[BirdOPrey5]

Simon,

I do believe like you there must be alien life in the Galaxy, let alone the universe. Also, considering the age of the universe it stands to reason there are likely civilizations MILLIONS of years more advanced then us. Think about that... in 100 years we went from the horse and buggy to the moon. in 35 years we went from a computer the size of a large room with 10 kb of memory to computers you hold in your hand with hundreds of gigabytes of memory.

It is not even conceivable what life and technology may be like in 10,000 years let alone 100,000 or 1 Million even.

I don't think we'll be able to travel to stars in the next 100 years. Maybe not even in the next 1000 years. But if there is any possible way to travel "faster then light" whether it be warp drive or wormholes or more than likely something we haven't even considered, then we WILL eventually find it. And if WE can find it, someone out there ALREADY HAS found it.

As for why would they "reveal" themselves to us that is a good question- one I have thought a lot about. On one hand I think we probably couldn't begin to guess at their reasons... Humans today will study things most of us would consider worthless- bugs, rats, monkeys, whatever- there are people studying everything out there. I don't doubt that some future race may see us as an intellectual curiosity. If we are being visited by aliens I'd bet we're not being visited by alien diplomats ready to welcome us into an interstellar federation, but more likely the alien equivalent of grad students doing university funded research.

Then I think that no matter how good technology gets, no matter how advanced, there will ALWAYS be a flaw in the design. That is to say- US. (Or them). Pardon the expression but even they are "only human." Mistakes will be made. A "Cloaking Device" is only good if someone remembers to turn it on. To take it a step further and look at our current civilization- NOT everyone agrees with every decision everyone else makes. If you have researches experimenting on monkeys you have PETA activists trying to free the monkeys. Sometimes they do. It is possible that not all aliens think they should be here on Earth or hiding themselves from us- it is also possible "sightings" are due to aliens sabotaging their own ships to make some sort of alien political statement.

[Simon Lloyd]

Lol, way to deep for me this time in the morning

[blind-eddie]

If any of you find the time to sit down and watch a documentary, watch Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking. He is an amazing man with believable theories. What he says makes a whole lot of since & has science to back up his theories...You will be amazed.

I think Netflix may still have it, I watched it twice...awesome documentary.

Youtube has a few clips on it but, not the full version from what I found.

[fmgrowit]

I'm personally responsible for many UFO sightings in North East Ohio in the late 1960's and 70's...sorry about that. What else is a young school kid supposed to do during summer break?

I don't believe this "life" thing is nearly an exclusive club as it used to be. With more stars in the universe than grains of sand of all the beaches in the world...I think it might be just a tad naive to think we're alone.

[vijayninel]

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

First, everyone agrees the "second event" was flares... I personally believe it was a good way for the military to draw attention away from the first event- just drop some flares... But let me ask... Why have they never dropped flares before? Or since? No one can show video of flares being dropped like that on ANY other night except the night in question.

They could have dropped them before or since. You see sometimes these lights are visible over great distances under certain special atmospheric conditions (like a mirage).

Secondly you are suggesting that the military is doing this deliberately to hide something and is some kind of conspiracy. There is no conspiracy. They just dropped some flares and in other countries, nobody would have paid much attention to them. Only in the U.S can flares become UFO's.

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

So you either have to believe that 1 or 2 people claiming they were planes was right, or thousands of people who saw a solid craft with stars being blocked out by it are right- one of those thousand being the Governor of his state.

Obviously some people will never change their minds, and I doubt (hope) a Wikipedia page doesn't change anyone's basic views on such profound issues- but I am curious as to the reasoning behind the decisions to ignore what thousands say in favor of a few.

It is just mass hysteria and yes thousands of people can make false claims due to this. In medieval Europe whole villages used to claim that they actually saw the witch perfom that un-natural act. BTW its odd that they never had UFO claims those days. These seem to be a 20th century, American phenomenon.

Closer to my home, thousands of people in New Delhi, India claimed to have seen a monkeyman roaming about the streets in 2001. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey-man_of_Delhi This is in a densely populated city of some 22 million people. Even some of my friends living in Delhi joined in on the gag for fun. It was just mass histeria but was big news on the mainstream mass media at the time (we also have the fox news types here).

So yes, a large community can also collectively make false claims. You should only go by systematic empirical, scientific and logical evidence.

[BirdOPrey5]

Originally Posted by vijayninel

It is just mass hysteria and yes thousands of people can make false claims due to this. In medieval Europe whole villages used to claim that they actually saw the witch perfom that un-natural act. BTW its odd that they never had UFO claims those days. These seem to be a 20th century, American phenomenon.

I've already shown UFO sightings are not in any way limited to America. There are UFO reports all around the world. The video talks about a Japan Airlines Pilot on a 747 who reported they were being followed by a massive, fast moving object. Radar confirmed this object was there. The co-pilot confirmed this object was there. The radar track and the pilot confirm this object was moving at seemingly impossible speeds and moving changes in direction no known aircraft could duplicate. That pilot was grounded by the airline after making this claim even though there was radar evidence and he had an otherwise normal record.

There have been countless sightings in Mexico, South America, Europe, and Russia. Most sightings do not produce great evidence though so they were ignored for this particular documentary (aside from the Belgium and UK incidents) - but no one can say UFO sightings are only made in the USA.

And finally, perhaps the people of medieval times who had never seen an aircraft fly, never seen even an internal combustion engine, - people who did not have a common point of reference that we do today didn't call them "UFOs" but instead called them Angels, Demons, or other super-natural entities that there are no shortage of reports of throughout human history.

[vijayninel]

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

Japan Airlines Pilot on a 747 who reported they were being followed by a massive, fast moving object.

Yes that pilot was put on a desk job because he made a habit of reporting such bizaire things and there was concern that he was not in proper mental condition besides being a headache for the management.

Captain Terauchi of JAL flight 1628 was equally convinced that he had encount- ered an extraterrestrial craft in the skies above Alaska. Skeptics are not so sure, citing the fact that Terauchi had reported seeing UFOs on two previous occasions--and would report yet another sighting the following January, again over Alaska. (He would later explain his second Alaskan encounter as city lights reflecting off ice crystals in the clouds.) CSICOP's Philip Klass thinks that ice crystals in clouds played a significant role in the November encounter. He theorizes that moonlight reflecting off the clouds accounts for the initial sighting, and that when the crew later saw Mars and Jupiter, bright in the autumn sky, they assumed the planets were lights from the original UFO. The signal on the onboard radar, Klass believes, could have been reflected by the same ice crystals (although ice crystals, unlike rain droplets, are very poor reflectors of radar energy). The FAA analyzed the ground radar and con- cluded that they had been uncorrelated radar signals, a common phenomenon that occurs when a radar beam bounced back from an airplane to a ground station doesn't match up with a separate signal sent by the airplane's transponder. Surce :http://j_kidd.tripod.com/b/8.html

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

There have been countless sightings in Mexico, South America, Europe, and Russia. Most sightings do not produce great evidence though so they were ignored for this particular documentary (aside from the Belgium and UK incidents) - but no one can say UFO sightings are only made in the USA.

And finally, perhaps the people of medieval times who had never seen an aircraft fly, never seen even an internal combustion engine, - people who did not have a common point of reference that we do today didn't call them "UFOs" but instead called them Angels, Demons, or other super-natural entities that there are no shortage of reports of throughout human history.

All of those sightings have been hoaxes, natural phenomenon, man made crafts like experimental planes, spy planes, pyrotechnics or rocket exhaust which can be seen from great distances under proper atmospheric conditions. etc. There is no credible evidence that any of these were alien spacecraft.

While I agree that there have been sightings in other parts of the world, the overwhelming majority of these have been in the U.S. Also the U.S is responsible for exporting some of this mass hysteria/hoxes the world over through Hollywood, TV serials and science fiction literature.

Also there were no sightings of UFO's till the 20th century. Dragons and flying saucers have very distinct shapes.

[setishock]

Can you explain away what the Mayans saw and interacted with then?

[AWS]

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

I've already shown UFO sightings are not in any way limited to America. There are UFO reports all around the world. The video talks about a Japan Airlines Pilot on a 747 who reported they were being followed by a massive, fast moving object. Radar confirmed this object was there. The co-pilot confirmed this object was there. The radar track and the pilot confirm this object was moving at seemingly impossible speeds and moving changes in direction no known aircraft could duplicate. That pilot was grounded by the airline after making this claim even though there was radar evidence and he had an otherwise normal record.

There have been countless sightings in Mexico, South America, Europe, and Russia. Most sightings do not produce great evidence though so they were ignored for this particular documentary (aside from the Belgium and UK incidents) - but no one can say UFO sightings are only made in the USA.

And finally, perhaps the people of medieval times who had never seen an aircraft fly, never seen even an internal combustion engine, - people who did not have a common point of reference that we do today didn't call them "UFOs" but instead called them Angels, Demons, or other super-natural entities that there are no shortage of reports of throughout human history.

There is one reason and one reason alone to answer the question why they would not want to interact with us. We are a destructive, paranoid and warmongering species. Anything that we can't explain we act hostile too.

On an intellectual level we would be so far behind any alien species, if they exist at all, they wouldn't gain anything from interacting with us, while we more than likely would lock them up, probe them or just lock them away.

My personal feelings is that is it just arrogant to think there aren't other intelligent life forms in our galaxy or others. Ones that are perhaps millions of years more advanced than us. There are probably even some that are on our level or in some sort of earlier stage of advancement.

I have always thought that these sightings are not alien at all. Instead I tend to believe that any alien species would avoid us at all cost due to our nature. It's my opinion that these sightings are a future version of us traveling back in time as sort of a history lesson. One has to think, if this is true, that they more than likely marvel that we actually made the next step in evolution.