<_< Hi All,
I would like to ask a simple question.
With all the cave drawings supposedly showing beings in "space helmets", and with the countless sightings and reported abductions, who believes that we have actually been visited by aliens?
I would like to keep an open mind but which way does the evidence point?
I'd like to hear anybodys opinion on this subject.
Hope to hear from you soon,
jsc248.

There is irreputable evidence of advanced life visiting earth, not many know this but there are over a million websights devoted to the study of E.T.(Extra Terrestrial) life on the internet.Sights designed by normal everyday people from all countries and all walks of life...coincedance? Hardly... think about it for a second...Photo proof...testimony from everyone including astronauts to U.S.presidents to police to judges...I'm sure every household has a story of the something strange happening at some time in their lives.
We as a species are not ready to partake in any knowledge of E.T. life yet, as we havn't matured enough as a species socially only technologically.We can't even get along with other nationalities never mind a highly advanced civilization travelling through time and space from other worlds...Myself yes, I witnessed a facinating sighting with 5 friends we will all never forget.And it wasn't even remotely something that could be passed off as imagination,weather or anything psychological.Although I concider myself very lucky to have been part of something far beyond the normal everyday,it was extremly distracting in my life to say the least for which I had to drastically change my thought patterns and beliefs for the most part,being reminded we are far from the center of life in the universe.People always ask me why don't "they" try to contact us,I always reply it's like a child with an antfarm in his/her room.They study the ants be it farmer ants-worker ants-leaf cutter ants ect ect.We learn all we have to about them and in the end...would you or I or anyone really need to have a voice chat with the ants in order to better understand them?we know all we need to know aboiut them so why?...we on earth are very much like an antfarm only on a greater scale.

Millions believe in a God they've never seen but millions see ufo's and almost nobody wants to believe.

•"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." --Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)[/color]•"Space and time are modes in which we think, not conditions in which we live." --Albert Einstein
•"If a man takes no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand." -Confucius (c.551-479 B.C.)

I hope I don't open up a can or worms with this post, but I thought I'd try and argue against some of the points previously made:

The plural of anecdote is not evidence: millions of people say they have seen UFOs, or claim to have been abducted. Fine. But I ask, from a scientific point of view, that they prove it. And they can't. I'm not just talking about psuedo-proof ("honestly, I swear I saw it!"), but verifiable, repeatable, scientific proof.

Otherwise you might as well accept anything - fairies, ghosts, crystal healing, the yeti, the loch ness monster.

The original post said "I would like to keep an open mind", suggesting that the opposite point of view would be a (negative conotation) closed mind. This is not the case. Where masses of evidence exists, the opposite of an open mind is an informed mind. And in the case of UFOs, an informed mind would conclude that there is no such thing.

True, as canadaguy says, there are millions of websites devoted to UFO sightings and abductions. But there are millions of websites devoted to Yogic Flying, spoonbending, and David Hasselhoff, but that doesn't make them any more credible.

So I urge you all: KEEP AN INFORMED MIND

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<span style='font-family:Arial'><span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%'><span style='color:blue'>Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.
From where you are you can see their dreams.

- Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood</span></span></span>

There is as yet no proof that extra-terrestrial life exists. It is not that we are not looking for it, however. THe difference between seeing a UFO and finding a working ray-gun in a UFO wreck are entirely different things. So far nobody has provided concrete and tangible evidence to back up their UFO sightings or abduction stories. Like it or not, there are always going to be people who are either crazy or just plain charlatans out for some secondary gain by promoting UFO and abduction stories. Until somebody does we will continue to look in the universe for signs if intelligent life the best way we know how.

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Quid hoc ad aeternitatum
The conversion of complex and abstract ideas into simple and concrete ones is the essential function of teacher of a body of knowledge.

As others have said already there is absolutely no irreputable proof of any alien "visitations". I've read science fiction since I was 7 years old so I've been exposed to the topic far more than any five ordinary people but I feel no need to believe in what is essence a 20th century version of a fairy tale without some compelling evidence. I have been using a telescope since age 12 and have spent thousands of hours observing the skies and have NEVER seen anything that couldn't be explained without resorting to LGM.

Dave Mitsky

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Chance favors the prepared mind.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Actually I liken it to a cult rather than a fairy tale. Alot of people have seen things in the sky that they cannot explain. I cannot say that I am one of them. I do not discount out of hand that there could be phenomena occurring in some places at some times that defy rational explanation. Most likely such things would be natural phenomena that simply havent been discovered before since they occur infrequently.
Going from this point to saying that you know the cause of unexplained sightings without any evidence or proof as to what they really are is totally irresponsible in my view. If an intelligent extra-terrestrial or intra-dimensonal travleller were to take the extraoridnary effort to visit this planet, it is unlikely that they would be unable or unwilling to communicate with us. In fact they most likely would be eager to communicate with us after going through all the effort to reach us. And you cannot argue that they are following some sort of non-interference rule or they would not make themselves visible at all to us.
If aliens wanted to perform experiments on humans, they would not fool around with abducting them and then putting them back. They would take lab samples back to wherever they came from and perform their experiments on them in a CONTROLLED environment, the same way our scientists do with lab animals. An uncontrolled environment would likely make their research useless by ruining their results. I am pretty sure that stories of alien abductions are nightmares remembered incorrectly, as all of these abductions occur when people are asleep. I find it amusing stories of implanted devices, yet none have ever been surgically removed and identified as alien technology.
To paraphrase a famous Missourian, show me the (tangible) evidence and I will believe it.

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Quid hoc ad aeternitatum
The conversion of complex and abstract ideas into simple and concrete ones is the essential function of teacher of a body of knowledge.

i have something to say ..........

the space is a big thing to be alone in it......
isnt that enough evidence that we arent alone......

second ......
why would people say such things " i saw an alien spaceship....." if they knew nobody would believe them.....the answer is.....to tell someone....to get it out... and feel better...the simplest of all explenations.


the big question "THE ONE WE SHOULD ALL FEAR IS ....."why is the american goverment so TOP-SECRET abaut this topic?


jan

No, that isn't enough evidence.

You're right, Jan, the sheer size of the Universe does make it seem impossible that we are alone here, and I would say that I am inclined to agree that there must be alien life elsewhere. But that's not evidence either. That's just my opinion.

In order for me to accept that there are aliens in the Universe, I want evidence. Repeatable, scientific evidence. As yet, no one has shown me any.

Answer: Because they thought what they saw was a spaceship, but it really wasn't. Or that they were drunk / stoned and began seeing things. Or they want attention. Or they are so obsessed with the idea of UFOs that they want to add their own little story to the hysteria... There are many reasons more plausible than actual UFOs.

Perhaps because there's nothing to cover up... Perhaps because having the nation obsess over UFOs means that the spotlight is off the goverment in other areas... Bread and circuses worked for the Romans...

__________________
<span style='font-family:Arial'><span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%'><span style='color:blue'>Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.
From where you are you can see their dreams.

- Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood</span></span></span>

Canadaguy,

How can there be millions of websites if not many people know? I can take a picture of a hubcap I tossed in the air, but that doesn't make it a flying saucer.


BlackTearsofApril,

First, silly name. :P Second, why would you proscribe different motives to cave painters than you would to modern people. Do you think our TV commercials will be taken literally ten thousand years from now because we'd have no motive to lie. They were either not space helmets, but some sort of wierd ornamental head-dress no longer used, or they were high on peyote buttons and making stuff up.


Jan,

Tha people who talk about this kind of stuff as though they've actually experienced it are sad, depressed, or lonely, and are just looking for attention. Even if you label them as nuts and laugh at them, at least you're not ignoring them.


The Earth is a tiny rock orbiting an average yellow-dwarf star in an ordinary spiral galaxy with a few hundred billion stars. The signals we've emitted that could be detected by any supposed intelligence have been traveling through space for only 68 years. For someone to have heard this and responded or come here means they would have to be within 68 lightyears and have the ability to travel across the vast distances of space to find us. There is, therefore, little to no chance IMO that any alien has ever tried to come to Earth. There is no reason to.

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...and we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere; and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys...

On the topic of UFO sightings, I'd like to submit this short true story that I felt compelled to write after I saw a UFO last year in Glasgow, UK:

I’d like to take a few moments of your time to narrate an actual event that took place last night (Tuesday 4th Feb 2003) as I left work. The following is entirly true, and changed my world view in a big way. I hope you read the whole thing, and don’t dismiss any of it until you’ve read it all.

I worked late last night, leaving about 8pm. It was cold and crisp outside, and the sky was crystal clear. As I walked along the riverside to Bell’s Bridge I was busy looking up at the stars (Orion was up, and both Jupiter and Saturn we clearly visible). I passed a man with a dog and was temporarily distracted. When I looked back up I caught something moving in the sky, near Orion. I’ll explain my observations and thoughts in the order that they happened.

In the first split second that I saw something moving I realised that it was moving at the same speed a satellite would move; that was my first thought, that it was an artificial satellite. That was an initial reaction based on a split second observation, and was due entirely to the speed at which it was moving.

After I focussed on it, I realised that it was orange/red in colour, and figured that it wasn’t a satellite. The next thing I noticed, just moments later, was that it had size. My reaction to that was that it was a trail from a shooting star, a puff of colour as a bit of space rock was vapourised in the upper atmosphere.

I continued to watch though, and it kept moving, at too slow a rate to be a shooting star – it was still moving at satellite-speed. In addition, there was no trail, ruling out shooting stars altogether.

All these observations and thoughts happened within the first second. As I stood craning my neck to watch it, it passed overhead, and I realised that I could make out a shape. It was almost too small to see, but what I saw was a perfectly triangular object.

It was still travelling at the same speed, roughly east to west, and I turned to watch it pass overhead. As I watched it I realised that it wasn’t quite travelling in a straight line, it was zig-zagging erratically, very fast, back and forth, as it kept moving westward.

Eventually it faded from view, and I was left staring after it, my mouth hanging open. It was totally inexplicable. As an astronomer I’ve spent a lot of time watching the sky and I had never seen anything like this. I was at a total loss to explain it. At that instant I’d seen a UFO. It was totally Unidentified.

However, this lasted for only five seconds. As I stood watching the sky, dumbfounded, I saw another one, following the same path. It was the same colour, the same shape, was moving at the same speed, and zig-zagging like before. But this one was bigger. It was bigger because it was lower; low enough in fact that I could see it clearly. It was a bird.

I laughed out loud (attracting a funny look from a passer-by) at how easily fooled I was. Here I was, someone who is used to looking at the night sky, and I saw something I couldn’t explain. I’m about as skeptical as they come, but in those few seconds I was in the same group as the multitude of UFOlogists who claim to have seen just such wing-shaped craft zigging and zagging through the sky in fantastic ways.

But it was just a bird! If I hadn’t seen the second bird, who knows what I’d be writing now. As it is I feel totally privilleged. It was as if the Universe looked at me and said; “I’m going to show you something amazing, something that thousands of other people have seen, but that is totally inexplicable… and then, just for you, I’m going to explain.”

Ultimately it has given me a better understanding of people who claim to have seen UFOs. They might quite innocently report just such an observation and be told rudely: “It was just the planet Venus.”

“No,” they’d reply. “I know where Venus is; it wasn’t that.”

“Well, in that case, it was just a bird reflecting light from streetlights below.”

To which the upset reply would be something like: “I think I’d recognise a bird when I see one.”

I didn’t.

__________________
<span style='font-family:Arial'><span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%'><span style='color:blue'>Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.
From where you are you can see their dreams.

- Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood</span></span></span>

Excellent story, Steven.

It's all too easy to interpret unusual sightings as something mysterious or alien. And it's almost impossible to view something without putting your own hopes and desires onto the interpretation.

I'm sure any visiting aliens would do something more spectacular than fly around and ambush random people in remote locations. Maybe a landing on the pitch during the F.A. cup or the Superbowl would convince me

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Spike
:)

Cracking story, Steven

Given the number of people who have seen Venus and mistaken it for a UFO, I find it hard to take the testimony of those who say "I saw a light in the sky" seriously...

...but I wouldn't be surprised if we've already been visited. If I were an alien visiting today, I wouldn't stick around thought. Planet Earth might be considered "mostly harmless" by many of the galaxy's hitch-hikers, but I'm sure the majority of advanced civilisations would find us very immature. I think the only interest an alien race would have in us would be to see if we survived or not.

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"The stars are my home"
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I've watched c-beams glitter in the dark, near the Tanhauser Gate... all those moments will be lost, in time... like tears in the rain..."

I think that there hasn't been very much intelligent life in the universe.

If we suddenly disappeared, we would have left behind some pretty obvious signs that we were once here, like New York. Yet, there is absolutely no conclusive evidence that aliens have landed here. A single base would suit me, or maybe an abandoned spacecraft. Also, no evidence either on or around any of the other planets. Like in 2001, the Moon would keep any artifacts essentially forever. No erosion, no large moonquakes, yet no definitive proof there either.

If there is (or has been) intelligent life in the universe the have 1) never been to Earth, which seems quite likely, or 2) they covered up their tracks very well, which begs the question: Why?

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"Critical thinking and skepticism form the cornerstone of intelligence."
-me

I agree about the base, but I think we're just curious to know if they've visited... whether they set up camp here is another matter

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"The stars are my home"
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I've watched c-beams glitter in the dark, near the Tanhauser Gate... all those moments will be lost, in time... like tears in the rain..."

I don't think that we are alone in the world and i don't know if anybody has been here, but I did see a UFO....just kidding. i think that we should keep our eye on the sky and listen to what people are saying but just keep it in the back of our mind for when the aliens get here. I do have a question about the UFO in that picture...oh gosh was it of Mary or was it just that old....it was a painting. I know that there are people out there that think Jesus was an alien...i don't know about that, but it is kinda weird that he walked on water and all that stuff. All i know is that when I look at my daughter i know that life is a miracle wherever it may show up.

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frijole cabesa

To my mind this is more to do with "our arrogance". To believe that we are alone in the Universe is a silly as putting, £1000 on Greece to win EURO 2004 at 100 to 1, before even the competition began ( how many of us had a bet on Serena to win at Wimbledon?) itis a sure fire bet, far more likely than winning the National Lottery and I play every other week! We are not alone! "No doubters now." When one accepts that as fact , in the same way that millions of people believe in a God we can not see,(Yea like all around us,) then all our questions are revealed. Yes maybe we have been visited and yes we maybe like ants, unable to perceive our selves or that which we can observe, like ants can't perceive themselves, and are just chemical connections, but I think we do perceive the Universe and that we do understand it all quite well, up until the beginning 400,000 years after the big bang. Due to the recent on going golden age of cosmology(please Nasa keep servicing Hubble) we can see that we came into being so that the Universe had away of knowing itself.
Our knowledge of the universe says that nothing travels faster than the speed of light, but I disagree,thought does. It was not let "there be light" it was more "We thought, let there be light." So in the same way "I thought I saw an alien, I thought Venus was an uFo, (flying being the relevant part) we willed extra terrestials into being, who wants to be alone in that vast space made just for us on our little blue rock.

I'm going to toss my opinion in here without reading the rest of these replies, so forgive me if I add something redundant.

First let me state that I am a very firm believer that there is other intelligent life out there. Mathmatically speaking alone, its highly improbable that we're totally alone out here (Carl Sagan's infamous "billions and billions" of stars and planets comes to mind). There are just so many stars and so many galaxies out there that I find it so very unlikely that Earth is the only life bearing planet in the universe.

Now, with that said..while I'm sure it's quite possible that we may have visitor's from time to time, I think it's -very- unlikely that it's as frequent as many of these website and "UFO nuts" claim. Let's think about this for a second....alien abductions...why??? Any species thats advanced enough to achieve space travel is certainly going to be considerably more advanced and probably evolved then we are. Yea, it's possible they may be "curious" and may want to examine us to see how we work, but why would they go out of their way for it? Remember our location in the Milky Way...we're really out in the burbs here. It would most likely be similar to one of us travelling to the moon to study a colony of ants....and we certainly wouln't want to mate with them! Yes we may want to study them for our own diabolical purposes, but they'd hardly be aware of our presence. This leads me to my next point...

Ok...any species thats cabable of inter-galactic travel is certainly going to be much more technologically advanced then we are...this is a gimme. Is it not likely that a species at this level of tech would be able to "study" us in a completely obscure way? Lets face it here...we already work with stuff like "stealth technology" and have for several years. To borrow a concept from Star Trek, its highly likely they'd have some kind of "cloaking" techonology or a similar concept...aka we would not know they were here unless -they- wanted us to know they were here. Speaking of Star Trek, I'm also a firm believer in the idea of "non-interference". This is a -very- dare I say logical idea to me. It is very possible that advanced species from other planets would adopt such an idea. To me at least, it's man kinds arogance that says we have the right to mess with whatever we please (and look at how we've screwed up the planet because of it!). There is a certain wisdom in allowing things to unfold naturally. I would also like to add to this that any species smart enough to travel the stars is also smart enough to know that we're still a very primative and violent species. Take a look at what goes on in the world...wars, rape, suicide bombers, petty (and not so petty) greed, people of our own species starving to death, hunting other species on our planet to exstinction, destructions of the rain forests, religion, politics, pollution...geezzzz...the list is huge! -If- there are people watching us, they know we're -NOT- ready! In addition I have no doubt that they would not want to bring our "bad habits" out to the stars.

As far as these people that have pictures of UFO's....rubbish. It is sooooooooooo easy to fake a photo and has been done since the advant of photography itself. Thats the great thing about photography is that it can not only capture a moment, it can in a sense create them! I'm sure there really are people out there that watch Star Trek and movies like Star Wars who -really- think that stuff is real, but these same people also need to move out of their parents basements and get real lives! I would also like to add that a university once (I forget which) had faked a UFO encounter as a phycology experiment. Sometime after faking it, they came out about it being fake, yet there are -still- people that believe it was real! There were "experts" that had examined the photos before the university had exposed their own fraud who had said that the photos were -NOT- fake (even though they clearly were)...even "experts" can be fooled. The people from the university showed precisely how they did everything step by step, but theres still folks that think they saw a real UFO...it's amazing. If theres anyone that really thinks their looking at a picture of a UFO, regardless of the source, then I urge you to take a look at my post under the Astrophotography section under the thread titled "What do you guys think of this" (or something similar). I included a picture of the much over-looked "King" Nebula. Honestly, if anyone gets a picture of a UFO, then it will most likely be someone like NASA with the Hubble or something (and probably quite by accident) and not a farmer or some looser with a Poloroid looking to make a buck at the National Enquirer.

Lastly, there is no real conclusive -proof- that we have been visited. As far as all the people that claim to have seen UFO's let alone those that claim to have been abducted, I would also like to point out all of the people that still believe in Christianty! Without turning this into a theological debate, if you look at the Christian religion objectively, I'm really not sure how any sane, rational person can put blind faith in such a religios system thats eronious at best and (historically speaking) out and out lies in many cases. A very smart man once said, "theres a sucker born every minute"...aka people will believe what they want to if they want to believe it badly enough and I don't know a single person who hasn't told a lie or indulged in the great art of "b.s." at one point or other (some more then others, but you get the idea). People can scream government conspiracies and cover ups all they want, but stuff of this nature would not stay covered up for long. Hell, even the stuff on JFK is starting to come out! LOL!!! I"m not saying it's impossible, but to me at least, it's highly unlikely.

Honestly, I would simply -love- to meet a person or persons from another planet. I've been waiting for the mother ship to pick me up for a lot of years (and I'm sure many people wish they'd hurry up about it! LOL!!!). While I've only been into astronomy for a very short time, I've been facinated with the universe and the idea of other life for as long as I can remember. However when you look at the facts...the actual facts and not what yo-yo's post on websites or even write books about (to make money I might add!) and when you really think about things logically, while we may have had one or two "fly by's" over our history, I think that most of the stuff on UFO's you see and hear is simply either delusional,