You believe that the amateur astronomy community, the professional astronomy community, the air-traffic controllers, and amateur flight-plan trackers are also in on it? Conspiracy theories are paranoia, Hank.

I don't believe that at all, and I have no idea how you're jumping to that conclusion. Perhaps you are the one being a bit paranoid?

Baloney. That's your opinion but you don't have any evidence for it. It's simply a paranoid attitude.

What exactly am I paranoid about? All I'm saying is that it is naive to think that our government, especially our military, is going to reveal strategically important information to the general public! I don't blame them in any way. I wish the world didn't have to be this way, but unfortunately it is. It's not being paranoid, it's being realistic.

It would be a public relations boon. The US would get credit for discovering alien life. People would be famous. There are both selfish and magnanimous motivations.

It would be a public relations boon for the citizens who discover it. The most selfish motivation, and it's fair to say that we are selfish, would be to keep that information where it can benefit the US the most. And that would be... secret. Reverse-engineering of any spacecraft capable of making it to this planet, and learning the technologies associated with that, and learning how to recreate that, would be a HUGE boon to our military. This is obvious. Why should we announce it to the world, and deal with international pressure to release information, or perhaps even sabotage? That is illogical. Keep it secret until we can reproduce it and learn how to use the technology to our advantage. Do you think we were sharing developments with the public when we were frantically developing the A-Bomb?

Are you kidding me? What would you do with the "information"? You don't think that at least some of the presidents in the last 50 years have been motivated by fame?

What would I do if I was able to reproduce the technology? I would have flown that sucker right into Afghanistan and plucked bin laden right out of his cave, and done some painful experiments. But we obviously haven't figured it out yet. Regarding the presidents, they're already famous. It's about maintaining power, not fame. I wouldn't even be surprised if the President did not know everything.

That's plain idiocy. The government would finance academic institutions if that was the case. We wouldn't have the areas of NASA or NSF or NAOA or DOE that were devoted to just that.

If you honestly think that we would share information or technology of such magnitude, I would have to direct your first sentence back at you. Have we shared Stealth development or technology?

Those are catch-phrases that don't mean anything. I know the story of the "alien technology" being kept secret, but the government could just as easily keep the stuff it wanted secret and still tell the world it had the evidence. In fact, it doesn't make any sense at all for the government to keep the existence of the technology secret. It wants the rest of the world to know that it has the edge.

There is no edge if you can't reproduce it. Just knowing it exists is no edge, or even having some wreckage is no edge. Using Roswell as an example, having a smashed spacecraft is no edge. Re-engineering it, and duplicating it... THAT is an edge and we would definitely use to our advantage. And we would want to keep this secret until we can duplicate it and use it to our advantage. This is logical, not naive or paranoid.

You certainly are toting the party line for not being "into" the scene.

Well there's conspiracies on just about everything. I only believe that the government knows more about UFO's than it's telling us, and that Oswald had help. Those are my two conspiracies. Oh yeah... one more... JS is CIA disinfo agent. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_eek.gif[/img]

You need to explain this statement. How does simple KNOWLEDGE give away a strategic or military advantage.

Please reread the paragraph. Having SETI find some artificial signal coming from a faraway planet in no way poses a threat to us, nor does it give us any advantage over our enemies. There is no reason to expend resources and money to cover this type of information up. I believe we WILL be told about this type of discovery. Hopefully this explains it better.

You're falling fast into crankdom, Hank.

Thank you. If logical exercises make me a crank, then that's what I am.