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Originally Posted by a-l-e-x
Yes, I agree that the people who talk about "Greys" and "Lizard Men" and such have clearly seen one too many scifi movies...
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I remember watching a documentary a few years ago that discussed abduction and so on. One person who believed in abductions argued that the abductees' accounts do not resemble any science fiction. As she was speaking, they showed comics and stills from films (such as Close Encounters) which were extremely similar to abductees' accounts. Which was amusing.
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Originally Posted by a-l-e-x
and if these are the people Hawking refers to as being crackpots, I would have to agree. Either that, or they are just out to make money/gain notoriety.
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I'm fairly certain he was. If we look at the quote again:
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"We don't appear to have been visited by aliens," Hawking said, adding that he discounts reports of UFOs. "Why would they only appear to cranks and weirdoes?"
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What he's doing here is humorously looking at encounters from the aliens' point of view, assuming the ETH was indeed correct. If they were visiting the Earth on a fairly regular basis, we'd expect them to be meeting all sorts of people, including people who can use a camera, and people who will be taken seriously because they have a reputation for being reliable. Instead they seem to restrict their social activities to lonely people in lonely locations. Reliable pilots and so on only ever seem to get fleeting glimpses of their craft - so fleeting that they might just as easily be some atmospheric phenomenon rather than alien spacecraft.