Former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington and his band of others are out beating the drums so loudly about UFOs that they might be heard on another planet. I just watched this Larry King interview ... and the stories these men tell are remarkable; just not remarkable enough to convert me from a lifelong skeptic into a believer.
Here are 10 of my reasons why, which you should consider yourself free to adopt:
No alien monkey wrench. This is not an original thought, but I've always found it a compelling one. Earthlings have littered the solar system with tons of space junk and yet no one has come forward with anything that we can all agree had to have been left behind by one of these multitudes of visitors from other planets.
There are no secrets. You say the space junk exists but it's being kept hidden by governments including our own? Phooey. First of all, our leaders would never do such a thing (don't make use an emoticon). Moreover and much more seriously, people who cling to this belief simply do not understand how lousy governments are at keeping secrets. Those who think the media is involved in the cover-up - like my own brother, for crying out loud - have no idea how many journalists would trade one of their own children for a scoop of this magnitude. And remember, the cover-up needs to have been ongoing flawlessly for generations now to support the theory.
No indisputable visual evidence. That kind of proof is necessary to overturn a ref's call in a football game, so it's necessary if we're going to believe in alien visitors. Ah, but what about all the fuzzy pictures and grainy footage, you say? Well, the fact that we're going to argue about whether any of it is indisputable means those pictures and home movies do not amount to what's needed here. Geraldo Rivera posing with a foot up on a spacecraft bumper: That I'll believe.
This is indisputable: Dreams, hallucinations, pranksters and optical illusions are unquestionably real.
Alien beings are too quiet. They can get here, but do not communicate, especially with world leaders or journalists? I know, I know, they're afraid of spooking us. Guess what? We're already spooked and they should be plenty smart enough to understand that fact. (By the way, I'm available for an interview, should any alien be reading this blog. I will not, however, give up one of my children.)
My pet South Park theory: The episode of South Park where Cartman gets - well, I have to worry about spam filters here - wouldn't be anywhere near as funny if UFOs were real spacecraft carrying real alien visitors. That's not supportive of my position, I'm just saying.
Tick-tock, people: This debate has been going on for eons and the pro-UFO crowd hasn't been able to make a case that the anti-UFO crowd will buy. Speaking for the latter, it's not that we don't want to believe or cannot be persuaded, it's that the evidence - which as Carl Sagan famously said needs to be extraordinary - remains extraordinarily weak.
We can't find them. Not for a lack of trying, mind you. SETI, to cite only one example, has been around since 1960 and SETI@home has been crowdsourcing this baby like nobody's business since 1999. Nada. I understand that our means of searching are primitive compared to what it would take to transport an alien being from a distant planet to Earth, but we're a lot smarter than we used to be and still unable to find anyone out there. By the way: Not believing that aliens have visited here isn't the same thing as not believing in them period. I'm willing to take it on faith that there's something life-like out there somewhere.
It's not my job; it's not your job. We have real lives to live, and besides, you can't prove a negative. The onus here is on the true believers. I'm not saying that every last skeptic needs to be converted - after all, some believe the Earth is flat and that O.J. was innocent. We'll settle for the reasonable-man-or-woman standard. I'm reasonable: Start with convincing me.
I've never seen a Star Trek movie. Again, I'm not saying this constitutes evidence of anything, just that it might help explain why I don't believe.
Welcome regulars and passersby. Here are a few more recent Buzzblog items. And, if you'd like to receive Buzzblog via e-mail newsletter, here's where to sign up.
A life or death struggle on our back deck.
YouTube's down, everybody panic.
"Bribe" or miswording: You make the call.
This Year's 25 Geekiest 25th Anniversaries.
TV crew tames the Bermuda Triangle of parking lots.
Women 4 times more likely than men to cough up personal info to a stranger.
Google renames the Persian Gulf.
Top 10 Buzzblog posts for '07: Verizon's there, of course, along with Gates, Wikipedia and the guy who lost a girlfriend to Blackberry's blackout.
|
|
Valid points however...
You really need to go back and watch the first disclosure conference held in Washington in May of 2001.
http://www.netro.ca/disclosure/npccmenu.htm
Yesterday's conference was interesting but this first one was even more impressive.
10 reasons you shouldn't believe in UFOs
The author of this article obviously hasn't had the experience of being 90' from A UFO. Get this, I had 10 years in the Air Force, I am familiar with military aircraft, I know how 10 G's will kill a person, and know the laws of physics. What my son and I saw several years ago was not anything of this earth. Try watching something as big as a football stadium go from an altitude of 90', to nothing more visible than a star in less then a blink of an eye. The old adage, you can't see what is in front of you because your to busy watching the lines. To bad your lines are empty words that you are filling your readers with. Something is out there that people need to be informed about and you my friend are doing your readers a disservice. NEXT TIME YOU WRITE AN ARTICLE, DO YOUR HOMEWORK.
Good call...
This author is clueless!!!!! And unfortunately, so are MANY more...but for those who know, it's all that matters!
Agreed
I agree, this blog post demonstrates ignorance of readily available facts.
Sadly, this is why giggles erupt when the topic should be taken very seriously. There's a lot of ignorance out there.
So you think governments can't keep secrets ? How about the F-117A ? It was kept a complete secret, even amongst aviation buffs, for about 20 years.
And its secret was basically some funny angles. That was enough for a whole community to consider it vital to their lives to keep it completely under wraps.
If you have actual interest in this topic, please do your homework first... and then blog.
UFO rebuttal
Thank you for providing the link here in your comment on my blog today. Here's my rebuttal...
>10 reasons you shouldn't believe in UFOs
>No alien monkey wrench.
Many ufologists (and yes, I think it's a silly term) do feel we've found just such items, but the media and public buys cover-stories about them weather-balloons and other terrestrial objects.
Debris from the 1947 Roswell crash. Face on Mars. And there's plenty of out-of-place artifacts in the historical record, such as The Antikythera Mechanism or functional copper-based batteries being found in ancient tombs. Not that those OOP artifacts are UFO-related, but they do show us the inaccuracies and grey areas of our modern understanding.
Any "alien monkey wrench" would have to traveled for at least decades (unless Einstien's wrong) to get here, across the resource-less void of space. It's probably a very hazardous journey, one that could easily go wrong. Decades of shipboard conservation of resources would make you keep good tabs on where your monkey-wrenches were.
>There are no secrets. You say the space junk exists but it's being kept hidden by governments including our own?
Yes. We are surrounded by secrets. Can you name undercover police officer in your city? Every person currently getting money from the CIA? How many kilotons of nuclear explosive are at each military base in the country? If you answered no to any of those, then the government is keeping something secret.
A few days ago I posted to my blog something about the conspiracies I've encountered in my life. As far as I can tell, I was the only whistle-blower in either of them. So, don't tell me secrets don't exist. The default paradigm is for secrets to remain secret. They reach the light of day via treachery or bravery. If someone thinks his secret is a matter of national security, he'd need to exemplify BOTH treachery and bravery to spread the word.
> No indisputable visual evidence. That kind of proof is necessary to overturn a ref's call in a football game, so it's necessary if we're going to believe in alien visitors. ...
> This is indisputable: Dreams, hallucinations, pranksters and optical illusions are unquestionably real.
Mexico city is plagued by UFO sightings. They were especially strong in the early 90's, but it's still going on. The most famous of those involved over a thousand witnesses. A few years back there was a sighting in Chicago that involved over 300 people. When over 100 people give corroborating testimony of a single incident, saying they saw something fly with aerodynamics that fit neither a jet nor a helicopter, you still won't believe?
Google or You Tube the UFO Disclosure Project. It includes mostly testimony, but also some radar images. Sure, radar's not as good as photographic proof, but when 400 professionals in the military or civilian air-traffic control, and/or military intelligence fields attest on the record to having seen UFOs first-hand, it should have some weight.
Now, admittedly, they could be lying. But YOU think it's unlikely that thousands of government officials could be lying to cover up UFOs because they were told it was in the best interests of their nation. So I imagine hundreds of former government officials lying for no such patriotic reason should be even harder for you to swallow.
> Alien beings are too quiet. They can get here, but do not communicate, especially with world leaders or journalists?
To say "I wouldn't do it that way if I were an alien" is a straw-man argument.
As a member of 20th-21st century U.S. culture, it's hard for you or I to understand the cultural mores and paradigms that made the Aztecs commit all those human sacrifices. A few hundred miles and years makes it bizarre and illogical to us. So it's ridiculous to assume our thought processes will in anyway resemble those of a being who grew up in non-terrestrial culture on another planet or on-board an alien starship.
It's easy for me to imagine a scenario where the aliens would conceal themselves. I'm not saying I believe in any of these, but for the sake of an argument, they'd explain the quiet:
Aliens could be planning an invasion or conquest, but only scouts are currently in our system. The firepower necessary to take over a nuclear-capable planet could be en route now, set to arrive in 50 years. In that scenario, it's the alien's best interests to lie low and keep us from getting organized.
In a similar vein, non-hostile Aliens could consider us dangerous, and wanted to see if we'd just nuke ourselves into oblivion. They could be watching out of self-preservation, and trying to decide how to proceed. The ET equivalent of Senate could be debating what to do about the "human menace" right now.
Or, if instead UFOs were angels. A quick read of the bible indicates god uses flying messengers, and flaming wheels. Why doesn't he talk to each of us personally on a daily basis? I don't know. Aliens could "work in mysterious ways".
They could even not have a spoken or written language. They may not understand how to communicate with us, let alone who to contact.
Not that I'm saying I think any of those four theories is true, I'm just pointing them out to illustrate that it was easy to come up with several possible explanations.
>Tick-tock, people: This debate has been going on for eons and the pro-UFO crowd hasn't been able to make a case that the anti-UFO crowd will buy.
Consider the Giant Squid. They exist in our oceans - Genus Architeuthis. For hundreds of years, sailors have claimed to see them, but Scientists could only find badly rotted corpses (of which about 20 wash up on shores world wide every year). The only photographic evidence is blurry images from a single underwater camera in 2005. Since that breakthrough image, biologists have also captured paralarval specimens. Sometimes, the truth takes centuries to accumulate the photographic evidence to prove it's not a myth.
It's only been 60 years for UFOs.
It's funny that such educated people fall back on the concept of needing photographic proof to believe. We have no photos of Caesar being stabbed in the Senate, yet we all accept that as part of our shared world.
>SETI, to cite only one example, has been around since 1960 and SETI@home has been crowdsourcing this baby like nobody's business since 1999.
SETI at home will only find them if aliens a) use the EM spectrum to transmit data b) have enough power behind those transmissions to send them all the way here c) were transmitting at least as many years ago as their distance in light-years from earth...
A or B could easily be false - an alien technology could use some other medium we don't know of: due method X being better, or due to some issue with radio that's unclear to us such as them evolving near a static-generating quasar, or just cause they never invented it. To stretch the imagination further, a telepathic or hive-mind alien race could find EM waves redundant.
Even principal C could be false if A&B were true. There was a headline on yahoo about a week ago about scientists getting a particle to jump between two prisms instantaneously, thereby putting Einstein's general relativity into doubt. Jury's still out on it, but if that's correct, then teleportation of some sort is possible. If so, aliens could live thousands of light years away and cross the gap in a heartbeat. Any radio signals they broadcast could still be hundreds of years from arriving.
And if we want to get paranoid (I mean REALLY paranoid), we could also say it requires:
d) the data released by SETI@home is not faked or doctored as part of a conspiracy,
> Speaking for the latter, it's not that we don't want to believe
Well, that's just not true. People believe what they want to believe. WMDs. 30% of Fox News viewers still believe we found them in Iraq, despite the white house fessing up.
I've sighted evidence and anecdotes to support my position. Did that have any effect on your opinion? Do you want it to? Seriously?
>I've never seen a Star Trek movie. Again, I'm not saying this constitutes evidence of anything, just that it might help explain why I don't believe.
That suggests to me that chances are you've never really examined the evidence closely. If you don't like Sci-Fi, you've probably written UFOs off as sci-fi and just decided they weren't worth your time to really examine. You DON'T want to believe aliens could be near. How many books on UFOs have you read? How may documentaries have you watched? How much time did you actually spend researching before posting your list of 10 reasons to disbelieve, or did you just base it on things "sane people already know"?
In the words of Rosencrantz (or was that Guildenstern? It was Tom Stoppard anyway...), "He has never written home, and thus he has never known anything worth writing home about."
If Geraldo WERE standing on the bumper of a UFO, wouldn't your first thought would be: "How'd they fake that?" If your instinct is to disbelieve, how do you know the evidence doesn't exist, and that you didn't just read the summary version, passed judgment, and dismissed it?
Did somebody mention Antikythera?
Fascinating stuff, even if not otherworldly.
Amazing to me
Isn't it amazing how people will believe that a spiritual being, that no one has ever seen, created everything on earth...but people raise their eyebrows at the idea that another species living on another planet could have built a spaceship?
Isn't it amazing how people
Isn't it amazing how people will believe that a spiritual being, who appears only in books, created the entire world and everything in it, but raise their eyebrows at the idea that a another species from another planet could build a spaceship?
5 Reasons why UFOs exist
1. You are not a unique snow flake.
2. You are part of the same rotting, organic, compost heap that makes up the rest of nature.It is the walking, talking, primordial instinct. And its applications are endless.
3. God was modeled after our fathers. Our Fathers left us. What does that tell you about God.
4. You have to consider that God may not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. If we are god’s unwanted children. so be it. We don’t need him. But first you must accept, not know, that some day you are going to die. It is not until we have lost everything that we are free to do anything.
5. Imagine humankind without distractions. Imagine man without emotion, faith, or hope. Imagine man with absolute freedom.
No real evidence of UFOs
I agree with "10 reasons you shouldn't believe in UFOs". With the millions of cameras in the world, video or still, you would think there would be at least one decent video or picture of a UFO.
I think it is entirely posssible that UFOs exist but as far as I'm concerned, there is just no crdible evidence of them so far.