LOL! I've answered that question of yours about 4 times now. You just repeat the same old crap. Don't waste my time. The evidence stands, and you can't refute it.
And yet we always do. Funny that. Maybe one day you'll stop being so ignorant and understand why that is?
You ignore the fact that blurry photos and anecdotes are insufficient evidence to prove that aliens in spaceships are visiting Earth. It's not an insult to point that fact out.
Actually it's radar evidence, eyewitness reports by multiple witnesses, photographs, impressions left in fields, and video. But you knew that. Hey, I know. I'll make it real easy for you. Why don't you refute the case posted in the OP? The one witnessed by 200 schoolchildren and a science teacher. After that, refute the ones witnessed by thousands in a soccer stadium. I'll wait.
You're the one making the claim that out of all the possible explanations, it's aliens in spaceships. You need to provide some pretty extraordinary evidence to back that claim up. You do understand what extraordinary means, don't you?
So you can't refute just those two examples I gave? Wow..How do you expect me to believe you've refuted the dozens I've posted in this forum then?
Yet you claimed you and others refute these accounts I post all the time. Are you now saying you lied about that? That you can't really refute any of them?
Simply put, it is irrational to treat tech advancement like magic just to suit the conclusion you want it to. Yes, alien life may be more advanced, may have discovered things that we can but only dream of at the moment. But it is simply irrational to conclude that they have therefore done so, that they are capable of visiting us etc in favour of rather more mundane explanations for what we have observed. No, I'm not saying "let's assume our current level... should apply equally...", I'm saying that we can not know what we don't know... and it is irrational to make claims of what we don't know in order to reach the interpretation you want, rather than more mundane explanations for what we have observed. Rationality - at least for me - works on the basis of applying what we know to be mundanely possible to explain that which we observe. Only when that fails to explain do we propose additional things, and we keep the additional things to the minimum necessary. Alien life, technologically superior enough to visit us yet do so in the manner we observe, is full of questions, holes, inconsistencies, and far too many unknowns to be considered rational (at least by me) when other far more mundane explanations exist. UFOs exist any time there is an observed flying object that is unidentified. It is the interpretation of that observation that is questioned. I have also not said that "aliens can't visit earth" - only that it is, in my view, highly unlikely that any of the observed UFOs are of alien origin - such that I fing claiming them to be of alien origin irrational.
The article is not about alien life but about sufficiently advanced alien life. It may be that all other alien life that exists never evolves past the equivalent of the highly successful dinosaurs - never reaching sentience sufficient to venture into the stars. Noone disputes the observations - merely the interpretation. And others have amply identified where the weakness lies in the evidence you present. Yes, it is interpretation. Everything we relate is an interpretation. Everything we observe we interpret. Someone sees what they think is a ghost is their interpretation of what they have seen. Their claim is their interpretation. But then you do have a habit of taking people's testimony as the truth - hence my comment that you seem to lack critical thought. I'm not editing any accounts. I'm making no definitive claim as to what the UFOs are/were - I am merely not jumping to what I see as the irrational conclusion that they are of alien origin. Do you see the difference? It's not the word "probable" you're having difficulty with, but what it is that is being assessed as probable. Do you see any difference between these statements: 1. Alien life existing somewhere is highly probable. 2. Interstellar-capable alien life existing somewhere is highly probable. You seem to be reading statements regarding "alien life" as applying to "highly advanced alien life" or "interstellar-capable alien life" etc. I would think most here accept that alien life - i.e. at least the most basic form of life - is highly probable somewhere in the universe, our galaxy even. That is NOT the same as saying that those same people think that that life is capable of visiting our planet. Does that clarify it for you?
To name a few: (freak/abnormal) weather patterns (such as lightning sprites, ball lightning, lenticular clouds, etc), military vehicles (experimental or otherwise), other existing vehicles, scientific equipment (weather balloons et al), or simply a deliberate fake. Beyond that, I am likely to conclude "unknown" before concluding "extraterrestrial origin", as there simply is insufficient evidence to support the notion that they are extraterrestrial in origin. There are also far too many inconsistencies with that conclusion that have to be excused away... such as these "visitors" being sufficiently hi-tech to travel at vast speed to our planet, avoiding detection upon arrival and within our atmosphere, but somehow choosing to appear to a few people before avoiding detection again. Why do they choose to play hide & seek at all? They also seem to need to display lights... these wonderfully advanced alien visitors who seem to go out of their way to avoid detection. And how come, despite all the mobile phones around the world, there is not a vast amount of video evidence for the most recent sightings? Does everyone really just see something incredible and stand there, and only afterward think "well, if only I had a means of recording this as evidence!" Sure one person might well appear to do that, but with just one person providing footage you have to show that it is genuine and not faked. Get a multitude of footage from different angles, all clearly showing the same thing, and you may be on to something. But it just hasn't happened. All we get are witness statements that, for whatever reason, some seem to take as the absolute truth while others take them merely as the person's interpretation of what they saw. And at best all they should conclude, rationally, is that what they saw is unidentified. It is, after all, more rational to conclude "I don't know" than to claim it is something else based on conjecture.
One infers aliens are capable of visiting earth after going thru hundreds of instances of craft being observed by witnesses that exceed anything we have and show the characteristics of advanced technology. There's simply no reason not to. If assuming aliens have technology far in advance of our own, something very logical to conclude, explains all the craft we have witnessed over the past 75 years, then it's a valid assumption. What IS irrational is assuming our present stage of scientific knowledge defines what is possible for all other species out there. We don't know that. But after all mundane explanations have been eliminated, we then resort to the next logical explanation of advanced alien visitation. That's what we do with the best of ufo sightings. We don't immediately assume them to be alien craft. Inferring something based on the evidence may lead to more questions, but you don't refrain from doing so just to avoid those questions. It's not rational to assume the real situation isn't even beyond our present means to rationally understand it. In the case of ufos, we may precisely be witnessing a phenomenon that transcends our current paradigm. But we don't therefore deny the phenomenon just because we don't understand it yet. We explore and research and gather data until we have some answers. That's the spirit of true science. Would you be satisfied if we just conclude, after eliminating all mundane possibilities, that the phenomena is real and is something we can't presently understand?
Then let's apply these criteria to 4 cases of ufo sightings: 1. In 1994 62 school children in Zimbabwe Africa witnessed an egg-shaped craft land near their playground and alien-looking beings come out of it. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ================================================================ 2. "The Belgian UFO wave peaked with the events of the night of 30/31 March 1990. On that night unknown objects were tracked on radar, chased by two Belgian Air Force F-16s, photographed, and were sighted by an estimated 13,500 people on the ground – 2,600 of whom filed written statements describing in detail what they had seen.[2]Following the incident the Belgian air force released a report detailing the events of that night. At around 23:00 on 30 March the supervisor for the Control Reporting Center (CRC) at Glons received reports that three unusual lights were seen moving towards Thorembais-Gembloux, which lies to the South-East ofBrussels. The lights were reported to be brighter than stars, changing color between red, green and yellow, and appeared to be fixed at the vertices of an equilateral triangle. At this point Glons CRC requested the Wavregendarmerie send a patrol to confirm the sighting. Approximately 10 minutes later a second set of lights was sighted moving towards the first triangle. By around 23:30 the Wavre gendarmerie had confirmed the initial sightings and Glons CRC had been able to observe the phenomenon on radar. During this time the second set of lights, after some erratic manoeuvres, had also formed themselves into a smaller triangle. After tracking the targets and after receiving a second radar confirmation from the Traffic Center Control at Semmerzake, Glons CRC gave the order to scramble two F-16 fighters fromBeauvechain Air Base shortly before midnight. Throughout this time the phenomenon was still clearly visible from the ground, with witnesses describing the whole formation as maintaining their relative positions while moving slowly across the sky. Witnesses also reported two dimmer lights towards the municipality of Eghezee displaying similar erratic movements to the second set of lights. Over the next hour the two scrambled F-16s attempted nine separate interceptions of the targets. On three occasions they managed to obtain a radar lock for a few seconds but each time the targets changed position and speed so rapidly that the lock was broken. During the first radar lock, the target accelerated from 240 km/h to over 1,770 km/h while changing altitude from 2,700 m to 1,500 m, then up to 3,350 m before descending to almost ground level – the first descent of more than 900 m taking less than two seconds. Similar manoeuvres were observed during both subsequent radar locks. On no occasion were the F-16 pilots able to make visual contact with the targets and at no point, despite the speeds involved, was there any indication of a sonic boom. Moreover, narrator Robert Stack added in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, the sudden changes in acceleration and deceleration would have been fatal to one or more human pilots. During this time, ground witnesses broadly corroborate the information obtained by radar. They described seeing the smaller triangle completely disappear from sight at one point, while the larger triangle moved upwards very rapidly as the F-16s flew past. After 00:30 radar contact became much more sporadic and the final confirmed lock took place at 00:40. This final lock was once again broken by an acceleration from around 160 km/h to 1,120 km/h after which the radar of the F-16s and those at Glons and Semmerzake all lost contact. Following several further unconfirmed contacts the F-16s eventually returned to base shortly after 01:00. The final details of the sighting were provided by the members of the Wavre gendarmerie who had been sent to confirm the original report. They describe four lights now being arranged in a square formation, all making short jerky movements, before gradually losing their luminosity and disappearing in four separate directions at around 01:30."====https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave ============================================================ 3. "On January 8, 2008 in Stephenville, Texas, one of the larger UFO sightings in the United States occurred. A few days ago the UFO investigative organization Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) released a 77-page report on the sighting. MUFON is a UFO investigative organization in the United States. Founded in 1969, it now has 3,000 members and is headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado. The MUFON report, entitled "Special Research Report Stephenville, Texas" was written by Glen Schulze and Ropert Powell. Shulze has radar experience from working at the White Sands Missile Range. Powell has a chemistry degree and has extensive experience with semiconductors from working for Advanced Micro Devices. The report is an analysis of radar records from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Weather Service, obtained through several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and comparing them to witness accounts. Shulze/Powell concluded that the radar data confirms the witness observations of an object, as well as the Air Force's statement that said ten aircraft were operating in the area. They say that it is too difficult to say what the witnesses saw, but that there was something there. Twice, they say, radar picked up an object travelling at nearly 2,000 mph, and at other times it showed a slow moving object."===https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/MUFON_releases_report_on_UFO_sighting_in_Stephenville,_Texas
4."At approximately 16:15 CST on Tuesday, November 7, 2006, federal authorities at Chicago O'Hare International Airport received a report that a group of twelve airport employees were witnessing a metallic, saucer-shaped crafthovering over Gate C-17. The object was first spotted by a ramp employee who was pushing back United Airlines Flight 446, which was departing Chicago for Charlotte, North Carolina. The employee apprised Flight 446's crew of the object above their aircraft. It is believed that both the pilot and co-pilot also witnessed the object. Several independent witnesses outside of the airport also saw the object. One described a "blatant" disc-shaped craft hovering over the airport which was "obviously not clouds." According to this witness, nearby observers gasped as the object shot through the clouds at high velocity, leaving a clear blue hole in the cloud layer.[1] The hole reportedly seemed to close itself shortly afterward. According to the Chicago Tribune's Jon Hilkevitch, "The disc was visible for approximately two minutes and was seen by close to a dozen United Airlines employees, ranging from pilots to supervisors, who heard chatter on the radio and raced out to view it."[2][3] So far, no photographic evidence of the UFO has surfaced, although it was reported to Hilkevitch that one of the United Airlines pilots was in possession of a digital camera at the time of the sighting and may have photographed the event.[4]"====https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O'Hare_International_Airport_UFO_sighting
I personally think that it's very likely that something functionally analogous to Earth-life exists elsewhere in the universe. By that I mean self-reproducing chemistry subject to natural selection and capable of evolution. A question then is how common it is and how far apart instances of it are spaced. My guess is that it's relatively uncommon and widely spaced. So any journey in which alien life travels to visit its neighbors is apt to be a very long trip, perhaps hundreds of light-years or more. That suggests that there might be a needle in a haystack aspect to it, since there will be a large number of stars and perhaps thousands of candidate exoplanets within that radius. Or bacteria. If the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and if it's true that life appears on Earth as early as 3.5 billion years ago, and if the appearance of multicellular organisms in the 'Cambrian explosion' only happened about 500 million years ago, then 86% of the history of life on Earth consisted only of single-celled organisms. So if space travelers do manage to locate and visit the life nearest to them, it might turn out to be seas full of something like biochemically alien photosynthetic bacteria. If anatomically modern human beings only appeared a little over 100,000 years ago, and the history of life on Earth extends back 3.5 billion years, humans have only been present for 0.0027% of the history of life on Earth. Most of that human occupation of the Earth was taken up by the stone age. It's only been 400 years since the scientific revolution. So if we imagine another planet with life on it, it might only be putting out spaceships for an infinitesimally small fraction of its history, assuming that it ever does. So that planet would have to be at precisely the right moment in its history. I think that the likelihood of ufo's is almost certain. Not every flying object is identified. Most of these reports have mundane explanations (or would, if enough information existed and the cases were pursued). There may or may not be some residue of cases that indicate some phenomenon or phenomena as yet unknown to science. I'm less sure about that. I don't want to put my thumb on the scale and prejudge things, but I'm inclined to think that the likelihood of extraterrestrial spaceships visiting us is low. There may be other possibilities, such as space-animals or time-travelers. Personally, I'm most inclined to see the 'flying saucer faith' as a psychological phenomenon, illustrative of the little understood process of myth generation responsible for the origin of religions. It's a little ironic, since MR argues for a mental-constructionist account of physical reality, but takes a stoutly realist approach to ufos (and ghosts and bigfoot). I take a stoutly realist approach to physical reality, but am inclined favor a mental-constructionist account of ufos. I think that I agree with Sarkus.
