http://skepdic.com/aliens.html alien abduction "...despite the fact that we humans are great collectors of souvenirs, not one of these persons [claiming to have been aboard a flying saucer] has brought back so much as an extraterrestrial tool or artifact, which could, once and for all, resolve the UFO mystery." --Philip Klass "Aliens, if and when we find them, could be so alien, so different from humanity as to undermine the meaning of any exchange we might have, or even make such exchange impossible." --Henry Gee "Choose the nearest star; decide how long you're willing to travel, how fast you will need to go to get there in that time, what you will have to take with you, and how many should be in the crew. Make it a one-way suicide mission if you wish. As a final step, calculate the kinetic energy that must be imparted to the spaceship to get you there in that time (one half the mass times the velocity squared.) I suggest you stay away from the relativistic limit; it complicates the calculation and won't help you anyway. The good news is that you will then sleep secure in the knowledge that UFOs from elsewhere in the galaxy are not subjecting humans to hideous experiments." --Bob Park There is a widespread belief that alien beings have traveled to Earth from some other planet and are doing reproductive experiments on a chosen few. Despite the incredible nature of this belief and a lack of credible supportive evidence, a cult has grown up around it. According to a Gallup poll done at the end of the twentieth century, about one-third of Americans believe aliens have visited us, an increase of 5% over the previous decade. more with regards to these nonsensical claims at the link.
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2005/09.22/11-alien.html People who claim they were abducted by aliens are not crazy, says psychologist Susan Clancy. But they are victims of bad dreams and a lively imagination. more at the link....
I've speculated occasionally about space animals. A somewhat more likely possibility for these is some unknown physical meteorological phenomenon akin to ball lightening. The thing about this class of phenomenon is that oftentimes it's just lights in the sky. The cause could be just about any light source, which leaves open a lot of possibilities. Most likely there isn't any single cause for all of them. That's certainly one of the possibilities and it can't just be summarily dismissed. I don't assign it a tremendously high probability though. Why? Because I see the initial appearance of life as very fortuitous and unlikely by its nature. That's because even the simplest forms of life are already hugely complex. Researchers devote their entire careers just to studying the hugely technical details of DNA, how information is encoded in the genome and how transcription is controlled. We aren't likely to get something like that just by mixing chemicals together in a "soup". (The creationists are right about that.) I don't know how life originated (it's one of the larger remaining mysteries) but I'm inclined to see it as the result of a long process of chemical evolution that involved competition and selection among simple chemical replicators. It probably was a matter of a whole series of intrinsically unlikely events, added together and ultimately cascading. That implies a number of things. First, assuming that life is the result of a whole series of fortuitous events that might not have happened, or might have happened in different order, life is apt to be rare. It isn't something that's going to pop up everywhere. Life might only exist on a tiny percentage of extrasolar planets (one in many thousands perhaps) and it's likely to be a needle-in-a-haystack, separated by long distances. And second, it suggests that any alien life out there is probably going to be very different than Earth life, biochemically speaking. If life is the product of a long series of fortuitious events, then alien life is probably going to be the product of a different series, that happened to result in something functionally similar. So there isn't going to be any interbreeding between aliens and humans, no alien-human hybrids. Having sex with an alien will be less productive of fertile offspring than having sex with a pine tree, which at least has a similar DNA-based genome. Aliens won't have the same anatomy as humans, they won't eat the same foods and they might not like our atmosphere very much. And there's what appears to be the fact that more than 80% of the history of life on Earth consisted entirely of single-celled life. If the Earth is in any way representative, that suggests that many alien planets on which something functionally analogous to life exists won't have produced anything resembling extraterrestrial space travelers. The appearance of multicellular life on Earth might have been another of those fortuitious events that might not have ever happened if things had unfolded differently. Then there's the fact that no human beings existed for more than 99% of the time since the Cambrian explosion. Multicellular organisms existed, but they were worms, trilobites, fish, insects, ferns, amphibians, conifers, lizards, dinosaurs, flowering plants, birds and non-human mammals. Life appears to have appeared on Earth some 3.5 billion years ago, multicellular organisms about 500 million years ago, and anatomically modern humans only 130,000 years ago. So if Earth is anything to go by, even if large complex organisms even exist on alien planets, chances are they won't be intelligent in our human sense. The appearance of intelligent life appears to be another one of those fortuitous evolutionary events. And the scientific revolution was only 400 years ago. Even if intelligent aliens exist out there, they might not be travelling in interstellar space. They might not have any idea that the dots in their sky are stars like their own. Add all the probabilities together and it suggests that the likelihood of interstellar visitors is very low. Of course, the counterargument is that the possibility-space that constitutes the unknown is unknowably large. Evolution seems to propel life to fill that possibility-space like a fractal. Just because what happened here on Earth has an infinitesimal chance of being repeated elsewhere, doesn't mean that astounding things can't have happened elsewhere, things that we can't even imagine because nothing like them ever happened here. I take this counterargument very seriously and give it a lot of weight. But just because amazing and unpredictable things are possible elsewhere, doesn't necessarily mean that those things are traveling here. That one seems most likely if we take the 'contactee' reports literally and factually, which I don't. The humanoid aliens, the abduction and human-alien hybrid aspects of the myth suggest time-travelers to my science-fiction sensibility, or maybe visitors from some many-worlds alternate Earth. The anatomical similarities, their comfort in Earth conditions, and the whole idea that they can mate with us and produce fertile offspring, suggest that things like the 'greys' are in fact human beings. They would seem to be no more different from us than Neanderthals, and we could apparently interbreed with Neanderthals. It's possible to imagine that they are our evolved (or genetically engineered) descendants from the distant future. It's easy to create a science-fiction framework around that. Time-travelers aren't supposed to alter the past since that would threaten to set history onto another course and endanger their own existence. But future humans (or post-humans, depending on taste) might know that our period experienced the UFO phenomenon, which actually records their own time-visits. So as long as they conform to the UFO pattern they aren't changing their own past, but making sure that it happens as recorded. But they can't reveal themselves directly or leave future artifacts behind. It's sometimes asked, 'If time travel is possible, then where are all the time travelers?' This hypothesis would neatly answer that question. I'm inclined to give it a fairly low probability, it's just too speculative and science-fictionish. And it's too dependent on the 'contactee' reports, which I don't believe. I like it more than the extraterrestrial hypothesis though. I'm inclined to think that the most likely explanation of the UFO phenomenon, or at least most of it (there may indeed be one or more signals mixed in with all the cultural noise), is that it's an example of contemporary popular mythmaking. What makes it new and unlike mythmaking in ancient and medieval times, is it's strong modernist form. It isn't magical mythmaking or religious mythmaking, it's "scientific" mythmaking. It takes the familiar trope of supernaturally portentious appearances in the sky, and reworks it in the form of spaceships. The mystery airships of the 19th century might arguably have been an interesting modernist forerunner, suggesting the existence of hidden super-scientists with impressive resources whose futuristic (to the Victorians) vehicles were visible above them. Those are very interesting. I will have to depart from H.P. Lovecraft and say that it's unlikely that there is any advanced civilization at the bottom of the sea. Certainly not a technological civilization, since we would have already encountered them. (Submarine sonars are very sensitive.) But the science-fiction nut in me asks 'If you were an alien or a time traveler, and wanted to create a local base safe from the eyes of the planet's inhabitants, where better to put it'? The problem that I see is jumping to conclusions. They are space-aliens, they just have to be! Or at the very least they have to be something transcendent and world-changing that will turn all of human life on its head. But we don't really know that. We shouldn't be confusing our own speculations and desires for what we really know. That doesn't mean that we can't form our speculative hypotheses, as long as we don't confuse them with knowledge. But what we really need are hypotheses that can somehow be tested, and they seem to be in very short supply.
Interesting cases such as the Marfa lights, the Brown Mountain lights, and the Hessdallen lights suggest to me some sort earth-connected electromagnetic phenomenon perhaps generated thru piezoelectric pressures on crystalline strata of rock. But there does seem to be a sort of intelligence to them, suggesting a lifeform of some sort. The green balls of fire over Los Alamos laboratories during the 1950's and foo fighters witnessed following planes in WWII suggest this aspect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fireballs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter I'm one of those who assigns high probability to the evolution of life in our galaxy, as well as a strong likelihood of intelligent civilizations. I don't think life is a exception given the proper physical conditions, but rather the rule. I think anywhere you have water and warmth, you will eventually get evolution of lifeforms, at least over billions of years. Extreme environments such underwater vents and geothermal vulcanism could certainly provide the energies to drive such processes even when lacking a close enough sun. There are other examples of extremophile bacteria that can flourish in below freezing temps. And that's just what we know. Who can fathom the possibilities open to non-carbon based biogenesis or even of plasmic lifeforms that could evolve in a gaseous nebular or brown dwarf environment. Good point about the unlikelihood of mating suggested by the prominent Grey alien abduction scenarios. I am not a strong believer in hypnotically obtained accounts of abduction, aware of the subtle effects of leading questions and the power of one's mind to conjure all sorts of fantasies. That's why I stick to conscious alien encounters, which are alot more bizarre and suggest the interdimensional or multiverse theory. Brad Steiger lists 17 theories for ufos. Some are really out there, while other more plausible ones I haven't even thought of. One more I might suggest is the dark matter bioform theory. Perhaps we are seeing beings made of dark matter that inhabit dark matter planets that coexist in the same space as our own planets. http://www.rense.com/general67/ENIG.HTM http://discovermagazine.com/2013/julyaug/21-the-possible-parallel-universe-of-dark-matter
Cont'd The hoaky nature of some of the ufo reports suggests to me some sort of archetypal expression of the current Zeitgeist. Terrence McKenna once saw one and didn't believe it because it looked like the underside of an old style vacuum cleaner! This just adds to the mystery though. I'm less interested in jumping to conclusions than I am integrating the ufo phenomenon, along with the paranormal, into my concept of reality. What does it mean regarding our concept of such? What are the implications regarding the human species and consciousness and the physicalist paradigm we have largely embraced? It doesn't suit me to just dismiss them as unknown and not think about them anymore as Paddoboy suggests. That's ingenuous denialism imo and doesn't help us understand the phenomena anymore than we already did.
And as usual at best you purposely misinterpret what people say, and at worst you are a damn liar. I have said many times, these nonsensical apparitions/fabricated stories of yours, are investigated and then after all available evidence is reviewed, some are explained away by mundane atmospheric phenomena or similar scenarios, while others where no firm outcome can be invoked, are labelled UFO's. And that my dear friend is where it lays, despite your jumping up and down and ravings.
http://www.womansday.com.au/enterta...turns-to-screens-with-mulder-and-scully-12020 X-Files returns to screens with Mulder and Scully byGenevieve Dwyer Mar 26, 2015 David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson are set to reprise their roles as FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully as the 90s classic 'X-Files' returns to screens. US Network Fox has confirmed they are rebooting the spooky 90s TV show for a six part series, as a one-off special event, thirteen years after the original series run concluded. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson will both return to the roles that made them stars, to terrify a whole new generation of kids staying up past their bedtime as they investigate paranormal phenomena. Fox says that it will be “a thrilling, six-episode event series which will be helmed by creator/executive producer Chris Carter.” Chris of course was the creator of the initial show. “I think of it as a 13-year commercial break,” he said of the show’s long hiatus. “The good news is the world has only gotten that much stranger, a perfect time to tell these six stories.” Dana Walden and Gary Newman, Chairmen and CEOs of Fox Television Group said: “The X-Files was not only a seminal show for both the studio and the network, it was a worldwide phenomenon that shaped pop culture – yet remained a true gem for the legions of fans who embraced it from the beginning. Few shows on television have drawn such dedicated fans as The X-Files, and we’re ecstatic to give them the next thrilling chapter of Mulder and Scully they’ve been waiting for.” David and Gillian were first propelled to fame on the show and have since gone on to great acclaim in their own separate projects. David, 50, is perhaps best known for his role as serial fornicator on Californication while Gillian, 46, has gained immense popularity in the UK for her role as DSI Stella Gibson in murder-mystery drama The Fall. With X-Files fans often just as keen as Mulder and Scully to find out if the truth is indeed out there, hopefully they won’t have to wait long with production on the new series kicking off mid-2015!
That's obvious, and just as obvious that you are again trolling. But let me explain anyway. As the article says, "to terrify a whole new generation of kids staying up past their bedtime as they investigate paranormal phenomena" It did far more than terrorise kids, it was partly responsible for terrorising gullible and impressionable adults also, as is obvious with yourself as a prime example. PS: By the way, I loved the show and never missed an episode if I could help it. But I was always able to sort the fact from fiction and Hollywood.
The show obviously drew upon the UFO myth and all kinds of other edgy and conspiratorial ideas circulating around out there. That was the source of its pop-culture strength. An engaging ensemble of actors and some very good writing didn't hurt either. It's unlikely that the show terrified anyone. The only people likely to perceive it as a fictionalization of truths were people who already believed in those supposed truths. I loved 'The X-Files', but I don't think that the show has very much relevance to the question of the credibility of various theories about UFOs.
UFO sightings are not a myth. X-Files never watcted this series. The truth of UFOs is in the evidence.
And the lack of evidence tells us that what some claim as Alien origin UFO's is just a UFO...nothing more, nothing less.
True. But it's undeniable that many stories and a large body of lore has grown up around the sightings. That's what I mean when I say 'ufo myth'. The idea that what's sighted are alien spacecraft, the greys, the reptoids, the abduction stories, the conspiracy stories... in the minds of a few people, the basic sighting material has become elaborated to the point where it becomes an entire world-view. The 'X-files' TV show's writers mined the Ufo myth for material. Then they set their fictional FBI investigators Mulder and Scully to work investigating it. Mulder and Scully would hear about a ufo crash, travel there, and encounter mysterious government commandos sealing off the site. Pressure would be exerted inside the government to shut their investigations down, but nobody could say where the pressure was coming from. Alien abductions featured prominently, chips would be implanted in people for mysterious reasons and alien-human hybrids were discovered walking among us. The beauty of that was that most viewers had already heard of these ideas before they watched the show. Mulder and Scully kind of created the impression that they were putting the disseparate pieces together to reveal a pattern, and that gave the show a facade of verisimilitude. It resonated very strongly in the popular culture of the 1990's, and the show became very popular. The truth of ufos is in the facts, whatever they are. If propositions about ufos correspond to whatever the ufo facts are, the propositions are true. Evidence doesn't figure into truth. It's entirely possible to say something true without any evidence at all, as a lucky guess or something. Where evidence becomes relevant is in justifying knowledge claims, in justifying somebody's claims to know what the truth is. Regarding ufos, it's simply wrong to say that there's no evidence. There's a huge body of sighting reports. But one can legitimately argue that the evidence isn't conclusive, that there are alternative explanations for the evidence that are more likely than extraterrestrial visitors. That's pretty much where I stand, personally. Of course, there typically isn't any conclusive evidence justifying a choice between the competing hypothetical explanations. It's all speculation, being judged on the basis of our own informal estimates of a-priori probabilities. So if we want to be totally accurate, we would have to say 'I don't know'.
