belgium during the early 90's. All the reports were the same: a triangular craft with lights and red flying balls coming from it. Thousands of eyewitnesses of this thing, and then they all stop. That can't be explained away as the planet Venus or the virgin Mary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave

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The fact that they seem uninterested is evidence that they are interested?

More like the fact that they go thru such effort trying to keep ufo information secret. If it weren't important, there'd be no record of investigations by the military into this phenomena. Yet we have access to records now as well as eyewitness accounts demonstrating the efforts of the military to downplay and cover up reports of ufo phenomena. If it weren't important they wouldn't be involved at all. And yet they are, as numerous eyewitness accounts confirm:
http://ufodigest.com/article/former-mili...-ufo-cover

[cluelusshusbund]

cluelusshusbund
Why do you thank it is... that most people thank Aliens are quite likely... but dont seem all that concerned about the ufo acounts from eye witnesses... or those captured in pics an videos.???

MR
I think it's a syndrome--let's call it paradigmatic insecurity. They have a world view of how reality is supposed to be. And they count on that to live their lives. The prospect of encountering a superior species from another planet is thus not only unacceptable to them but absolutely traumatizing. It's one thing to think ET might be out there on a planet lightyears away. But REALLY there? Like a mile away in a spacecraft overhead? People can't generally handle that. It raises so many more questions that it sort of drives you crazy. You have to be pretty strong to handle a truth like that, accept it as a reality, and then keep living life like it was all normal again.

Do you thank civilization woud be beter off if people grew able to accept that suprior species are here an near... an if so... what do you thank the benefit woud be.???

[Magical Realist]

Do you thank civilization woud be beter off if people grew able to accept that suprior species are here an near... an if so... what do you thank the benefit woud be.???

I think we'd be worse off, at least to the extent that we define normalcy for humans as going to work everyday and raising our families and recycling and voting and watching TV and taking anti-depressants. Consciousness of another conscious intelligence would be unnerving and a little maddening. Peoples' worldview would be challenged and their own self-definition as the ultimate being would be threatened. The change in our cosmic awareness must come about gradually, and not all at once. We have to grow used to the fact of another intelligent species, and then we will be ripe for contact, assuming that contact is friendly and not predatory that is! The only precedent for this sort of de-anthropocentrism was when evolution showed us we came from animals instead of from God. It's a realization that took over a century to really sink in, if it has at all. Alien consciousness is just the next logical step in man not being the center of everything as he thought he was.

[Image: Martians.jpg]