Normally it is Dennis Kucinich who gets flamed for this stuff, now it is John Podesta:
John Podesta is a distinguished Washington insider. He is currently the president of the liberal Center for American Progress, and previously served as co-chair of Barack Obama’s presidential transition team (2008-2009) and White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton. Podesta is also a visiting law professor at Georgetown.
Not included on his official resume is a peculiar position he’s long-supported – investigation into UFOs.
Podesta has written the foreword for a book that will be published next month, titled UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record, by Leslie Kean. In the foreword, Podesta plays defensive from the very beginning: “As someone interested in the questions of UFOs, I think I have always understood the difference between fact and fiction. I guess you could call me a curious skeptic.”
I’ve never understood the “anti-UFO” nonsense or painting people who believe in the possibility of alien life as crazy. First off, a UFO is just that- an unidentified flying object. Pilots used to report them all the time- because pilots often see things they can’t identify flying around in the air. Sometimes it turns out to be weather balloons, other times other things. Sometimes they never figure it out.
Being interested in UFO’s really isn’t that crazy. Likewise, even if when discussing UFO’s one actually met “alien life,” so what? In a culture that takes two weeks off every year to celebrate the virgin birth of a prophet who then goes on to make water into wine before being killed for telling people to get along (RIP, Douglas Adams) and then being resurrected a couple days later, the possibility that there might be alien life-forms somewhere out there just doesn’t strike me as that crazy. Why not?
Silver
It’s not crazier than the religious beliefs espoused by our current President, I’ll give you that.
It’s still crazy, however.
Chad S
This is nowhere near when Strom Thurmond wrote the foreword for a former aide’s book that was about some giant UFO conspiracy(Strom claims he didn’t know what the book was about and asked for it to be removed).
Linkmeister
What the heck are you trying to do, impose rationality into the illogical?
‘Course, in a bazillion galaxies logic would tell us that there probably is life somewhere out there.
gbear
so are you going to turn that title into a tag?
amorphous
I am deeply offended that you would compare something so undeniably real with something so comically unbelievable. As an Amurrikin, a thinking person, and an atheist, I know there are aliens out there.
Comrade Jake
Five posts and nobody brought up the Flying Spaghetti Monster? What the hell is wrong with you people?
me
@Comrade Jake: So, you think he should look for flying dinner plates rather than flying saucers?
El Tiburon
All ponies will be delivered via UFOs.
In a related story, Jane Hamsher is writing the forward for a book on the existence of the chupacabra.
Allison W.
Well when you say it like that…..
Midnight Marauder
@Silver:
Not really. Either you can identify a flying object or you can’t.
QuaintIrene
Hey, it got Shirley McClaine a TV mini-series.
But have to second the sadness of Doug Adams no longer being with us.
ruemara
meh. You think that’s crazy, not only do I like cryptozoology and UFOs, I actually believe that progressives can stay organized and focused.
MTmofo
As with so many topics, the enthusiastic behavior of the ‘true believers’ diminishs the possibility of reasonable consideration from their polar opposite doubters.
steviez314
Are they illegal alien life-forms?
QuaintIrene
Only noticed this after I clicked, ‘Submit’
GoogleAds is certainly thorough. On the right margin- “Female Aliens. Find Female Aliens at great prices. www. pronto.com”
General Stuck
me neither, and I saw one up close once. It is about unfathomable to me given the size of the universe and all it’s mysteries that arrogant peeps declare we are the one and only form of semi intelligent life in said universe.
Of course, the problem is imagining something we have no clue of, except on teevee, on how those other peeps would travel the great distances to come visit us. But they said Wilbur and Orville wouldn’t get that contraption to fly neither.
So take that unbelievers.
note – my one and only diary at the GOS was about Dennis the Menace and his UFO beliefs. People there were narrow minded wankers of the first order and flamed me to a crisp for that. Fucking hippies.
mnpundit
You now, referring to Jesus as a prophet doesn’t actually fit with the rest of your description which is describing the Christian view. Only Muslims believe he was a prophet.
Cat Lady
I’ve seen one. A real one. My whole family did, and to this day it’s hard to talk about 50 years later. My 10 year old sister saw it first cuz she was outside – it was on a Sunday around noon, and she ran into the house yelling. All five of us stood and watched it, it was over the next door neighbor’s big giant tree. It had the different colored lights and it was silver and platter shaped. When it left, it just literally swept away so fast, it was gone. My father reported it to the police, and lots of people in town reported it too. Of course it was reported in the paper as a weather balloon. We didn’t talk about it again for a very long time. The tree died within 2 years, and every time the subject has come up in our family, which is very rarely, we all still experience some vestigial physical effect. Seriously, just putting these words down is making me feel uncomfortable – not because it sounds crazy which it does, but because it feels like something happens.
Flame away. I don’t blame you.
Anton Sirius
@El Tiburon:
Wouldn’t that be a bit like getting Dracula to write a forward for a book on vampires?
Martin
The problem with alien UFOs is that they’re very nearly a paradox. We know there are no spaceship capable life in the solar system other than us. We also know that there are very, very, very unlikely to be any spaceship capable life in the reasonably nearby star systems that we have already thoroughly scanned for planets. That means that the only aliens that might be visiting us are capable of near-speed of light travel, which means that the last thing they’d be doing is flyby’s over Florida retirement communities. Any alien UFO that could reach us wouldn’t be visually observed, certainly not just banging around in the atmosphere, and it wouldn’t be manned because it’d only make sense to send unmanned probes out first. It’d be doing what we do with probes – orbiting, or landing. Sitting inbetween is just boring.
K. Grant
*sigh*
Look another post that encourages overly simplistic mocking of religious beliefs.
Yep, why bother treating the issue seriously, or at least treating people who actually have religious beliefs with a modicum of respect?
But no, because there are people in the world who have completely and egregiously missed the point of one of the faiths, it is completely fair game to mock ‘all’ who happen to believe, even if they wildly disagree with the way in which their faith has been bastardized by know-nothing knaves.
I am sorry, but it is easily the major frustration with the bloggers on this site (pretty much the whole stable of writers here frolic in the anti-religious pool on a regular basis) that I have. I love this site, but the constant repetition of the anti-religious thing is just tiresome.
I wouldn’t even mind if it was generally thoughtful in its construction, but it isn’t, it is usually mocking, derisive, (often dead ignorant of anything outside of right-wing fundamentalist Christianity), and unremittingly thoughtless.
Of course, I am sure I will be tagged by many as being wholly defensive and touched in the head.
Sorry, back to your regularly scheduled programming.
General Stuck
@Martin: Worm holes dude. worm holes.
I love living in the land of Roswell. My people.
MikeJ
@K. Grant: It’s not mocking religious beliefs, it’s equating those beliefs with belief in UFOs. They’re equally plausible. I don’t see how stating that is the least bit controversial.
General Stuck
@Cat Lady: It’s a wonder you weren’t abducted. Thank the lard!
Comrade Jake
Was balloon-boy ever a UFO? I don’t recall.
Silver
@General Stuck:
You might emerge somewhere else in space, somewhen else in time.
Martin
@El Tiburon: Let me guess, Obama is the chupacabra?
General Stuck
@Silver:
usually I just call that waking up in the morning.
We have chupacabra here too.
FoxinSocks
I believe you, @Cat Lady.
I’ve had my own set of experiences. Here’s the thing, I saw and experienced something. Now, I could be delusional, it could be a brain tumor or some sort of hallucination, but I think I would be crazy if I denied it, because something happened. If people believe in God, who most have never seen, why can’t I believe in something I have seen and felt?
Xero
Us UFO geeks will have the last laugh when the Old Ones return and land on the White House lawn on December 21, 2012.
Yeah.
Comrade Jake
It’s not a tumor!
dmsilev
Heh. I remember a year or two ago, there was a UFO-ish sighting at O’Hare airport. Strange light came down, and then vanished. Joke at the time was that it was going to land, but there weren’t any open gates…
dms
moops
I will make things a little simpler.
There is a good probability, knowing what we know today, that there is lots of intelligent life in the universe.
There is no mechanism known or even imagined that would permit this intelligent life to visit us, or even communicate with us.
Until such a mechanism is proposed alien visitation is, by definition, magic.
like actually turning water into wine (not the staged version). Magic. It’s all magic.
some day we might figure out how it could happen, just like some day we might discover some strange fungus spoor that turns water into wine and explains the event.
So to recap. Aliens ? most likely. Alien spaceships ? magic
Patty K
“who then goes on to make water out of wine ” What? No. Better yet he turned water into wine.
Cassidy
@K. Grant: Because there are two kinds of Christians in this country: Those who have remained silent and allowed their religion to be hijacked by crazy people and crazy people. Either way, no one should be particular obligated to treat mass psychosis respectfully.
schrodinger's cat
Resistance is futile, you shall be assimilated.
schrodinger's cat
@Comrade Jake: We are believers of Ceiling Cat here, all hail mighty Tunch, Ceiling Cat’s representative on Balloon Juice.
Please can we have a photo of our prophet?
Cat Lady
@General Stuck:
Funny you should say that. It was my sister who saw it first that felt “they” were there for her – she’s absolutely sure that if she hadn’t panicked and run right in the house at that moment, she’d be gone. She remembers feeling a tugging sensation. It was broad daylight too, so everything was clear. We saw it. It wasn’t a weather balloon.
LM
Amen (heh heh).
I used to write novels with a lot of lefty politics in them, and it didn’t bother people at my book talks. (I got some hostile winger notes, sure, and a few Code Pink types were upset by my mild poking of fun, but nothing in my face.) Then I had a lawyer character defend a client who believed he’d seen/been abducted by a UFO, and people in book talk audiences stood up and screamed at me, even in super polite Minneapolis. They were outraged I’d talk about it in anything but derisive terms. I wasn’t even expressing an opinion, really, just using belief in UFOs as an example of something that would cause an otherwise respected character to be dismissed and mocked. (I couldn’t think of any religious/astrological/paranormal notions that would do the trick.) It seemed to me from the reactions I got that skeptics don’t feel obliged to any more research than gullible people do.
Patrick
Actually, we take two weeks off every year to celebrate the fact days are getting longer again. Everything else is just a story pasted on top of that.
John Cole
@K. Grant: I didn’t say anything anti-religious. Believe whatever you want. I merely pointed out that people believe in all sorts of things that make no sense, why do we treat people who believe in alien life or unidentified flying objects like they are crazy?
I take it you are religious. Do you think people who claim they have seen UFO’s are nuts?
K. Grant
@Cassidy:
Have you ever read anything by Martin Marty? Or others like him? Good, liberal Christians have been fighting the good fight against the fundamentalist strain of Christianity for quite some time. It doesn’t make cable news chat shows because it is not particularly sexy, but if I may suggest looking around a bit, you will find a great many who have been trying to work against the millennialist, anti-science, literalists for quite some time.
And to MikeJ, no, you are correct, this post does not mock, but I guess I am in a bit of a defensive crouch, as it usually happens as night follows day around here.
some other guy
@mnpundit:
Clearly, like our Marxist-in-Chief, John Cole is a secret Muslim. Also, too, until we see Mr. Cole’s long-form vault-copy birth certificate I think it’s reasonable to assume he’s an illegal immigrant.
D-Chance.
In a culture that takes two weeks off every year to celebrate the virgin birth of a prophet who then goes on to make water out of wine…
I think we call that “Manischewitz”…
Ailuridae
@Martin:
Well written. I’m going to steal this going forward.
El Tiburon
@K. Grant:
Lighten up, Francis.
kommrade reproductive vigor
On the one hand we have elected officials who insist President Obama must really truly and absolutely prove he didn’t cleverly conceal his real place of birth from … well, every intelligence agency in the country, for starters.
On the other we have a “political insider” who believes people, including pilots in the armed forces (see for example, foo fighters), sometimes see things flying through the air that they can’t identify.
Which one sounds crazier?
K. Grant
@John Cole:
My apologies, I posted before watching the thread develop. Usually the derisive comments about religion crop up whenever the bloggers here bring up any topic related to religious belief systems.
And no, I don’t think people who have stated that they have seen UFO’s are nuts. I would like to enter into a constructive conversation with them, and I may disagree with their arguments, I may even respectfully challenge their statements, but I don’t dismiss them simply because their experiences are outside of my own.
I find that most of the bloggers here will not extend that same courtesy to those with religious beliefs.
gypsy howell
@K. Grant:
Yes, because Christians are so so persecuted in this country. Not like atheists or people who believe it might be possible that we’re not the only living things in the universe. Those kinds of people have great positions of power in this country.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Teasers!
Mike E
The whole “Signs” scenario got it right–if they’re really here, we’re totally fucked. I like my friend’s attitude, he of the Poconos: if you see an actually E.T. start shooting until you know they’re dead, then keep shooting until you run out of ammo.
scav
@K. Grant: well, if you’re waiting for courtesy, you may be at the wrong blog. — equal opportunity courtesy deficient is practically a motto and probably a virtue.
Mnemosyne
@Cat Lady:
The writer David J. Skal has an interesting story in his book Screams of Reason about the UFO he saw one night. He’s pretty sure it was an experimental aircraft from a nearby Air Force base because it’s extremely unlikely that aliens would use the same red-and-green landing lights on the bottom of their crafts that we use on ours.
K. Grant
@El Tiburon:
Look, I was airing a frustration, you don’t share that frustration, I understand that. But is this blog not the place to air frustrations? Do you not vent your spleen every now and then? Should I tell you to lighten up every time you talk about the bee in your bonnet? No. Why? Because I respect your desire to vent, to argue, to explain, to discuss.
This is not a world-ending crisis for me (not even close), but I wanted to express my frustration. I did. Should I have not offered my frustration?
Polish the Guillotines
Long before the X-Files, Jack Webb gave us Project UFO. Loosely based on the files of Project Blue Book.
Good times.
Mnemosyne
It is pretty funny to see people declaring on one hand that the story of Jesus is completely stupid but insisting on the other that aliens have totally visited Earth despite the fact that there’s approximately the same level of proof for both propositions.
Sorry, guys, but if you’re going to insist that an irrational belief in God or gods gets no respect, your belief in UFOs doesn’t get a free pass from the same mockery because it sounds all science-y.
K. Grant
@gypsy howell: I didn’t say Christians are persecuted in this country. I never will, because it isn’t true. Not even close.
I rather like the idea of tolerance quite a lot. I rather like acceptance, too. Tend to practice both rather a lot.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
You deserve credit for noting that “believing” in UFOs is probably no sillier than believing a man-god was born of a virgin and rose from the dead.
Certainly not, but taking seriously the hypothesis that alien beings are visiting Earth is something else. This is really indistinguishable from religious belief in that there is zero theoretical basis for who would be doing it, why they would be doing it, what technology would allow them to do it, and so on. We have as much understanding of how beings such as ourselves might traverse the distances in question as we do how a man-god might rise from the dead. In other words, we have none.
That’s a different question. That there might be life as we define it elsewhere is an interesting question. That this life is “intelligent”, interested in space travel, capable of space travel, and actually doing space travel is adding enormous layers of sheer speculation to the question.
Hiram Taine
It came out of the sky..
And then said, take me to a paleontologist.
Mike E
@Mnemosyne: I do enjoy that scene in Life Of Brian where our hero takes a ride in a marauding spaceship. Also.
General Stuck
I surely hope this rare and most excellent thread on UFO’s does not get hijacked into another mind numbing debate over religion. If you’ve seen jeesus in a space ship, then that is fine, or not, is fine also too. But please, be kind to the wonders of imagination. That is all.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Mnemosyne: The thing you need to remember is that UFO believers have Randy Quaid as one of their representatives (Independence Day). They’re already starting at a pretty severe handicap.
BWV 988
@Silver:
“The sky calls to us, if we do not destroy ourselves we will one day venture to the stars.”
This conversation reminds me of the Fermi Paradox. In a nutshell, considering the vast number of stars in the universe, there must be other life out there. But where are they?
mclaren
Skepticism about UFOs isn’t nonsense. It’s well deserved.
After 60 years of investigation into UFOs no one has produced a single scrap of hard evidence to suggest they’re anything other than atmospheric effects or mass hallucinations.
Consequently, UFOs have the same amount of forensic evidence to back up their existence as chupacabras or ghosts or vampires. Do you understand the “anti-chupacabra” skepticism, Cole? How about “anti-ghost” skepticism? Or “anti-vampire” skepticism?
Do you consider skepticism of ghosts “anti-ghost nonsense”? Do you think someone who doubts vampires are real is spewing “anti-vampire nonsense”? Well, there’s no more hard evidence that UFOs are real than there is that ghosts or vampires are real.
There’s not a shred of evidence that any of those pop culture myths are real. Likewise, there’s not one iota of evidence that UFOs are anything more than a pop culture myth. After 60 years of exhaustive investigation and zero evidence to support the claims, skepticism seems warranted.
The question of whether there’s extraterrestrial life is entirely separate from the question of whether UFOs buzz the earth every week. Life elsewhere in the universe seems like a good bet. The problem comes when people start claiming that life elsewhere in the universe is creating crop circle in Idaho every other week.
There almost certainly is life elsewhere in the universe. But given the time and energy required for interstellar travel, it’s ridiculous to suppose that hundreds of their spaceships have travelled thousands of light-years to earth in order to make crop circles or do cattle mutilations.
Francis
Then there’s that old joke about transitional verbs, that goes something like this:
I am religious.
You are in a cult.
He is delusional.
K.Grant, I’m all for people treating each other well, and if you need a big old Sky Father to help you down your road, then ok so long as you keep it to yourself.
But please recognize that there’s a really big number of people who say that they share your beliefs and then act really really badly. (pederast priests, creationists, some of the anti-vaxxers, faith healers, suicide bombers, etc.) They deserve everything they get and a lot more, and frankly I’m fresh out of compassion for people complaining about being caught in the cross-fire.
General Stuck
@mclaren: You are the smartest person probly on the planet at telling people what they already know. I bet you lectured Santa on being a phony when you were little, uh. dint ya big brain.
Redshirt
I’ve read some interesting comparisons of alien visitors and demon/angel visitations in the past. The experiences are often quite similar, the theory being that whatever the popular culture puts out there as the “bogeyman” will manifest itself in the night terrors of people.
I believe strongly in the possibility of alien life – but it’s probably going to be microbial. I haven’t seen anything that ultimately proves advanced alien life is visiting/has visited in the past. And considering the sheer difficulty in any kind of visitation, I’m inclined to be interested but highly skeptical.
WereBear
You know who hated UFO’s? Hitler.
Seriously, though, my main complaint about this kind of controversy is summed up by: “Are we alone in the universe? Is there someone else in the universe? And, either way, isn’t it amazing?”
Spirituality is as much a part of us as our DNA. It is like the wind; we cannot see it, but we see what it does.
dadanarchist
Seems like a good thread to post this:
Did Planet Hunter Leak Data About Other Earths?
Long story short: at TED a European planet researcher working with the Kepler telescope accidentally said, before the data was supposed to be released, that Earth-sized planets are very likely and that there are possibly 100 million + in our galaxy alone…
General Stuck
@WereBear: Hear hear. Lots of stuff we don’t know, but everybody has faith of one sort or another. Even if it’s just expecting the sun to rise in the morning. Spirituality and faith are as important to human life as beans and potatoes. It’s just harder to define.
scav
Toleration and acceptance don’t necessarily mean people don’t take the piss out of you too.
And if I get an alien, I definitely want to get it in a blue box.
Ella in New Mexico
@mclaren:
Ummm, sorry but your statements are inaccurate.
Anyone who is interested in sorting out the kooks from the real stuff will soon find that there is actually quite a bit of interesting stuff out there that defies plausible, common explanations. Stuffing these events under the rug by calling them all mass hallucinations or weather effects won’t change the fact that we simply do not yet have all the answers for things. If the government has a hand in providing cover or disinformation that can clarify things, it should cough it up, which is what Podesta is on the side of.
Sorry, living in this part of the world makes it a little harder for me to pretend to myself that UFOs are all imaginary, especially since our entire family was witness to one 15 years ago that continues to defy explanation.
Having relatives who work at a major military testing base and who have had actually seen years of official, recorded data of UFO activity over the base–that the government considered to be problematic– doesn’t help, either.
Bella Q
@General Stuck: Don’t get me started about how telling the whole Santa myth can lead to awkward questions for the pastor about Jesus and the belief that another one of those “wink wink / nod nod” things the grown ups tried to pull on kids was the whole extraterrestrial controversy, when there were PSAs on the TV that all aliens had to register their address at the post office by January 31 each year.
Anton Sirius
Anyone who automatically equates “UFO” with “alien spaceship”, despite this paragraph in the post they’re commenting on:
comes across as either an illiterate moron or someone who is trolling. Take your pick, mclaren.
By the way, there’s metric shit tons of forensic evidence on UFOs. The F-117’s probably the best-known example — test flights were reported by civilians as UFO sightings all through the ’80s until the Pentagon finally admitted the thing existed.
Do some research next time before you dive head-first into the shallow end of your intellect.
K. Grant
@Francis:
I had a much longer post that I deleted because of excessive snark and assorted whatnot.
My apologies for bringing this up tonight. It was neither the time nor the place.
General Stuck
@Ella in New Mexico: You visited the VLA yet? Awesome sight to see, I think 27 of those giant dishes sitting out in the middle of the high plains of St Augustin.
Anton Sirius
@Redshirt:
If you don’t know about it, look up the work of Dr. Michael Persinger, who generated angelic visitation/alien abduction-type experiences in test subjects by applying very low-level magnetic fields to their brains.
Vince CA
Believing in the resurrection of a Jewish insurrectionist two thousand years ago and believing in UFOs are part and parcel in the same broken part of our brains. It’s only that the former is considered a litmus test for political office while the latter is considered guano insane. In reality, both are crazy, but we’re not allowed to say that out loud.
Tax Analyst
@gbear:
I think maybe John is channeling Fiona Apple and her 2nd CD release, “When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King…” which went on for about 80 or 90 words, I think.
Cassidy
@mclaren: After 60 years of….no links or citations?
Mark S.
@Redshirt:
I would say alien life is a certainty considering how big the universe is. As for highly developed species that have developed interstellar travel, that’s a lot less certain. I’d imagine it’s happened, but it might’ve happened in some galaxy a million light years away from us.
Tax Analyst
I wrote a song parody once where my narrator admits to having thought Santa Claus and Jesus were one in the same, since they both seem to appear more or less out of nowhere in December. ‘He said,”Ho, Ho, Ho…then he saved your soul’. It made sense to him…see, he was only 5 or 6 when he first came to that belief. I really liked that line, too.
The song winds up with his chagrin at still believing that crap when he was 10…
Cassidy
I”m just curious. How is it so implausible that alien life wouldn’t be visiting? I realize that I’m anthropomorphically channeling but wouldn’t we do the same?
“Hey, we found a planet that sustains life. Oh shit there is life on it. Let’s check it out.”
We can’t be the only planet in a very large galaxy with dwindling resources.
Guster
@K. Grant: I’m about as militant an unfriendly God-hater as you’ll find, but if BJ isn’t always the time and place for disagreeing, I don’t know what it is!
I say, bring it on, God hugger!
CaseyL
I feel the same way about Scientology: What’s so absurd about believing aliens dropped to Earth, or that Thetans are the source of all evil? Is that really more outlandish than angels and demons, or punishment that lasts an eternity for acts done in a relative eye-blink?
Religious mythology has no basis whatsoever in objective reality. Not a single religious claim can be proven, quantified, or even analyzed rationally. You can’t even start, because there are no data whatsoever to model from.
The possibility of UFOs and extraterrestrial life actually existing, OTOH, at least start with mathematical probabilities: if biological activity can be found in x environments, then it is possible, if not likely, that anywhere x environments exist, so does life.
Granted, that only describes the probability of any life, not necessarily sentient or sapient life. Intelligent extraterrestrial life is much more of a crap shoot, since we don’t know why intelligent life occurred on Earth, or whether intelligence is an inevitable evolutionary development given certain stipulated factors. And what would those stipulated factors be, anyway?
When you get right down to it, believing there has to be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe based on a law of averages is itself a leap of faith. Even the line from Cosmos, about how if there’s no one around but us in the universe it would be a “waste of space” (one of my favorite lines of dialog ever) is predicated on a belief that some kind of intent and purpose shapes the universe, and we’ve no proof at all of that.
But life generally? Of course there’s life elsewhere in the universe. It’s quite possible there’s life in the seas of Europa – an environment very similar to the deep-ocean heat vents here on Earth, where we keep finding more species of fish, bivalves, and arthropods all the time. Critters which are at least sentient, in fact, which bodes well for finding sentient life elsewhere.
ETA: I am not a Scientologist, nor sympathetic to Scientology. I just don’t see why it’s inherently any less likely than the mainstream religions.
Honus
@General Stuck: I’ve wanted to see that for a long time, and the one in South America, too. Back here in the hills we make do with Green Bank
Guster
@Cassidy: As I understand it, the objections are a) they’re just too friggin’ far away, given the laws of physics as we understand them. It’s possible we’re wrong about some basic stuff, and they can open magic-to-us portals and such, but barring that, they just can’t get here from there. And b) there’s no reason to assume the alien life would evolve the same way that terrestrial life has for the past .0001% (or whatever; talking out my ass here) of life on this planet, into a technologically-advanced society. We’re not a necessary endpoint of evolution, we’re just an incredibly recent and brief anomaly. The chances that an incredibly similar anomaly arose on another planet is slim.
I just wasted 100 words repeating “anthropomorphically channeling” to you.
Anne Laurie
@moops:
As Arthur C. Clarke put it: “Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic.”
Uncertainty makes fundamentalists
anxiousangry. Rather than deal with the source of their uncertainty, they attack the very possibility that their own variety of fundamentalism might be less than the sole, perfect, all-purpose answer to all life’s questions. For most of human history, the fundamentalists used one or another variety of “religion” as their Grand Unified Theory of Everything. Today’s fundamentalists have added both “science” and “politics” (hello, Mclaren) to the list of weapons against uncertainty. It’s not the name on the framework that matters to these fundamentalists, it’s having a nice secure framework to protect themselves against the horror of an unmediated universe. Everybody needs a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, but the surest mark of a fundamentalist is that their GUTE is an angry GUTE!Brachiator
Once you equate belief in UFOs as being like belief in religion, which is then no longer science, and no longer meaningful or interesting.
If you listen to the late night radio shows, you find that people talk about UFOs the way that people talk about angels or deities. And they don’t stop at the possibility of UFOs, but create elaborate mythologies to “explain” what the aliens want with us.
Then you have all the nutcases who insist that the government knows the truth about UFOs and is keeping it from us. There is even a new variant of this that claims that there is some special significance to the Obama Administration either trying to reveal or suppress information which proves the existence of UFOs.
All of this suggests the simplest answer: UFO-ology reflects group psychological anxieties. This may be true for religion as well.
If there really are space aliens, they could reveal themselves whenever they wanted, Earth governments be damned. If they show up, cool. Otherwise, it’s largely speculative nonsense.
Matt McIrvin
Podesta’s been into this stuff for a long time. Several years ago he was lending respectability to a supposed activist organization pushing for disclosures of supposedly secret UFO information, that seemed to have actually been organized by the Sci-Fi Channel to promote some of their bogus documentaries about alien abductions.
That’s an aspect of the UFO phenomenon that really bothers me: active mendacity, exploiting the paranoid style of politics for material gain. I don’t think Podesta was in on it, but I suspect he’s kind of gullible when it comes to this stuff.
People who aren’t crazy have all kinds of experiences they can’t explain, and that probably never will be explained because they’re insufficiently characterized to begin with. I had a weird ball-lightning-like experience one night when I was a kid–strange lights outside the window and a loud frying noise–that I suspect was probably just a dream or half-dreaming hallucination (people who have UFO experiences are often badly sleep-deprived), but I’ll never be able to tell.
And, of course, there are the UFOs that turn out to be very real, human-made vehicles, like all those treaty-violating Soviet ICBM tests that generated UFO reports in the Sixties, or all the ones that were secret American spy planes. Those are interesting, if not extraterrestrial.
But it’s telling, I think, that amateur astronomers–the people who spend the most time systematically looking at the sky, and are trained to know what they’re looking at–almost never see flat-out unidentified, unidentifable flying objects. There’s always going to be some residue nobody can explain, but it suggests that the UFOs that people usually see aren’t alien spacecraft. Meanwhile, “UFO investigators” don’t do the kind of systematic observation that amateur astronomers do; they’re always hunting for anomalies in old records nobody is going to be able to puzzle out, or demanding that scientists do research for them.
Intelligent extraterrestrial life–oh, yeah, I figure it’s out there somewhere. Probably so far away we’ll never find it. Taking that possibility seriously is very different from saying it’s a leading hypothesis for UFOs.
kdaug
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” – C. Sagan
daniel thomas macinnes
“This conversation reminds me of the Fermi Paradox. In a nutshell, considering the vast number of stars in the universe, there must be other life out there. But where are they? ”
They’re picking up satellite broadcasts of Fox News, and they’re staying the hell away. If they’re also smart enough, they’ve seen the movie “Deliverance” and put two and two together.
All these posts about God and UFO’s, and nobody’s mentioned Terence McKenna? For shame…..
LosGatosCA
One acronym – SETI.
And the favorite meal of these extraterrestrials is organic arugula with dijon mustard with low sodium water with gas from France.
It’s understandable that the Teabaggers are so defensive about the rest of us discovering their pods.
Anne Laurie
@Cat Lady: @K. Grant: Since we are in a confessional mode… I am a religious believer. Had my first ‘experience of the numinous’ when I was 5 or 6, in Hapshetsut’s hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It wasn’t the kind of religious belief approved by the parochial schools I attended for 12 years, but while the Dominican sisters and the Jesuits provided me with an excellent vaccination against more recent varieties of fundamentalism (whether Marxist, Libertarian, or Scientistic), they couldn’t stop me from being whole-heartedly religious, either. I am an animist, I have been an animist for 50-odd years despite the blessings of a high IQ and membership in the most technologically advanced society on the planent, and I will probably be an animist till the day I die… possibly at the hands of an enraged fundamentalist.
kdaug
@Mark S.: IE, a million years ago. What do you think we could be doing in a million years (if we survive)”?
Badtux
It’s not the UFO’s themselves that are the problem, but, rather, the bizarre conspiracy theories that the UFO-ologists build up around the fact that, well, we have no good pictures of a UFO other than UFO’s that turn out to be USAF stealth aircraft in prototype farm. So they start ranting about mysterious Men In Black who show up to seize any good pictures of a UFO, they start ranting about mysterious Grays who have a dungeon at the White House from where they use brain control rays upon the President, they start claiming there’s alien bodies hidden away at Area 51, and so on and so forth… it just gets silly and ridiculous and leads to utter tinhattery. And once you hit utter tinhattery of brain control rays and disguised grays wearing masks in positions of government power, you’ve done passed beyond fruity into plain ole’ loopy in the fruit loops box’o’nuts, yo.
– Badtux the Listened-to-Art-Bell-one-night Penguin
Mark S.
@Cassidy:
One interesting thing is that an alien life form would have little use of the organic material of this planet. They almost surely couldn’t eat our food (or us!) because it’s highly unlikely they would have the same biochemistry (eg amino acids) as life on Earth. If they needed a new planet, they would probably be better off somehow terraforming a barren planet like Mars and stocking it with the plants and animals of their planet.
As for fucking us, that probably wouldn’t work too well either. If they even use DNA, it would undoubtedly be a lot different from ours. So there wouldn’t be any little Mr. Spocks running around.
(I know this didn’t really have anything to do with what you were talking about; I’m just geeking out.)
Brachiator
@Ella in New Mexico:
Just because we can’t currently explain something does not make it evidence of space alien visitation. People used to think that bad air, malaria, caused disease because they didn’t have the germ theory of disease or any way to observe micro-organisms, or an understanding of insects as disease carriers.
Dr. Morpheus
@Guster: Uh, no “they” are not too far away.
For some reason UFO skeptics always assume that alien intelligent life has to be flitting around the universe in some sort of Star Trek kind of fashion.
You know, they go from planet to planet all within an hour including commercial breaks.
And since that seems to be impossible from our understanding of physics ((but actually is open to debate) Q.E.D. UFOs can’t be aliens from another planet and so anyone who might entertain that idea is nuts.
Nevermind it doesn’t take faster than light travel to be able to populate the galaxy. That’s exactly what the Fermi Paradox points out.
Read the Wikipedia article I linked to for a discussion of the possible alternative explanations for the Fermi Paradox.
Of course the most obvious answer to it is that UFOs are the “missing” aliens that Fermi wondered about.
Dr. Morpheus
@kdaug: Carl Sagan didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.
What defines extraordinary? Einstein’s Relativity predictions seemed “extraordinary” to Newtonian physicists but it didn’t require “extraordinary” proof to show that it was correct.
The correct prediction of the perihelion precession of Mercury was not “extraordinary” in any sense of the word.
Like I said, Carl Sagan didn’t know shit.
kdaug
@Anne Laurie: Animism is also hinted at by quantum entanglement, in which one particle reacts to another, unattached and unrelated, particle’s behavior. I think of it as sort of a proto-consciousness, in which case matter itself as in a sense “alive”. It’s as good an explanation of the phenomena as I’ve found.
Brachiator
@Dr. Morpheus:
It’s simpler than that. I presume that alien intelligent life could leave a non-ambiguous calling card if they so desired. Until they do, I have no great need to try to discover them. I am interested in scientific investigations into the possibility of life (simpler, obviously) elsewhere in the universe.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@Dr. Morpheus:
No, UFO skeptics know of no theoretical framework for flitting around the universe, Star Trek or otherwise. If you have one please share it.
Redshirt
@Dr. Morpheus:
Blasphemy! You, good sir, don’t know what you are talking about. Good day!
Brachiator
@Dr. Morpheus:
To paraphrase another great scientist, if you knew what you were talking about, you would understand how wrong you are.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Win.
Yutsano
Of course, we could also listen to Stephen Hawking, who thinks that if extraterrestrial life does exist and is indeed intelligent, and is therefore advanced enough to travel beyond the speed of light, that they’d better stay the hell away or we’re pretty much doomed. His reasoning is based upon the cultural subsumation and destruction of the many Native societies when confronted with technologically advanced Europeans. It seemed rather nihilistic for him.
Xanthippas
Oh John, clearly you’ve never spent time around people who are serious believers in UFOs. Like…eh, my mom.
Anyway, hardcore UFOlogists (yes, that’s a word) are identified by a particular brand of….eccentricity. The desperate search for meaning outside of one’s life that leads some people to believe that aliens are visiting Earth in an oddly unorganized and confusing manner is kind of sad, but a lot less harmful than those who search for meaning in cheering on wars they never have to fight in. Still, there’s a reason UFOs are lumped in with the paranormal. There’s a big difference between believing that life must exist elsewhere in the universe and believing that it’s visited us multiple times and routinely kidnapped people to probe and experiment on.
But it’s bad form to snicker at these people. John’s right; we all believe something crazy.
Dr. Morpheus
@Brachiator:
And what makes you think they desire to do so?
If supposing alien intelligence has or is visiting Earth is speculative, what exactly is presuming to know alien psychology or motivation?
Can we really say that we understand such Terrestrial intelligences like elephants and dolphins? I would say no, except in the most primitive sense (pain/pleasure/anger, etc.).
In light of that, what possible argument could be made that we know that if extraterrestrial intelligence to visit the Earth that they MUST either contact us or leave some sort of “calling card”?
Xanthippas
@Dr. Morpheus:
You should be banned from the internet for one year for that. Carl Sagan shit more knowledge down the toilet every morning than you’ve acquired in your lifetime.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@Yutsano:
Which raises the question, why would you traverse cosmic distances only to play games of cat and mouse with the hairless apes infesting this planet. If they’re going to turn us all into Soylent Green I wish they’d just hurry up and do it before Sarah Palin’s next tweet.
Dr. Morpheus
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.):
Yes they do, there are examples of skeptics (I believe one was Carl Sagan, as a matter of fact) invoking that very example (UFOs must be traveling around like the Enterprise in Star Trek) as indicating the ridiculousness of even entertaining the idea that interstellar travel is possible.
We have had the capability of interstellar travel since the 1950s, see Project Orion, which was quite capable of achieving velocities of up to 10% the speed of light.
That’s plenty fast for interstellar travel not to mention even that velocity isn’t necessary. For instance generation ships (where generations of astronauts live and die on board) can also work.
Dr. Morpheus
@Redshirt:
Sorry, Sagan, Dawkins, and Asimov are all examples of third rate scientists who made a career out of writing ‘pop science’.
Only Arthur C. Clarke was deserving of the adulation he received.
Oh, and writing of which, I think the other two laws of his apply to this discussion:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right.
When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Brachiator
@Dr. Morpheus:
RE: …if they so desired.
jeez, you miss my point. If there is alien intelligent life buzzing by now and again, then I have to presume that they are intelligent enough to make themselves known to us, if they wanted to. That is, I discount the possibility that Earth governments could force alien intelligent life to hide themselves if they wanted to do a flyover during the Olympics.
On the other hand, if alien intelligent life is visiting, but deliberately hiding themselves from humanity, then in practical terms it is the same as if they don’t exist.
If space aliens exist but want to play hide and seek, then I simply don’t care about any speculation about their supposed existence. It is a waste of time.
Congratulations. You have now become a member of a very exclusive club: writer of dumbest Internet comment ever.
Dr. Morpheus
@Brachiator:
I do know what I’m talking about and I know exactly how right I am.
Name me three non-coauthored papers of significant, original research that Sagan wrote.
Good luck with that.
Dr. Morpheus
@Xanthippas:
Speaking of irrational, non-factually based beliefs…
mclaren
@Ella in New Mexico:
Umm, sorry, Ella, but my statements are apodictically accurate and meticulously correct. They’re backed up by a mountain of evidence and a huge amount of supporting logic.
Let’s start with what I actually said:
I specifically used the word forensic when I mentioned “evidence”. To make what I was saying even more unmistakable, I also used the term “hard evidence,” which is another well-known shorthand for forensic evidence.
Forensic evidence is something special. It means physical evidence consisting of samples that you can analyze in a lab. Forensic evidence is not eyewitness testimony. Forensic evidence is not tall tales or hearsay. Forensic evidence is not blurry copies of blurry copies of blurry copies of a shaky videotape because, unlike the TV shows, you can’t press a button marked ENHANCE and get anything out of a copy of a copy of a copy of a shaky handheld videocam recording that degraded.
Here’s what forensic evidence is:
Skin cells.
Hair follicles.
Clothing fibers.
Residue — dirt, dust, metallic particles, etc.
Bodily fluids (semen, saliva, blood, etc.).
Physical objects left behind (tools, weapons, discarded cigarettes, etc.)
Tool marks on objects left behind.
Fingerprints.
Footprints, boot marks in the ground, etc.
You’ve seen the TV show CSI right?
Well, here’s an interesting fact…after 60 years of exhaustive investigation, not one single scrap of forensic evidence has ever been found that demonstrates in a laboratory that aliens have ever set foot on earth.
Think about that for second.
Let that sink in.
After all the investigators combing over all the reported sites of alien landings, not one single hair follicle or skin cell or clothing fiber or boot print or piece of dust or metallic particle of an unknown alloy has ever been found.
Ask yourself: how likely is that?
When forensic investigators scour a crime scene, they typically come up with a wealth of physical evidence. Saliva, blood, fingerprints, hair, fibers, DNA, you name it. It’s just about impossible to avoid leaving this kind of evidence at a crime scene. Yet despite all the alleged alien landings with all the claims about aliens walking about on our planet, they’ve never left a single clothing fiber…not one single skin cell…not even a single bootprint.
Is that credible?
Absolutely true. Your conclusion, however, does not follow from your premise.
Premise:There is actually quite a bit of interesting stuff out there that defies plausible, common explanations.
Conclusion: Therefore, extraterrestials!
This is the well-known and thoroughly discredited logical fallacy of the “argument from ignorance.” The argument from ignorance goes like this: we don’t know the explanation for this phenomenon, therefore it must be exotic and remarkable!
As David Hume pointed out in the 19th century, this is an obvious logical fallacy. Just because we don’t know the explanation for a phenomenon, that doesn’t mean the explanation is exotic. The explanation could just as well be mundane but non-obvious. The classic example here is the folk legends we encounter. For example, in the 1940s, New Jersey was wracked by reports of “a moaning monster” in the woods. Observers heard a weird rapsing sound, definitely non-human. Panic spread. Wild rumors erupted.
Investigators eventually determined that “the moaning monster” was a crow with asthma. A crow with asthma is implausible and uncommon. Still, that turned out to be the explanation. No monsters needed.
Or consider the report from last year about an allegedly “weird creature” found near the Mexican border. “Is this the corpse of a chupacabra?” the tabloids asked breathlessly. No, it turned out to be corpse of a coyote with a glandular condition. A coyote with a glandular condition so extreme it no longer looked like a recognizable animal isn’t plausible, and it certainly isn’t common. But an autopsy showed that was the explanation. No chupacabra needed.
David Hume pointed out that when the explanation for a phenomenon is unknown, the sensible way to proceed is to require evidence in proportion to the suggested explanation. If the explanation is mundane, low-quality evidence suffices. You don’t need exhaustive documentation to prove that the sun rises in the morning. But if the claim is truly extraordinary, then in order to believe there’s anything going on there, we require extraordinary amounts of evidence. Really high-quality evidence. And mountains and mountains of it, tons of absolutely sterling first-rate evidence.
Everyday life reflects this. A great deal of physical forensic evidence is required to convict someone of murder in our court system, but very little evidence is required to convict someone of speeding. A cop who testifies “I saw the defendant and from my experience, I would say he was speeding” is fine for a traffic citation. But that kind of evidence would never pass muster in a murder trial — no cop could get up on the stand and hope to convict someone by saying “Isawt he defendant and from my experience, I would say he looked like a murderer.” A DA wouldn’t even file charges based on that kind of shoddy evidence. To convict someone of murder, you need a lot of hard forensic evidence.
Now consider, Ella — murders are committed every day. We know they happen. They’re uncommon, but we have proof that have occurred, and we have every reason to expect they’ll continue to occcur.
Yet the claim you’re making goes far beyond murder. If aliens visited the earth, it would be greatest event in human history. It would make a murder look like a trivial everyday occurrence by comparison. Alien visitation is an event so amazing, so remarkable, that it would be a once-in-human-history event of gigantic proportions. It would be the single most astounding event known to mankind.
Yet you’re telling us we should believe in such an amazingly extraordinary claim based on crappy shoddy evidence of the same caliber as a cop eyeballing someone for speeding?
You tell me, Ella…does that make sense?
Let’s start with the loaded phrase “stuffing these events under the rug.” Who’s “stuffing these events under the rug”?
I said skepticism seems warranted. How is that “stuffing these events under the rug”? If this is the quality of your observations, we have even more reason to regard your claims about UFOs with skepticism. You can’t even accurately describe what I said on this forum — how can we expect you to accurately describe what you claim to have seen in the sky?
And now let’s deal with that precious little tidbit “these events.” What events? You’re reporting something you claim to have seen. That’s not an event, that’s something you think you saw. People think they see lots of things, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything happened. Let’s call these UFO reports what they are: uncorroborated eyewitness testimony.
Let’s unpack the mishmash of logical fallacies, unjustified assumptions and wild assertions jammed into that one sentence.
First: “living in this part of the world.” Why does living in one part of the world invalidate logic? What, if you live in Kalamazoo, suddenly the Pythagorean Theorem isn’t correct? If you live in Calcutta, common sense doesn’t work anymore and you should stop looking both ways for traffic when you cross the street? That doesn’t make sense, Ella.
Where you live has zero effect on basic logic and simple common sense. Basic logic tells us that if you make an extraordinary claim, you need to provide a whole lot extraordinary evidence to back up that claim. Hearsay and tall tales and claims that “I saw something weird” won’t cut it, we need forensic evidence and lots of it — an alien corpse, a UFO we can let scientists examine, skin cells from the aliens, hair fibers, bodily fluids from the aliens we can run through DNA analysis. Where you live has nothing to do with it. That’s bizarre…it’s like asserting “living in this part of the world makes it a lot harder to claim that 2 + 2 = 4.” It doesn’t make any sense at all.
Next, you go on to claim that I’m pretending to myself that UFOs are imaginary, or that I’m asking you to pretend to yourself that UFOs are imaginary. I never said that. I never asked you to do that.
Let’s go back to what I actually said:
What I said is that I’m skeptical about UFOs. I suggested that skepticism is warranted.
That does not mean that I think people are lying when they say they saw a UFO. People probably saw something. The question is: what? What did they see? Just because you think you see something doesn’t mean there’s anything there.
In fact, the entire term “UFO” is inaccurate, because it suggests there’s something flying. We don’t know that. We know people saw something in the sky, but that doesn’t mean it’s flying or that it’s a physical object. It could be cloud or a gas or a plasma, and it could be a reflection. Just because you see something in the sky doesn’t mean it’s a physical object — refraction and diffraction of light through temperature layers and particles suspended in the air can produce some amazing visual effects, not to speak of high-atmospheric phenomena like noctilucent clouds, lenticular clouds, sprites, auroras, glories and sundogs produce remarkable visual effects. But they’re not solid physical objects, and they’re not flying.
Let me give an example of how unreliable the human visual apparatus can be. I stayed up nearly three days in college to cram for a test and at night I saw a weird mechanical bird in front of my apartment. It was the damndest thing you ever saw, like something out a science fiction film, a little mechanical device that flew like a bird and hopped around like a bird. Looking closer, I saw that it was a piece of newspaper blowing around in the wind. Darkness and nearly 3 days without sleep played tricks on my eyes. What I had thought I was seeing wasn’t there.
This happens all the time. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Women who have testified in court to the identity of the man they claim raped them, face to face, one on one, have been proven wrong by DNA evidence. A woman who was raped made a mistake in identifying her attacker even though his face 3 inches from hers while he was raping her.
Eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable. Therefore, skepticism about what you (or any other UFO enthusiast) claim to have seen seems warranted.
That doesn’t mean I’m denying you saw what you saw. What it means is that we have no independent corroborating evidence that what you saw is what you claim it is.
Let me drill down on this for a second to make clear how hard it is to rely on visual identification of aerial phenomena…
When you saw that UFO, did you have a laser rangefinder with you? If not, how do you know how far away it was? Aerial objects are notoriously hard to range. Was it a small object nearby, or a large object far away? How do you know? Do you have any independent forensic evidence to back up your claim about the object’s size and speed?
Many people claim they see “shiny objects” in the air. In my introductory optics course, we were introduced to Snell’s Law. Turns out that all physical objects become perfect reflectors when the light hits ’em at a shallow enough angle. Yes, even a lump of coal becomes a perfect mirror when light strikes it at an oblique enough angle. Doesn’t this suggest that those supposedly “shiny metallic objects” in the sky that are allegedly huge and far away might actually be small opaque objects nearby that are being hit by light rays at a very shallow angle and turning into near-perfect mirrors from your viewing angle? (You see the same effect when you look at a puddle of water in the distance: light reflects at a glancing angle, turning it into a mirror, but as you come closer,the angle of incidence steepens and the puddle becomes transparent. The same effect produces mirages in layers of heated air near the horizon.)
Many people claim to have seen solid objects in the air. How do you know? Did you have a spectrophotometer with you? Did you do neutron absorption testing or X-ray diffraction analysis to determine the object’s composition when you saw that UFO?
No, you almost certainly didn’t — so how do you know it was a solid object? Many aerial phenomena look solid but are actually reflections or gasses or plasmas (like ball lightning) or clouds of particles. Small particles in a cloud can produce exotic diffraction effects depending on the size of the particles — you can get Fresnel diffraction or
Fraunhofer diffraction. Moreover, clouds of particles produce different scattering effects depending on the wavelength of the incident light compared to the size of the particles: Rayleigh scattering and Mie scattering. Changing the size of the particles can change the colour of the scattered light, and it can run through the entire visible spectrum from deep red to the far violent. Particles of gold were used by ancient glassmakers to impart rich colors to glass by means of Mie scattering.
Isn’t it more likely that what you saw was a cloud of aerial particles (perhaps dust, possibly ice crystals) changing colour due to Mie scattering and then looking mirrorlike due to total internal reflection rather than a spaceship from another solar system?
It’s possible that what you saw is an exterrestrial space vehicle — but how likely is it?
What kind of “official, recorded data of UFO activity over the base” are you talking about? Can we see this “official, recorded data”? Can we examine it?
More to the point, is this so-called “official, recorded data” any better than the “official, recorded data” that said there were WMDs in Iraq?
The U.S. military is run at the highest levels by incompetent cowards, at the mid-level ranks by spineless yes-men who didn’t resign their commissions because they’re not smart enough and skilled enough to find work in the civilian sector, and at the lowest levels by rapists (1/3 of all women who join the U.S. army report they were raped by our wonderful troops) and gang members.
Asking us to believe that the U.S. army can conduct a rigorous investigation that produces convincing physical evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life is a tall order after the shoddy crappy “investigations” the U.S. army conducted into Pat Tillman’s death and Pvt. Jessica Lynch’s injuries.
Something Fabulous
What’s really funny to me is that now this whole long-ass title shows up in the “recent comments” bar, each time someone comments. So I just did it again, before reading the thread.
Dr. Morpheus
@Brachiator:
The gods all have clay feet. Sorry if lifting the scales from your eyes was painful.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@Dr. Morpheus:
Again, if you have a theoretical framework for interstellar travel please share it. Accelerating a piece of metal to 10% of the speed of light solves a miniscule fraction of the problems.
kdaug
@Dr. Morpheus: Ad Hominem Abusive. You don’t agree, so “he didn’t know shit”.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Prove it, jackass.
Dr. Morpheus
BTW, I should clarify that I doubt that aliens are currently buzzing us. Rather that probability dictates that at some point in Earth’s history extraterrestrial intelligence has visited the Earth.
My only point of contention is the vacuous statement that interstellar travel is impossible. It amounts to nothing more than ‘calls to close the patent office’.
There is no physical reason that we, or any other species, cannot send unmanned or even manned probes to other stars.
The technology is actually present (although highly dangerous and very controversial), again, Project Orion.
kdaug
@mclaren: Where’s the forensic evidence for gravity?
ETA: Better yet – forensic evidence for God? Claims, evidence, you get the routine.
Dr. Morpheus
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.):
I’ll let Freeman Dyson do that for me.
Oh, but what would a world acclaimed physicist know about that subject compared to you, almighty Bruce?
Popeye
@Dr. Morpheus:
What a weird way to argue that someone was ignorant.
Dr. Morpheus
@kdaug:
O.K., what is the operational definition of “extraordinary”?
Please, I’m having difficulty finding it in my CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.
There is no scientific definition of, nor measurement of, “extraordinary”. Whether it be a “claim” or “evidence”.
Sagan was talking out of his ass.
NCReggie
ya know its funny to read through a ufo themed thread on balloon-juice. But why would it be physically impossible to to traverse interstellar distances? Given enough time for intelligence to develop a high enough technology for space flight, why would that species be limited by the light speed barrier. Physicists like Michio Kaku and Albucierre have been kicking around ideas for supeluminal travel for years now. The motivations for extraterrestrial life could be just as varied and kooky as the daily motivations for human life. To hedge and say “as big as the universe is, of course there is life, but intelligent space faring civilizations, fucking impossible!”
mclaren
@kdaug:
Hold out a bowling ball and let it go. When it drops on your foot, you’ll get your answer.
Moreover, this experiment is repeatable.
Dr. Morpheus remarked:
Correct. Scientists have proposed a number of methods of interstellar travel.
The Bussard Ramjet (uses interstellar hydrogen scooped up by a large magnetic field to power a fusion drive), photon propulsion, a solar sail (depending on a super-high-powered laser from the home planet, alas), generation ships, the Alcubierre warp drive, and then the more exotic methods like wormholes and naked singularities.
My personal favorite? Tippler’s time machine, in which a cylinder whose edge rotates faster than 0.5 c produces a timespace singularity along its axis which gives access to geodesics that can go anywhere in the timespace continuum. Not only will the Tipler machine let you travel in space, it theoretically lets you travel in time too. Two great flavours that go great together! See Tipler’s paper “Rotating cylinders and the possibility of global causality violation,” Tipler, F. J., Phys. Rev. D 9, 1974, pp. 2203–2206.
While all these methods are physically possible, there’s no sign that they are even remotely practical for living creatures occupying a ship of an size, at least practical in an engineering sense or in an economic sense.
Any probe sent to another star system would likely be a nanomachine no bigger than a speck of dust. It would produce bigger and more complex machines once there from information stored inside itself using raw materials available in the other star system. That’s the most likely form of interstellar travel, given the constraints of engineering and economics.
Dr. Morpheus
@Popeye: Sorry, but a man whom I considered not only a friend but my mentor recently passed away.
He did extensive, original work in rheology. So much so that a correction to measurement in rheology, the Bagley Correction, was named after him.
He labored anonymously compared to Sagan who, frankly, spent more time on TV than in any laboratory or observatory.
Not that Dr Bagley wanted fame, but it irks me to no end to see the deification of someone whose claim to fame is largely because of his popular TV series and not any actual scientific research.
mclaren
@Dr. Morpheus:
Sure there is. Murder is universally recognized as extraordinary. The highest current per capita murder rate occurs in Caracas, Venezuela, and it’s 100 per 100,000 population. Los Angeles, California in 2003 had a more typical murder rate: 15 per 100,000.
So we can reasonably judge any event for which we have forensic evidence that occurs at a per capita rate of less than 100 per 100,000 population as “extraordinary.”
The per capita number of alien visits for which we have forensic evidence is 0 per 100,000.
That’s extraordinary. It belongs to the same category as people walking on water, Carlos Castaneda’s flying indians, psychic surgery, and werewolves.
Cacti
When it comes to the church of the UFO, I’m in the agnostic camp.
M. Bouffant
I certainly agree w/ mclaren (tl;dr all of it) that there’s never been any (publicly revealed) forensic evidence of aliens, but it’s not as if every alleged UFO landing site has been gone over w/a fine-tooth comb by a crime scene unit either.
But I also note that almost all reports of “UFOs” are actually reports of Unidentified LIGHTS in the sky, not flying objects.
And I have to question the way the question is usually posed: Never “What do you think about the possibility that UFO/Ls are non-Earth origin craft?” but “Do you believe in UFOs?” That tells us a lot about the psychology behind the whole thing.
Lysana
Considering how many cases in Project Blue Book had to be marked the equivalent of, “we have no damn idea,” claiming it’s all mass hallucinations and prototype jets is horseshit. What are the unidentified ones? Got me. I’m no expert. But that “it’s all fake” jargon is the faith of the atheist. Science must know all, and so if they’re faced with something that doesn’t fit evidence, it has to fit theory. Or get brushed aside. Like a child and a crowd under a clear blue sky. Or my apatheistic acquaintance who met a Shinto god in his temple while said acquaintance was stone sober. Or any of a dozen tales I could tell about my own life, like the flat tire that spontaneously refilled after weeks of being flat the night after I left some cream for the Fair Folk outside my door.
Science. Does. Not. Know. Everything. And neither does anyone here.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Dr. Morpheus:
Here’s one that I found access to. This link also makes it abundantly clear that Sagan was an accomplished researcher.
With regards to the other people you slammed, Dawkins has published a lot of actual papers in peer-reviewed journals, while Asimov is known primarily as a science-fiction author, not a scientist.
What’s your beef with popularizing science anyway? I think it’s important that the public understand the importance and majesty of science.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Lysana:
What does this even mean? Technically, science is a framework to understand nature with, not any sort of dogma.
Mark S.
@Dr. Morpheus:
No it doesn’t. Even if there were hundreds of space flying alien civilizations, there are hundreds of billions of stars just in this galaxy.
My personal opinion is that life is probably very common in the universe, but intelligent life probably not. I’m just going by the fact that of the millions (billions?) of species that have come and gone on this planet, only one of them has developed the intellect to even think of trying to travel to other star systems.
Sheila
How many people have not seen UFOs? If one looks regularly at the sky at night, there are always unexplained phenomena. Furthermore, to postulate that the entire cosmos as we “know” it only exists for us is akin to believing the sun orbits around the earth.
Mum
John Podesta wears many hats. He was on last night’s episode of “Top Chef” as one of the guest diners, along with Senator Mark Warner and several media people, including Joe Scarborough.
Mum
@Cat Lady:
I wouldn’t think of flaming.
I’m both excited and terrified by the prospect of encountering a UFO. It would have to be a most disconcerting experience.
Mum
@mnpundit:
No. Many non-Christians refer to Jesus as an avatar, an enlightened being, and/or a prophet.
Brachiator
@Dr. Morpheus:
Are you high? I could cite Sagan’s works, but that wouldn’t mean that you knew what he was talking about, especially since you want to pretend that you are able to judge him. Maybe you are, though one certainly couldn’t tell that by your meanderings here.
But for you and others in this thread, there is a common misconception about Sagan that he was either just a popularizer of science or that his productivity declined steeply after he became a media celebrity because of his TV work. Oh, yeah, and there are some who think that Sagan was not a good scientist because he liked to smoke grass.
But here’s a little something from the Skeptic Society’s Michael Shermer on the quality of Sagan’s work compared to other world class scientits (complete with handy charts and graphs), link here http://www.michaelshermer.com/borderlands-of-science/excerpt/
and a little nubbin here:
Dr. Morpheus, how do you measure up to this?
Mum
@Dr. Morpheus:
I’m not sure that it is entirely fair to call Sagan, Asimov, and Dawkins “third-rate scientists.” Why would you label them in that way? Is it because they wrote and or talked about science in ways that made it more accessible to a large audience? Do you have the same negative feelings about the work done by people like E. O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson? I would think that with the rather sorrowful science literacy in this country, we would applaud scientists and science writers who popularize science and make it more appealing to “the masses.” No?
vaux-rien
It seems sensible that there would be intelligent life out there, maybe on lots of planets, and I don’t think it’s unlikely one or more of them could have worked out interstellar travel. Possibly they’ve been to our neighborhood, but “belief in UFOs” usually means accepting that smallish craft have been making low-altitude flights on Earth on a very regular basis for about the last 70 years. That seems highly unlikely to say the least, so are 99.9% of witnesses mistaken, and .1% correct? It’s possible but until I see some credible evidence, like say one good photograph, the idea that 100% are mistaken is enough to satisfy me.
I’m not saying I know anything really, or that there isn’t something interesting to investigate behind all those reports, but the popular explanation is pretty weak.
Also I think it’s interesting that these reports have been common since we’ve had flying machines but weren’t beforehand. Perhaps it’s just an odd coincidence that ETs started to visit at that time but, really? It’s not more likely that our imaginations found something to replace angels and dragons?
lucslawyer
Saw one in September, 2001…a daylight disk about the size of a full moon (and no, it wasn’t the moon)…. a very unsettling experience….
Yutsano
@Brachiator: I believe the term you’re looking for is communication out the anal orifice. Sagan has been a well documented and well respected astronomer and scientist since long before Cosmos. And no one should be demonized for popularizing their scientific field.
Plus he was very quotable. I love this one:
mclaren
@Lysana:
With respect, the evidence you cite proves the opposite of your conclusion. Project Blue Book found that 94.5% of all reported UFOs were explained by weather phenomena, civilian or military aircraft, balloons, etc. Only 5.5% of the evidence for UFOs was unexplained (701 out of 12618 reported UFOS).
If you talk to a police investigator, you’ll find that this is higher than the proportion of inconclusive or mitigating or exculpatory evidence in a typical murder investigation. If we accepted your standard requiring more than 95% of all available evidence to point to a conclusion in order to believe it, we’d never be able to convict anyone of murder.
(Incidentally, the reason why some crime evidence is mitigating or exclupatory or inconclusive is that in every investigation some minor bit of physical evidence always gets lost or mislabeled, some DNA samples often get contaminated, some fingerprints are often smudged or unidentifiable partials, some saliva samples usually get contaminated with bacteria and breaks down, some tool marks are inconclusive, fiber evidence often shows fibers from a carpet so common that it’s not unique to the defendant’s home, etc.)
For what it’s worth, I’ve never seen a UFO. Never saw any aerial effects or phenomena I couldn’t explain, and I’ve seen sundogs and auroras and lenticular clouds and mirages. I’ve also never seen events or phenomena I’d classify as outside the ordinary course of nature or inexplicable. Maybe my life is really boring. Throughout my entire life, I’ve never even come close to encountering a scrap of credible evidence for anything like psychic powers, levitation, telepathy, teleportation, UFOs, alien abductions, psychic surgery, astral projection, remote viewing, dowsing, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, clairvoyance, astrology, or any of the mythical creatures like werewolves or vampires. Nothing. Zero. Absolutely no credible evidence whatsoever. I’ve seen cold readings and ouija board sessions, nothing supernatural there. Hypnotism is more mysterious, and that’s fairly well understood. I’ve done tarot readings for people to debunk that belief system — I told them the exact opposite of what the cards said. The people were ecstatic about the alleged accuracy of my reading. I’ve participated in ouija board sessions — it’s easy and fun to steer the board and spell out profane suggestions.
Mark S.
Huh, reading this article on the Fermi Paradox:
Didn’t know that. I kind of assumed that we’d luck out and catch some other civilization’s radio or tv programming. Considering the nearest star to us is about 4 light years away, that’s pretty damn unlikely.
Norman Rogers
It is if you want Cokie Roberts to like you.
SRW1
@Anne Laurie:
Amen, sister.
blahblahgurgleblegblah
In 1994 I saw a UFO perform maneuvers on a dime and then leave with crushing acceleration in broad daylight. It looked like a cliché from the 1950s, a flying saucer. I have no explanation. Did not witness any occupants. Have never seen anything like it since. But it continues to bother me.
I definitely believe that something is real about that phenomena. But the UFO crazies are mostly conspiracy nuts. My sense of it is that the government knows that some activity is unexplained, but sixty to seventy years in they’re just as ignorant of the cause and explanation as they were during the initial UFO flaps of the late ’40s.
I’m very skeptical about Roswell and other myths of UFO crashes and alien contact with government officials. But I’m not skeptical about the many instances of multiple simultaneous radar contacts from multiple angles by world aviation officials. That’s in the public record and represents instrument based physical evidence. Gun camera footage is relevant too. The rest is hooey.
Asshole
@Francis:
Why should he have to keep his religious views to himself? It’s a free country, he can express what he believes. Just like you can. If he believes in God, he can talk about that. And if you don’t, you’re allowed to say so too.
If we let the majority rule on who had to shut up about religion and who didn’t, I’m pretty sure only the Christians would be allowed to express their opinions on the subject.
timb
@QuaintIrene:
/third’d
twiffer
granted, my only personal sighting of a UFO involved 2 & 1/2 tabs of acid (ah, college days) and, in retrospect, was probably a firefly.
still, the odds of us being the only planet with life on it in the entire universe are small. very small, as far as i’m concerned. same goes with intelligent life. heck we aren’t even the only intelligent or sapient species on our own planet. dolphins are damn bright. we’ve observed culture in other apes (chimps, orangutans, etc.). even certain birds know how to use tools.
does this mean extra-terrestrial species have been swinging by? no idea. based on our current knowledge and technology, interstellar travel is rather difficult and extremely time consuming. still, just because we don’t know how to go as fast, or faster than light doesn’t mean it’s impossible. nor that other creatures haven’t figured it out. compared to the age of the universe itself, our world is still relatively young.
Brachiator
@Yutsano:
But some scientists are odd ducks. On a number of occasions I have heard scientists grumbling about some science popularizer (Gould, Sagan, a few others). It’s weird. There is the expected hint of jealousy that somebody other than them are getting all the publicity and kudos. They also carp that the popularization is dumbing down science or misrepresents science, especially if the popularizations relate to their own work.
But a strange conventional wisdom sets in that if you are a popularizer, you must obviously be falling down with respect to your main job of actually doing science.
Even stranger, when you ask them how a lay person is supposed to keep up, they often invoke the cloak of the High Priesthood and in effect demand that they lay person be able to keep up with all of the current journals or offer as an alternative some unreadable jargon filled books.
It’s both sad and funny.
This is plausible, but doesn’t prove that anybody else is visiting us, or explain UFO sitings.
And then we also have the double hoop twist that all religion is based on mis-interpretations of visits of space aliens. You know, ET Jesus.
Badtux
Even forgetting forensic evidence, we don’t even have a *picture* of one of these so-called UFO’s that’s not a blurry mess that clearly has been doctored to hide the fact that it’s a saucer topped by a cup being held up by strings. Unless you’re a paranoid idiot who thinks mysterious Men In Black are showing up to seize the good photos, the notion that little green men could be visiting the Earth on a regular basis for over 40 years and all we got is crappy photos of a saucer with a teacup on top held up by strings doesn’t pass the laugh and giggle test.
I flew once. Not by stepping into an airplane, but, like, really flew, just floated out of my bed and started rising in the air. I floated up the stairs and out the back landing and watched my father far below working on his Pontiac Tempest (which always needed working on, freakin’ GM junk). I floated around for a while longer, looking at stuff, then headed back to bed.
Dudes, it was a *DREAM*. It sure seemed real. I was sorely disappointed that, when I woke up, I *couldn’t* fly by just thinking about rising into the air. But even a six year old kid knows the difference between a dream and real life, which is why I didn’t try to step off a landing and fly. Sadly, it appears that some adults don’t have the sense the Great Penguin gave a six year old…
– Badtux the Flightless Penguin
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@Dr. Morpheus:
Again…
What you have there is a proposed solution to one out of a great many profound problems that would have to be solved in order for living things to flit around the universe. Some of those problems have already been discussed in this thread,
Ella in New Mexico
@mclaren:
Reading lots of Michael Shermer and Phill Klass lately? ;-)
My God, the word count ALONE of that post indicates that:
A. you have far too much idle time on your hands.
B. you are far too worked up about these matters. Me thinks thou dost protest too much comes to mind….
And as for
It doesn’t. But living in a place with months of vast, wide open, clear night skies, a long history of unexplained phenomena, and the unequaled open-mindedness one begins to embrace from living alongside native American religious culture means that I get it that there might be more to things than my tiny human mind can validate with “logic”.
I still can’t “logically” make sense of most of quantum theory, but I don’t freak out and just deny it’s got any proof so therefore its a bunch of crap.
No, you can’t, unless you have a top secret clearance, work in the program where the data is utilized, and have a need to know. Sorry!
Seriously, lighten up.
Ella in New Mexico
@mclaren:
Oh, and where the hell does THIS come from, Senor Logico?
Brachiator
@Ella in New Mexico:
I have no idea what understanding quantum theory has to do with proof of UFOs.
It’s like saying “I can’t make sense out of quantum theory, therefore the Easter Bunny must be real.”
And keeping it light, I am just surprised at the number of posts on this topic. I had no idea that people outside of the late night conspiracy radio folks had much of an opinion about UFOs. There is a kind of “reverse creationism” at play here in a way, since a lot of folks really want to believe that there is more out there than just us.
Redshirt
Sagan worked on the Voyager probes for crying out loud, and is directly responsible for the “Pale Blue Dot” photo.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@mclaren:
Say it ain’t so, Joe.
Brachiator
Stepped on my pun. One more time:
And keeping it light, I am surprised at the number of posts on this topic. I had no idea that people outside of the late night conspiracy radio folks had much of an opinion about UFOs.
There is a kind of “reverse creationism” at play here in a way, since a lot of folks really want to believe that there is more out there than Just Us, while the creationists believe that there is only Jees-us.