[benjikan]

For those that wish to debunk all UFO reports as Horse Sh-T, watch this documentary in its entirety.

YouTube - UFO - The Black Box Secrets - Part 1 of 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWt1pb4uBmE

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Last edited by benjikan; 01-25-2009 at 10:06 AM.

[mickeyobe]

Why such a highly dramatized documentary?
I they are talking about factual occurrences they should be presenting their case(s) in a factual manner.
This has all the appearances and gimmicks of a very poor Hollywood sci-fi, not very thrilling, thriller.

If not H-S then definitely B-S.

Mickey

Oh wait. Wait! Looking out my office window I can see a squadron of 11 reddish brown circular objects that look like - yes - toilet plungers sans handles. Each has a glowing, pulsating blue-green letter on its side.
They are moving into a straight line formation to spell - wait for it ..........
"P-Y-D-W-J-R-V-Z-U-H-G".
Wow! Sacrebleu!

Gotta get a picture of that. Oh no! My K100D camera is jammed!
I'll get my simple Kodak Brownie.... It too, is jammed!
The Argus C3. ....The lens fell off!
Speed Graphic. ..... The dark slide is stuck!.
Surely my reliable Pentax K1000 .... No film!

There they go, faster than a speeding bullet out of sight beyond the western horizon .

It happened. I saw it. I swear.

[benjikan]

Great Documentary...

YouTube - UFO documentary p1

Ben

[falconeye]

Ben, as you are obviously scanning the media for credible evidence of your case, please share it with us.

So far, I only hear words and see blurry photo/video which could be everything. It wouldn't even be enough to win a court case for murder. Let alone enough for a paradigm shift.

And you need credible evidence. Otherwise, I am let to deduce that evidence is typical where even I can see that the ufos are water drops on a glass surface...

[rparmar]

When I was a teenager there was a surge of interest in UFOs (no apostrophe please!) with magazines devoted to them and the lot. I was very interested and read everything I could get my hands on, all the books, etc. I knew what the different "close encounter" classifications were long before Close Encounters of the Third Kind hit the cinema.

My conclusion was that it was all a bunch of mystic nonsense driven by some very lonely and/or gullible people.

As an adult my opinion has not changed but I do know more about Jungian archetypes and other explanatory mechanisms. To put it simply: the mind is a wonderful and mysterious thing. Training it in logic and common sense only makes the unknown more interesting. A shame more people don't try it. (Thinking, I mean.)

[maritimer]

Being a hardcore astronomy buff I find it pathetic that people actually believe we are the only intelligent life in the universe. I could put up some ( very factual btw ) numbers that almost proves we can't be the only things out there.

For starters, to count discovered galaxies, as of say last week, you would have to count ONE every SECOND for over 300 years. In our Milky Way galaxy alone, there are over 150 BILLION stars exactly ( give or take in size ) like our Sun, each with possible solar systems and planets.

As much of a believer as I am though, unfortunately, I can't say that I have seen 'hard core' evidence of intelligence beyond our planet. I think sometimes people forget some things about space travel. It's more than building an engine to go near light speed. It's more than having a material to build the vessel that will not shatter like glass the moment these accelerated speeds come into play : it's the intelligence to build a naviagation system that will not fly you into a rouge star, an asteroid or even a 2 inch piece of space debris.

Even only 300 years ago, the idea of an airplane was beyond the imagination ( remember the *ahem* cell phones of the late 80's? ). Say we ( humans, the planet ) survive for another 100,000 years... what things could we discover / create?

So, it's beyond theory that there IS a civilization somewhere out there that have been around one million + years longer than humans. And most importantly.... every single ounce of intelligence we possess as human beings : WE have created that intelligence, WE have created those answers and explanations. Nothing is ever set in stone imo... No other "being" has shown us the laws of physics, the idea that life ( as we know it ) is the only life. We are only as smart as we've made ourselves and I firmly believe it is straight up arrogance that makes people believe we ARE the only things out there.

Just my 2 cents...

[vinzer]

When I was a teenager there was a surge of interest in UFOs (no apostrophe please!)...

Yes, that's one of my pet peeves - people adding apostrophes to plural nouns. That, and spelling out lens as lense.

Nothing big, though, and I don't get too worked up over it, but it almost always gets my attention.

Anyway, I'm one of those that think there are other life forms out there. It's not that much of a stretch, really. I'd like to think God (or whoever it is you believe in) put in others in this universe.

[rparmar]

Anyway, I'm one of those that think there are other life forms out there. It's not that much of a stretch, really. I'd like to think God (or whoever it is you believe in) put in others in this universe.

I'd much rather believe in other intelligent life than some deity or other. But the same mathematical logic that can be used (pace Carl Sagan) to show the likelihood of life throughout the universe can also be used to show that such life could have evolved and died millions of times without it ever happening near enough to other lifeforms (in time and distance) for contact to ever occur.

Space is big. Really big. You just won't imagine how unbelievably big it is. ;-)

Space is big. Really big. You just won't imagine how unbelievably big it is. ;-)

I do Robin, it's about that much plus a bit more.

[KrisK10D]

I'd much rather believe in other intelligent life than some deity or other. But the same mathematical logic that can be used (pace Carl Sagan) to show the likelihood of life throughout the universe can also be used to show that such life could have evolved and died millions of times without it ever happening near enough to other lifeforms (in time and distance) for contact to ever occur.

Space is big. Really big. You just won't imagine how unbelievably big it is. ;-)

Interesting this. I watched someone with a similar theory regarding our own galaxy explain this using randomly blinking Christmas lights wrapped around the tree. Each blink represented the beginning, and end, of a civilisation on some planet, at some point in time, from the beginning of time. 2 never lit up at the same time.

I like to use the words 'vast' & 'huge' when talking about space

[benjikan]

Ben, as you are obviously scanning the media for credible evidence of your case, please share it with us.

So far, I only hear words and see blurry photo/video which could be everything. It wouldn't even be enough to win a court case for murder. Let alone enough for a paradigm shift.

And you need credible evidence. Otherwise, I am let to deduce that evidence is typical where even I can see that the ufos are water drops on a glass surface...

If you have some time try reading the following two books:

1. Disclosure by: Dr. Steven M.Greer
2. UFO's and the National Security State by: Richard M.Dolan

A good start...

Ben

[Luciferase]

"If there's just us, it seems like an awful waste of SPACE!" - Contact

Everytime I look up, I believe.

[falconeye]

If you have some time try reading the following two books:
1. Disclosure by: Dr. Steven M.Greer
2. UFO's and the National Security State by: Richard M.Dolan

Hi Ben, it is not that I didn't try to find the evidence myself. As for the books: do they contain at least one convincing image? And if so, could you scan and share with us? Please. And if not, why should those books be able to provide evidence?

[falconeye]

Being a hardcore astronomy buff I find it pathetic that people actually believe we are the only intelligent life in the universe. I could put up some ( very factual btw ) numbers that almost proves we can't be the only things out there. [...] 150 BILLION stars [...] I firmly believe it is straight up arrogance that makes people believe we ARE the only things out there.

But the same mathematical logic that can be used (pace Carl Sagan) to show the likelihood of life throughout the universe can also be used to show that such life could have evolved and died millions of times without it ever happening near enough to other lifeforms (in time and distance) for contact to ever occur.

Each blink represented the beginning, and end, of a civilisation on some planet, at some point in time, from the beginning of time. 2 never lit up at the same time.

Both arguments (the space is too big to have only one civilization; and no two civilizations ever exist at the same moment) are arguments which have been typical of the 50s. The third such argument is that extraterrestrial life may be so alien we may not even recognize it when we see it.

However, 50 years later, none of the three arguments represents anymore what is current science. Rather, things now look like this:

- A civilization, once it reaches a state about ours in 100 years, will start to hop to the next habitable planet (~30 lightyears away). Either by using generation space vessels. Or cybernetic organisms. This mechanism is called colonization wavefront. Otherwise speaking: Once a single planet in a galaxy reaches this critical state we are so close at, intelligent life will spread throughout the galaxy and will never disappear again. You would see it everywhere. That we don't is called Fermi's paradox. We don't see it everywhere. The galaxy appears to be sterile.

- The fundamental laws of physics seem to be fine-tuned (for a yet unknown reason) to allow for biological, carbon-based life. There is little chance that there can be other forms of life, if not created by carbon-based intelligence.

- For carbon-based intelligence, we can compute vague probabilities that it is created by a process of chemical, biological and social evolution. As it turns out, it is quite likely that biological life exists but very unlikely that it evolves into a technological civilization.

- A galaxy may have 3 * 10^11 stars, the universe may have 10^24 planets within our light cone, but is is relatively easy to "eat up" a dozen of factors of ten by requiring unlikely, still necessary events, like:

+ planet crash creating a moon so big that it stabilizes the axis of rotation, but not too big that it stops rotation over billion of years.
+ the right frequency of big meteor incidences to fuel evolution
+ a planet staying in the habitable ring despite the fact that this ring moves outward when the star gets hotter. Which means too that the star must be of the right size.
+ the human race emerged after 4700 million years and only about 100 million years before the earth will have become too hot. This shows that the entire process was unlikely in the first place. One can compute, how unlikely. If conditions are stable as they are.
+ no near-by supernova or gamma ray burst event (the sun is a relatively empty region of the galaxy, and was most of the time. Of course, most stars are in the crowded region).
+ a star created in a region with the right mix of heavier elements (only relatively few stars are -- the sun is an exception in that for its age, it is far away from the crowded center for its mix of elements).
+ a planet not been thrown out of the solar system and keeping a near-circle orbit (the sun seems to have had more planets in the past).
+ a planet keeping its vulcanism over billion of years.
+ ... I could go on forever

Did you know that the human race was once near extinct with only a couple of thousand individuums left?

We cannot yet compute the exact expectation value for number of civilizations in a galaxy after 13.7 billion years. Too many factors are not known exactly enough. But I wouldn't be too surprised if it is below 1.

Some physicists now believe that there are zillions of (disconnected) universes out there, differing in their laws of physics, most of them empty (read: unobservable), and of the non-empty, only populated by a single observer (read: civilization). If this is so, then most likely, we are alone in our universe and our universe is special because we are in it. I don't say that this is a fact. I only say that this is a more serious argument than the nice but naive idea that we "cannot" be alone.


Personally, this recent scientific progress has made me appreciate the importance of the human race. We are the gem on this planet, if not in this galaxy. I don't believe in god, so I don't say it is a wonder. But our mere existance is the closest thing to it. Hiding alien space crafts in our atmosphere would be the second closest thing.

But how do people say: When it rains wonders, it pours wonders

[rparmar]

If this is so, then most likely, we are alone in our universe and our universe is special because we are in it. I don't say that this is a fact. I only say that this is a more serious argument than the nice but naive idea that we "cannot" be alone.

Great post!

Just to be clear: I did not say that I believed in extraterrestrial life, I only said that if one follows Sagan's logic that leads to that belief as an end-point then one must also believe UFOs (in the sense of extraterrestrial visitors) do not exist.

As to my beliefs, I can only say that I believe in intelligent life on Earth, and am doing my best to help it come about one day.