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I think at this point that there are (somewhat simplistically) two opposing camps in this debate. The first believes that UFOs are entirely the result of terres

• nazgulnarsil 14y ago
  if humans are all cognitively similar we shouldn't expect a large number of similar reports about things to be surprising.
  • Kelliot 14y ago
    Should we also expect to follow pop culture? the classic description of a grey turning up following science fiction and newspaper publishing.
• samstave 14y ago
  Also, we will never know if accounts that would be considered hard evidence were not simply destroyed and not included in any surviving record. While I am personally on the fence about believing the accounts any gov has - clearly we know basically nothing of the universe relative to its size and existence.... so I will withhold judgement in any form - but lets look at the examples through history: The earth is flat. The Sun revolves around the earth. Germs dont exist. What is this radiation malarky? There are no other planets in the universe. There are no other solar systems like ours in the universe. Lets kill eachother over imaginary rulers and their rules. etc etc etc People are STUPID. So, are there UFOs? No idea - but I have sen weird stuff and I will never let another human tell me what the limits to the universe are. I'd prefer to just keep seeking, keep experiencing life and the wonders of all that is. The fact that Humans exist proves there is some intelligence in the Universe, lets just hope we are not the pinnacle as that would be rather sad.
  • andrewfelix 14y ago
    "...but I have sen weird stuff and I will never let another human tell me what the limits to the universe are" I would suggest rather than depend on personal observation and anecdotal evidence you listen to groups of others who are actively seeking out information. We no longer believe the earth is flat because of a consistent and large amount of data has told as otherwise.
    • samstave 14y ago
      I wasn't really meaning I was going to only rely on personal observation per se, I am just saying that humans are intrinsicly historically wrong about everything. Thus I will not just say "those people told me that there are no other sentient beings capable of anything such as flying through space to visit a remot planet, so they must be correct!" We have already sent probes beyond our system and to many planets within our system and we only discovered FLIGHT 100 years ago. Just imagine 1,000 years from now.
      • pyre 14y ago
        > Just imagine 1,000 years from now Like flying cars in the year 2000? ;-)
      • nitrogen 14y ago
        I wasn't really meaning I was going to only rely on personal observation per se, I am just saying that humans are intrinsicly historically wrong about everything. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm We have already sent probes beyond our system and to many planets within our system and we only discovered FLIGHT 100 years ago. Just imagine 1,000 years from now. I think it's just as likely that technological development will follow an S curve as remain exponential. Look at Moore's Law -- the laws of physics provide a hard ceiling for certain kinds of technological progress.
  • rimantas 14y ago
    > So, are there UFOs? No doubt, if you talk about unrecognized flying objects which can be anything—from weather baloons to weird clouds. Were ther aliens? I don't think so. Yes, there may be another intelligent life in the universe, but even so I think it is too far away even for the signal from it to reach another one within the lifetime of their exsistance. Physical visit is even many many orders of magnitude less likely.
• Permit 14y ago
  >While I do not doubt the logical validity of the skeptics positions, there is nevertheless a large body of evidence (circumstantial though it may be) which becomes difficult to deny when taken in the aggregate. I think it's incredibly important to remember that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
  • andrewfelix 14y ago
    Exactly. You could argue that God exists based on witness accounts.
    • ktizo 14y ago
      I know god exists. elvis told me only last week, and the king never lies.
  • calebmpeterson 14y ago
    > I think it's incredibly important to remember that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Honestly, where is the barrier between the two? I'm not suggesting it doesn't exist, just genuinely asking where it is, or at least where it's near?
    • grimboy 14y ago
      Well, roughly and someone may have a better answer. Data is collected in a structured, systematic way, and the sample is carefully chosen. Anecdotes are not structured or collected in a systematic way, but worst of all the sample you've taken is the people who've chosen to speak up.
    • nazgulnarsil 14y ago
      Anecdotes ignore selection effects. Data tries to control for them.
  • c3d 14y ago
    Why would radar recordings or radioactive soil samples not count as data (in the same sense that fossils are data)?
• sage_joch 14y ago
  Interesting; I had always taken Sagan's opinion as gospel, but I suppose there is room for questions. A bit of googling shows both Jimmy Carter and Dennis Kucinich have seen a UFO, and they're honest people. That certainly doesn't make me a believer, but it's nice to see there's at least a small possibility.
  • ladzoppelin 14y ago
    Keep in mind that UFO just means that it is unidentified and not necessarily from another galaxy. In my opinion Sagan and Hawking are right and that actual visitation from an alien species would be really unlikely given the size of the universe.
    • joering2 14y ago
      Not necessarily -- a fact alone that they could visit Earth implies that their technology is sophisticated enough to fight gravity, travel at speed of light (or faster) and do plenty of other things that may not even been covered by science-fiction just yet. Now, before you say it doesnt matter whether you travel at the speed of light, faster or slower, the moment you catch up with space debris, you become a crashed and burnt debris yourself. If all physical objects vibrate at some rate, then as wild as my imagination can go, it may be possible to speed up this rotation of a physical object so much that would eventually become... a wave.
      • lobster_johnson 14y ago
        It's not sufficient for the aliens to be sophisticated. They would also have to exist in exactly the right time frame. Consider the age of the universe: 14.6 billion years. Earth was formed about 10 billion years after the universe, and it took 5.4 billion years for the Earth to see the emergence of a civilized species, which has existed for an absolutely microscopic amount of time compared to those enormous intervals. How long does a species last, realistically? Counting from its "space age", would a species survive a thousand years, ten thousand? Extinction from natural disasters, epidemics, war and the like could be averted by scattering oneself across a solar system or wider. How many civilizations could reach that stage? I have absolutely no doubt that a myriad of alien life exists. But I think the chances that there exists alien species that: * has evolved before us or roughly at the same time, * has not driven themselves to extinction * achieved the technological capability for crossing galaxies, and * is willing to do so …is exceedingly slim. Even if a species develops space-faring tech needed to visit Earth, I think it's extremely unlikely that their existence will coincidence with us. They are either all dead by now, or they will be dead before we/they develop the tech to visit, or they don't exist yet, and we will all be dead first.
• derekp7 14y ago
  Let's say I flipped a coin a million times. Now lets assume multiple witnesses saw me flip the coin so that heads came up twice in a row. There may be hundreds of such reports. Maybe even thousands. Would you conclude from that group of reports that I can, on demand, always flip the coin so that it comes up heads twice in a row? Or even that every time I flip the coin it comes up heads? Before taking a group of reports as evidence, keep in mind that this is selection bias.
• chmike 14y ago
  Eyewitness reports contains facts that can be checked objectively. I.e witness reports powerlines oscillating in opposite phase in presence of UFO. There are also photographs showing strange things like a fuzzy dark mass beneath the UFO or multiple dark rings around the UFO. This can be explained as light polarisation in presence of intense magnetic field. It is even possible to estimate the strength of the magnetic field. This is something eyewitness can't make up. There are also reports of rotating compass. This can be explained and can only happen if precise conditions are met i.e oscillating intense magnetic field. By knowing the properties of the compass it is possible to determine the frequency of the magnetic field. If there is some reality in this phenomenon, it is possible to find evidences in the testimonies that can be indirectly objectively checked. This is science process.
• dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  I don't think there is anything difficult to deny for skeptics. There are fundamental, and very serious problems with the whole ET visitation thing that make the whole thing just untenable. Where are they? I mean this would be a "big freakin' deal". The idea that the government could cover this up is ridiculous. World governments can barely keep secrets from eachother. You'd have to believe in basically MIB and neurolyzers. The physics of this ... is basically an appeal to magic in the guise of "advanced technology" (and don't give me the whole "any sufficiently advanced technology ... line). Now, it seems to be a big coincidence that there are many, many definitive hoaxes, I mean admitted by the perpetrators, but yet that the phenomena is still exists ("Sure we have faked this thing a million times, but it just so happens that it's real, I promise"). So we have to believe 1) ET doesn't want us to know about him and 2) ET is mega advanced but is so stupid that a bunch of rednecks and believers in woo/psi have discovered him (not that every "believer" is like that but clearly Joe Bob has discovered, so ET is evidently a mega physicist but sucks at basic hide and seek even with dimension traveling technology?). It's just too much nonsense.
  • c3d 14y ago
    I don't think tenants of the ET hypothesis all assume a MIB-style government cover-up. We don't have to believe your 1) or 2) either. Here are a few more likely explanations: 1) ET doesn't know how to communicate with us. We don't know how to communicate with most animals on the planet, yet they share most of our DNA. How would you communicate with a being that has no notion of sound, has a sense of smell based on silicon biology, can't touch you without dying or killing you, and has a vision only in deep infrared? 2) Interstellar travel, while possible, is very expensive, so scientific expeditions behave like our own expensive scientific expeditions say, to the moon: touch, collect samples, and go. 3) There's a sort of prime directive or at least an attempt at letting us evolve in our own way. As for the faking argument, it's like saying that because there's been a few Titanic movies, the Titanic didn't exist... It's the opposite: there's interest in faking it only because there is something. Otherwise, we'd also routinely see fake witches, fake angels and daemons, fake faeries, fake invisible people and fake ghosts.