Why does the government hide UFO's?

An allegation of fakery isn't evidence of fakery. And it isn't sufficient to just say it is possible. That was my point with the flying bats. All sorts of things are possible. That is not sufficient grounds to dismiss evidence. But with unbiased examination of the evidence and background on the events, we eliminate most of those possibilities. It is not sufficient to claim plausibility with no evidence to support that claim. Is it plausible that this particular person lied? We don't know that until we meet the eyewitness and research his background. Then we can say it is or isn't plausible. A possibility explains nothing.

 

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LOL! So all those thousands of people and the Belgian airforce just made all this up? That's the absurd and non-evidenced attempt to "explain away" something that doesn't support your faith-based worldview. What am I supposed to do? Take your explanation on faith?

 

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Exactly. Even ufologists practice the standard scientific skepticism when examining cases. Were there military operations going on at the time? Was the object stationary and "freefloating" like a balloon or did it move quickly and directionally? Did it just descend at an angle like a meteor or did it go down and up and sideways? Is the eyewitness some new age kook writing books on ongoing contact the Uranians? What they DON'T practice is that sort of faith-based debunkery that assumes the phenomena isn't real even before the evidence for it is examined. They take the appropriate agnostic position of a true skeptic.

 

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Or just vote for Andrew Basiago for President -
http://andy2016.com/proposals/
I think MR might have found his next cause!

 

Oh for fuck's sake! No one is trying to stifle any discussion.That's plain stupid to even suggest. All our "fundamentalist true believing debunkers" as you so derisively put it, are trying to do, is establish what that truth is.
Why do these UFO sightings just flitter in and then flitter out again, until the next time they feel like flittering in and flittering out again. Obviously if they were truly of Alien origin, wouldn't they want to try and make some truly intelligent logical contact? Wouldn't they at least recognise that we were somewhat of a Intelligent species [even though still possibly light years behind themselves] and would again, want to make some officially recognised contact? Again, obviously being in advance of us, they would not really need to be afraid of us, nor would they need anything, as what is on Earth is generally readily available everywhere in the universe....And why is there never any physical evidence of their apparent visitation?
Surely people, the fundamentalist true believing debunkers, are entitled to ask for hard evidence...extraordinary evidence in other words, when there are so many other alternative explanations.

Time travel is allowed for and the solutions are evident within GR....I believe if we can survive our own Earthly follies and become sufficiently advanced enough, we may one day be able to manipulate spacetime to achieve a perception of time travel......I also believe in a universe that at the very least can be said to be "near infinite" or humongously immeasurably large beyond comprehension, that ETI most certainly does exist somewhere, sometime......I also believe that if we were alone, it would raise far many more questions as to why, than assuming for my stated logical reasons that we were not alone...But certainly that non zero chance remains....I would also dearly love to have this aspect of the great human questions answered before I kick the bucket.....So, yes, I would love the extraordinary evidence to be available that we have been visited and that we are not alone.
But until that is available, these unexplained sightings remain just that.....Unexplained and hence correctly labelled UFO's

 

So aliens have to want to contact us in order to prove their existence? That doesn't follow at all. And as far as physical evidence goes, I've already posted on that. See post #83. As usual your simplistic pontifications on this subject are immediately discredited by your overwhelming ignorance of it. Not to mention your glaringly biased attempt to shut down all research and discussion of this subject as just "unknown". There could not be a more obvious attempt at censorship by a pseudoskeptic afraid of looking into a phenomena that questions his faithheld worldview.

 

Probably not for a gullible true believer no. For a logical thinking person though, one would ask, why would any advanced intelligent species want to travel perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of L/years across the universe, without making official contact, realising that they would have nothing to be afraid of nor anything of need.

Sorry old friend, that's exactly what they are at this time....unknown, and hence UFO's.

 

The obvious reason would be the Prime Directive of Star Trek: to never interfere with a civilization's natural progress. Maybe they know thru prior experience that exposing themselves to us would devastate us emotionally and mentally to the point that it would produce a collapse of our whole society. You certainly wouldn't be able to handle the existence of a species higher and more intelligent than your holy scientists. It'd be for you like losing your religion. You'd probably commit suicide. That's why it's so important for you that they NOT exist. It would pop your little anthropocentric bubble of a human-centered universe..

 

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The usual nonsensical emotional posts by our friend in a vain effort to maintain at least some credibility for something without any credibility, and evidenced by the many threads and posts I have made over the years deriding the idea of any human centered universe.

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It happens all the time.

 

Yazata, you may dish out your slanderous lies with a more even-tone than MR, but if anything that just makes them worse. What you suggested there is nonsense and you almost certainly know it.

 

Brutal honesty is never pretty. lol!

 

Whereas brutal dishonesty is always pitiful.

 

Admirable in my book. Nothing is more beneficial to oneself than the sudden surprising revelation of how you are behaving badly.

 

Agreed!

Agreed!

 

It is not a shock that you are a proponent of dishonesty, MR.

 

Whenever anyone tries to start a thread on Sciforums about ufos that takes the phenomenon seriously, that suggests that there's might be anything at all mysterious about it that deserves further investigation, they will inevitably be shouted down by idiots and flamed into smoking lumps of charcoal. That makes it awfully hard to discuss the subject in any thoughtful way.

This thread had already descended into ad-hominem insults by post #10.

I don't think that you are in any position to discuss the subject of truth, Paddoboy. The nature of truth, and the means by which truth might become known by human beings are philosophical questions.

Must a phenomenon be repeatable on investigators' demand in order to be real?

I don't know what your phrase "logical contact" means. How does logic enter into the discussion? What is supposed to formally imply what?

Maybe ufos aren't of "Alien" origin, if by "Alien" we mean intelligent space aliens. I personally think that the likelihood of any of the sightings being of space aliens is probably very low. My own guess is that they are items of modern folklore that very likely don't correspond to any single objective physical phenomenon. I'm more inclined to speculate that a whole variety of physical phenomena are being interpreted in a particular way, in accordance with a particular modern myth. I'd guess that's the result of people's desire to believe in certain kinds of things. But that's just my speculation and in real life, none of us know what most of them really are.

Assuming that they are non-human intelligences (which is something that we don't really know), maybe they have any number of hypothetical reasons for not making unambiguous contact. Maybe they are extraterrestrial anthropologists of some sort and want to examine the development of another species at a crucial moment in its history, the period right after the rise of science and industrialism perhaps, without distorting the unfolding of Earth history by making their own presence known. A flight of science-fiction speculation (it's nothing more than that) that I'm personally fond of is that they are time travelers from our own future who know that they can't change the past without endangering their own history. But if they already know about the history of the ufo phenomenon in our time, they figure that they are safe if they conform to it (since it turns out that they are the ones who created it in the first place).

Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. It's a valuable thing if done well. The problems arise when the response to ufo reports is flames and insults, when everything turns ad-hominem, and the assumption is introduced that any report of ufos is bullshit simply by its nature, merely because it's a report of ufos. There's an implicit assumption in there that ufos are nothing but bullshit and that any attempt to take them seriously is "antiscience" or "pseudoscience" or whatever it is. That's debunkery and the assumption that motivates it is something that the debunker doesn't actually know.

As I see it, the problem isn't that our skeptics are being skeptical, it's that they are being skeptical in a such a crude way. Hence the importance of the skepticism/pseudo-skepticism distinction from the other thread.

I agree with you. So why all the knee-jerk hostility and reflexive anger at the subject of ufos just because it's the subject of ufos?

Why shouldn't people say that there's a huge body of reports of anomalous sightings in the sky and that nobody really knows how to account for many of them? That's all that anyone really knows. That's something fascinating and worthy of investigation in and of itself. All of the loud posturing around the views that yes, they are extraterrestrials and no, they aren't extraterrestrials, is all just speculation at this point, things that nobody really knows and typically more an expression of people's pre-existing beliefs and desires than anything else.

 

If you disagree with anything that I said in any of my posts, why not quote it and explain why you disagree with it?

 

The problem, Yazata, is that whenever "anyone" (and we know who we mean, don't we?) comes forward with stuff on this topic it is weak, anecdotal and lacking in any kind of corroboration. It is this that gets everyone so exasperated, especially when the response to criticism of the information offered is, not to delve more deeply into well-researched cases, which would actually lower the temperature and be interesting and challenging to us all, but simply to flood the thread with even more unsubstantiated anecdotes - and then to claim that because of their number there must be something in it. This is effectively resorting to the Gish Gallop - a disreputable rhetorical technique. You yourself know enough about the history of science to realise how it gradually acquired the habit - which has stood it in good stead ever since - of setting aside superstitions and unverifiable ideas. The need for reproducibility and corroboration has been a vital part of this. So it is only to be expected that shoddy evidence will be shot at, on a science forum.

I know you like to wage war on "scientism", as practised unthinkingly by some here - and in that you have my sympathy - but defending ideas that rely on lousy evidence would not be my way of doing that.

You are of course right to say that nobody can 100% rule out alien visitation, especially since many of us agree it seems likely there is life somewhere else in the universe. But what we would need is some real, hard evidence, not just piles of of undocumented stuff off the internet, full of cranks, hoaxers and general shitehawks as it notoriously is. Without hard evidence, there is nothing to get excited about, unless one wants to go into what it is about the psychology of human beings that makes them go in for this sort of thing.

 

You can't simultaneously complain about me not posting compelling cases of ufo contact and then complain about me posting too many. That's a no win situation and you know it.

Oh lookie! Here's 10 well-documented multiple-witnessed ufo cases now!




"The Lonnie Zamora incident was a UFOclose encounter of the third kind which occurred on Friday, April 24, 1964, at about 5:50 p.m., on the southern outskirts of Socorro, New Mexico. Several primary witnesses emerged to report stages and aspects of the event, which included the craft's approach, din, conspicuous flame, and physical evidence left behind immediately afterward. It was however Lonnie Zamora, a New Mexico State police officer who was on duty at the time, who came closest to the object and provided the most prolonged and comprehensive account. Some physical trace evidence left behind—burned vegetation and soil, ground landing impressions, and metal scrapings on a broken rock in one of the impressions—was subsequently observed and analyzed by investigators for the military, law enforcement, and civilian UFO groups.

The event and its body of evidence is sometimes deemed one of the best documented, yet most perplexing UFO reports. It was immediately investigated by the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and FBI, and received considerable coverage in the mass media. It was one of the cases that helped persuade astronomer J. Allen Hynek, one of the primary investigators for the Air Force, that some UFO reports represented an intriguing mystery. After extensive investigation, the AF's Project Blue Book was unable to come up with a conventional explanation and listed the case as an "unknown"...===https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Zamora_incident

Chicago O'Hare saucer sighting of 2008:

"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 craft hovering over Gate C-17.

The object was first spotted by a ramp employee who was pushing backUnited 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 five 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."===https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O'Hare_International_Airport_UFO_sighting

The Belgian UFO wave of 1989-1990:

"The Belgian UFO wave began in November 1989. The events of 29 November would be documented by no less than thirty different groups of witnesses, and three separate groups of police officers. All of the reports related a large object flying at low altitude. The craft was of a flat, triangular shape, with lights underneath. This giant craft did not make a sound as it slowly moved across the landscape of Belgium. There was free sharing of information as the Belgian populace tracked this craft as it moved from the town of Liege to the border of the Netherlands and Germany.[1]

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..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave