1966 Interview with Carl Sagan

reply to post by Orkojoker


no sorry, sagan looked into ufos quite a bit. He even held a conference inviting both ETH believers & skeptics to debate the evidence. He was invited onto a panel which looked at the best cases/evidence of et visitation. His conclusion was there is no good evidence to support that claim.

famous quote on ufos by sagan . " The reliable cases are uninteresting and the interesting cases are unreliable"

That quote still rings true 50 years later.

garbage

I love Sagan,
always have...
But now I understand a bit more about him than I used to..
and as brilliant as he was..
He still wasnt all he was cracked up to be.

I love what one of my favorite men ever once said~ lol

Did you Doctor John E. Mack was a paedophile?

It's true!

See what I did there? I put words around your favourite man and didn't substantiate them with evidence.

But you are a believer and so you'll take me at face value.

Whereas I call you a liar and a stirrer of dung until you can back up your claims against one of the greatest minds of our time. And even if you could back it up - cannabis? Really?? You know it's legal in a lot of places don't you??

But first prove it or accept that John E. Mack is a paedophile.

-m0r

I don't get how him smoking cannabis would be so bad anyway. Sherlock Holmes regularly smoked opium and injected heroin in the books yet was still a master detective.

Sorry if I broke a TOC but had to use an example.

reply to post by Ahmose


you look desperate trying denigrate someone like carl sagan. He's looked at alot of evidence, held conferences about ufo evidence he came to his own conclusions. Believers have had 4 decades to prove him wrong but havn't. Think about that

reply to post by Orkojoker


Well of course what he said can be argued, anyone who claims to have been abducted would disagree with what he said.

But he doesn't discount it entirely, he believes we may have been visited, just not very often.

His analogy to fishermen turning up to a remote island in the Indian ocean rings true to me as well.

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People
I find it interesting that this interview shows that even in 1966 the scientific community was of the belief that many stars had planets, and that it was possible -- and perhaps even probable -- that at least some of those planets had intelligent life.

That was the view of SOME of the scientific community then.

When considering Sagan's statements on UFOs, I think it has been borne in mind that he was in the vanguard of the scientific community in relation to SETI.

Several SETI scientists were keen to distinguish their work from the "UFO" lunatic fringe (in the same way that many UFO researchers seek to distinguish their work from certain elements within our field...).

All the best,

Isaac

Originally posted by yeti101
reply to post by Orkojoker

 

no sorry, sagan looked into ufos quite a bit. He even held a conference inviting both ETH believers & skeptics to debate the evidence. He was invited onto a panel which looked at the best cases/evidence of et visitation. His conclusion was there is no good evidence to support that claim.

famous quote on ufos by sagan . " The reliable cases are uninteresting and the interesting cases are unreliable"

That quote still rings true 50 years later.

edit on 9-3-2011 by yeti101 because: (no reason given)

No need to apologize for a difference of opinion. The Sagan quote you posted is actually an even better example of his relative ignorance of the phenomenon than the quote I named in my initial post. There certainly are many cases that are both interesting and reliable, and which should be admitted to be so by any reasonable person whose notions about UFOs are not totally preconceived. Sagan's sentiment does not ring true to anyone even moderately familiar with the writings of J. Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallee and James McDonald - each of whom has far more experience investigating UFO reports and studying the patterns therein than Carl Sagan had. I might go so far as to say the claim in the quote you posted is demonstrably false by what most people would consider commonly accepted standards. I give Sagan the benefit of the doubt when I say that he was relatively ignorant of the data, because to say that he WAS conversant with the facts as relayed by his three fellow scientists noted above and could still make such a statement implies something completely other than a simple lack of diligence on his part.

reply to post by Orkojoker

but sagan spoke at length to hynek about ufos several times. In the end hynek didnt even believe ufos were nuts & bolts craft occupied by E.Ts neither did jacques valle. I dont see how they support the belief thats prevelant in ufology.

Originally posted by yeti101
reply to post by Orkojoker

 

but sagan spoke at length to hynek about ufos several times. In the end hynek didnt even believe ufos were nuts & bolts craft occupied by E.Ts neither did jacques valle. I dont see how they support the belief thats prevelant in ufology.

edit on 9-3-2011 by yeti101 because: (no reason given)

Both Hynek and Vallee eventually did extend their speculations beyond the standard extraterrestrial hypothesis, but both agreed that something unknown and important lay behind the phenomena being reported. Sagan appears to have been of the opinion that there is nothing to the phenomenon but errors in perception and quasi-religious yearnings. The theories of Hynek and Vallee come much closer to something like the ETH than to Sagan's dismissive, and possibly disingenuous, attitude. The former felt that there was more to the phenomenon than meets the eye; the latter, less.

While I do consider much of Vallee's thought on UFOs to be the deepest and most articulate to be found in print, I find parts of his "five arguments against the ETH" to be rather fallacious. There certainly is reason to speculate that some UFO phenomena may represent something even stranger than alien visitation, but that does not justify ditching the idea altogether.

Originally posted by ZombieJesus
reply to post by Chadwickus

 

Thanks for the vid chad

I am work right now, so I gotta wait to watch the vid, but if it's coming from the mouth of Sagan, I'm sure it's good.

yea, maybe we can be taught about our reptilian inner selves later. NO THANKS. hogwash science and a hogwash scientist!

Originally posted by ZombieJesus
reply to post by Chadwickus

 

Thanks for the vid chad

I am work right now... but if it's coming from the mouth of Sagan, I'm sure it's good.

If it's coming from the mouth of Sagan, I'm sure it's reptilian.

reply to post by Orkojoker


all ufo evidence needs a leap of imagination to whatever conclusion you want to arrive at. Theres no good evidence. What has anyone found out about UFOs in the last 40 years? people see things they cant identify thats about it.

What is DARPA (Defense Advance Research Projects Agency) doing, having Cornel University do "deep space" studies for? Back then.

( I know the narrator said "ARPA" but that is DARPA's old name.) inventors.about.com...

I'm just askin is all.

Originally posted by yeti101
reply to post by Orkojoker

 

all ufo evidence needs a leap of imagination to whatever conclusion you want to arrive at. Theres no good evidence. What has anyone found out about UFOs in the last 40 years? people see things they cant identify thats about it.

Our knowledge of the world would be completely stagnant without a good deal of imagination, you're right. However, your characterization of the problem is simplistic in the extreme. People do see things they can't identify, but that is far from "it". The next fact to note is that a subset of the things people see are unidentifiable not only to the percipient, but also to people with the knowledge and expertise to apply a conventional explanation to the sighting were it possible. Furthermore, as more of these reports came to light and were investigated throughout the 1950s and 1960s, patterns began to emerge that were consistent worldwide in regard to the described appearance and behavior of the reported phenomena. This consistency, at least, needs to be, and has not been, satisfactorily explained to date.

reply to post by Chadwickus


If I'm not mistaken, he didn't say that it was beyond belief that extraterrestrials could have visited us, what he basically said was that the majority of UFO sightings and ET contacts are either fraudulent or just misunderstood phenomena, and a lot of UFO researchers agree with him.

"... it's much more reasonable if you want to speculate on the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, that there are very rare visits from extraterrestrials to the Earth. There's no evidence for this, i just say that's not implausible."

Originally posted by Torgo
reply to post by Chadwickus

 

If I'm not mistaken, he didn't say that it was beyond belief that extraterrestrials could have visited us, what he basically said was that the majority of UFO sightings and ET contacts are either fraudulent or just misunderstood phenomena, and a lot of UFO researchers agree with him.

In this, he would be absolutely correct. No serious person would deny that the majority of what people report as UFOs can be satisfactorily explained as conventional objects or natural phenomena. The real question is how can we explain those in the unknown category? Maybe someone here can enlighten us as to Sagan's explanation for this remaining percentage of reports.

Originally posted by Orkojoker
In this, he would be absolutely correct. No serious person would deny that the majority of what people report as UFOs can be satisfactorily explained as conventional objects or natural phenomena. The real question is how can we explain those in the unknown category? Maybe someone here can enlighten us as to Sagan's explanation for this remaining percentage of reports.

I'm not asking for an interpretation of a dead man's wording. Is there anyone here who can enlighten us to an explanation for the small amount of unexplainable sightings that apparently come from credible witnesses?

I realise the Japanese Premier's wife doesn't count - but there have been cases of unexplainable aerial phenomena from well trained and awarded leaders which warrant further investigation and could be of intelligent extra-terrestrial origin. This is why I am here.

But I require a plausible story to go along with a particular sighting rather than some specific piece of nonsense which is a blanket description for all cases and cannot be backed up or verified.

I am not against the idea of visitation from another species from outer space - I just need evidence to back up any of the cases where this remains a proper alternative theory.

As I said before; you want to stand with complex tales of why these beings travel huge distances then fine. But you stand laughed at by any person reasonable of clear thinking.

-m0r

I'm still in the camp of Sagan being in with the secret-keepers. He certainly seemed to move in the right circles, and know the right people that would fit with the idea. Beyond that, just a gut feeling that he doesn't believe the things he says.