At a relatively early age I learned not to dismiss other peoples' experiences due to having my own.
The Green Light UFO
To this day I do not know what that was, and no one has presented a good explanation. I have always been an avid reader, and have always been fairly
open-minded. As an adolescent and teenager, I began to read books like
Chariots of the Gods (which oddly enough was included in my HS library),
The Book of the Damned, and other books about UFOs, cryptozoology, and unexplained phenomena.
I suppose I have been a "believer" of sorts since that first UFO encounter, and many things have pushed me towards the belief that something is out
there. However, I still don't claim to know - or be 100% convinced - what that something is.
Anyway, for what it's worth, here is my "logical" thought process on the matter. If you added up all the witnesses of UFOs, aliens, ghosts,
cryptids, and other anomalies, how many people would that be? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? So if none of it is real, what did they all experience?
Personally, it boils down to one of two possibilities:
1) A significant percentage of humans are psychotic, delusional, etc. and regularly experience hallucinations.
2) At least some of these experiences are real.
If 1) is true, then a significant number of human beings can't trust their senses and don't know what's real anyway. An uncomfortable hypothesis,
since by virtue of having had a few experiences, I'm one of them.
If 2) is true, then something is indeed out there, and no one seems to have a definitive answer for what that "something(s)" is.
Personally, I prefer 2) and I spend a fair portion of my leisure time pursuing stories and evidence, learning more about all types of "anomalies"
and trying to figure out what is out there. According to my current beliefs, there is quite a lot that we humans don't understand or know, and I
always like to be one that knows things that other people don't.
I don't like labels or stereotypes, but I guess I have to go to the believers' side of the fence if I'm not allowed to sit on it, and what I wrote
above is why.
Edit to actually answer your question:
To be 100% convinced, I would want to see a live alien, a body, a physical ship (or pieces of one) that was proven by analysis to be extraterrestrial,
a DNA sample from an alien, or an "officially" endorsed communication from aliens.
[edit on 29-8-2008 by Heike]