People are ready for a change, but my personal opinion is that we need to take the foot off the gas instead of gunning it like we have. I feel society in the US is really a mix of illusions where people are hollow on the inside. I sincerely hope that if the aliens showed up they would be here to grant the power of the spirit more than the power of space travel.

I think alien revelation is something that would impact our world more than we can imagine. People would still need to eat and sleep and be entertained...but how would you feel knowing that the "ETs" could do to you whatever they wanted and no one could stop them? They could take your kids, your parents, your lover...they could say that mafufacturing is killing the Earth so all jobs related to that must be stopped, cars are to be outlawed, Muslims should own California, Catholics are to be killed. Now that may seem far fetched and illogical, but think of the more subtle ways that a superior power could manipulate our world. I think some people in power in our government have already thought this out and decided there is little benefit in exposing a "possible threat" that can't be defeated on a world and expect everything to be normal the next day. Too risky.

Of course if the aliens want to open up their society to us and their technology, go very slow, and allow us uninhibited travel to verify their motives...then we may have a deal. To me it's all up to the aliens not the government.

Thanks for your time Mr. Ambassador!

[edit on 7-14-2004 by Boogie]

Considering that we still kill other humans for nothing more than minor ethnic differences and differences of beliefs (anybody remember ruwanda somalia bosnia?) if I was an alien I wouldn't show myself.
However the discussion of "full disclosure" presupposes at least two unproven suppositions.
1) Aliens are visiting the earth
2) the government knows/has proof

The fact is even after more than 50 years there is still no hard evidence of alien visitation.

Bear with me here as this is my very first real post here....
A lot of good thought in this thread. As to the government telling us the truth!? Could you imagine the upheavel in the religious community? The general public? Remember the part in "Men In Black"

A person is smart; people are dumb panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

there would be people killing themselves, quiting there jobs, running amuck like blind scared cattle...it's very sad, but also true. Our social structure would suffer.

Yeah I remember that part in MIB. Just watch the first MIB (the second just wasn't as good) read a book like Area 51 (a pretty good fiction novel). Ok heres a scinerio for everybody, you know a 15 year old girl as a friend or parent or what ever. Lets say shes going on a date with some guy that she always had a crush on. Shes all ready but you notice a large zit on her forhead. But she doesn't know. Know what happens if you tell her about that zit. She would most likely panic and or call of the date. And then its one of those sad situations were if you didn't tell her the date would have been the best night of her life.
Ok the scenrio is flawed but you get the idea. I figure the smart, calm and collected people should know but the majority of society who are idiots should just be left to their own lives ruling over their magical kingdom in the TV.

You know what the funny thing is about the whole alien debate, and trust me I am on the fence but I have my moments of belief and denial. Is that what is the REAL percentage of the total population in the world that has SEEN with their own eyes something that would be considered a UFO or an EBE that can not be explained by any other means?

I mean really come on, I am a total UFO,Alien logically must exist somewhere out there type person. But I have yet to really experience something that without a doubt would be considered an extra-terrestrial event. Sure I could make up all sorts of stuff, from channelling an alien society (Nancy/Zeta) to photochopping some obscure photo as a hoax about some event that happened in the 30's or 40's passed down to me by my grandfather on his deathbed. To the fabrication of a story that is impossible to verify due to the fact that my "sources" are all dead. I could say that I say a fancy shiny sports model UFO that the goverment "recovered" from the aliens and make up fanciful stories about how it operates out of a base that simply does not exist. Or I could come up with a very chilling horror story about Starship troopers battling a fierce alien enemy that resulted in many deaths, yet none of the families have come forward about there loved ones being unaccounted for, let alone a whole society of alien beings numbering in the thousand that exist in a multi billion dollar secret facility under the ground in the middle of the New Mexico desert that must live their without any interaction by humans and without any resulting "leaks" and photos of this massive alien society on earth.

Lets face it, the number of REAL tangible, unexplained sightings is so few that you could probably count them all on two hands. And lets say we just take into account starting around 1939 to the present and the billions of people that have lived on this planet over the millions of square miles of populated land and you would think that ANY hostile action by such few actual, observed "crafts" that they would simply be outnumbered and destroyed by the population on this planet.

So lets say there really was a crash of an Alien UFO in Roswel and lets assume that a badly mangled EBE body was recovered or many more then one. But they were all dead and since that time we have had no other interaction, no contact, no reverse engineering, considering the craft was pretty much destroyed, no advanced technology gleaned from the craft or EBE's. What do you think the goverments option would be ?

Just say to the public, gee look what we found, our scientists have attempt to reconstruct the craft but unfortuantly it is made of materials that we are unable to reproduce on earth. The biological entities that we recovered were dead and are currently in a containment facility BUT we have no idea where they came from, how long they have been here and if anyone "else" knows they are missing. So for the next 60 years or so, YOU the public are just going to have to sit around in anticipation that, maybe tomorrow, more of them will arrive, or maybe not. Maybe they were alone and supposed to report back somewhere but got lost and now wherever they came from has just written them off as lost to the universe and our lonely planet will continue to exist in this corner of our solar system, alone until some fateful day that we are able to make contact ourselves with another inhabited planet.

What do you think the population of the world would do ??? Would they all want the "alien corpses" to go on the road as some sort of freak show so that everyone can see for themselves what an alien looks like? If "they" exist, then is there other aliens that might be different from them as well ?? On other planets that may not even know that "they" exist ?

The questions would become an endless paradox that would never be fully explained because according to man's current technological/ universal knowledge we will never be able to account for the true extent of life in the universe, we will always be stuck in the I wonder whats out there mode.

So in conclusion to help keep mankinds thought focused on the day to day activities in his or hers life, aliens must remain a plausible but never confirmed "idea" until such time that a situation presents itself that will be undeniable about the existence of both UFO's and of extra-terrestrial, alien civilizations.

That is why the "goverment" does not disclose what it knows, because ultimately right now, it does not know what it knows. It only has a small tid bit of information but still has many questions that remained unanswered even almost 60 years later after REAL tangible evidence of an "alien" thing was discovered. (That is, IF you believe Roswel was a REAL event)

But I have yet to really experience something that without a doubt would be considered an extra-terrestrial event.

And that's why you're still on the fence....

I wish that everyone could have seen what I did when I was 9....then you wouldn't even question it, hehe.... And the secret would be no more...

I wish that I could have a sighting like that again, but alas, the odds are likely against it... At least it was far better than just an anomalous site in the sky (the full account is on a thread here somewhere)...