Ufology

[Steven Russell]

Good points, Abby and thanks for the compliment.
Steve.

[TomTomKent]

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.

Not really. When you see lights that look like flares, where you expect to see flares, that onlyform an "unexplained" pattern from one angle, then I would tend to need very good evidence they are not just flares. Especially if the mystery can be reproduced with flares.

[Scorpio]

Flares produce vapour. Flares descend, albeit slowly, through the atmosphere, but, a strong wind making a possible acception, not through it. I think the military was pressed to explain these events, and being damned if they could and damned if the could not, then they come up with the flare thing.

[TomTomKent]

Flares produce vapour. Flares descend, albeit slowly, through the atmosphere, but, a strong wind making a possible acception, not through it. I think the military was pressed to explain these events, and being damned if they could and damned if the could not, then they come up with the flare thing.

Or it could be that the LUU2 Air Deployed Illumination flare is launched at an altitude of 1000 feet, and burns for five minutes illuminating an area of around a kilometer each. The descent speed slows around halfway through the burn time when the alluminium outer cannister has been burned away. The pheonix metropolitan area, from which these "UFOs" were witnessed covers around 14,000 square miles. If we restrict our viable witness statements to the Goldwater Range we are talking about 4,000 square miles. The flares were launched much closer, only 50 miles from Pheonix, but the average witness was 70 miles away. They saw the lights supposedly hanging in the air for about five minutes, then dissappearing.

These are the same characteristics we would expect flares to have if we watched them burn out from over fifty miles away.

The military being pressed to answer questions is not evidence of aliens. It is evidence that the military do not like to disclose details of their exercises. LIke I said before, the results are repeatable, which may not eliminate the possibility that an unknown phenomona (again UFOs are Unidentified, which means any assumptions of their origins is premature), but it does mean we have to weigh the possibility of an unkown phenomona against the known characteristics of hardware we know the military uses in the area, which are repeatable.

There are more reasonable assumptions we can draw from this information with out assuming the word "alien", and should at least discount the more earthly possibilities first: If a military arm is reluctant to share details of an operation is it more likely to be:
a) Because the pilots strayed from the intended flight plan.
b) Because revealing too many details may allow a deduction of what target the pilots are training to attack.
c) Because it is not considered the done thing.
Or d) Because it was a cover up for aliens.

[Scorpio]

I do not believe in the alien explanation either, but the A10 Warthogs releasing flares in an exercise has not been universally accepted by witnesses.
Delta winged, experimental aircraft, which will make there debut on the international scence within a generation, are my top culprits.

[Jonathan H]

I have to declare a prejudice regarding the extra-terrestrial explanation for some UFO sightings. As a child I adored 'Close Encounters off the Third Kind' and would love it to be true: that friendly aliens would visit us.

The 'Phoenix Lights' of 1997 thus got me quite excited, at first, because it involved multiple witnesses, the sighting was lengthy in time, the 'craft' were not saucer-shaped, nobody was claiming to see, or to have been abducted by grey aliens, dead or alive, and it had been [partially] filmed.

Very, very disappointingly, a closer look at the sources revealed that those witnesses with binoculars could see that the 'massive, triangular craft' had no visible structure between the lights -- that this space was transparent and objects could be seen through it.

In other words, it was an optical illusion created by terrestrial aircraft flying in formation.

[Errata]

I do not believe in the alien explanation either, but the A10 Warthogs releasing flares in an exercise has not been universally accepted by witnesses.
Delta winged, experimental aircraft, which will make there debut on the international scence within a generation, are my top culprits.

I'm fine with it being a military exercise, I just thought it was damned peculiar. Why A10s? I mean, theyre my favorite aircraft, it just seems an odd choice. Especially as they are not quiet by any means.

[TomTomKent]

Quiet from fifty miles away though? I live half that distance from Manston, and can often see far larger vessels take off and land with out hearing engine noise.

[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

[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 ?.

[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]

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.

[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

[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]

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