An excellent read:

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...28/ai_n6361832

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Anything may be possible, but not everything actually is. Some things are true and some things are not. Wisdom is knowing the difference.

Even if this happened I suspect many would still not 'believe' for a while. People find it very difficult to change their 'beliefs,' and have been known to develop some strange denial strategies. The history of science reflects as much.

I think sociology is an important issue missed by the article. Certain subjects are fashionable, and others are not. People band together; they want to be one of the boys or girls, and very often fear to even discuss certain sensitive subjects. I think Ufology is stigmatised to such a degree that sensible conversation is generally precluded in the scientific community.

Bernard Haisch of ufoskeptic.org has been dismissed out-of-hand by a number of people on this board for daring to take a scientific look at a complex and emotive subject.

Even the Peer Review system, for example, seems to perpetuate predujice at times, dominated as it is by BB cosmology.

I think pride may also play a part. It is hard for us to accept that more advanced races, if they exist, might regard us as we regard chimpanzees.

This is simply untrue, not to mention intellectually dishonest. Haisch has been approached with warranted skepticism not for his ideas, but his methodology.

soupdragon2, those who spend any reasonable amount of time on this board are well aware of your distaste for BB cosmology. There are plenty of existing threads for such discussions, and it's completely unnecessary for you to continually grind this axe in those completely unrelated to the subject.

The answer to this question is simpler than UFOology proponents want to admit: SETI is approached scientifically, UFOology is not.
The history of science strongly contradicts your assertion. Most of the greatest discoveries in the history of science were immediately recognized for what they were: Galileo, Newton, Einstein, etc. - all were recognized in their lifetimes, by their peers, despite the popular myths to the contrary. Few other fields can say that - its practically a standing joke in art (find an artist who is dying of cancer and buy a bunch of his paintings...).

And the article is wrong.
As russ-watters points out, the difference between pseudo-science (UFOlogy) and science (SETI) lies in the method.

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papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

And Soup, when you start a thread about a non universe creation suject and try to worm the "BB whine" in, it lends you little credability...

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Feynman
>~~~~<
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

I always hope to hear they found the craft, or pieces of it. No, it is just lights and OH MY GOD! It can't have come from here. Once I would like to see some professional footage, that holds still and has some resolution. A good short focus comet chaser scope in a repeating arc, over time. That is one edge of a scientific approach. I never see it around UFO research though.

Another problem is, people seem to want a God to take care of the problems. They are always looking for the wise extra-terrestrials who will solve earths problems. Gotta get beyond that if they are going to be taken seriously.

Bottom line though, using the basic laws of physics, it is far more probable that we will get something in an energy form far sooner than we will find pieces of the craft laying around.

David Davis
Toledo, OR

That was a strange article, because all of the successful, scientifically acceptable tenets of SETI also validate the possibility of extraterrestrial visitations to Earth. Both SETI and the unfortunately named ‘Ufology’ forward the reasonable hypothesis that intelligent life exists out there, and it seems that with every passing year, this hypothesis appears to be more sound. So the only difference, at the argument level, is whether or not interstellar flight is reasonably practical or not. And since we humans haven’t got any really good ideas about making travel through such enormous distances practically feasible for sending unmanned probes through the galaxy, we assume that’s it’s more scientific to assume that it’s not.

That seems strange to me, since the one constant in scientific evolution, is change. We’re going to eventually figure out a viable form of interstellar transportation, and we’re going to send some very advanced probes to interesting star systems--that seems like a reasonably conservative assumption, given a couple of hundred years.

Will it only be then that we earnestly consider the possibility that others have been sending such probes our way? Isn’t the void of credibility in the field of aerial investigation more a product of it being left to unqualified people, than the validity of this one conservative projection of a future technology only presently beyond our means?

After all, over the course of decades of research, SETI has produced no evidence whatsoever. Whereas the number of photos, films, eyewitness accounts, and radar confirmations of unidentified atmospheric phenomena numbers in the hundreds, if not thousands. If we can tentatively set aside our own fleeting technological limitations as a yardstick for gauging the possible accreditation of this suggestive evidence to other forms of intelligent life, then a reasonable case can be made to attribute some small number of these events to life forms investigating our general interstellar vicinity.

In its present form, this is largely true, but the efforts of NARCAP demonstrate that this is not a necessary limitation. I think this is attributable to the droves of unscientific minds tauting haphazard theories all willy-nilly to explain some interesting, though indeterminate, cases of unidentified sightings. The thing is, there’s a much larger, quieter group of individuals, who are far more interested in the issue of unidentified aerial phenomena in general, and who do not limit the scope of their interest solely to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, though many, like myself, see no convincing argument to rule that out either. Within this domain, findings such as ‘ball lighting’ attract attention, and contribute to the general goals of scientific investigation.

I think it’s wrong to relegate an entire class of investigation to ‘pseudo-science,’ just because a lot of boisterous and opinionated people have claimed it for their own. The sensible course of action would be to wrench control of this area from the quacks by applying serious minds and methodology to the inquiry.

If we’re assuming that humans will never send probes to other planetary systems, that seems like a very questionable basis upon which to dismiss an entire class of possibilities. But even beyond that, it seems rash to presume that we have learned everything there is to know about what goes on in our atmosphere. Rather than rationalize the stigmatization of the entire subject, wouldn’t we be wise to instead look harder, and with open minds?

I've seen something in the sky that -could- fall into the ETH, but I've also seen other things as well, which seem to have no relation to that concept whatsoever. And the how's and wherefore's of those events have also defied my best efforts at classification. There are answers to all of these observations. I wish we could see more investigation and less dispute, so we could understand more about our world.

Scourge,

Even if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe (something we don't know), and even if they are capable of interstellar travel (something we know even less about), we still cannot assert that UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors here on earth. That's the problem.

What "UFOlogists" must do, which to date, they have been unable to do, is to provide bonafide evidence that unidentified flying objects are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft. This is the methodological failure of UFOlogy. Its not enough that its possible that they are. What's missing is evidence that they actually are.

And groups like NARCAP aren't really improving upon this sorry state of affairs. Simply reporting and cataloging "sightings" doesn't illuminate what those sightings are. Nor is NARCAP as objective as it claims to be. Both Richard Haines and Ted Roe are long time advocates of UFOs as extraterrestrials. They've tried to paint NARCAP with the color of objective respectability, when they're not at all objective on the subject. Its a bit deceptive.

In fact, NARCAP is just a two person organization consisting of Haines and Roe, although they list the names of a number of individuals as "specialists" affiliated with the organization, these people don't really do anything. There isn't any paid staff. The mailing address is a personal residence of Mr. Roe. And, Mr. Roe would be happy to accept your donation of cold hard cash, but don't count on it producing anything but more bandwidth for his website.

Regards,
Algorithms

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Anything may be possible, but not everything actually is. Some things are true and some things are not. Wisdom is knowing the difference.

I am skeptical re. BB cosmology, and believe that it has been successfully debunked on this very Bulletin Board. My point is that some theories receive general acceptance in the mainstream despite very vague evidence. Dark Matter is another good example. But there are other threads for these.

I have no idea what you mean by this!

I never use the term in the first ellipsis above.

Some theories have been quickly welcomed, but not all, and not always quickly, as I have stated. Please desist in misrepresenting my statements.

Some people refused to look through Galileo's telescope, which contradicts your assertion above. Halton Arp, for example, is often described as a modern day Galileo.

By his defenders, yes. Many painters are described (by themselves and their families) as modern day Van Goghs. Most of them (probably all of them) aren't. Although being shunned by the mainstream scientists isn't a prove that you're wrong, it is even less a proof that you're right, even though many ATM scientists (or their defenders) seem to think so.

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Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

You still do not understand.
The difference between SETI and UFOlogy is not the object of their studies, but the approach to it.
The SETI program is searching for the evidence of the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Many UFOlogists assume the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence without the supporting evidence, and interpret the UFO sightings in terms of that assumption.

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papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

Scientists all over Europe (Galielei's peers) studied his work and built their own telescopes to test his theories.
The people that refused his findings were the ones accepting the authority of the Church over science.

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papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

No, soup, those people were not scientists (you don't assert they were, because I think you know they weren't). You're bastardizing/misrepresenting science and history. That's dishonest.

Since Arp has not been accepted by the mainstream, he also is not a valid example of someone who was shunned only to later be accepted.

If you could provide even one example to back up your assertion, that'd be great...

Observations and experiments leading to confirmation...imagine that.

Sorry, soup...I don't see the contridiction.

Including you soupdragon?

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Some try to tell me, thoughts they cannot defend,... - Moody Blues.

That's also a popular pseudoscientific myth. The Laws of the Universe are, by definition, eternal. Our scientific theories are our attempt to find these laws. Therefore, the closer we get to those Universal Laws, the less our theories will change and most good theories do not get tossed aside when they are supplanted.

And as with soup's myth, the history of science does show my explanation of this myth to be correct: Keeping with soup's example, Galileo helped establish the relationships that led to Newton's laws. Newton's laws provided the best approximation of orbital motion at the time, but were known to be imperfect even then. Einstein's GR is vastly different in theoretical structure, but its practical model is merely a refinement Newton's (Newton's gravity became a special case of GR).

Thus, anything that Newton's law could do correctly in 1600, it can still do correctly today. The same will be true for Relativity in another 400 years: it correctly models high fractional C mechanics and no amount of new physics discovery will change that.