Ufology

[Scorpio]

The warp engine is not as wacky as it sounds. Scientists have recorded the distortion of space time,due to powerful gravitational fields; so, given some equally awesome source of power like electro-magnetism it could be artificially achieved. The only intelligent species known to exist, who might conceivably build such an engine, are Humans.

[sleekviper]

I think that the wrong problem with travel is being addressed. Special relativity, I think, contained the twin paradox; the faster a body in motion goes, the slower the amount of elapsed time. So a twin that is static, will appear older than a twin in motion. The distance that is given for a star is the static distance, traveling near the speed of light to that distance is very reasonable. So if a star is 14 billion light years away, it may take someone 2 years to reach, and return, but to the earth, which is static to the speed traveled, it has been 28 billion years. If it were possible to bypass the paradox, the real problem comes into play; if someone is going greater than the speed of light, or even within reach of the speed of light, every space particle is enough to equal a big bang two if it is hit. Been awhile, but I think that is how it works out.

[Errata]

I think that the wrong problem with travel is being addressed. Special relativity, I think, contained the twin paradox; the faster a body in motion goes, the slower the amount of elapsed time. So a twin that is static, will appear older than a twin in motion. The distance that is given for a star is the static distance, traveling near the speed of light to that distance is very reasonable. So if a star is 14 billion light years away, it may take someone 2 years to reach, and return, but to the earth, which is static to the speed traveled, it has been 28 billion years. If it were possible to bypass the paradox, the real problem comes into play; if someone is going greater than the speed of light, or even within reach of the speed of light, every space particle is enough to equal a big bang two if it is hit. Been awhile, but I think that is how it works out.

Ah the Fitzgerald Contraction. It also means that objects traveling at the speed of light get crushed down to two dimensions along the axis of travel. Which I hear is lethal for us 3-D types.

[Jonathan H]

As Carl Jung argued it is unfulfilled religious desires which lie behind anybody taking the extra-terrestrial explanation for anomalous things seen in the skies seriously, over the age of eight.

Cold War jitters did the rest.

In the 50's aliens were metaphors for the international Communist Conspiracy. In the Detente years of the 70's, we saw the success of the friendly alien paradigm with 'Close Encounters'.

Such cultural reflections things, however, are not rigid.

The UFO hustler George Adamski claimed to meet friendly, long-haired, 'Aryan' aliens in the 50's, who took him on a joy-ride to Venus and warned against nuclear weapons, and 'E.T.' came out at the height of the renewed Cold War under the Reagan administration (due to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas 1979, where the Soviet Superpower got hopelessly bogged down -- does nothing ever change?)

But here is what history teaches us.

1. Kenneth Arnold, of the famous original lone-pilot sighting near Mt Rainier on June 14th, 1947, described nine, jet-like, or crescent-moon shaped craft travelling as fast as a rocket, in down-step echelon formation. He probably mistook a flock of White Pelicans.

Whatever, the point is that a journalist changed the description of wing-shaped craft into 'flying saucers', misunderstanding that Arnold was talking about how the mysterious objects flew: eg. undulating like if you skipped a saucer across water, or like the tail of a Chinese kite. That, of course, suggests objects being propelled by wind.

If only he had said flat stone, instead of saucer ..?

The historical truth about the world's first 'flying saucer' encounter, as in it was not one, means that every single subsequent UFO sighting, or photo, which has a saucer-shaped craft can be discounted as a mistake or a hoax.


2. Betty and Barney Hill, the first recorded UFO abductees of 1961, initially described shortish men, with hair and big noses; standard Freudian dream imagery.

The spaceship was a saucer, so that's that.

In 1975 a very good TV movie about the Hill [alleged] abduction, 'The UFO Incident' established and popularized the imagery of grey aliens with large eyes and bald heads.

People think that this image, even more widely popularized by 'Close Encounters' two years later, is exactly what the Hills claimed to remember under hypnosis.

Not in the original primary sources, which like the truth about Arnold is not well known.

Therefore any 'abductee' who claims the aliens looked like the ones from 'The UFO Incident', is either lying, or mentally ill, or a victim of a sleep disorder (and a further victim of unscrupulous Ufologists) but they cannot have been with aliens.

3. 'The Roswell Incident' was totally unknown to lazy UFO researchers until 1977 when Stanton Friedman, who is as 'certain' and as wiild-eyed as a roving Jesuit priest, stumbled upon, by accident, the ageing ex-Major Jesse Marcel. And even he was not that impressed, at first.

Marcel claimed that the bits and pieces he found in the New Mexican desert were really parts of a crashed alien spaceship, and there was headline which seemed to prove this diagnosis, at least initially. He also claimed that one of the photos showed the real debris before it was switched with a weather balloon.

In fact, a cursory look shows that every photo has a smiling Marcel holding up the same unimpressive scraps of a weather balloon (one of Project Mogul's balloons and radar devices testing for Russian atomic tests as the Air Force revealed, under public pressure to waste tax-payers money on an internal investigation, in 1994).

Again, historical methodology provides the better explanation.

When the Roswell crash happened 'flying saucers' had only been reported a week or so before via Arnold. The idea initially was these strange aircraft were 'ours' or,chillingly, might be 'theirs', as in Russian. Not that they came from outer space, an idea popularized by the original UFO hustler, Ray Palmer.

Therefore the linking source between the incompetent Marcel, in 1947, wrongly thinking he had found something extraordinary, and his later bitter, Grandpa Simpson claim that it was a crashed alien spaceship, which the military covered up, is the Aztec Saucer-Crash hoax off 1950. A tale complete with small, dead, alien bodies, and a saucer-shaped craft, made up by two convicted con men -- and the subject of the best-selling 'Behind the Flying Saucers' by Frank Scully.

Although I don't think much of Marcel as a source -- to put it mildly -- at least he never claimed, even on his deathbed, to have ever seen or heard about dead aliens.

Actually, 'The Roswell Incident' never made a dent in 'Ufology' until the 'Majestic-12' document hoax of 1987 which, though quickly exposed as crude forgeries, propelled 'Roswell' into the epicentre of pop culture, at least for a couple of decades. More 'witnesses' came forward, joining the Alien Gravy Train to make a few bucks.

Though the 'Roswell' mythos has been in decline for years now, ever since 9/11 gave conspiracy and anti-government 'fruit loops' something new to 'theorize' about, God help us

[sleekviper]

I think it is a stretching action, like pulling a rubber band. Extremities would be pulled off as it started I think. Not sure anymore though, has been decades since that was serious interest.

[Phil H]

Kensei

On what do you base your statement:

The Roswell case is actually very, very well documented by credentialed ufologists like Kevin Randle and Stanton Freidman, and while it is true that most of the evidence for it is anecdotal, there is a ton of such testimony by people who say they witnessed various aspects of the incident, and such eyewitness testimony is routinely used in courts of law to convict criminals.

Randle is, I thought, now pretty DISCREDITED!!

A jury hears someone say, "The defendant told me that he committed the murder," and they convict.

Where is it you live precisely?

You might convict a murderer on that basis, but I think we need a higher standard of evidence for a subject the existence of which is yet to be proven!!

They'll blame the whole thing on weather baloons, crash test dummies mistaken for alien bodies, and aging witnesses surely being senile and mixing up the years in which they saw things.

Which is actually TRUE of many of the so-called Roswell "witnesses" - take Gelnn Dennis (the mortician) as a case in point.

I didn't think you were so gullible, kensei.


Phil

[TomTomKent]

Kensei

On what do you base your statement:

The Roswell case is actually very, very well documented by credentialed ufologists like Kevin Randle and Stanton Freidman, and while it is true that most of the evidence for it is anecdotal, there is a ton of such testimony by people who say they witnessed various aspects of the incident, and such eyewitness testimony is routinely used in courts of law to convict criminals.
Randle is, I thought, now pretty DISCREDITED!!

A jury hears someone say, "The defendant told me that he committed the murder," and they convict.

Where is it you live precisely?

You might convict a murderer on that basis, but I think we need a higher standard of evidence for a subject the existence of which is yet to be proven!!

They'll blame the whole thing on weather baloons, crash test dummies mistaken for alien bodies, and aging witnesses surely being senile and mixing up the years in which they saw things.

Which is actually TRUE of many of the so-called Roswell "witnesses" - take Gelnn Dennis (the mortician) as a case in point.

I didn't think you were so gullible, kensei.


Phil

The Skeptoid episode (Skptoid.com) on Roswell is pretty good, and points out where a lot of sources fall down.

[Steven Russell]

The Skeptoid episode (Skptoid.com) on Roswell is pretty good, and points out where a lot of sources fall down.

Hello, TomTom.
Just had a look at this and I have to say it's a pretty good debunking of Roswell (although I was not a Roswell believer anyway). However, the description of Stanton Friedman as "an obsessed UFO whacko" hardly smacks of even-handedness.

Best wishes,
Steve.

[TomTomKent]

Meh. It is not too hard to see how even an objective sceptic could draw THAT conclusion. At best the UFO "conspiracy" can be seen as a deliberate misinformation campaign to distract attention from flying wings and jet research.

More reasonably these are largely flights of fiction and fantasy from attention seekers.

But we have to be careful. Clearly there are Unidentified Flying Objects. It would be pointless to argue otherwise. But "Unidentified" does not mean "Alien", and storiesof crashes, close encounters, etc, with no evidence to support them tend to be silly.

[kensei]

Kensei

On what do you base your statement:

The Roswell case is actually very, very well documented by credentialed ufologists like Kevin Randle and Stanton Freidman, and while it is true that most of the evidence for it is anecdotal, there is a ton of such testimony by people who say they witnessed various aspects of the incident, and such eyewitness testimony is routinely used in courts of law to convict criminals.

Randle is, I thought, now pretty DISCREDITED!!

A jury hears someone say, "The defendant told me that he committed the murder," and they convict.

Where is it you live precisely?

You might convict a murderer on that basis, but I think we need a higher standard of evidence for a subject the existence of which is yet to be proven!!

They'll blame the whole thing on weather baloons, crash test dummies mistaken for alien bodies, and aging witnesses surely being senile and mixing up the years in which they saw things.

Which is actually TRUE of many of the so-called Roswell "witnesses" - take Gelnn Dennis (the mortician) as a case in point.

I didn't think you were so gullible, kensei.


Phil

I packed a lot into my last post. You respond only to what I said about the Roswell case. Ok then, that's fine. I certainly don't claim to have all the answers on it, but much of what I've read and heard on radio and tv programs has impressed me greatly. I've read and seen just as much of the skeptical side as I have of the proponents, and in my humble opinion neither side can yet claim to have closed the case. I remember Kevin Randle appearing next to the late Phil Klass on the Larry King show debating the case, and after Randle described the testimony of the late Jesse Marcel about how he had handled the debris of the crashed UFO- the paper-thin metal that you could crinkle up but would immediately return to its prior shape and could not be burned with flame or even damaged with a sledge hammer- Klass' response was to point out that Marcel was old and therefore probably senile when he gave that testimony. It hit me so blatantly- Phil, you're an elderly man yourself. So when should we stop putting any faith in anything you have to say based purely on your age? That says nothing about Randle's credibility I know, but I thought Klass' approach to the argument was really arrogant and juvenile. I have also heard the testimony of Marcel's son who was shown the debris by his father- he is a doctor and military veteran with considerable credence behind his name, and he completely confirms his father's statements about the stuff recovered from that desert.

Stanton Freidman- well, he is a nuclear physicist after all, which dwarfs my own educational status by leaps and bounds. His point by point intereactions with debunkers in favor of the Roswell case have resonated with me.

Now, what I said about eyewitness testimony as it is used in court as opposed to how it is regarded in paranormal cases- I think your "Where is it you live precisely?" comment might be based on certain high profile cases in the news in which justice does not seem to have been served, and I understand that. Casey Anthony just yesterday walked free and went into hiding when she most probably did have something to do with the death of her daughter. I get that. Sometimes the guilty go free, and when they do they make for big headlines. But usually they don't. Thousands of cases play themselves out around the world all the time in which eyewitness testimony plays a major role. That means someone simply says what they saw or heard, and a jury believes them. And based on that, it just frustrates me that when someone who might be believed in a case like that is completely discounted when they swear that they've seen a UFO or been abducted by aliens. Just put yourself in that place- you say "I've experienced something so incredible that it's changed my life," and society says to you, "No you haven't, you're crazy."

People do lie. Lord knows, I have written elsewhere on this site how badly I've been effected in my life by someone's lies. But when that happened to me, I chose not to go into a place of never trusting anyone ever again because I understand that blatant lying is not the norm. Most people who tell amazing stories are trying to do the best they can in describing something weird that has happened to them, and they know that not everyone will believe them. Some seek attention, and some very actively shun it but still think that their stories should be told. I apply that to Roswell, where an awful lot of people have gone on record to say, "I saw this."

And as for the military, they have had three different responses to Roswell. The very first was when Walter Haut went public and said the Army Air Force had captured a flying disc. The second was the next day when they said it was all a mistake and it was the debris of a weather balloon. Years later they announced it was Project Mogul, balloons carrying secret devices to monitor the skies for purposes of national security, and the people who said they saw alien bodies were just remembering when we did experiments a few years later dropping crash test dummies out of hot air balloons and as they aged they mixed up the years in which it happened and thought they'd seen alien bodies at the same time as the Roswell crash. But then, after all that, when Walter Haut was dying he wrote a confession saying that no, the story of the UFO crash and the alien bodies was true and I saw them.

Maybe I'm naieve, but I would just like to think that when mass numbers of people all swear to having experienced something, and when individual people swear that they were there when things happened and they saw it, they can't all be liars.

[Phil H]

kensei

I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that I was " elderly" I suppose it depends on perspective, but I am a hale and hearty 60 with a firm intent of remaining active for a few decades yet!!

...after Randle described the testimony of the late Jesse Marcel about how he had handled the debris of the crashed UFO- the paper-thin metal that you could crinkle up but would immediately return to its prior shape and could not be burned with flame or even damaged with a sledge hammer- Klass' response was to point out that Marcel was old and therefore probably senile when he gave that testimony.

My understanding was that the late Jesse Marcel had himself been "outed" as a liar, in that he made various claims to medals and awards and to being a personal adviser to Presidents that simply were not true. If he did misrepresent himself in some areas of his life than surely this must call his testimony on Roswell into question also.

I seem to recall that almost all the details (dates etc) changed between two books by Randle which hardly makes them reliable sources.

My own reading on Roswell was frustrating, as reference would be made to some document or other - the diary/log of some local nuns might be a case in point - but no book I have found illustrates this, provides a precise identification or even proof of its existence.

You try to make a note of a sighting or a claim and when you analyse it, what is said is imprecise and indefinite - no use. No two authors use the same sources or correlate each other. There is confusion on dates, and locations of crashes.

And then we have the whole saga of false or misremembered (if one is being generous) testimony from the likes of the mortician and the ex USAAF sergeant or whomever (Kauffman?) - apologies my books are not here.

Testimony changes, huge numbers of witnesses are cited (300-600?) but how many saw anything that suggested an "alien" element to whatever happened.

All in all I have concluded that a secret terrestrial "balloon" or some such is probably the best explanation.

Phil

[Wolf Vanderlinden]

I’m agnostic on the subject of UFO’s (great band though) but I have, in my life, talked to two people who have stated that they had seen one relatively up close. One man was a neurosurgeon from India who as a teenager saw some sort of craft that had landed in a field just outside his village. The other was a cameraman for the CBC who first saw lights in the sky at his weekend cabin somewhere north of Toronto and, a little later, saw a craft land in a clearing in the woods and then take off. Neither man had anything to gain from talking about these experiences and, in fact, both had been ridiculed for doing so.

As I said, I’m agnostic on the subject but I believed both of them were telling the truth. I know personally how difficult it can be to talk of some experience which lies outside of the limits of conventional thinking and understanding and to be ridiculed for doing so.

Wolf.

[Errata]

You know, I never bought Roswell, and quite few other famous sighting in retrospect can easily be explained by the experimental aircraft of the day. But the lights over Arizona... that's pretty mysterious.

[kensei]

kensei

I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that I was " elderly" I suppose it depends on perspective, but I am a hale and hearty 60 with a firm intent of remaining active for a few decades yet!!

Phil

Phil, I was not referring to you at all with the word "elderly" but to Philip Klass, who is now deceased. As far as I knew you could have been 25. Sorry for the confusion.

[Abby Normal]

I am as convinced as one can sensibly be that ours is not the only planet to harbour intelligent life. The vast numbers involved are just too persuasive. But, if we were confronted with alien life, would we recognize it, as an earlier poster has asked? The differences between, say, an elephant, a jellyfish, and a bacterium seem vast but these life forms have all evolved on the same planet. Even if we restrict ourselves (and there's no reason why we should) by saying that life needs a home planet, must be carbon-based, and needs liquid water, alien species could well evolve completely differently to Earth species given differences in environment.

For example, we would not exist in our current form without:
1) chemical and geological composition of the Earth,
2) the Moon, providing tidal forces and stabilizing the Earth's rotation,
3) Jupiter hoovering up potentially disastrous comets and rogue asteroids etc.,
4) extinction events e.g. that which put paid to the dinosaurs.
I am sure there must be many more but I hope these few will serve to illustrate the point.

Interstellar distances do seem to be an insurmountable problem. But so did the sound barrier and powered, controllable flight. It may be that warp speed is possible. Nonsense, you say, but imagine sitting Shakespeare down to watch the cricket on telly from half a world away. In any case, Earth species enjoy very different lifespans. Our three score years and ten might seem like an eternity to the average insect but a bit pathetic to a redwood tree. What if there are alien species with a lifespan of thousands or millions of years? Even at sub-light speed, a trip to Earth might seem like visiting your aunty.

So I firmly believe that intelligent life exists elsewhere. But have they been here? I think probably not. But they may be watching...

Best wishes,
Steve.

Hi Steve
Great post. There are approx 100 billion galaxies in the universe. The average galaxy has about 100 billion stars. Thats 100 billion x 100 billion stars in the universe with each star being a possibility to harbor a planet in the "goldilocks zone" right for life, just as the Earth. The sheer numbers alone convince me that the probability for other life and intelligent life is so high as to be inevitable.

As to what alien intelligent life may look like? who knows but if it arose on one of these goldilocks planets with similar conditions of Earth (not too hot or cold, liquid water, carbon based elements etc.) then I do not really have a problem with the possibility that they could look "humanoid" as convergent evolution on this planet shows that even spacially seperated and unrelated species can evolve with similar charactaristics.


And for those who think they would be so far advanced than us that they would take little or no interest in us I say-no way. They would be extremely interested in us. Even we study bacteria and viruses. Have they physically visited us? perhaps but they probably would be so advanced that they could study us without actually travelling here.

And I dont think they would announce themselves to us all of a sudden. They would probably have rules and procedures for that sort of thing amonst the various intelligent civilizations that already know of each other. Its probably along the lines of revealling themselves very gradually and/or not letting us know of there existance until we advance enough in intelligence, technology etc. where we can discover them.

And i have one more point to make-a thought experiment for the folks who don't beleive in other intelligent life in our universe:

name one thing, anything, that there is only one of. Good luck. If there is one of something there is usually alot of it. There is either more than one of something or there is none. Intelligent life is same way i would imagine-there is alot of it. Heck, even our universe isn't the only one.