Ufology

[Scorpio]

If an interstellar craft includes a crew of organic beings such as ourselves, even if there is no reason why it should, then cryogenics seem the logical answer. All bio-cell activity ( cell division is the process of ageing ) ceases if you reduce the temperature sufficiently. Its all a matter of damaging the cells during the freezing process.

[Abby Normal]

But is it? From a human point of view, travel to nearby stars is impractical if we concede that the speed of light cannot be exceeded.

Perhaps it can but let's assume for a minute it can't. Even on Earth, some creatures seem to live life at different speeds than others. Try swatting a housefly or catching a mouse with your bare hands. An extraterrestrial species could live life at a completely different speed to us. If you had a lifespan of tens of thousands of years, a ten-year hop to the nearest planet would not be out of the question.

Best wishes,
Steve.

A very perceptive point. and i agree.

I would imagine an advanced lifeform would have learned to bio/cyber/robo engineer themselves to greatly increase there lifespans.

Just look at how far the avg lifespan of human beings here on earth have increased.

[Scorpio]

2013 might be the year when science fact catches up with science fiction, and the idea of engineered UFO's seem a little less fancifull. The aforementioned year will see the debut of a new plasma rocket engine that apparently can reduce a return mission to mars to thirtynine days.

[Steven Russell]

But is it? From a human point of view, travel to nearby stars is impractical if we concede that the speed of light cannot be exceeded.

Perhaps it can but let's assume for a minute it can't. Even on Earth, some creatures seem to live life at different speeds than others. Try swatting a housefly or catching a mouse with your bare hands. An extraterrestrial species could live life at a completely different speed to us. If you had a lifespan of tens of thousands of years, a ten-year hop to the nearest planet would not be out of the question.

Best wishes,
Steve.

[Scorpio]

Faster than light travel is the real hurdle for alien visitors. If i can be convinced by the physics behind the theory, then the whole premise seems more reasonable. We will have to wait untill humans have developed the technology no doubt;but when will that be?.
If the theories are valid, then i believe that travelling to the nearest star systems ( a few parsecs ) will become a pratical reality by the final quarter of the 21st century;Engineers and astro-physicists would probably consider this a wildly optimistic claim.

[kensei]

When was the first modern verified UFO sighting?; something even predating Foo fighters of WW2 ?. I personally doubt it.

There was a wave of "airship" sightings in the late 19th-early 20th century, though I believe many of those were experimental man-made craft (the Wright Brothers not being the first to get off the ground, just the first to go public with it). Then there are really old cases- an ancient Roman report of a "burning shield" passing across the sky, a painting from the middle ages of a cityscape with what looks exactly like a modern flying saucer in the sky, things like that. As for when the "first modern verified" sighting was? Well, skeptics would say that none of them are verified, but there's a theory that they started to appear in wide numbers in the 40s in response to the atomic bomb.

[Scorpio]

When was the first modern verified UFO sighting?; something even predating Foo fighters of WW2 ?. I personally doubt it.

[kensei]

I listen to a LOT of radio shows and read articles and soforth that reference ancient astronauts and how mankind may have been created by aliens visiting Earth eons ago that became thought of as gods and eventually became responsible for the creation of religions, etc. Even the Bible gets interpreted as descriptions of contact with E.T.s, and there are authors out there who write that peoples' encounters with benign and hostile aliens are really encounters with angels and demons. And I am very tired with all of it. I happen to be a religious person, AND I happen to believe that extraterrestrials visit Earth, but I don't think the two have anything to do with each other, apart from the fact that the same divine creator would be the source of all of it. Angels are angels, demons are demons, aliens are aliens. I have heard interviews with two different scholars (don't ask me to remember their names) debunking Sitchin and his theories on the Annanakie (or however you spell that). He said he had decoded the Sumerian texts and found all this lengthy and fascinatingly detailed E.T. stuff in them, but both the debunkers referenced a fairly recent public translation of those texts finally being published, and that none of what Sitchin talked about was anywhere to be found in them. When asked about this, all Sitchin could say was, "It's all in my books." I let Sitchin go at that point.

The UFO phenomenon to me is much more about modern cases and what can be gleaned from them. Things like accounts I have heard about both the Phoenix lights and the similarly shaped objects seen over the Hudson Valley of New York and how a few people in both cases reported seeing not just lights but structured craft- hundreds of feet wide in Hudson Valley, and up to a mile wide in Phoenix. Things like every single witness to the Travis Walton abduction in Arizona in 1975 passing lie detector tests about what they'd seen. (One failed initially, but retested years later and passed.) Things like the Hickson-Parker abduction case in Pascagoula, Mississippi, wherein the two men while sitting in a police station after the event were listened in on while they sat in a room alone together without knowing they were being listened to, and talked not about how they were going to get away with their lie but despaired about how no one would believe them about what had just happened. These are things that stick in my mind after many years of reading a lot of UFO books that I don't have in front of me now, so again, don't ask me for references. I just think there is a human element to the subject that can't be ignored. People get accused of telling these stories for attention, but the kind of attention they often get is hardly the kind anyone woul want.

[Phil H]

I seem to recall that one of Von Daniken's later books had a foreword written from a swiss prison where he was serving time for FRAUD - That should have been a warning!! (I may have got the details wrong - but I read all his books once.)

His ideas, like those of Zachariah Sitchin - are excellent as the basis for creative writing - sort of planetary saga stuff. But do they represent something real? I doubt it frankly. I think often that - like Christian fundamentalists, they are prone to interpret the symbolic as factual.

That's not to say that historians have got ancient history right. The age of the Sphinx etc may well be out by centuries. The pyramids at Giza may well have been used as something else BEFORE being used as tombs and then copied by later generations. The ancients may have been more advanced scientifically than we now believe. But none of that means that aliens were involved in any way (IMHO).

I love the CUT in Kubrick's "2001 - A Space Oddessy" - when the apeman tosses a bone used as a weapon into the air and it becomes the space station rotating in space. A tool is a tool and the intervening generations/millenia are irrelevant to the intellectual and physical process.

Phil

Phil

[Sally]

Hmm..

Isn't Von D the man who published 'artistic' pictures of the Nazca Lines and claimed they were secret alien runways?

I saw a UFO when I was a child. I was convinced at the time, but now I think it was an experimental aircraft. Hell, I even lived quite close to a military base, so it should've been obvious, really. Duh.

[Phil H]

Von Daniken may SOUND plausible but he's a con man and his so-called "facts" and examples have long been demonstrated to be false.

I know that the modern Egyptians (I talked to some about it a few years ago) and also I believe the Mexicans get very angry that their forebears are perceived not to have been capable of evolving civilisation.

To agree that there is likely to be other intelligent life in the universe is NOT to say that it has visited earth, just as we have to date not visited any other planet.

Phil

[Scorpio]

The intervention of our galactic cousins on prehistoric and ancient human civilisation has numerous adherents. I have seen chariots of the gods, out of idle interest, and E V D is suprisingly plausible. I think its the Swiss/German accent that does it;he sounds so serious about everything.

[niko]

My belives.......

Hi everyone,
It's hard for me to belive after seeing the hubble image of untold millions maybe billions of galaxy's in outer-space, that Human's are only to be found on Earth. I also belive there is inteligent live form's on other planet's, what they look like, I leave to your imagination.

I belive to be different culture's over the world, which there history or mythology tell of god's coming to the Earth from the sky. I also belive entitys or aliens have been visiting the Earth way before man ever excisted on Earth.

I belive that a great percentage of ufo's are to do with military aircraft and commercial planes, but the remianing percent, "who knows" I would also like to belive that man and woman will put there feet on another planet simular to earth, but first we have to find out, how to get there.
This our just my belives, and think ther is no harm in thinking them, all the best, Agur.

[Scorpio]

Just like the supernatural in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ufology is ripe territory for the con and the credulous; i am reminded of the Victorian spirit photos particularly. Just when was is realised that the extraterrestrial craze could be used to disguise/debunk ?.

[Phil H]

Looking back at many of the reports of UFOs - and I read widely when doing my research on Roswell - I believe that they may indeed relate to sightings of secret military aircraft (for instance the stealth fighters etc) being tested. The shape and capabilities of those craft were so unusual that I beliecve they might well have misled members of the public and even European military communities (if for instance, the US tried to demonstrate that the craft could penetrate radar without being picked up, or at least identified.

These would then, properly, have been unidentified flying objects.

The other thing that consistently puzzled me was, that for all the reports of sightings there has been NO (I repeat NO) evidence found that would convince anyone. Several individuals have claimed to possess material from the Roswell crash, but always it appears it was taken away by unknown security/military people, or disappeared from their possession, or was lost. ALL OF IT!!

If it had been so special then surely - the military repossessions apart - it would have been kept very carefully, not least because - if it were genuinely alien - it would be worth a HUGE amount.

Finally, so many of the writers who have published books purportedly revealing the secrets have been unmasked as liars - there was a chap from Area 51 (name forgotten, I regret but Bob Lazar sticks in my mind?) who seems not to have earned many of the academic awards he claimed; and a man who wrote about sightings in Florida who was eventually shown up as a fraud.

Against that background one would need some convincing that a future self-claimed witness was not bogus.

Phil