Why us?

[webplodder]

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there do exist very advanced technological cultures, whether in our spacetime or perhaps in other dimensions, what reason would they possibly have in expending time and effort in visiting a primitive society like ours? Doesn't really stand up, does it? Even if they are time travellers it does not seem to make sense that they would gain anything from coming here! Might it not be more of a case of thinking we are important and therefore deserving of the attention of superior beings? Perhaps it the same psychology as believing in a caring God.

Doesn't all the so-called evidence just boil down to misidentifications, exotic natural phenomena, mental aberrations, satellites, downright lying, celestial objects such as planets and stars, etc., secret aircraft and so on and so on? Also, the reports of abductees are so ridiculous that you have to feel a bit sorry for the people who seek to gain attention from such exhibitionism. I find Col. Halt a credible witness, however, I do think he was fooled in some way by a rare confluence of events that night that, in combination with human psychology, led to the the experience he and others honestly thought occurred. Also, the binary idea seems to have emerged as an afterthought, which is highly suspicious. There does not exist one shred of viable scientific evidence to support the idea that we have been visited by ET civilizations - all evidence that is put forward can always be explained in other terms. Occam's Razor tells us that usually the simplest explanation is correct, so there we are - no need for aliens, just human behaviour.

[Observer]

webplodder

Very well put, can I add my two penneth. Does an alien craft from another world or dimension perhaps a million years ahead of us with the technology to get to earth from another galaxy crash land in a blaze of light and in the back yard of a NATO air base. The word crash I suspect would not be in their remit or vocabulary. Hey guys, we are over hear just follow the lights, the engine has been playing up since Mars, do you have any spares. Sorry about the broken branches but we used that funny light on that island as a NAV aid.

Obs

[larry warren]

gents, why does this stuff have to come from other planets? the facts are it comes from somewhere, further it is insulting
to many more than you think there are, your coments about those that talk about close interaction with THEM .
perhaps you should look into the the work of dr roger leir, MIT, ect it happens so get educated on the matter or you just come off like loud mouths ! love you long time GI !

[Observer]

Larry
Chill Brother, I'm only having a bit of fun, mainly because we are not getting any where.

As far as I can remember you have never changed your story unlike some other people and if only you would be more willing to debate with us your findings out lined in the book. I have several questions about the descriptions of objects you mentioned in the book. For another thing, I do not know your opinion of other people's stories.
Be more willing to debate things and we will work with you.

Obs

[webplodder]

Larry, I'm sorry mate, but your credibility has been totally shot down by Halt and the others because they maintain you were never even seen at the site of the events. Also, if you are now saying the objects seen weren't necessarily from other planets why did you say you saw 'creatures' about the size of kids floating above the ground near one of the 'vehicles' and communicating with USAF/Intelligence personnel? Come on, Larry, pull the other one son. Do you want to change your story?

[Frank]

Doesn't all the so-called evidence just boil down to misidentifications, exotic natural phenomena, mental aberrations, satellites, downright lying, celestial objects such as planets and stars, etc., secret aircraft and so on and so on? (...) There does not exist one shred of viable scientific evidence to support the idea that we have been visited by ET civilizations - all evidence that is put forward can always be explained in other terms.

No, every serious investigation into the UFO phenomenon got stuck with a substantial amount of “unknowns” – even the Condon report that was meant to relieve the USAF from the UFO problem. Another interesting fact is that the percentage of unknowns grows with the quality of the reports, and that the unknowns contain consistent patterns that even enabled a serious scientific analysis of the UFO propulsion system to a certain extend (http://www.amazon.com/Unconventional-Flying-Objects-Scientific-Analysis/dp/1571740279).

Occam's Razor tells us that usually the simplest explanation is correct,

Yes, but an explanation has to explain ALL the data. This is where most skeptics go wrong. They offer an explanation that fails to explain all the data and then misuse Occam’s Razor to defend it. But a failing explanation doesn’t magically become true just because it’s ‘simple’.

Might it not be more of a case of thinking we are important and therefore deserving of the attention of superior beings? Perhaps it the same psychology as believing in a caring God.

It might be to some people, but not to the serious scientists that have studied and continue to study the UFO phenomenon. I’m afraid the hard cases do not contain any evidence of a ‘caring superior civilization’. There is also no evidence of hostility by the way. ‘Curious but indifferent’ is a more appropriate term.

Note that the extraterrestrial hypothesis is a hypothesis, not an established fact. It is a valid hypothesis because there is nothing unscientific about the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligent life forms that have the ability to reach Earth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox).

Maybe this thread is interesting for you: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=809

[webplodder]

Frank, you have made some interesting points but we do not know for sure that interstellar forms of travel will ever become a reality anywhere in the universe. We like to think that science will, one day, allow us to manipulate time and space to enable us to visit other star systems but currently this remains just a hope and the evidence for this idea is sadly lacking. I am no scientist but I do gather that the energies required to manipulate space (based on the ideas of Einstein) are so immense it is hard to see how it will ever be achieved. This is why we have to look for more prosaic explanations in order to account for the 'patterns' of circumstantial evidence thus far amassed. There may be things existing in our atmosphere that we do not understand that get mistaken for ET vehicles by casual observers and the possibility of hoaxes is always a significant consideration so that one cannot blame the scientists for insisting on more solid evidence to support extraordinary claims. Carl Sagan was right when he said: "Extraordinary claims have to be supported by extraordinary evidence" (or words to that effect). How do we know that intelligent species do not typically die out before they ever have a chance to become clever enough to visit other star systems? Why must we assume that just because a particular star system is a billion years older than ours it then follows that there must exist beings who are much older and technologically advanced than us? It takes some rather large assumptions to conclude that we, here on planet earth, have been and possibly still are being visited by advanced technological species, even if the objects in question are just probes that originated somewhere off the earth.Why has SETI failed to discover any sign of intelligent life in the cosmos so far, could it be that we have simply missed them and that they no longer exist? Intelligent life might be so rare in the universe that the chances of two or more civilisations being able to communicate are vanishingly small. It is hard to accept the fact that in all of the so-called ET cases there has never been anything compelling enough to allow the scientific method to do its work. Hearsay is just not enough. The fact is that the earth happens to be in a very privileged position that not only allows life to form easily but is protected by Jupiter and the other massive planets that act as 'vacuum cleaners' in sucking up potentially catastrophic impacts of comets and asteroids that have the ability to bring about Armageddon if they ever struck the earth. How many other planets in our galaxy share the same favourable conditions as ours? I wonder. So far there is very little evidence of earth-like planets existing within other star systems, although I accept that the science for this is in its infancy, but it does appear that the earth is a very special place, not replicated to any significant degree in the rest of the universe.

[David Bryant]

It's worth recalling that the first extra-solar planet wasn't discovered until 1992: now nearly 300 have been identified. Also, the Sun is a bog standard G-type star, of which there are squillions in our galaxy alone. There can be little doubt that the number of Earth-like planets is vast. As to our world being 'protected' (some Clarkian teleology going on here!) by the gas giants: it has been pounded by comets and planetissimals since it first formed (from the debris of a masive collision that created the Earth-Moon system.) If it weren't for cometary impacts, our planet wouldn't have any water: furthermore, there's compelling evidence that life (or at least amino acids and other macro-molecules) arrived here as a passenger on a meteorite.

The quantity of 'circumstantial evidence' that UFOs exist and are probably extraterrestrial in origin is far greater than that for many accepted phenomena: ball lightning, dark matter and anti-matter being prime examples. Additionally: the only evidence for the existence of many totally 'mainstream' objects such as Black Holes is entirely interpretive, based on photographs and radio astronomy results. I'm not saying I don't believe they exist, merely that lay-people believe whatever 'Science' tells them! Most people would be surprised that the best-known dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus Rex, is known only from a handful of incomplete specimens, or that the entire history of human evolution is based around even fewer (and still contentious) fossil remains.

Finally: your posting falls into the same trap as the Fermi Paradox: it assumes that ETIs, like us, communicate via EM radiation. The entire SETI search has been conducted with radio telescopes. That's like saying there are no such things as jellyfish because they don't show up on X-ray searches! We must beware of investing ETIs with human motivations and evolutionary and technological developments: there is no fundamental reason why that should be the case.

[webplodder]

Well argued but there is another point to consider here: what do we mean by 'advanced beings?'

Does being a highly developed organism necessarily imply the acquisition of technology and space travel? If some ET cultures have in fact attained 'ideal' societies would they have a need to develop vehicles to visit remote places in the universe? They may lead a very spiritual existence having little need for artificial machines or, perhaps, some may have created a kind of virtual world sustained by incredibly powerful computers and therefore have no need to exist anymore in spacetime. Homo-Sapiens are a highly inquisitive species and experience a strong urge to explore their surroundings but, perhaps, not all conscious life in the cosmos is like us. As you say, we are in danger of imbuing other intelligent organisms with similar motivations and agendas as us, which could be a fundamental error. This is one flaw in the ET hypothesis, viz: we have a tendency to characterize possible visiting ETs as being rather like us in that they are monitoring us, or are protecting us from our use of nuclear weapons (there have been cases where UFOs are said to have 'closed down' nuclear weapons) or even that they might have 'seeded' us by genetic manipulation sometime in the past. All very egocentric, in my view.

[David Bryant]

I find it most intriguing that a fair percentage of 'UFOs' seem to have the characteristics of life-forms: this point was made by Astronaut Story Musgrave in re one of his (several) sightings. Certainly the 'rod' and 'blob' types seem to be in that category. Maybe, as 'someone' once said:

[i]"Not only is the Universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we [i]can imagine!"[/i][/i]

[Frank]

Interesting speculations ..

I don’t think we have such a strong urge to explore. Most humans are too busy surviving, competing, and consuming. There may be other species that are more intelligent, are better organized, and have a far stronger urge to explore than us.

Some more speculations:

A species that stays on its home planet has little chance of surviving in the long term. Sooner or later a cosmic disaster will hit. So this class of extraterrestrials will be wiped out after a few million years.

But as soon as extraterrestrials start inhabiting other planets in other solar systems, things change drastically. The probability of extinction will rapidly grow to 0.

The result of this line of thinking: Only a few civilizations will grow to be very, very old and these will automatically be the ones that have spread through the Galaxy. Who knows, maybe there is only one such civilization in the entire Galaxy.

But one is all it takes. The Fermi paradox shows that such a civilization will span the entire Galaxy in less than a 100 million years (which is very short compared to the age of the Galaxy).

[webplodder]

The Fermi paradox of course assumes that interstellar travel is attainable. It may or may not be, we don't really know what hurdles have to be overcome to achieve this - perhaps one day we will find out. There may be some kind of cosmic restriction on how much it is possible to manipulate time and space. It's a fact that science has yet to unite all the known forces of nature into a 'theory of everything' and, perhaps, may never be resolved, in which case we will never be in a position to make further progress.

But the point about being protected to some extent by catastrophic meteor/comet impacts is important because all it would take is one major impact on earth to halt technological progress for some considerable time and we may never be able to recover. It's all very speculative and we await further scientific data as to the number of viable planets that might support advanced technological societies.

[bignos]

The Fermi paradox of course assumes that interstellar travel is attainable. It may or may not be.

you are joking, right?! Have you never watched Star trek ?

[Frank]

The Fermi paradox of course assumes that interstellar travel is attainable. It may or may not be.

you are joking, right?! Have you never watched Star trek ?

No warp speed needed here .. even if you assume sub-light-speed travel (think of space ships the size of a city travelling at 40% of the speed of light to other solar systems) the Fermi Paradox stays valid. Fermi never assumed that the light speed barrier would be broken.

From Wikipedia (emphasis mine):

If interstellar travel is possible, even the "slow" kind nearly within the reach of Earth technology, then it would only take from 5 million to 50 million years to colonize the galaxy.[11] This is a relatively small amount of time on a geological scale, let alone a cosmological one. Since there are many stars older than the Sun, or since intelligent life might have evolved earlier elsewhere, the question then becomes why the galaxy has not been colonized already. Even if colonization is impractical or undesirable to all alien civilizations, large-scale exploration of the galaxy is still possible.

This is why Fermi exclaimed: "Where are they?" and this is why it is a true paradox.

Of course if the light speed barrier really cannot be broken, staying in touch over interstellar distances is impossible. So if such a civilization is bound to light speed communication, it will probably fall apart. This is what happened to us when we started spreading over the Earth in pre-history - although we were able to spread over the Earth but we were not able to “stay in touch”.

Who knows how strange the sociological history of the Galaxy turns out to be? Probably stranger and more complicated than we can imagine ..

But the key point to me is: You cannot dismiss UFO data based on these kinds of speculations. You simply have to face the data as-is and try to make sense of it without the prejudice that extraterrestrial visitation is a logical absurdity.

[bignos]

joking aside, every 'therory' on extraterrestrial life / travelling through vast distances is flawed - simply because its all guess work (no actual science involved) or is based on know laws of physics etc

To that end, my guess (or therory) would be to look back and learn from ourselves and how throughout history 'experts' predicted things were impossible only until they were proved wrong with new information, the truth is, nobody knows and as such you should have an open mind as a closed mind will never learn

[Observer]

Guys

As much as I find this thread fascinating although its way above my head, I respectfully suggest you all come back down to earth and put the same amount of effort into solving the Rendlesham Forest Incident. I'm sure collectively we can move forward.

Obs

[Vortex]

But the key point to me is: You cannot dismiss UFO data based on these kinds of speculations. You simply have to face the data as-is and try to make sense of it without the prejudice that extraterrestrial visitation is a logical absurdity.Frank

Spot on. I feel that speculation about the origin of UFOs in a general sense is actually quite damaging to the investigation of the phenomena and to the entire subject matter. It frustrates me that the term 'UFO' is synonymous with 'alien spacecraft' to a lot of people and in particular, to the media. Indeed, it's for this exact reason that news articles tend to discuss little green men or play the X-Files music whenever the subject of UFOs is under the spotlight!

Essentially, UFO is an umbrella term to describe any anomolous object that is witnessed in the sky. I'm sure that most UFO sightings have very logical and mundane explanations and are essentially the result of misidentifications (I don't think anybody could really argue with this fact), however there do seem to be a number of cases that occur each year that do defy explanation in such terms. Now, does this mean that all of these unexplained objects are alien spacecraft? No, of course not. However, I think in certain instances (particualarly where multiple eye-witness sightings are corroborated by ground and air radar returns or landing trace evidence etc.) it genuinely seems that high-performance objects of unknown origin are being encountered. Of course, this still doesn't mean that they are alien spacecraft! However, in such cases, I think the 'extraterrestrial hypothesis' is as valid a theory as anything else, until refuting evidence can be obtained - one such case that springs to mind is the Belgian UFO wave in the early 90s (although I'm well aware of the skeptical theories surrounding this case!).

Basically, all I'm trying to say is that each case should be investigated individually and that we should remain agnostic about the origins of the UFO(s) witnessed. Let's look at the data from each case and see where it takes us. There might be a logical explanation or we might be dealing with a true 'unknown'. If this kind of approach could be adopted on our large scale with international and civilian/miltary co-operation, I'm sure we'd make significant in-roads in this field in a very short space of time.

Vortex

[David Bryant]

If this kind of approach could be adopted on our large scale with international and civilian/miltary co-operation, I'm sure we'd make significant in-roads in this field in a very short space of time.

Good luck with that! If the UK/US military told us even a tenth of what they know, the origin of UFOs would be a matter of public record....

[webplodder]

Has anyone considered the 'Ultraterrestrials' option?

Entities that may inhabit another or even greater reality than the one we are used to and that have evolved here on earth, possibly long before Homo-Sapiens, but are normally hidden from us unless they choose otherwise. Many UFOs are reported as suddenly 'disappearing', including the Rendlesham one, so where do they go? Col. Halt said he saw what appeared to him as 'molten metal' dripping from the UFO in the farmer's field yet no trace was found. Did it come and go from and to another dimension existing here on earth? It would dispense with the need to travel vast distances across the universe to visit us because they would already be here but hidden!

[AdrianF]

The result of this line of thinking: Only a few civilizations will grow to be very, very old and these will automatically be the ones that have spread through the Galaxy. Who knows, maybe there is only one such civilization in the entire Galaxy.

But one is all it takes. The Fermi paradox shows that such a civilization will span the entire Galaxy in less than a 100 million years (which is very short compared to the age of the Galaxy).

It is entirely possible that the one civilization could end up being us, if we sort out a whole bunch of other problems first. We've already got spacecraft entering interstellar space and have only been at the game for half a century, so it isn't unrealistic to think in 200 years or so we will have at least interstellar probes making their way to the neighbours. It's also possible that there are civilizations dotted around the galaxy, but stay confined to their own local systems, especially if interstellar travel proves too difficult to manage. It's all speculation, but interesting anyway.

While I don't have a problem with the ETH, it's a pretty reasonable idea, it does seem to dominate all discussion of UFOs and is quite hard to get past sometimes. There could be a whole range of different explanations, some of which we don't fully understand, for a select few cases.