A question based on.... Astronomy?

Before we begin lets consider the following for the thread: ( I'm not saying these are true, but just for the example)

-Alien life exists and they are visiting Earth.

Now lets look at this:

Bernstein and his colleagues used Hubble to look for planetesimals that are much smaller and fainter than can be seen from ground-based telescopes. Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys was pointed at a region in the constellation Virgo over a 15-day period in January and February 2003. A bank of 10 computers on the ground worked for six months searching for faint-moving spots in the Hubble images.

The search netted three small objects, named 2003 BF91, 2003 BG91, and 2003 BH91, which range in size from 15-28 miles (25-45 km) across. They are the smallest objects ever found beyond Neptune. At their current locations, these icy bodies are a billion times fainter (29th magnitude) than the dimmest objects visible to the naked eye. But an icy body of this size that escapes the Kuiper Belt to wander near the Sun can become visible from Earth as a comet as the wandering body starts to evaporate and form a surrounding cloud.

www.spaceref.com...

Now why cant we search or pick up objects even closer to us with this same principle?

Surely with the near daily sightings we would be able to register a hit and say hey, what the hell was that flying out of earth.

I mean, lets face it, these "spaceships" are not camping out on earth. But then again I guess that depends on who you ask.

But in the end, why are we not seeing something like this from our telescopes etc?

Is it:

A- A coverup, they dont want us to know or see
B-They are looking in a similar fashion
C-There are no UFO's, it just isnt happening

Lets say you take option A. Do you not think these people want to see something like this? Surely they would. It would not be hidden.

Lets take option B. Maybe we are looking, and maybe we just dont see them. But explain to me how you cannot see an object travel these considerable distances, at any speed even.

If an object passes you by at a great speed you may not see it, but do you not see it as it leaves? Think of a car driving in the horizon. You have plenty of time to see the object before its too late.

Don't forget to factor in speed here. Sure if these "spaceships" are travelling here at amazing speeds (they have to, even at the speed of light its going to take considerable time) dont think we cant see them. Because they will register some movement.

Option C starts to look good after awhile, I mean with all these eyes on the sky, you would think more would catch a glimpse.

So is it plausible?

[edit on 26-9-2005 by Dulcimer]

Im assuming you have a telescope here, so heres a little experment if you live near an aiport try track a plane taking off.I think you'll find its extreamly hard to keep the plane in view , almost impossible.

Planes as you know are moving quite fast , but visable they look like there travling slow but dont let this fool you.Binoculars would be a better bet as human refexes are much better than tripod set ups at tracking visualy.

Now UFO's we must assume travel at hypersonic speeds as you have said, which would make them almost impossible to track,to get an image one needs a decent exposure time.

Bottem line is telescopes are desgined for viewing large , almost stationary objects over long exposures, not small fast moving objects with short exposures.Its not impossible just very improbable.

[edit on 26-9-2005 by Merkeva]

Hmm...you bring up a very good point! I, for one, don't believe in UFOs anyway. (It doesn't make much sense to me, that a ship can travel here from God-knows-where, only to crash outside a town like Rosewell.) But as for why our telescopes don't detect UFOs, well, I guess you need at least one of the following to detect ANYTHING in space.

A. A surface that reflects sunlight.

B. A readable heat source.

C. Enough influence on surrounding heavenly bodies to make your existance plausable to the guys who interpret the data.

Now, I'm not siding with the pro-UFO team, but if I were to visit another planet and really DIDN'T want my ship noticed, I'd make sure it had none of the above characteristics.

Definitely A or B but not C:

Too many unexplainable sightings have occurred to choose C. Like Roswell, Kecksberg (many more) and now NASA’s own shuttle footage with objects that slow to a stop then continue and right angle turns at extremely high velocities.

I have an Orion XT10 (10" aperture) and it’s a pretty good telescope. All of my eye pieces are mid to high end superwide angle lenses. Here is a link to see the scope:

link

There is a light beacon about 3 miles from my house for airplanes. With my 8mm eye piece coupled with my 2x Barlow I can clearly see the 12” light and few of the details on the light cover. But this is a stationary object…

One evening I saw a jet very high in the sky so I tracked it with the scope. At 100x (only the 12mm eye piece) it was unbelievably difficult to keep it in focus and in the view. The only thing that allowed me to do it was the flashing lights on the plane. However, I was able to see 2 jet streams and some of the body of the jet. It was more like a shadow with flashing lights. I have tried to track satellites as they pass above us. It is more difficult than you think. Objects like satellites need very high magnification but at high magnification you can't get the moving obect in the view let alone track it. With scopes you need an object to focus on first and most UFO sightings are brief to say the least and the ones on the NASA tapes all seem to be moving. So unless you know where to initially look and focus to it is pretty much impossible and the object has to be reflecting enough light to see it in the first place… I seem to remember David Sereda (he did Evidence, The Case for NASA UFOs) suggesting on a Coast to Coast AM show that these objects on the NASA tapes may be emitting light at a higher frequency that what we can see with our human eyes.

I’m always looking for UFOs when I’m out with my scope but I have never seen one. However, for me, this doesn’t suggest that they aren’t there.

Sorry I don’t mean to shoot down your idea but you need to know where the UFO is going to be in order to see it with a telescope and it has to be there long enough to focus on it. Perhaps somebody in the Arizona area might snap a photo through an eye piece of a telescope of one of these slower black triangles some day. I’d like to see one during the day through a scope.

Its not impossible just very difficult.

(mod edit to change page stretching url to a short link)

[edit on 29-9-2005 by pantha]

Your missing an important point in astronomy. The obvious eludes you ecause you have no backgrouwnd in the working of telescopes. The reason this could not work is because:
1. These alien crafts would be moving verry fast. The tequniqe used was simply point the HST at a point in space for a good long time and hoping to find something. Also these alien craft might as well be smaller than the comets found and move at higher speeds both making them almost undectable. And also telescopes work on the principal of gathering collected light. If the object emits no light it can not be dected.

2. You do not understand the shere size of the sky. In astronomy the sky is grided by Degrees. from horizion to horizion you would have 180 degrees or a semi circle which is the dome of the sky. We use this system to find objects... Quick example the north star is directly over head at the north pole. as you move down in latituude it drops one degree (think of a compas in geomtry) So say you live at the 40th degree northern latitude. The north star will be 40 degrees above the horizion due north. ( that was just to explain how degrees work in astronomy) IN astronomy Degrees are devided into smaller parts (as you may remember from the begining of Trigonometry) of Mineuts and Seconds. Each degree is subdevided into 60 min and 3600 seconds. We call this arc min/arc sec. Arc for the arc of the sky. the average viewing feild of a telescope is about 0.3 of a degree. The more you magnify an object the smaller your FEILD OF VIEW becomes and the smaller chunk of the sky you can see.

And all of that BS now means that for the HST to view ALL OF THE SKY and from space all 360 degrees in every direction is an almost impossible task. And the luck that would be needed to find one of these craft is almost just ast impossible.

simply put, thinking things actions are not entirely governed by the laws of physics and space is just too big.

The United States has the ability -- and the need -- to track every single object in near Earth orbit (NEO) and actually publishes liss of this "space junk": dead satellites, ejecta from other spacecraft, etc. This is important stuff to know, because we don't want out space station running into to a frozen globule of space sewage at a velocity delta of a couple thousand miles per hour!

The United States also has the ability -- and the need -- to track every object flying in American airspace between, say, 5,000 and 45,000 feet, whether that object has filed a flight plan or not.

Now these ongoing surveys are run by the US Air Force, the FAA, and several other agencies; indeed the flight data is available in real time to anyone who has paid a subscription fee to Flight Explorer. So if there were any Spaceship Guys out there, it simply couldn't stay secret for long; there are too many people who know what's there.

Our colleague tn2k, in his excellent post, brings out some key and very important comments about the difficulty in tracking moving objects with an astronomical scope. And our colleague Mizar, although he made several errors in his rebuttal, does have a point about a spaced-base telescope like HST being an impractical way to detect relatively close and small objects due the the volume of the sky. HSA simply doesn't have the aperture to see anything smaller, say, something the size of a very large house on the Moon's surface and it can't be moved rapidly enough to track a spaceship if one happened along.

However, there are several organizations which use series of computer-guided telescopes for discovering and tracking comets which can (and do) track large parts of the scky every night. They've been extremely successful in discovering new comets, and one would thing that if any light-based observer would see a Spaceship guy, it would be these folks.

And they haven't.

My point is that existing evidence and basic science points overwhelmingly to the conslusion that there are not any Spaceship Guys visiting Earth, but you can't very well use the capabilities of the HST as evidence one way or the other.

[edit on 26-9-2005 by Off_The_Street]

I believe only speed would be the killing factor here. Clearly in the example I provided:

These icy bodies are a billion times fainter (29th magnitude) than the dimmest objects visible to the naked eye.

I still believe it would be possible to catch some craft with a method as posted in the original post.

Im no astronomer though, just a theory.

The space telescope can detect objects as faint as 31st magnitude, which is slightly better than the sensitivity of much larger earth-based telescopes. (The human eye can see celestial objects as dim as sixth magnitude.) Because generally the fainter an object is the farther away it is, Hubble has been used to probe the limits of the visible universe and uncover never-before-seen objects near the horizon of the cosmos. Because it is outside our atmosphere, the telescope can view astronomical objects across a broad swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, from ultraviolet light, to visible, to near-infrared wavelengths. The telescope can also see faint objects near bright objects.

Surely applying the same "watch the sky for movements" idea on a closer to earth scale would yield some results, even if you are only monitoring a small patch of sky.

Eventually, if these things exist, something would be registered. No?

Off_The_Street,

Okay... hmm... although your argument seems logical on face value, it seems (since I can't possible afford to subscribe to a flight data service) that I can believe you that nothing unusual is picked up on our radar tracking systems...

or...

I can believe renowned Astronuat Gordon Cooper who said to the entire UN:

"For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists and astronauts. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us."

So you are some guy on the Internet and he is a famous Specialist.

So to believe you I have to believe he (and many many other people who have actually gone into space) are big liars...

I also have to believe that the U.S. Govt. would give access to an unedited radar feed to civillians despite any National Security concerns...

And finally, I would have to believe that the hundreds of members here and the thousands of people eslewhere who have actually seen amazing machines up close are all delusion too..

Well it is hard to believe the public sometimes - especially when they tend to vote for people who will get them killed, but I'm sorry - the Astronaut and Military Specialist testimony just puts it over the top for me.

So I find your cynicism and unbelief misplaced at best and deliberate at worst.

LoL.

I have no comment !

truth magnet says:

Okay... hmm... although your argument seems logical on face value, it seems (since I can't possible afford to subscribe to a flight data service) that I can believe you that nothing unusual is picked up on our radar tracking systems...

I never said "nothing" was; I said that "if there were any Spaceship Guys out there, it simply couldn't stay secret for long." There's a difference between 'nothing unusual' (e.g., any type of unidentified thing) and visiting alien intelligences. And, for what it's worth, I don't think $10/month is all that much to spend on a flight data service if you're interested in knowing the identity of every commercial aircraft you see in the sky.

or...

I can believe renowned Astronuat Gordon Cooper who said to the entire UN:

"For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists and astronauts. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us."

So you are some guy on the Internet and he is a famous Specialist.

I assume you're talking about Cooper's assertions in his book Leap of Faith. Here is what Cooper's former colleagues say about him. Note particularly the paragraph that starts: "But several space veterans who SPACE.com consulted about one of Cooper's spaceflight stories had very different versions of the original events. And some of them showed me hard evidence to back up their skepticism."

Now of course, if you ignore "logic" (as you so graciously characterized my comments) or "hard evidence" (as shown in the citation above) in favor of believing someone who lacks both but has been on the cover of Life Magazine, knock yourself out.

I was fifteen and a hard-core science nut in 1959 when Cooper and the other six were chosen as the first American astronauts, and they were (and still are) my heroes. But they were only human beings and they each had their peccadilloes. Many old guys familiar with the program say that Gus Grissom was a crybaby, John Glenn was a control freak, and Cooper was somewhat of a nut. I don't have any first hand knowledge of this, but from what I've read of the individuals involved, that seems a pretty fair estimate.

So to believe you I have to believe he (and many many other people who have actually gone into space) are big liars...

I also have to believe that the U.S. Govt. would give access to an unedited radar feed to civillians despite any National Security concerns...

And finally, I would have to believe that the hundreds of members here and the thousands of people eslewhere who have actually seen amazing machines up close are all delusion[al] too..

You don't have to believe anything you don't want to. I personally don't think that people who say they have seen Spaceship Guys are either "liars" or "delusional"; I think they are mostly mistaken in how they interpret what they see.

Well it is hard to believe the public sometimes - especially when they tend to vote for people who will get them killed, but I'm sorry - the Astronaut and Military Specialist testimony just puts it over the top for me.

Again, if you consider fame as more important than logic and evidence, go for it.

I mean hey, both Oprah Winfrey and Madonna believe in Spaceship Guys -- what better proof do you need? They're real famous!

So I find your cynicism and unbelief misplaced at best and deliberate at worst.

You mean I'm deliberately cynical and skeptical?

No argument there!

Originally posted by Off_The_Street


I never said "nothing" was; I said that "if there were any Spaceship Guys out there, it simply couldn't stay secret for long."

Wrong. Big time wrong.

First of all.

First off, the vast majority of high tech monitoring and space study in this country is either done by NASA, various NASA partners, or other high tech government facilities. And the universities not affiliated with the government directly still recieve a large part of their funding from the federal government. A threat to withdraw funding from a certain project or school is certainly enough to make most university staff say "no comment".

Second of all, its fallacy to assume that we know about every single thing in near earth orbit. We dont. We are constantly finding new debris every day we did not know was there. There is simply too much crap to be properly identified and tracked in earth's orbit. Thats like saying the government keeps a file on the underwear preferences of ever single human on the planet. They track what the can. And in many cases, they often put filters on their tracking equipment, like NORAD did, to filter out signals that were too slow to be a meteor but too fast to be a missile or plane.

Third, you assume that our technology would even pick up any UFOs. The fact of stealth technology nullifies this arguement. If at our technological stage we posses the ability to cloak aicraft from radar detection, then a race of spacefarers perhaps thousands of years ahead of us have probably bypassed detection via radar after a few years of studying us and learning that we could detect certain objects with radar beams.

So, in reality, the idea of space travelers comming to this planet for whaever reason is not impossible or improbable because of the above arguements. I still see nothing logical produced yet that effectively rebutts the possibility of alien visitation.

And its not ridiculous at all to think that a UFO crashed at Roswell. During the time period that the Roswell incident happened, Roswell was, at that time, the technological capital of the world. Mankinds most advanced inventions of the day: rockets, nukes, radar, ect, all were being researched, tested, and devloped in hat small area of New Mexico that includes White Sands Missile Range and Los Alamos Labs. In fact, that would be the most logical place for an ET explorer who wanted to get a feel for our current level of technological devlopment to start observing us.

Its never been a secret. For over 500 years people have been reporting flying objects in the sky, sometimes in the water.

There are paintings of UFOs in the skys well before the Wright Brothers were ever born.

There was what we would today call a UFO flap in America in 1897.

There were reports of "Foo Fighters" by Allied Air Men in WW2 that have never been adequately explained.

The Air Raid over L.A. in 1942 was never adequately explained.

There was a whole handful of UFO reports in the days before the Media picked up on Kenneth Arnolds Sighting in 1947.

Then three weeks later the press release of a captured flying disk near Roswell.

Tons and tons of sightings since then , even I had a Close Encounter in 2002 when a Night Light came and Hovered 30 yards away from my parked car for five minutes.

Even if you use a telescope or detect a UFO in any other way , you will just become one of hundreds of thousands of people saying that you saw a UFO. No one will believe you, and the Government and NASA and NORAD will continue to say there is no evidence that " Flying Saucers or Spaceship guys are real" and everyone will get another good laugh out of the deal.

I hate to be so cynical about things , but having seen that UFOs are real with my own eye's, I have to believe that even if you got the evidence to prove they are real it would be confiscated from you. Otherwise why has that not happened yet?

Some people hypothesize that the alleged ufos travel through some kind of hyperspace, wormhole, warpdrive thigy (like, say, Star Trek or Star Wars) and aren’t really In our space when they are traveling those oh so vast distances, thus, we can’t see them coming (or going) just Bamf, now you see ‘em, Bamf, now you don’t *shrugs*

Skadi, you seem to take issue with my saying that "if there were any Spaceship Guys out there, it simply couldn't stay secret for long."

Your reasons seem to be as follows:

A threat to withdraw funding from a certain project or school is certainly enough to make most university staff say "no comment".

Most grunt work on these programs is done by graduate students who tend to be more interested in science than secrecy. Besides, most university studies are not "cover-ups"; if there were such things, the government'd hire professional spooks, not engineering professors. The local Universities here (Arizona State and University of Arizona) are involved in designing things like the Mars Lander and they are more than happy to talk about them.

Finally, most of the sky surveys are not done by US government agencies, they're done by a wide range of private individuals, which is why so many comets are discovered by amateurs. And those government-funded surveys, like the Shoemaker-Levy Cometograph Project, the Jarnac Comet Survey, and the PSI Team, are completely open about their results, which are available in real time to anyone willing to pay for it.

Second of all, its fallacy to assume that we know about every single thing in near earth orbit. We dont. We are constantly finding new debris every day we did not know was there.

I don't think anyone here said we do know all about all the debris; I said we have the ability (although it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of money to do so) and God knows we have the need, given the paranoia about debris in space damaging our satellites or space station.

Besides, what does that have to do with the thrust of my argument, which is that large optical telescopes are not the best way to see Spaceship Guys? Re-read the subsequent paragraph of my post, if you will, and note that I am talking about ongoing surveys. And given that there are so many people running all these kinds of surveys for NEO comets, debris, etc, and that no one in this incredibly diverse community of scientists and researchers has ever reported Spaceship Guys ... well, that tells me something.

they often put filters on their tracking equipment, like NORAD did, to filter out signals that were too slow to be a meteor but too fast to be a missile or plane.

How do you know that? If it's true, then you should be able to show me where and how it's done. If you can't show me, then it's either classified (in which case neither you nor I know anything about it) or it doesn't exist.

Now I wouldn't argue that, during the height of the Cold War, NORAD was probably a lot more interested in radar returns showing the characteristic returns of incoming ICBMs or bomber fleets, but that's just conjecture...

...unless, as I said before, you have some evidence of such filtering happening that you'd like to share.

Third, you assume that our technology would even pick up any UFOs. The fact of stealth technology nullifies this arguement.

If that's the case, then you (or I) will never be able to prove anything about UFOs at all, and the entire discussion is a waste of our time.

Yet if this technology will never pick up the Spaceship guys, then why do the UFO people always quote "radar sightings" or actual visual sightings by people out in the boondocks? What about all these "mysterious lights"? Skadi, you can't have it both ways! Either they cannot cloak themselves and we can't use invisibility as an excuse for not having any evidence -- or else they can cloak themselves, and the reports on their sightings are bogus.

So, in reality, the idea of space travelers comming to this planet for whaever reason is not impossible or improbable because of the above arguements.

It's not impossible; nothing is impossible. But I think your arguments don't hold water, and it seems that all you have to bolster your belief is a bunch or widely varying reports, rumors, etc. and no hard evidence at all.

I still see nothing logical produced yet that effectively rebutts the possibility of alien visitation.

Neither do I. I can't prove that Spaceship Guys are impossible, and I can't prove that Spaceship guys have never come here. Maybe they have.

But you, on the other hand, can't prove that I'm not the Long-Lost King of France or that the mushrooms in my back yard were not placed there by the Little Fairies of the Moonlight. If I were to make such a ridiculous statement, it would be up to me to prove my assertion, not up to you to disprove my assertion.

I am not trying to prove that Spaceship Guys don't exist, because it's hard to prove a negative. You are the one making the assertions about Spaceship Guys; where is your proof -- or even evidence?

[edit on 27-9-2005 by Off_The_Street]

You are quite incorrect in your assumption that astronomers havent seein UFOs. J. Allen Hynek did a couple surveys o0f his scientific collegues, and found that 13% had reported seeing UFOs....which is a larger percent than the population at large. And since astronomers arent going be fooled by such things as the planet Venus, comets, meteors, and planes, we can see they also have a higher rate of unkowns.

As far as university students go, they still recieve their grant money and such from government funding, no matter who they are. And of course, pressure from professors, who might insist the student saw nothing more than a comet, can go along way. Peer pressure is an effective silencing force.

Out of all the Astronomers that Hynek interviewed about UFO sightings, not a single one had ever reported the incident. Why? Fear of ridicule and professional isolation kept them quiet, since the scientific community ridicules and persecutes people who have seen UFOs. There are numerous incidents of this. The fear of damaging their careers by claiming a UFO sighting is enough to keep most pros quiet.

The proof, as you insist, of UFOs and spacemen, comes from the thousands of credible, solid witnesses, trace landings, radar visual case, government documents, ect. Our scientists believe in the xistance of black holes with far less evidence than we have for UFOs. Lack of proof of the existance of black holes doesnt stop scientists from believing in them. They base their believes on various pieces of evidence they collect, combine, and analyze. Major scientific discoveries have been amde with far less evidence and proof than we have for the UFO phenomenon.

And how do I know about NORAD's tracking filters? Yes it is classified. I was once in the army Air Defense. We were always working hand in hand with the Air Force. I learned about this from several former NORAD personnel. How they filter it, or what exactly the range of the filters are, is all classified information, which I do not know. All I know is that they do it. The fact that they do it is not classified, only the methods and range of filters is. Our own Patriot missile system had similar filters, whose tolerances were changed from tiem to time, only the operators knew how or what range. But I do know from several sources, that odd objects are tracked quite often for which no explaiantion exists, and the whole matter of it is highly classified. Why he classification I do not know. But it exists.

Skadi says:

"...J. Allen Hynek did a couple surveys o0f his scientific collegues, and found that 13% had reported seeing UFOs... not a single one had ever reported ...."

Well, Skadi, which one is it? One of your statements seems to be wrong.

Lack of proof of the existance of black holes doesnt stop scientists from believing in them. They base their believes on various pieces of evidence they collect, combine, and analyze.'

Exactly. Evidence they collect and analyze. They don't have proof, but they have evidence, and the math of things like the Chandrasekhar Limit (BTW, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar is who the Chandra X-Ray telescope is named after) provides some pretty powerful evidence (at least to most researchers) that such things exist. At least, the existence of a black hole seems to explain certain phenomena better than anything elese does. I don't think UFOs as Spaceship Guys provide the answers to questionable phenomena, but hey, that's just me..

Major scientific discoveries have been amde with far less evidence and proof than we have for the UFO phenomenon.

Yes, and the reason those scientific discoveries have been validated over time is that more and more evidence comes to light, and finally the amount of actual evidence (as opposed to reports) is such that everyone accepts the discoveries.

Perhaps some day thre will be actual evidence (as opposed to reports) that UFOs are really Time Travellers or Spaceship Guys or whatever, and then the UFO's will be IFOs! But until then, UFOs are -- literally -- unidentified flying objects, the definition or explanation is whatever you choose to postulate.

If a spaceship lands somewhere and a Spaceship Guy gets out and is cought on all the networks, then I will buy into it. But for me, UFOs as Spaceship Guys simply don't pass the BS test. I haven't a clue as to what all of them are, and I'm up front enough to say I don't know.

Originally posted by Off_The_Street
Skadi says:

"...J. Allen Hynek did a couple surveys o0f his scientific collegues, and found that 13% had reported seeing UFOs... not a single one had ever reported ...."

Well, Skadi, which one is it? One of your statements seems to be wrong.

OTS , what Skadi said I believe was that Hynek surveyed his colleagues and found that 13% of them confidentially reported seeing UFOs to Hynek , although they had never officially reported the sightings.

Major scientific discoveries have been amde with far less evidence and proof than we have for the UFO phenomenon.

Yes, and the reason those scientific discoveries have been validated over time is that more and more evidence comes to light, and finally the amount of actual evidence (as opposed to reports) is such that everyone accepts the discoveries.

Right , just as every year more and more evidence for the reality of UFOs comes to light. The difference being that Black holes are stationary Celestial bodies that remain in fixed positions in the Sky for easy independent confirmation.

Now you have to remember that if a UFO happens to be a technologically manufactured Craft capable of locomotion is not going to stay in a fixed position. That makes the normal process of independent confirmation inadequate.

Think about it like this , if you phone to the Highway Patrol and report a Car wreck then the Officers will show up where you told them it happened and find a Car wreck ( confirmation ). But if you phone in and report a drunk Driver, then if the Officers show up exactly where you told them the DD was , there will be nothing at that location.

Does this mean that there are no good reports of drunk Drivers ( UFOs ) as opposed to Car wrecks, or that simply showing up at the location of the report( normal process of Scientific Confirmation ) is an inadequate way of confirming reports of drunk Drivers ( UFOs )?

In other words the normal confirmation process that is fine tuned for the confirmation of new Comets and new Planets and Black Holes , is not an adequate process for the confirmation of objects that have the ability to change course or hide from you or any other normal thing that a technological device under the influence of an intelligence can do.

And the whole point of looking for UFOs is to find those that would be technological devices under intelligent control.

So does that mean that it is not possible for Mankind to draw the Scientific conclusion that some UFOs are intelligently controlled craft just because the normal accepted methods of Astronomical Scientific confirmation are inadequate for the task? No.

For instance , hypothetically if Russia lets say was flying a secret aircraft over the US , would we confirm that by calling Astronomers and asking them to independently confirm our observation of the " Unknown " ?

No . We would look at the sighting reports , and if there were good information from credible observers that were independent of one another and we had RADAR or Theodolite or any other instrumentation that collaborated with the witness observations we could conclude that a Foreign Aircraft was in our Airspace.

Why would we do things any different for confirming that some of the Unknowns are also real objects? It seems to work just fine when we are talking about similar events such as Foreign Aircraft ? So why change the methodology when the word UFO is used instead of Air Craft?

Astronomy can not give you Scientific confirmation of an Air Craft or a UFO.

SETI on the other hand is looking for a Civilization located on a Planet or near a Star in which case if it finds such a civilization Astronomy could Scientifically confirm that.

So I basically agree with Skadi. When you take the evidence the reports with the best information from the best observers and the RADAR/visual sightings the evidence is overwhelming that some of the unknowns are real intelligently controlled technological devices.

You have to look at the evidence to come to that conclusion , and the evidence is the Reports. Reports are the same way we would determine if
a new enemy Air Craft or Technology was being introduced if we were at War.











[edit on 29-9-2005 by lost_shaman]

Lost Shaman says:

Right , just as every year more and more evidence for the reality of UFOs comes to light. The difference being that Black holes are stationary Celestial bodies that remain in fixed positions in the Sky for easy independent confirmation.

But that's my point -- there is no more evidence that comes to light every year. Every year, you have more unverified reports, more fuzzy pictures, and no actual hard data like pieces of a Spaceship or an interview with a Spaceship Guy. You hear reports of radar images, usually spread by the media, which the people who actually do them, like the military, deny.

Now you may choose to believe that the military is, by their denial, automatically lying and covering up, and maybe that is true (I will withhold judgement, since all I have to offer is what you have -- opinions). But the bottom line is that the denials mean there is no real evidence.

Now you have to remember that if a UFO happens to be a technologically manufactured Craft capable of locomotion is not going to stay in a fixed position. That makes the normal process of independent confirmation inadequate.

True. You actually have to have more than just reports of something that isn't there any more.

Think about it like this , if you phone to the Highway Patrol and report a Car wreck then the Officers will show up where you told them it happened and find a Car wreck ( confirmation ). But if you phone in and report a drunk Driver, then if the Officers show up exactly where you told them the DD was , there will be nothing at that location.

Exactly. I have no evidence.

Does this mean that there are no good reports of drunk Drivers ( UFOs ) as opposed to Car wrecks, or that simply showing up at the location of the report( normal process of Scientific Confirmation ) is an inadequate way of confirming reports of drunk Drivers ( UFOs )?

The normal process of "Scientific Confirmation" is not just going out and grabbing something and dissecting it. However, since a UFO tends to move around, it is going to take more than just reports to provide evidence of it.

Nowadays, many people have with them cameras which are better than the best professional models of 1947, the year of the Roswell incident (I carry a 5 Mp camera with me all the time, and I'm not even a UFO person). Many people also carry with them video cameras with 20:1 zoom, lens-stabilization; and almost everyone has access to the Internet where they could place their pictures -- still or video -- for the world to see.

And yet all we see is fuzz. The photos are still the same -- blurred.

In other words the normal confirmation process that is fine tuned for the confirmation of new Comets and new Planets and Black Holes , is not an adequate process for the confirmation of objects that have the ability to change course or hide from you or any other normal thing that a technological device under the influence of an intelligence can do.

Right. You're going to have to get a piece of the thing or have it land on the front parking lot of the UN. I agree that evidence is harder for you to get, but that doesn't give you a free pass. If you want the idea of UFOs as Spacehsip Guys accepted by the mainstream, you're going to have to come up with evidence other than unconfirmed reports and fuzzy pictures.

And the whole point of looking for UFOs is to find those that would be technological devices under intelligent control.

So does that mean that it is not possible for Mankind to draw the Scientific conclusion that some UFOs are intelligently controlled craft just because the normal accepted methods of Astronomical Scientific confirmation are inadequate for the task? No.

You're right, it doesn't. But no one is going to buy into your "scientific conclusion" unless you come up with evidence. Saying that "UFO's are possibly Spaceship Guys, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is all well and good for the UFO conventions, but it's not evidence. What is do difficult to understand about that?

No . We would look at the sighting reports , and if there were good information from credible observers that were independent of one another and we had RADAR or Theodolite or any other instrumentation that collaborated with the witness observations we could conclude that a Foreign Aircraft was in our Airspace.

Thats' because we know that thre really are such things as foreign aircraft, and we know that foreign aircraft are in our airspace all the time. We have evidence and proof of such things happening.

Why would we do things any different for confirming that some of the Unknowns are also real objects? It seems to work just fine when we are talking about similar events such as Foreign Aircraft ? So why change the methodology when the word UFO is used instead of Air Craft?

Because everyone agrees that aircraft exist.

Astronomy can not give you Scientific confirmation of an Air Craft or a UFO.

No, but anyone who goes to an international airport can convince themselves that there are foreign aircraft in our airspace. The existence of aircraft is not a subject of debate. Hey, I work for the largest producer of aircraft on the planet! But I don't know anyone who can go down to the spaeport and watch the Spaceship Guys come in.

SETI on the other hand is looking for a Civilization located on a Planet or near a Star in which case if it finds such a civilization Astronomy could Scientifically confirm that.

Maybe they'll find something. I, for one, sure hope they do.

And if reports are evidence enough for you, then go for it. But I can't help but think of one of the most famous reports of a UFO ever written. It starts like this:

"...When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I awoke from my bed to see what was the matter....
And what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a tiny sled and eight tiny reindeer."

That didn't convince me, either.

Shaman, let me conclude by re-iterating that I am not denying the possibility that some UFOs might be Shapechsip Guys. I simply don't have any evidence that pass my standards to tell me tht they do. I read my first science fiction story (the Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov) when I was ten years old. That was a half-century ago. I have been an inveterate science person ever since, and actually worked as a contractor to NASA (I was employed by IBM Federal Systems Division as a console operator in the Grenbelt Space Complex in Maryland) during the tail end of the Gemini Program and the Apollo Program.

I am not a person who denies the possibility of UFOs being Spaceship Guys. But I am also an engineer, a race of strange beings known for being somewhat hard-headed, who make their living working with things tht are, not things that might be.

Originally posted by Off_The_Street


Well, Skadi, which one is it? One of your statements seems to be wrong.

Obviously, you are having problems interpreting this simple statement. Niether is contradictory. 13% of scientists have seen UFOs, but none reported them. In other words, they did not fill out an offical report of the sighting to the authorities. But they saw a UFO, regardless of whether or not they reported it.

One astronomer, not a colleague of Hynek, but a world renown and highly respected astronomer, had two UFO sightings that he publically went on the record with. That man was Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered the planet Pluto in 1930.

www.ufoevidence.org...

Lost Shaman has pretty much summed up my other points. There is far more evidence in the UFO phenomenon tha just a bunch of reports. There is physical trace evidence in many cases that has no mundane explaination. We have radar visual confirmation cases on record. The fault lies not in the lack of evidence, but in the scientific establishments failure to examine it instead of auto debunking it or ignoring it. UFOs are very dangerous to many scientists theories. If we had confirmation that UFOs were indeed alien spacecraft, many scientists theories would be threatened. Many scientists spend thier whole entire lives developing or supporting certain theories, and will often irrationally fight anything that might threaten them. Science of today is not so different from the church 500 years ago, where strange or radical ideals are persecuted and people who endorse them are burned at the stake, figuratively speaking.

While no oen has definitive proof that UFOs are spaceships, that is what the evidence, when viewed collectively, compared and catalouged, points to. It is the conclusion that the pentagon came to in private while they were denying it in public.

Thus, there is nothing unscientific about saying UFOs are alien space craft. The vast majority of evidence leads us that way, and until something is produced that totally destroys that theory, it is the theory that anyone familiar with ufllogy can comfortable endorse.

skadi says:

Obviously, you are having problems interpreting this simple statement.

Sorry, Skadi. When you said "reports" I assumed you meant, well, "reports"!

13% of scientists have seen UFOs, but none reported them. In other words, they did not fill out an offical report of the sighting to the authorities. But they saw a UFO, regardless of whether or not they reported it.

They didn't "report" a UFO, I assume, for fear of ridicule. But they had no problem in "reporting" it to someone who obviously had a pro-UFO agenda, which means that the word about their UFO sightings would get out and -- there goes the ridicule! That doesn't make sense. Why would they hide something and then admit it?

Unless, of course, they all asked that their names not be used, which means that there is no record at all of what any particular scientist actually saw, which kind of casts doubt on what Hynek is saying.

I mean, do you have any names of these 13 percent who suddenly got religion and admitted to seeing UFOs -- or is that just hearsay? I'd sure like to see Hynek's sources, wouldn't you?

One astronomer, not a colleague of Hynek, but a world renown and highly respected astronomer, had two UFO sightings that he publically went on the record with. That man was Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered the planet Pluto in 1930.

Clyde Tombaugh was a fine fellow person whose name will go down in history, but he was not a "highly respected astronomer". He was a guy with no degree at all -- just a highly talented amateur -- when he was hired by Lowell do do the blink-comparator grunt-work. He didn't even get his undergraduate degree until two years after he ran the blink-comparator plates which found Pluto. He certainly wasn't in the same category as people like, say, Hubble and Chandrasekhar.

By the way, Tombaugh (according to your own cited web-site) interpreted flashes of light while observing Mars as evidence the thae Martians had set off an atomic bomb!

There is far more evidence in the UFO phenomenon tha just a bunch of reports. There is physical trace evidence in many cases that has no mundane explaination.

When you say "physical trace evidence" are you talking about actual physical evidence such as a piece of metal inexplicable by any other means? Or if you mean something else, exactly what is it?

We have radar visual confirmation cases on record.

Someone registers a radar blip, someone elsxe sees moving lights. They happen at the same time, so a person concludes they're the same thing. Possible? Cerrtainly. A UFO? Of course; by definition, it is a UFO. Is it proof of anything? No.

The fault lies not in the lack of evidence, but in the scientific establishments failure to examine it instead of auto debunking it or ignoring it.

Right, and if people would get serious about my beliefs instead of just debunking me out of hand, they'd realize that I'm the long-lost King of France. C'mon, Skadi, blaming the government for your lack of evidence is weak.

UFOs are very dangerous to many scientists theories.

And so was Darwin's ideas of Natural Selection Lyell's ideas about stratigraphy and Einstein's theory of Relativity and Wegener's theories of Continental Drift and Watson and Crick's ideas about replicating proteins and even Lister's theories of infection. All of those nutbar ideas threatened the reputations of powerful and influential scientists; yet, enough evidence came about so that even the scientists who didn't want to believe in them finally had to.

Maybe some day the UFOs-as-Spaceship Guys hypothesis will have evidence which will overcome the disbelief and skepticism of scientists. But complaining about the scientists not buying into your belief is'n't going to cut it.

You still need to come up with evidence, not complaints.

Whether or not you can "comfortably endorse" the Spaceship Guys assertion doesn't mean that scientists and engineers do, because they don't. If you're satisfied in your beliefs and don't care what the mainstream thinks, then you're good to go.

But you don't have enough evidence to convince 99 percent of the scientists and astronomers, and accusing them of bigotry and 'debunking' isn't going to change their minds -- or mine.