Ufology

[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]

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.

[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

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Steven Russell]

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.

[kensei]

I think it was established much more than a year ago that the Alien Autopsy film was a hoax. Bodies dead for any significant length of time just don't bleed like that. But to call it the Roswell Alien Autopsy film-- I guess that was implied, knowing that people would associate it with Roswell, but actually there was nothing in the film that stated "This is from Roswell." 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. A jury hears someone say, "The defendant told me that he committed the murder," and they convict. But when it comes to paranormal subjects, for some reason, no amount of people swearing "I saw this" seems to be enough for hardcore skeptics. 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.

A soldier named Walter Haut was the public information officer for the Roswell base in 1947 when the incident occurred. He issued a press release stating publicly that a "flying disc" had been recovered by the military. The next day it was rescinded, with the explanation that it was only a weather baloon carrying a radar target that had fallen to earth. That was the official explanation for many years, but a few years ago when Walter Haut died he left behind a sworn deathbed statement that not only was his original press release the truth but that he himself had seen the alien bodies that were recovered.

I understand that people will speculate that the universe is so vast that there is no way that beings from other worlds could get here, and that descriptions of aliens being of basic humanoid form are unlikely. But advanced physics teaches that civilizations far more advanced than our own may have developed ways to manipulate space and time, using wormholes to traverse the vast distances in space in mere moments, making the number of miles between worlds completely meaningless. And then you have the myriad of people from all areas of the United States and even around the world, from all walks of life, a complete cross section of humanity, that claim to have had interactions of one kind or another with aliens. It is absolutely NOT only anally-probed citizens of the deep south. That is a bigoted and quite offensive stereotype, and anyone who would say that is demonstrating that they have only skimmed the very surface of the subject and have not delved into its study in any real depth.

There have been implants removed from people that have been analyzed and found to be made of something not identifiable on Earth, or of earthly elements but in combinations never seen before. There are alien abduction cases in which witnesses have come in and found a person to be literally gone during the time in which the abduction was supposed to be occurring, ruling out the possibility of it just being a dream or hallucination. There are UFO landing sites where grass has been killed in circular patterns with no other obvious explanation as to how such could have occurred other than that someone claims to have seen a spaceship landed there. There is all kinds of evidence for this phenomenon. But is there PROOF? Well, evidence and proof are two difference things as people like O.J. Simpson and Casey Anthony keep reminding us. I think the only real proof when it comes to UFOs will be when the aliens finally reveal themselves to us in some undeniably public worldwide way.

[Stephen Thomas]

About a year ago it was revealed that the Roswell alien autopsy film was shot in a room over a restaurant in London using a manufactured model.

[Scorpio]

Anthropoid aliens are a stumbling bloke. Little fellows with big heads and grey skin dont quite cut it. The size and complexity of the universe compared to the limitations of our own planet reduce the probability of an alien species looking anything like us to pratically zero.

[Errata]

I saw a UFO once, i just don't think it was aliens. I think aliens probably have better things to do than anally probe the population of the southern United States. I think it's patently ridiculous to think that we would even recognize alien life as life. Anyway, we aren't even the dominant species on this planet. Why would they want us?

It's like Dan Ackroyd's character in Sneakers when he's reading the tabloid "Oh look! Cattle mutilations are up""

[The Grave Maurice]

I once believed that I had seen a UFO. I was out on a boat, late at night, in Lake Memphremagog in Quebec's Eastern Townships. I was looking up at the stars when I noticed that one of them was moving...quickly. Oh boy, I thought, aliens! Turned out, as I learned from the radio the next day, that it was just a Russian satellite passing by. Still, it gave me a bit of thrill at the time.

[Scorpio]

Yes, the Universe is big, but, for UFO's at least,i consider the terrestrial explanation, and misidentification, the only acceptable one. The very size of the universe and the mind boggling distances separating the stars, would, given our current grasp of physics, make stellar travel improbable; especially If you combine this problem with the simple fact that not a single piece of evidence suggesting Alien life exists,and i would not accept apochryphal tales of frozen saucermen concealed in secret government facilities as evidence.