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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."

203 of 1,267 comments (clear)

  1. Bombula by Bombula · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    A-Bomb
    1. Re:Bombula by QuantumG · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I can't believe the civilization as advanced as ours is full of people who can't even program a computer. It's just odd.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    2. Re:Bombula by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Bombula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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?

    4. Re:Bombula by Smidge204 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Perhaps you are overestimating just how advanced our "civilization" is...

      It would not be terribly strange, for example, for someone who bolts tires to cars on an assembly line his entire life to not know much about computer programming.

      However, 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.

      Unless they were on the "B" Ark...
      =Smidge=

    5. Re:Bombula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not everyone who buys a car is smart enough to design one. Maybe they're just hick aliens crashing their society's equivalent of a mass-market SUV into some boring planet in the middle of nowhere.

    6. Re:Bombula by Fozzyuw · · Score: 5, Funny

      As much as I want to believe aliens are among us, it just doesn't make sense that [they] would crash in New Mexico.

      No kidding. New Mexico is soooo, yesterday. Kansas is where anybody who's anybody crashes.

      --
      "The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
    7. Re:Bombula by Walt+Dismal · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Accounts at the time noted there had been a massive thunder and lightning storm. Maybe they took a really big lightning hit. My guess is that what went down was only a small kind of landing craft, not the big boy. Probably couldn't take a massive lightning strike.

      And given the huge number of people deployed to cover many acres looking to retrieve SMALL debris, no weather balloon or Russian nuke detector payload would have justified such effort. And several local people did find and see unusual materials, notably thin yet very strong metallic foil. That was not a technology of the time. Unless we had some form of stiff Mylar, but why aluminize it for a 1947 balloon? And we didn't really have any vacuum-deposition for plastic films technology back then. Remember, plastics technology of the time was limited to Bakelite and other hard chunky plastics, not thin films; the plastics revolution had not yet occurred. Cellophane maybe but nothing better.

      And in particular, why would they have rushed to gather a large amount of dry ice, as a local coroner noted occurred, unless there was something likely to chemically or biologically degrade?

      As for the chances of aliens being humanoid in appearance close to zero, I refute that simply by pointing to Dick Cheney.

    8. Re:Bombula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    9. Re:Bombula by Jace+of+Fuse! · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes, but it wouldn't be hard to believe our military would shoot down an unidentified flying egg no matter how advanced or rare it's occupants might be.

      Not that I'm saying... uhm... yeah.

      --

      "Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"

      Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
    10. Re:Bombula by g0dsp33d · · Score: 2, Funny

      I can't believe the civilization as advanced as ours is full of people who can't even program a computer. It's just odd.

      Isn't ours? Don't they have similar testimonies about the Philadelphia project, ghosts, dragons, dinosaurs, faeries, unicorns, and women IT professionals? (and I'm sure some will read this, so its just a joke, don't get mad... my office is all guys :(... )
      --
      lol: You see no door there!
    11. Re:Bombula by martin-boundary · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, but think again: did you know that Dick Cheney just appeared one day in 1941 out of nowhere? The day before, nobody had heard of him, and then, poof! there he was. And ever since, he seems to appear for a while and disappear without a trace for long periods. Coincidence? I reserve judgement.

    12. Re:Bombula by Balthisar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't want to give credence to this, but for the sake of logic, I've got to say: maybe the crew didn't navigate four trillion miles. Consider that Navy aircraft carrier pilots have no idea how to navigate an aircraft carrier from Hawaii to the sea of Japan, but yet you're saying that it's inconceivable that a crashed F-14 pilot could pilot such a craft. I have to think that even an advanced society has some type of delegation of responsibilities that would permit a craft to crash on the Earth. 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. ;-)

      --
      --Jim (me)
    13. Re:Bombula by truthsearch · · Score: 2, Interesting

      However, 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.

      It's likely that 99.999999+% of that distance was interstellar space, not in any planet's atmosphere or near any large object's gravity. It's also most likely it was on autopilot most of the time.

      Of course, it's also unlikely they'd bother traveling that far and not prepare for such flight. But how easy could it be to fly an egg?

    14. Re:Bombula by g0dsp33d · · Score: 2, Funny

      You totally misspelled half of that post. :-p

      --
      lol: You see no door there!
    15. Re:Bombula by ushering05401 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Hate to break it to you, but birds have four limbs and often deploy all four to establish balance. You may think wings are only for flight, but birds use them for many things including maintaining balance while repositioning in trees, regaining balance on the ground while in windy conditions, etc..

      I am not agreeing with the GP, but as a birdwatcher I can tell you that they use their wings regularly to maintain balance.

      Animals that stand erect with only two dominant limbs (weight bearing) almost either have stabilizer limbs like wings or balancing limbs like significantly sized tails.

      Regards.

    16. Re:Bombula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
      Yeah, I don't think they are quite as advanced as we make them out to be. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere online that they decoded the final transmission of the spacecraft.

      It was:

      You win again, gravity!
    17. Re:Bombula by rolfwind · · Score: 2, Insightful
      I don't really believe in Roswell or spend too much time thinking about it as it is a waste of time but:

      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.
      Shit happens. It didn't make sense that Italy would get bogged down in backwards Ethiopia in WW2, that the English would lose a few battles to Zulus with spears, or that with our technology we can't conquer Iraq. Weirder things have happened.

      Technology can break down. Maybe rarer as the farther one advances, but I still bet there are mishaps.

      And the chances of aliens being humanoid in appearance are close to zero.
      We have no way of knowing this unless we meet aliens. Perhaps being humanoid has certain advantages in handling machinery and setting off an industrial revulotion. Afterall, scientists love pointing out our opposable thumbs in relation to most other animals as being an advantage to using tools.

      I have problems with the whole UFO thing, mostly that they hide from us seems to be more of a contrived book plot than anything, but some issues are nonissues. Until aliens do come and reveal themselves or something like SETI gets results, it's a waste of time obsessing over the 1,000,000s of conspiracies that exist.
    18. Re:Bombula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Even more amazing is that in such an advanced society as ours someone could think that tires are bolted to cars.

    19. Re:Bombula by shaitand · · Score: 3, Interesting

      '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.

    20. Re:Bombula by adona1 · · Score: 2, Funny

      It's also possible that they implanted Furon DNA in our genes thousands of years ago ;)

      --
      Between the falling angel and the rising ape
    21. Re:Bombula by ozmanjusri · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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.

      I doubt it was the flight conditions.

      It's far more likely they navigated all those trillions of kilometres, then sent down what to them was a clearly unarmed, unarmored lander that demonstrated they were peaceful types hoping to say hello to the locals. When they got near the touchy military types at Roswell, their lander copped an unexpected sidewinder up the clacker.

      The military then covered up the fact that they'd screwed humanity's chances of ever having friendly chats with some people who could solve the problem of interstellar space travel, cure cancer, save the whales and promote world peace.

      Let's face it, if the US military had scored any advanced alien tech, they wouldn't have kept it secret. They'd have used against someone by now.

      --
      "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
    22. Re:Bombula by SageMusings · · Score: 5, Funny

      And let's not forget the debt we owe them for the anal probes that today's proctology enjoys. Most former alien abductees will testify to the genius of their probes.

      --
      -- Posted from my parent's basement
    23. Re:Bombula by Nazlfrag · · Score: 3, Funny

      "But how did you get there in the first place then?"

      "Easy, I got a lift with a teaser."

      "A teaser?"

      "Yeah."

      "Er, what is..."

      "A teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets which haven't made interstellar contact yet and buzz them."

      "Buzz them?" Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him.

      "Yeah", said Ford, "they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor soul whom no one's ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae on their heads and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really."

    24. Re:Bombula by LWATCDR · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yea it actually is.
      1. At this time the P-80 shooting star was the top of the line fighter the US had. It would have a very hard time shooting down a 737 much less a space craft of any type.
      2. The US air defense network at that time was almost none existent.
      3. SAM sites? The US didn't have them yet.

      Also the US doesn't really have a history of shooting down aircraft over our air space.
      If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost you will see that the US really isn't that trigger happy.

      You don't know many people in our military do you?

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    25. Re:Bombula by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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;
    26. Re:Bombula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Posting as AC for obvious reasons.

      I for one agree that alien anal probes are perhaps the most comfortable anal probe that I have ever experienced. The aliens really take pride in their probing. This is nothing at all like the TSA, Customs, or the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The aliens want to make sure that you enjoy the experience (since many of them have been probed by those above)! As a proud customer of alien anal probing I would say that if I had to chose to be probed again I would select the aliens anal probes before any US governmental agency anal probes. Why have an inferior probe when you could have the best?

      As for a recommendation, if you are in the SF area ask for Gertrude No Lube. They'll know who I'm talking about.

    27. Re:Bombula by click2005 · · Score: 5, Funny

      But how easy could it be to fly an egg?

      Mork was a moron and he could fly one just fine.

      --
      I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
    28. Re:Bombula by bladesjester · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I have problems with the whole UFO thing, mostly that they hide from us seems to be more of a contrived book plot than anything

      IF they exist, why would it be so hard to believe that they'd stay hidden while studying us? Biologists do it to animals all the time when they want to study them without affecting their behavior. Heck, even a lot of hunters conceal themselves from their prey through the use of things like blinds that blend into the environment.

      --
      Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
    29. Re:Bombula by brian0918 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "4. The human-like form is somewhat universal after all."

      It's only universal among the uncreative minds of most scifi authors. Even on earth the diversity is so great that you wouldn't consider birds/insects/slugs to be "human-like forms" but even they have most of the parts (eye, head, nose, ears) in approximately the same relative locations. The chances of this occurring on another planet seem remote.

    30. Re:Bombula by tomhudson · · Score: 4, Funny

      "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. ;-)"

      Darn it Jim, that WAS our eugenics program!

    31. Re:Bombula by TapeCutter · · Score: 5, Funny

      "When they got near the touchy military types at Roswell, their lander copped an unexpected sidewinder up the clacker."

      Definitely "unexpected" since sidewinder's had not been invented.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    32. Re:Bombula by jcr · · Score: 2, Informative

      We are "humanoid" because it's an efficient shape to have.

      Not exactly. Our shape has proven to have greater survival value than the shape of our ancestors. That doesn't mean that it's optimal, or even particularly good.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    33. Re:Bombula by tylernt · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, it all boils down to who gets laid the most before dying.
      Doesn't bode well for /.ers, I'm afraid.
      --
      DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
    34. Re:Bombula by NMerriam · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You sound like the type of person that thinks that evolution is random. Evolution is actually the opposite of that.


      Well, mutation is random. Survival of those mutations is not. But the idea that primate forms are "ideal" simply because we happened to be the result of evolution ignores that while we survived, the individual physical traits chosen from were random. There were probably far superior (but equally random) options that just never happened to pop up in the right place at the right time.
      --
      Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
    35. Re:Bombula by Dirtside · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The chances of this occurring on another planet seem remote.

      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
    36. Re:Bombula by Planesdragon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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 I can't believe that a civilization advanced enough to go to the moon could crash an automobile on their own planet.

      I can't believe a civilization that can split the atom could burn all their fossil fuel.

      I can't believe a civilization advanced enough to circumnavigate the globe could still practice slavery.

      You're a screwball, you know that? Space travel is likely dangerous, or if not dangerous then so frequent that accidents still happen.
    37. Re:Bombula by Amiga+Trombone · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's only universal among the uncreative minds of most scifi authors. Even on earth the diversity is so great that you wouldn't consider birds/insects/slugs to be "human-like forms" but even they have most of the parts (eye, head, nose, ears) in approximately the same relative locations. The chances of this occurring on another planet seem remote.

      Yes, but then again consider sharks and dolphins. Very similar in appearance, even though one is a mammal and one is a fish. Frequently they're mistaken for one another even thought they aren't remotely related.

    38. Re:Bombula by lawpoop · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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
    39. Re:Bombula by Planesdragon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That makes no sense at all, when at least 99.9% of the species on Earth (a very "earth-like" planet) are not humanoid!

      100% of the sentient ones are. And, above a certain size, flying creatures are all "bird shaped."

      Your point?

    40. Re:Bombula by Tatarize · · Score: 5, Funny

      What part of a signed and sealed affidavit on a death bed did you not understand? Not only does nobody ever lie on their death bed, he signed an affidavit (that you aren't allowed to see) and if he lied he can be prosecuted to the full extent of the law (considering he's dead this involves not being prosecuted at all).

      I mean, would you disbelieve the guy who on his deathbed said that he actually faked those Loch Ness pictures? How about the guy who after he died had his family expose how exactly he faked those nice big foot pictures and tracks?

      Well, I knew this guy and have a signed and sealed affidavit from him that their signed and sealed affidavit was acquired by threatening his family.

      --

      It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
    41. Re:Bombula by macdaddy357 · · Score: 5, Funny

      An egg shape craft? If they were shot down, it must have gone something like this... Shazbat! we've been shot. We're going down. They are gathering all around the ship. They may want to kill us! Perhaps a friendly greeting will appease them. Greetings! I am Mork from Ork. Nanu Nanu.

      --
      How ya like dat?
    42. Re:Bombula by lawpoop · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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
    43. Re:Bombula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      However, 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.

      Let me illustrate something:
      However, it would be kinda strange for an individual or crew capable of navigating an air craft around the world to not know how to fly a plane well enough to avoid crashing.
      And yet planes do crash from time to time.

      If you want another:
      However, it would be kinda strange for an individual or crew familiar with driving an hour or more a day to not know how to drive a car well enough to avoid crashing.
      Many people who commute at least half an hour to work each day get in auto ascendents.

      Finally:
      However, it would be kinda strange for an individual or crew capable of operating a high altitude balloon keeping it aloft for months to not know how to manage it well enough to avoid crashing.
      So clearly it can't be a weather balloon.

      I'm not saying anything one way or the other about what may have happened, I'm just pointing out that they could have crashed if there was a they.

    44. Re:Bombula by bladesjester · · Score: 3, Funny

      I've made a similar comment in the past.

      The response I usually get is like the one above you that "oh, those are just dumb animals."

      I find that kind of amusing considering how many extremely intelligent animals, and painfully stupid people I have known.

      As an example, the cat that, as I type, is laying behind me asleep learned how to lock the front door of the house I used to live in. In fact, he made a habit of locking the door on me while I was outside if I ticked him off. It got to the point where I took my keys with me even if I was only going out to get the mail.

      --
      Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
    45. Re:Bombula by Raideen · · Score: 2, Funny

      Kansas is where anybody who's anybody crashes. It was good enough for the son of Jor-El.
    46. Re:Bombula by Dracos · · Score: 2, Insightful

      or that with our technology we can't conquer Iraq

      We're not in Iraq to conquer it. Iraq is a money laundering scheme.

      Taxpayers > government > private contractor corporations.

    47. Re:Bombula by jd · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Last I looked, space had fewer mountains. Before the advent of the artificial horizon (which would be a meaningless thing to have in deep space), pilots were forever crashing into lakes, snowy hilltops, etc. There's a canal in Europe that is packed full of World War II aircraft who mistook it for a runway or a road for emergency landings. The wrecks have lowered landing gear and seem to have largely made smooth but very unexpected and probably quite fatal splashdowns.

      Besides, USAF pilots can fly for tens of thousands of miles but one still crashed and died in Oregon recently. I can't remember if it was last year's airshow or the one before in Hillsboro, OR, that a veteran pilot in a veteran aircraft in better-than-new condition ploughed into the ground at high speed.

      Does this mean that the Roswell incident occurred? No. It is possible through the use of mathematics to prove that very long-range manned interstellar flight requires conflicting constraints, that no matter how good the technology of some pictured civilization, it will never be able to achieve such a goal. I believe such distances may be crossable, but they will never be crossed in that specific way. Because I believe the distances crossable, I believe that aliens could potentially visit Earth. Because I believe the method often described requires certain conditions to be simultaneously true and false, I do not believe that the observations attributed to aliens could possibly be so.

      Personally, my biggest interest in the question is not whether we have been visited, but whether we can draw inspiration and imagination enough from the claims for us to go there. NASA had a 50 Km solar sail design over two decades ago that, had it been built at that time, would have reached Alpha Centauri and returned with a rock or ice sample. (It had a predicted top speed of a quarter of the speed of light at the midway point. Allowing for acceleration/deceleration time, it would have been approaching Earth about now.)

      It was never built. The celebration of Columbus' voyage in the early 90s - by having a mini solar sail race - also never happened. The plans put forward for NASA in the present day lack, well, everything. Only now are people researching the effects of prolonged isolation on humans - long after the optimal point of launching a Mars mission. Because of cost? lluB. It costs virtually nothing to lock someone away in an isolation chamber. The CIA apparently has hundreds they're not using, and the CDC has many such chambers for isolating people with deadly, contageous diseases. You're going to be paying the person's salary anyway.

      If the Roswell story gets people fired up about space, gets people motivated to find some "get up and go" that hasn't already got up and gone, then I don't care if it's real, fake or purple. If it achieves for society what society won't achieve for itself, then by all means declare it true.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    48. Re:Bombula by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Funny

      Wow, that's the first time I've ever seen capitalism applied to justify the appearance of aliens.

      Well done.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    49. Re:Bombula by tsa · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think the brain is in a separate, moveable part of the body because the nerves that send the pictures from the eyes to the brain can only be so long. A LOT of data is needed to see, and nerves are not very fast in transporting data, so you need your eyes close to the brain. And of course it's very handy to be able to move your eyes around without having to move your whole body around. Hence the configuration we see in almost all animals on earth. This is the reason why Larry Niven's Pierson's Puppeteer is unlikely to really exist on a planet like ours.

      --

      -- Cheers!

    50. Re:Bombula by feepness · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes, but it wouldn't be hard to believe our military would shoot down an unidentified flying egg no matter how advanced or rare it's occupants might be.

      You know, I actually can't really complain about them shooting it down two years after the world just finished blowing the crap out of each other and nuclear weapons made their first appearance.

      It seems anyone smart enough to fly a few bazillion miles would also be smart enough to reconnoiter a less advanced (but still dangerous) civilization.

    51. Re:Bombula by brit74 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Well, gee, you use a lot of fancy words and "logic", but how do you explain Kang and Kodos, Mr. Smartypants? pwned!

    52. Re:Bombula by nametaken · · Score: 5, Funny

      You know what else I find totally unbelievable? That a civilization so advanced that it could send an orbiter all the way to other planets would manage to crash it when it got there... and over something as retarded as metric vs. standard. :)

    53. Re:Bombula by kestasjk · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Trillions of kilometers? That's about 1/10th of a light year, you need at least 8 light years for interstellar travel (and we'd be pretty amazingly lucky to have intelligent life so close to us).

      Try "gajillion bazillion manyillian kilometers". Interstellar space travel is pretty ridiculous, and not just because we can't think of a technology that could do it, but because a technology that could do it and not take millenniums would be impossible.
      Most of all why would they bother coming all this way? If they did want to travel so far just to say "hello, what's up?" why not do it via radio? This would be much faster and easier. If they wanted to invade or take over, assuming our planet is hospitable to them, wouldn't they send more than an "egg"?

      (And why do the accounts of these interstellar travelers involve anal probes, corn, barn dances and farm animals?)

      --
      // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
    54. Re:Bombula by vandan · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The thing is ... you're completely wrong. It was a Christian country who invaded Iraq and killed 1,000,000 people since 2003. The same goes for any example you might be able to drag out of your half-addled brain ... Christian atrocities are echoed with a far smaller response from the Muslim world. If this were not the case, there would be no New York left AT ALL.

    55. Re:Bombula by Fred+Ferrigno · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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. Apparently you haven't heard about the octopus that can open jars. Remember that even for us humans, we have these things called "tools" which enable us to manipulate objects in ways that our natural appendages cannot. In fact, the introduction of these "tools" was crucial for our development as a species. It even seems likely that our fine motor control actually evolved as a result of the tools we used, rather than the other way around.
    56. Re:Bombula by ozmanjusri · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Well, transistors were "invented" 6 months after the "crash" at Roswell

      Yeah, but point-contact diodes had been in use since the '20s. Adding a third wire isn't that big a conceptual jump, and the main reason it didn't happen sooner was that triodes were already doing the job.

      --
      "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
    57. Re:Bombula by zCyl · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Our shape has proven to have greater survival value than the shape of our ancestors.

      Perhaps more precisely, the shapes of your ancestors had greater survival values than some of your more distant cousins.

      Consider this perspective: Every single one of your ancestors, all the way back to single-celled organisms, survived long enough to procreate successfully.
    58. Re:Bombula by BlueStraggler · · Score: 4, Insightful

      2. They are us from the future.

      I'm thinking it's us from the past. Considering that Homo Sapiens Sapiens is at least 50,000 years old, and recorded history about 5,000, there's been plenty of time for us to develop a few spacefaring civilizations. If you allow for some alternate branches of the homonid family you have a lot more time than that. You'd expect them to swing past the old farm from time to time to see what, if anything, has changed.

      On the other hand, who's to say they're from space at all? Even if the stories are 100% true, there's not a shred of evidence to show that they're from space. We've never seen spacecraft, only aircraft. Is space alien really more plausible than some kind of technologically superior earthling who can live undetected (almost) on the same planet as us?

    59. Re:Bombula by E++99 · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.


      Or maybe that's why the crashed.
      "Turn the egg! Turn the egg!"
      "I can't, I don't have any hands!!!"
      "AHHHHHHHHH!!!!"
    60. Re:Bombula by __aajfby9338 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The "wheel" vs. "tire" terminology point is correct, but "no bolts required" is still not quite right.

      Although they're much less common than one-piece wheels, many trucks use 2-piece wheels which have two halves that bolt together around the tire. This allows tires to be changed without needing to stretch the tire over the rim with tire irons. I have a military-surplus HMMWV which has such wheels, and I've changed the tires on them myself.

      Automobile and light truck tires are usually mounted and dismounted with tire-changing machines these days, but tires on commercial trucks and industrial machines are still commonly changed the old-fashioned way with tire irons and a tire hammer. 2-piece rims (whether bolt-together, split rim, split locking ring, etc.) can make that job easier, especially if the tire needs to be changed in the field. I speak from personal experience here. ;-)

    61. Re:Bombula by Max+Littlemore · · Score: 4, Funny

      Crypto!! You're not supposed to be posting on Slashdot. Get back to the invasion site immediately!

      --
      I don't therefore I'm not.
    62. Re:Bombula by murple · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost

      And how many soviet recon aircraft flew over US territory? (This is a serious question, I never heard about such incidents.)

    63. Re:Bombula by Torvaun · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That was my first thought on seeing this headline. If on my deathbed, I have the opportunity to fuck around with the minds of half as many people he just did, I would do so, and die a happy man.

      --
      I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
    64. Re:Bombula by TheNetDevil · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You mean metric vs imperial, right? :)

    65. Re:Bombula by mrbooze · · Score: 2, Funny

      You forget that in the Star Trek case, the Federation has "eliminated poverty". They don't even have money any more. (Although that one was a little hard for the writers to remember all the time.)

      By "eliminated poverty" I always took that to mean "Fed all the poor people into the biomass supply for the replicators."

    66. Re:Bombula by chthon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    67. Re:Bombula by misleb · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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 had read that symmetry is not so much a matter of random luck... but a matter of information efficiency. That is, it is much more efficient/quicker (and therefore more likely to happen) to just repeat existing patterns than to evolve a unique structures for each "side" of the organism.

      -matthew
      --
      "THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
    68. Re:Bombula by Genda · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    69. Re:Bombula by pugugly · · Score: 5, Funny

      The same reason *my* brain isn't stuck into my abdominal cavity where I keep all my other importan stuff - My brain is about 1% of my weight, but produces about 20% of my body heat.

      That's why I store my brains in a lower, dangling organ, where they can cool easily - that's the way most of us Bipedal aliens do it. -

      Pug

      --
      An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
    70. Re:Bombula by st0nes · · Score: 2, Funny

      Was it a free-range egg?

      --
      Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
    71. Re:Bombula by E++99 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Trillions of kilometers? That's about 1/10th of a light year, you need at least 8 light years for interstellar travel (and we'd be pretty amazingly lucky to have intelligent life so close to us).

      Try "gajillion bazillion manyillian kilometers". Interstellar space travel is pretty ridiculous, and not just because we can't think of a technology that could do it, but because a technology that could do it and not take millenniums would be impossible.
      Most of all why would they bother coming all this way? If they did want to travel so far just to say "hello, what's up?" why not do it via radio? This would be much faster and easier.


      Actually travelling can be much faster than radio. Special relativity limits communication between fixed parties to the speed of light, because it limits observed travel to the speed of light. Contrary to popular opinion, it does not limit subject travel to any speed whatsoever. While the traveller will never "technically" see his destination approaching with a velocity faster than the speed of light, he will see the distance to is destination relativistically contracting as his speed increases.

      Therefore, in a space craft that could accelerate and 1g for half the trip, then decelerate at 1 g for half the trip, Special Relativity predicts you would reach the center of the galaxy in 20 years, covering a distance of (from earth perspective) 30 thousand light years. From earth perspective, our max speed was 0.999999999 c and it took us hundreds of thousands of years to get there. Our perceived speed at any instant was never any faster, but because of the changing length contraction, at journey's end, our perceived distance travelled over time was 1500*c.

      These are the lengths of time it would take to travel to the following places using the 1g acceleration/deceleration method. (From http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/S R/rocket.html)

      4.3 ly nearest star ==> 3.6 years
      27 ly Vega ==> 6.6 years
      30,000 ly Center of our galaxy ==> 20 years
      2,000,000 ly Andromeda galaxy ==> 28 years
      n ly ==> 1.94 arccosh (n/1.94 + 1) years

      As an added bonus, if you made the trip to Andromeda, you'd get observe 2 million years of galaxy evolution over your 28 year trip.
    72. Re:Bombula by pugugly · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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
    73. Re:Bombula by st0nes · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If Paris is acting she deserves an Oscar. I doubt that she is, though; she really is as thick as two short planks.

      --
      Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
    74. Re:Bombula by Rebelgecko · · Score: 3, Funny

      You seem to have misinterpreted him. The GP wasn't referring to a sidewinder missile, he means that aliens were attacked by flying snakes . And I don't know about you, but I've had ENOUGH of the motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking flying saucer.

      --
      CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
    75. Re:Bombula by Squalish · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And the evolution of those eyes are determined by Environment * Ease of Evolution * Chance

      We're 10x as sensitive to green as to red at least partially because when that photosensitive pigment evolved, our ancestors were forest dwellers (this happened relatively recently, only occurring in apes and certain monkeys). Our spectral peaks don't cover even a single power of two between them because it's harder to focus different wavelengths using the same lense. And the spectral territory we happened upon is where a high proportion of visible light occurs, because with a strong ozone layer and long lifespans(most pigments can't hold up to ionizing radiation), there's not much point trying to see in bloody UVA. The sky is blue, blood is red, and the plants are green-yellow-brown. These things needed to be fit into an omnivorous diurnal mammal, though our 'red' receptor is much less sensitive, because it peaks over the yellow portion in most people(Evolutionary advantage to resolving yellow grass and camo > evolutionary advantage to resolving blood).

      Interestingly, color sensitivity is a highly polymorphic trait. It's possible that this is advantageous in itself, advantageous enough that carriers can deal with the occasionally colorblind result in exchange for the benefit - a population can easily shift environments entirely in only a few generations and retain excellent vision.

      --
      People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
    76. Re:Bombula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost you will see that the US really isn't that trigger happy...
      I don't think Soviets had planes that could do recon missions over the States at the time, or at any time, for that matter. US is basically an island nation, or an island-dominating nation, very well isolated and fortified. There is no country in the world that could dream of successfully invading and occupying it, neither in recent past nor in foreseeable future. When you compare armed forces of Soviets to that of US, you'll see large distinction in that US Navy is on par or dominant over US Army, while Soviets had their accent put on army, dwarfing their navy in comparison (well, admitted, being constrained onto landlocked and polar seas kind of nullifies usefulness of a navy). It is possible and useful to send planes to fly by borders, or shortly fly over parts of Russia, when you have bases in surrounding allied countries. However, reconnaissance flight over US is a sure suicide mission.

      We can only win battles against small third-world countries like Afghanistan, and most of the people we kill there are civilians...
      Yeah, like... Third Reich, Japanese empire, North Korean + Chinese armed forces... Iraq was considerable adversary in first Gulf war and you know, Afghanistan is not exactly a small country...
    77. Re:Bombula by JoeKilner · · Score: 5, Funny
      Who is to say that _we_ shot it down?
      Weren't there nine of these things seen and then only one on the ground?
      If any of this is true (which, of course, it isn't) then the most credible conclusions are:
      • The aliens look human therefore they are human.
      • They are on earth therefore they came from earth.
      • Their technology is more advanced than ours therefore the crash was an accident or caused by someone of sufficiently advanced technology.
      So we have some theories:
      • At some point far in the future our descendents try out time travel and something goes wrong with one of the time travelling craft (they were probably visiting roswell to see if an alien really was found there - ah, the irony...)
      • Humanity in a parallel dimension was experimenting with cross dimensional travel and it went wrong.
      • At some point in the past a super intelligent branch of humanity separated from the rest of us and has been living in secret along side us for a while now. They were pissing around buzzing some country-folk and something wet wrong. Maybe a teenager stole the keys to their dad's flying-egg-car?
      • Any of the above except it was an escape attempt by some dissident / terrorist / freedom-fighter / messiah / anti-christ / "crack commando unit sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit" and they were shot down by pursuing craft.
      Anythying else is just pure speculation and fantasy.
    78. Re:Bombula by SEE · · Score: 3, Informative

      Not remotely related? They're both descended from the jawed fish that was the prototype for infraphylum Gnathostomata in subphylum Vertebra in phylum Chordata, an ancestor that provided both with the same basic structure (skull, jaw, spinal column, pairs of limbs) and over 80% common DNA.

    79. Re:Bombula by Solandri · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost
      And how many soviet recon aircraft flew over US territory? (This is a serious question, I never heard about such incidents.)
      I don't think there were many into U.S. territory. They did happen though (bottom of page 8). Most of the incursions were prolly into Canadian airspace. And a favorite Soviet flight path was from the Arctic down to Cuba, right along the U.S. coast (but in International waters).

      I would agree though that the number of recon shootdowns by the Soviets doesn't actually mean anything. The Soviets really didn't need to do much aerial reconnaissance. Once they got a man into the U.S. (or Canada - the border is unfenced and unguarded), he could do a much more thorough job collecting intel just by driving around with a camera while "on vacation." That wasn't the case for the U.S. The U.S.S.R.'s closed and restrictive society left aerial reconnaissance as one of the only means of gathering intel on what was going on inside. And from the 1970s on, both sides shifted towards satellite recon.

    80. Re:Bombula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Bush was approached by God in a dream that he should attack Iraq (source The Independent). If someone was told by Allah in dream that he should crash a plain, it would definitely call it religious, so why should you not call this religious.

      To my knowledge, the only peer-reviewed estimations of deaths in the Iraq war have been done by the Lancet (which happen to have an impact factor among the to ten scientific journals). The last estimates (published in October 2006 - I am not sure when data collection stopped) was 654,965 direct deaths. Note that the numbers are fairly old, and that violence since that has not been reduced. Just adjusting these numbers for time would lead you very close to 1 million. However the numbers do not take into account indirectly caused deaths (like deaths caused by deteriorating health services, increased child mortality etc).

    81. Re:Bombula by Stooshie · · Score: 3, Insightful

      By dismissing anything "bad" done by other people that call themselves christian, that leaves you looking squeaky clean. That's convenient!

      --
      America, Home of the Brave. ... .and the Squaw.
    82. Re:Bombula by bytesex · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No, he meant standard vs. imperial.

      --
      Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
    83. Re:Bombula by jollyreaper · · Score: 3, Funny

      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. Yeah, but you left out the most important question: can Kirk bang their chicks?
      --
      Kwisatz Haderach
      Sell the spice to CHOAM
      This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
    84. Re:Bombula by NoisySplatter · · Score: 3, Informative

      Or you could stop trying to troll and realize that 90% of those deaths are from Iraqi on Iraqi violence and not from American action. Yes, I've been there, and i know what I'm talking about.

      --
      In Soviet Russia meme tires of you!
    85. Re:Bombula by Himring · · Score: 2, Funny

      I think such a decision would depend, entirely, on the psychology of the individual. You, having just admitted to it, probably have the right psychology to do such a thing. We have no knowledge of this for the individual in question.

      All of that being said: you're every parent's worst nightmare....

      --
      "All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
    86. Re:Bombula by indifferent+children · · Score: 5, Funny

      No. He meant Rebel vs Imperial.

      --
      Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
    87. Re:Bombula by Gospodin · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Wonderful. But from our POV on Earth, a 2Mly trip still takes > 2M years. So it isn't faster than radio.

      I'm also ignoring the slight problem of actually accelerating at 1g continuously for 20+ years.

      --
      ...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
    88. Re:Bombula by CmdrGravy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I can't say that I have, to be honest from what I've read about it I'm a bit put off the seemingly extreme levels of pretenciouness and lack of humour that seems to be exhibited ( although I realise this might not be what it's really like ).

      In any case comparing a single two week festival to a civilisation capable of achieving space flight is something of a stretch. All the stuff people take to Burning Man is manufactured elsewhere where even today you could probably go and see direct evidence of its creation and when you say the area is cleaned up afterwards you really mean it's all taken off and dumped elsewhere.

    89. Re:Bombula by Scrameustache · · Score: 4, Insightful

      90% of those deaths are from Iraqi on Iraqi violence and not from American action.
      Yes, I've been there, and i know what I'm talking about. "I didn't hurt those people! It was the wasps from that nest I threw rocks at! Stop blaming me for the consequences of my actions!"
      --

      You can't take the sky from me...

    90. Re:Bombula by redbaritone · · Score: 2, Insightful

      --...it just doesn't make sense that a civilization advanced enough to cross interstellar space would crash in New Mexico

      Like us, they probably have not evolved beyond hiring the lowest bidder.

    91. Re:Bombula by Randolpho · · Score: 2, Funny

      Thanks, you've just given me an idea for next week's D&D game. :D

      --
      "Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
      -Marilyn Manson
    92. Re:Bombula by NoisySplatter · · Score: 2

      Neither Japan nor Germany devolved into such an all out state of unrest and civil war in the times they were occupied after war. Occupation of a country and installation of a new government are common things after armed conflicts. A population that would rather kill their countrymen than build a nation with them is not.

      --
      In Soviet Russia meme tires of you!
    93. Re:Bombula by LWATCDR · · Score: 2

      1. That is a combat situation.
      2. Most of the deaths have been caused not by US troops but by other forces.

      As I said people like you don't know any military people. They are people not monsters. I suggest stop trying to feel superior and try to understand.

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    94. Re:Bombula by Dusty00 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So by just being there you know what you're talking about? Are you the one who surveys a site after the US has just dropped a bomb on it or the one who catalogs the casualties in Iraq? Quite frankly, being there doesn't give you any insight into what sort of violence cause what casualties unless that's the job you're doing. I think you'd better name some credentials if you're going to throw out a 90% stat.

      And for my disclaimer, yes I am ex-military.

    95. Re:Bombula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny
      Nope, you're wrong. The translation of the last transmission was something like:

      Male: No Honey, we are not asking for directions, I'll take a look to the map, hold the wheel.
    96. Re:Bombula by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
    97. Re:Bombula by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Funny

      The Federation is clearly a very unpleasant society. Eliminating money implies that people must be coerced to work, or perhaps bio engineered to have no choice in the matter like social insects. Most Federation citizens live in a harsh military dictatorship where the ship's captain has absolute power. Federation drones aren't aware of this of course, they are programmed to think that their captain is infallible and they choose to obey his orders, they are still human and that they work without payment for the benefit of society.

      But a quick look at the Federation shows this to be untrue. Most people seem to spend their lives on warships, even raising their families on them. The Federation seems to spend most of its resources on these warships, starships with weapons systems so powerful that they can't possibly be designed for peaceful exploration, let alone for non interference. As an advanced society it seems to be curiously dependent on very old works of art, mostly from the 20th Century or from far before.

      I suspect that the immense wealth the Federation has must have been generated on slave worlds. A possible analogy would be with slavemaker ants for example, which use other species for all the hard work. It is also possible that flocks of federation starships attack more primitive civilizations like plagues of locusts and use their rather admirable technology to strip them bare and then move on, Independence Day style. This would explain the non human social structure seen on warships where a captain has absolute power and everyone seems to have some sort of military rank. It would also explain the lack of recent works of art and why no one in the Federation seems to do any real work. Like the imperialists of the 19th Century, the Federation is essentially parasitic. Not that Federation drones are aware of any of this of course, possibly some of the exploitation is done by machines or unseen servant races. There are signs of this, Vulcan and Klingon serve on starships without pay i.e. as slaves, but I think it more likely, given the fearsome offensive capabilities of Federation warships that they spend much of their time on conquest but the drones memories are manipulated to hide this lest their dormant sense of humanity awakens causes their insect like social structure to break down.

      There are signs that the Federation has extensive virtual reality technology, though characteristically this is portrayed as being used frivolously. My theory is that Federation drones live in a sort of Matrix like virtual reality where the Federation is benign and they are still human. Perhaps the Federation was originally like this, before its crazed imperialism, unsustainable military budget and advanced technology turned it into something much nastier. If this is true, it's a nice Orwellian touch that the Federation's sometime (and possibly fictitious) competitor the Borg Collective is used to scare Federation drones into compliance by portraying it inside Federation virtual reality as behaving much the way the Federation must do in reality.

      --
      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;
    98. Re:Bombula by Spudds · · Score: 2, Insightful

      We are a country that has Christians and are founded on Christian principles I hate this sectarian self-serving BS.

      No We're Not. This country was found by men of many different religious ideals. We have very specific, plainly stated separation of church and state (which is quickly ebbing away [Thanks Right-Wingers!!!]). A good portion of the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were Atheists. Seriously, do your research and stop trying to "own" the country with your ridiculous and archaic beliefs by saying the country was founded by any particular sect of religion.

      A simple google search (try this one for instance) will prove you wrong. Hell, some of the founding fathers were actually incredibly against religion in general, citing a slew of negative impacts religion has had on societies all throughout history.

      I hate being "lumped up" into other people's belief systems. "Oh you're American? Guess you're Christian then."
    99. Re:Bombula by Valdrax · · Score: 2, Informative

      At some point far in the future our descendents try out time travel and something goes wrong with one of the time travelling craft (they were probably visiting roswell to see if an alien really was found there - ah, the irony...)

      Actually, this is part of the backstory of the time-travelling, table-top RPG Continuum. Of course, being a game about keeping the timeline consistent, the "aliens" know that they have to crash and the have to die long before they're ever sent there.

      The explanation for why humans ended up looking like grey aliens is pretty funny too. Essentially, when body modification became common, anime big eyes and small mouths became really popular and then fashion eventually trended that way.

      --
      If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
    100. Re:Bombula by johno.ie · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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

      --
      872835240
    101. Re:Bombula by Aeiri · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If they are alien, why would their cellular structure be the same as ours? They might not even have DNA as we know it, so a cell going bonkers and repeating itself might not affect them. If it did affect them, it would probably be much different from our cancer.

    102. Re:Bombula by sgt_doom · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Beautifully said, Good Citizen Dusty00! As a former combat veteran, I stand against this mindless Nazi-sounding drivel to support the foreign invaders of Iraq, or any other country, for that matter. To have the unmitigated gall, or abject ignorance and stupidity, to suggest that the invading and occupying forces of America (American-financed mercenaries included)have nothing to do with the ongoing, horrendous violence in Iraq after the Busheviks invaded, destroyed their infrastructure, caused massive and continuing unemployment by shutting down former government-run industries, and bringing in transnational (Halliburton, et al.) corporations which only - or predominantly - hire foreign nationals (sounds kind of like Amerika, don't it?) and the citizens there have little or no social order at all is indistinguishable from insanity....

    103. Re:Bombula by jwiegley · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That argument makes no sense. I cannot fathom how that got +5 insightful.

      Written history is perhaps 5000 years old. Geological recorded history is millions to billions of years old. There is nothing credible in either of these historical records to suggest that your missing 45,000 year gap, or any time before it, included any homo sapien (nor any other species') abilities, achievement or potential to produce a being capable of leaving this planet let alone survive or create a civilization to come back from and "visit the old farm."

      The only credible evidence to suggest that some being may leave this planet in the reasonable future is a few successful test trips to its nearest moon. That history is only 40 years old. And even, then the last 30 of those 40 years indicates very little continued progress.

      Further, An undetectable, advanced alternate terrestrial civilization is just as implausible as an undetectable flying spaghetti monster. So yes, I would look for space aliens before the undetectable civilization. And I don't think any advanced alien race has ever crossed stellar distances and visited this planet.

      The observations presented are not insightful; at best they are +1 thoughtless fantasy.

      --
      I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
    104. Re:Bombula by lawpoop · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm not saying that intelligent life can only be humanoid in shape. I'm arguing that it's not a projection of anthropomorphic thinking to say that intelligent life can be humanoid.

      Random mutation creates myriads of body plans, but only a few are selected by the environment. Radial symmetry and single-celled life are a successful body plan; AFAIK, bacteria are far and away the most abundant species on Earth, in terms of biomass.

      But my argument is that any intelligent life than can build things must have some kind of hand-like appendage. If they're coming here in ships, rather than just floating here in their bodies like space-faring jellyfish, they must have built those ships. Or maybe they 'grew' the ships by conscious or unconscious manipulation of DNA or bodies of other life forms... who knows? But if extra-terrestrial life developed on a rocky planet, or a gas giant, there's a good chance that it could be bilaterally symmetrical, with limbs, because that is a reproductively successful body plan in oceans or on land.

      There could be strange intelligent life made out of dark matter, weird crystalline creatures in solid rock, jellyfish creatures in gas giants like Saturn... But what would intelligent creates look like? On Earth, trichordates happen to have died out, but that doesn't mean in another scenario they might be a dominant species in terms of biomass. We know that bilateral symmetry is a successful body plan. That means you get an even number of limbs -- 2, 4, 6, 8, even dozens in the case of centipedes. Heads also seemed to be highly selected as far as body plans.

      If you have an animal that both walks on a limb and manipulates objects with it, you have a limb that's selected for cross-purposes. It's probably not a great manipulator nor a great runner. It's a jack of all trades. But, if you have dedicate object-manipulating limbs, like hands, then evolution can select for better and better manipulation, and then better and better intelligence to manipulate objects.

      So then once you have a bilaterally-symmetrical animal that has a head and dedicated object manipulating limbs, i.e. hands, you basically have a humanoid. It probably wouldn't two-limbed, because you need at least one pair of limbs for locomotion, and other for object manipulation. It could be two-legged, like us, it could be four-legged, like a preying mantis, it could be 6-legged, like a handed spider, or multi-legged, like a centipede with hands. But it's not totally unreasonable to expect a life form to be humanoid.

      All I'm saying is that it could be rational to believe it's a possibility that intelligent life could be humanoid, and not simply a projection of "Humans on Top" thinking. It would be an example of convergent evolution, like eyes, legs, and wings. It could be radially symmetric, like a jellyfish or plant, it could be a tri-chordate, like we used to have on Earth, and it could even be a humanoid. Rationally speaking, not just what works well in the sci-fi movie make-up department, or Freudian dreams.

      --
      Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
      -- Pablo Picasso
  2. So? by sanmarcos · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It is not like this affidavit is going to change the world or anything. There is absolutely no proof. It just sells newspapers and adds fire to crackpot theories. Even if there was extraterrestrial life, I would not want to know about, or even let any of the crazy people in this world know about it. The reaction would not be good. Humanity is not ready yet.

    1. Re:So? by Bombula · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I disagree. I think humanity is more than ready, and it would do us an enormous amount of good.

      --
      A-Bomb
    2. Re:So? by gravos · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I couldn't agree more.

      Some guy signing a docket on his deathbed is strange behavior that needs explaining, certainly, but the best explanation may well not be that there actually were aliens.

      Perhaps the CIA was testing LSD or an experimental new drug at that site at that time to see what it would do to young army officers. In fact that seems a lot more likely to me than aliens crashing in a desert.

    3. Re:So? by dc29A · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I disagree. I think humanity is more than ready, and it would do us an enormous amount of good. Ready? Lot of people in the west can't tolerate gays, lesbians, blacks, arabs, dogs, cats, Windows and whatnot. We have the most powerful nation on the planet with 92% of it's citizens believe in some magical man up in the sky. We kill each other over silly things like who's God can beat up who's God. We lie, cheat, don't trust anyone and are insanely greedy.

      Imagine some aliens sending us some peaceful message, but these aliens look grotesque by our standards. Guess what? The neocons, China and Russia declare "War on Aliens", we'll jihad their asses. Unfortunately, we humans are extremely intolerant, and nowhere near ready to meet aliens. Not even close.
    4. Re:So? by lawpoop · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Perhaps the CIA was testing LSD or an experimental new drug at that site at that time to see what it would do to young army officers. In fact that seems a lot more likely to me than aliens crashing in a desert. Well, that might make sense if you leave out the LSD part. You can't really control or have any influence on anybody's hallucinogen experience. And you certainly can't get two people to have the same trip, and definitely not more than two! There is no magic mind-control serum. Mass media is the best that we've got. Hallucinogens make you *less* susceptible to suggestion and propaganda, not more.

      "Soldier, report to base. There's just been a crash of a UFO, and bodies have been recovered!"
      "Sir, why is your face growing leaves? I'm gonna bake a stew made of lizards, and offer it to the Sun God. Maybe those aliens are here to help humanity enlighten us. You should smell what they look like and get back to me. If you don't, it doesn't matter anyways. The octopuses will help us. Blankets, blankets, blankets. You know, my mom was a great book-- er, cook, but she loved my brother more than she loved me."

      Even if you set up dummy props with a fake UFO and bodies, and get other officers to play along, somebody on LSD or mushrooms might be more concerned about the inherent, transcendent beauty of desert plants, figuring out their relationship with their parents, or terrified of an invisible chicken, rather than going along with your fake UFO scenario. In fact, I would say that introducing hallucinogens into the mix would make then *less* likely to go along with your fake scenario, because hallucinogens alter your experience of reality, leading you to question then foundations of perception, your paradigm, and the workings of society, collective consciousness, mass media, the hierarchical structure of the military, etc. etc. That's why hippies and other serious hallucinogen users have all kinds of weird ideas about reality and society. They question everything, and get all kinds of weird answers. You won't find them agreeing on *anything*.

      A better way to try the experiment is set it all up and leave out the LSD. Then you don't have any soldiers or officers questioning reality, including this UFO crash.
      --
      Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
      -- Pablo Picasso
    5. Re:So? by solios · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I call bullshit. On the ready bit, anyway. Just imagine the sheer force of the political shitstorm a First Contact would stir up. Anyone who could decode the garbage we eject into space would be smart enough to scope out the political situation - anywhere you put down, you're going to be politically validating whoever's collecting taxes on the ground you drop on.... and if you don't land in the US, you'll have the US military six feet up your ass muscling whoever else out of the way for first call on photo ops, resources, etc. Land in the middle east and you've not only brought that political shitstorm to a boil, you've also incited two of the world's major religions. Then there's the language thing.

      Personally, if I were an alien and I came across a planet like this, I'd stick a huge visible-from-earth goatse billboard out past the moon and leave. The effort it would take earth to pull that kind of an insult out of the sky might actually cause us to grow up a bit.

    6. Re:So? by bazorg · · Score: 2, Funny

      I, for one, do not welcome any sort of goatse-displaying alien overlord.

  3. I don't suppose... by wesley96 · · Score: 4, Funny

    the craft's name was 'Humpty Dumpty'?

    --
    Serving time in Aristotelean prison for violating laws of physics
  4. Ah! by McGiraf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    He probably died laughing behind his teethes.

    1. Re:Ah! by hedgemage · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I would love to leave behind one last, great practical joke such as this.

  5. Egg-shaped craft?!?!?!? by jzarling · · Score: 3, Funny

    THEY WERE FROM ORK

    --
    It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
  6. Highly improbable by i_want_you_to_throw_ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I want to believe.....

    That being said... the U.S. government is remarkably inept at keeping secrets much less orchestrating a cover up of this size.

    Same is true of most conspiracy theories.

    1. Re:Highly improbable by jstomel · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I often hear this kind of reasoning, that the government is too incompetent to keep something like this secret. I find this an odd defense, seeing as if it did happen then the government obviously was not able to keep it secret. Otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it.

    2. Re:Highly improbable by Danny+Rathjens · · Score: 3, Funny

      "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."

    3. Re:Highly improbable by Fulcrum+of+Evil · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think the problem is that you're confusing the political branches with the military; the military is very good at secrets - witness their record keeping the SR71 quiet, the specifics of satellite imagery, and the NSA's contribution to DES. Contrast that with Watergate and you'll see who sucks at secrets.

      --
      "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
  7. Not a trustworthy source by evildogeye · · Score: 5, Informative

    He was the founder of the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, NM. I think that makes it necessary to take his death bed statement with a grain of salt.

    1. Re:Not a trustworthy source by l0ungeb0y · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Ultimately why would a space craft be built out material resembling tin foil. "

      Because it's powered by hats?

  8. Mod Parent UP by Gabrill · · Score: 2, Insightful

    At this point, unless his affidavit leads to compelling and PUBLIC evidence, it doesn't matter whether it was a deathbed joke or and earnest confession. It will come to nothing more than a Discovery Channel episode.

    --
    Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
    1. Re:Mod Parent UP by Dun+Malg · · Score: 2, Insightful

      At this point, unless his affidavit leads to compelling and PUBLIC evidence, it doesn't matter whether it was a deathbed joke or and earnest confession. It will come to nothing more than a Discovery Channel episode. Given that the decedent was a freakin' PR man for the Air Force, I doubt he was privy to any secret information at all, much less any compelling secret information about aliens. Basically all this loser knew was that something happened and they wanted it covered up with a fake story about a weather balloon. As a veteran of the military, I can assure you that it's not now and definitely was not then full of keen, erudite intellectuals. A lot of minimally educated hayseeds and urban mooks end up in the military, and they gravitate towards jobs like public relations. What did a PR man do in 1947? Hand out mimeographed press releases to reporters, and probably little else. The man's story started off being rather simple: "I dint see nuthin'", basically. Over the years it grew, till eventually he said he had been shown bodies and a 15 foot egg shaped craft. No explanation was ever given why anyone would be foolish enough to show the base PR man information of such monumental secrecy. Application of Occam's Razor gives us the most likely story: William Haut was a small time nobody till he became associated with an extraordinary event. The more extraordinary the event, the more important he became. Funny thing, when you give someone the means to make themselves more famous simply by embellishing a story that no one will ever be able to prove false*, the story will nearly always become embellished. What's more, the more you tell such a lie, the easier it gets to believe it yourself. The real story is too stupid for the romantics out there who are dead-set on finding little green men: It was a classified balloon-lofted radar reflector system that crashed. Some dumbass thought saying it was a flying saucer would be a good cover story. When it immediately became clear that the saucer story was bringing MORE attention, not less, it was quickly changed to a more mundane but plausible "weather balloon" story. Unfortunately, the damage had been done. We will forever have fools demanding to see Hangar 18 at Wright Field because of it.

      * after all complete lack of evidence is simply proof that the conspiracy is working!
      --
      If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
  9. Maybe he just has a wicked sense of humor by Don'tTreadOnMe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You gotta admit, a deathbed confession deisgned to perpeutate a myth would be pretty funny. I'd be laughing all the way to the mortuary, if it were me...

    1. Re:Maybe he just has a wicked sense of humor by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'd be laughing all the way to the mortuary, if it were me...

      And I'd be really creeped out if I were the coroner...

      --
      This guy's the limit!
    2. Re:Maybe he just has a wicked sense of humor by CptNerd · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Not to mention the publicity would help keep interest going in the area, to help out his heirs...

      --
      By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
  10. follow the money or the little green men .. by abes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This was posted on digg, and as someone pointed out, Haut also ran a UFO museum. So .. yeah .. no ulterior motives ..

    A simple google search gives one of many such links:

    http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tw/07-20-95/cover.htm

    Not to say that's the only reason he did that .. who knows. It just a bit odd. Other military people have come forward, including a high ranking general (who released a book). The general claimed all our current technology came from UFOs. Such as the night-vision goggles. This is a fairly outrageous claim even for someone with a rudimentary understanding of electronics.

    It's not that I think aliens are impossible. I just am highly suspicious that they'd sneak about so much. Or that our government could keep anything a secret for so long. And crackpots coming out with books on UFOs does not count as the leaks.

    1. Re:follow the money or the little green men .. by ColdWetDog · · Score: 2, Funny
      you probably come up with a chance of much greater than 100 %.

      Those are really good odds. I'll take 'em.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  11. +1 Insightful by coaxial · · Score: 2, Funny

    Hear! Hear!

    You can't keep anything secret for 60 years.

    The most recent vast government conspiracy is of course that GWB et. al. Either orchastrated, or allowed to happen and then embellished, 9/11. Of course, all of this hinges on a grand conspiracy being meticulously carried out by Bush Administration. I'm sorry. But THIS adminstration? The adminstration that brought you Iraq and Katrina? I'm sorry, but we've seen the MO for this adminstration and competence, just isn't it.

  12. Alternate Headline: by Guppy06 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Dying Man Has Perverse Sense of Humor

  13. Why not? by mfh · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A drop of water is the same shape in any atmosphere (relative to temperature and gravity), so who would argue that people wouldn't kinda take the same basic shape anyway? If they crashed, the idea they were of higher intelligence sheds new light on theories of their conquering ways. They came to Earth likely to give us an intergalactic hug and US air force likely shot them down, thinking they were Russians.

    Boy were they surprised!

    The mystifying result of that accident sheds light on the nature of the universe itself... ... ... We're all stupid!!

    --
    The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
    1. Re:Why not? by larry+bagina · · Score: 2, Interesting

      if not for an alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune, dinosaurs (or rather, their evolved descendants) might still be at the top of the food chain. It takes no imagination to think that human characteristics are best, but it's not the only (or most likely) possibility for intelligent life.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    2. Re:Why not? by shaitand · · Score: 2, Interesting

      'Arguing that relatively advanced lifeforms should all be vaguely humanoid because we consider ourselves to be advanced and humanoid is essentially saying that environment has no influence on evolution.'

      Fair enough, although the odds of us encountering an alien lifeform that is similar to ourselves are not as poor as the odds of any random lifeform being similar to us. They are far better and for fairly obvious reasons. All we have to do is look to ourselves. What are we paying particular attention to on mars? The quest for water, the possibility of life or previous life. When seeking out new planets what is of particular interest and makes them newsworthy? Well, being able to support life like our own of course.

      Whether aliens came here searching for a planet or for life (or both) it is reasonable that they would be looking for something as close as possible to what they already know. The universe is a big place with a lot of rocks, while any odds are possible on a cosmic scale the odds are significantly better that any alien who is going to pick this particular rock to visit is doing so BECAUSE of the conditions found here.

  14. Old News by Stanislav_J · · Score: 2, Funny

    I thought we had already established that it was the Ferengi?

    --
    "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
  15. Humanoid form by riker1384 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I disagree, I think there are significant chances they would be somewhat humanoid if they existed. If they move around on land, they most likely need legs to do that. They might have more, but two is the minimum so they might have two. To make tools they need manipulative parts, and they could end up with two there. They would work better if they're up off the ground and a geared more towards fine control rather than being robust enough to walk on. Biology and evolution seem to favor bilateral symmetry, so they would probably have even numbers of limbs at least.

    Also, sensory organs would usually work best when they're high up off the ground and able to turn in different directions, so I wouldn't be suprised if they had something resembling a head.

  16. anyone curious... by catbutt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    why the affadavit, which has been "released", is not printed in any of the articles?

    1. Re:anyone curious... by lawpoop · · Score: 4, Informative

      why the affadavit, which has been "released", is not printed in any of the articles?

      How often have you seen a source document in a news article? Almost never. The audience tunes out; you lose readership. It's a waste of column space.

      Someone posted the affidavit text on digg:

      2002 SEALED AFFIDAVIT OF WALTER G. HAUT

      DATE: December 26, 2002
      WITNESS: Chris Xxxxxx
      NOTARY: Beverlee Morgan


      (1) My name is Walter G. Haut

      (2) I was born on June 2, 1922

      (3) My address is 1405 W. 7th Street, Roswell, NM 88203

      (4) I am retired.

      (5) In July, 1947, I was stationed at the Roswell Army Air Base in Roswell, New Mexico, serving as the base Public Information Officer. I had spent the 4th of July weekend (Saturday, the 5th, and Sunday, the 6th) at my private residence about 10 miles north of the base, which was located south of town.

      (6) I was aware that someone had reported the remains of a downed vehicle by midmorning after my return to duty at the base on Monday, July 7. I was aware that Major Jesse A. Marcel, head of intelligence, was sent by the base commander, Col. William Blanchard, to investigate.

      (7) By late in the afternoon that same day, I would learn that additional civilian reports came in regarding a second site just north of Roswell. I would spend the better part of the day attending to my regular duties hearing little if anything more.

      (8) On Tuesday morning, July 8, I would attend the regularly scheduled staff meeting at 7:30 a.m. Besides Blanchard, Marcel; CIC [Counterintelligence Corp] Capt. Sheridan Cavitt; Col. James I. Hopkins, the operations officer; Lt. Col. Ulysses S. Nero, the supply officer; and from Carswell AAF in Fort Worth, Texas, Blanchard's boss, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey and his chief of staff, Col. Thomas J. Dubose were also in attendance. The main topic of discussion was reported by Marcel and Cavitt regarding an extensive debris field in Lincoln County approx. 75 miles NW of Roswell. A preliminary briefing was provided by Blanchard about the second site approx. 40 miles north of town. Samples of wreckage were passed around the table. It was unlike any material I had or have ever seen in my life. Pieces which resembled metal foil, paper thin yet extremely strong, and pieces with unusual markings along their length were handled from man to man, each voicing their opinion. No one was able to identify the crash debris.

      (9) One of the main concerns discussed at the meeting was whether we should go public or not with the discovery. Gen. Ramey proposed a plan, which I believe originated from his bosses at the Pentagon. Attention needed to be diverted from the more important site north of town by acknowledging the other location. Too many civilians were already involved and the press already was informed. I was not completely informed how this would be accomplished.

      (10) At approximately 9:30 a.m. Col. Blanchard phoned my office and dictated the press release of having in our possession a flying disc, coming from a ranch northwest of Roswell, and Marcel flying the material to higher headquarters. I was to deliver the news release to radio stations KGFL and KSWS, and newspapers the Daily Record and the Morning Dispatch.

      (11) By the time the news release hit the wire services, my office was inundated with phone calls from around the world. Messages stacked up on my desk, and rather than deal with the media concern, Col Blanchard suggested that I go home and "hide out."

      (12) Before leaving the base, Col. Blanchard took me personally to Building 84 [AKA Hangar P-3], a B-29 hangar located on the east side of the tarmac. Upon first approaching the building, I observed that it was under heavy guard both outside and inside. Once inside, I was permitted from a safe distance to first observe the object just recovered north of town. It was approx. 12 to 15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high, and more of an egg

      --
      Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
      -- Pablo Picasso
  17. Speculated Where??? by DumbSwede · · Score: 5, Funny

    "This recent evidence would seem to confirm speculation that egg-shaped saucers are notoriously difficult to fly safely at low altitude."

    I'm curious just where this speculation was forwarded. Is there some UFO magazine with articles like "Egg Shape Saucers -- How Easy to Fly" or "Egg shaped versus conventional Plate shaped, which Flying Saucer is right for your intergalactic traveling needs?" or better yet is Consumer Reports planning a Fly Saucer Safety issue? "Flying Saucer Roll Over Crash Test Results -- Egg Shaped Models perform poorly"

    1. Re:Speculated Where??? by Icarus1919 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That thing flying over your head is not a UFO.

  18. Exactly! by Tony · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The most recent "vast government conspiracy" has to do with GWB and friends hijacking the US Constitution, lying to the world to lead the US into war with Iraq, providing bid-free billion-dollar contracts to close friends, and declaring the Vice-Presidency is outside the law.

    I mean, who could believe *that*?

    --
    Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
    1. Re:Exactly! by wordsnyc · · Score: 3, Funny

      Funny you should ask. I saw 'em just the other day on TV, standing in line for the latest shiny horseshit.

      You're doin' a heck of a job, Generation iPod.

      --
      Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
    2. Re:Exactly! by ari_j · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're doin' a heck of a job, Generation iPod.

      Thanks, mom and dad. I'm doing like you taught me.

    3. Re:Exactly! by jamesmrankinjr · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Conspiracy implies that the facts of the matter are concealed from most people.

      Everything you mention is pretty much common knowledge at this point. Which I think either disqualifies it as a conspiracy, or marks it as an extremely poorly concealed one.

      Which goes back to the original point that governments are very bad at keeping things secret.

      -jimbo

  19. But he will go to jail! by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Signing a fake affidavit is a serious offence!

    Seriously folk, why should we listen to people on their death bed or to voices from beyond the grave? Do we really think that when people have nothing to lose or are dead they somehow get enlightened and honest?

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
  20. Re:Eggheads! by JustOK · · Score: 4, Funny

    Eggs can fly, as long as they're in a 3oz or less container.

    --
    rewriting history since 2109
  21. Government and Secrets - An Analysis by rueger · · Score: 5, Funny

    There is no way they could keep a secret of this magnitude and cover it up for 60 years.

    Ok, let me get this reasoning straight.

    a) There's no way that the government could keep a secret that long.
    b) How do we know that there's no way that the government could keep a secret that long?
    c) Because if the government tried to keep a secret that long we would have beard about it.

    Just for the sake of argument, what if the government managed to... um ... keep a secret secret? Is it possible that we wouldn't have heard about it?

    (especially if they used secret alien technology to keep it secret!)

  22. Mars by pablo_max · · Score: 2, Funny

    How many times did we crash on mars once we made it all the way there? And that was not even something complicated enough to carry creatures. Shit happens in space..At least it always seems to the case when I go. ;)

  23. They found a banner inside the craft by Prototerm · · Score: 2, Funny

    When translated the banner said "Mission Accomplished". That confirms it. The crew were actually Americans from the future.

    --
    "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
  24. Re:Well, remember ... by DynaSoar · · Score: 2, Informative


    > Just because he made a sworn affidavit does not mean that the man really saw something.
    > As scientists have demonstrated, this might easily be something he created and believed himself.

    Yup. re: Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, U. Wash. She's the most sought after expert on real- and false-memory creation. Bottom line, all memory is reconstruction, not retrieval. It's never perfectly accurate (vivid =! accurate) and so even when "correct" is only at least good enough, not "true". People can be made to "recall" a lot of stuff, by others, thesmelves or context/situations.

    I was pointing more at what people will or will not believe about what the guy said, not what he "remembered".

    --
    "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
  25. I just don't buy P-51s shooting down a spaceship by tjstork · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The whole problem, in my mind, with the Roswell "conspiracy", is the part that has a flight of P-51 Mustangs shooting down a spacecraft capable of travelling at intersteller speeds. As good as the P-51 was back in its day, it would be almost miraculous for one of these planes to shoot down a modern jet aircraft such as the F-22 or the EF-2000. Obviously, the technology required for manned interstellar space flight is easily 50 - 100 years beyond what we have now, and so, the claim seems utterly foolish. In any case, if an interstellar ship could reach the earth once, why wouldn't they have sent a rescue party looking for their fallen comrades?

    --
    This is my sig.
  26. Re:Phoenix Lights. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I need an explanation, that isn't flares, cause that explanation stinks.

    Ok, I'll play your silly game if you just want to throw the truth out because you don't like it. It wuz aliens. Seriously, as an ex Gulf War I crew chief on A-10s there is little doubt in my mind that they are flares dropped from A-10s. That is *exactly* what flares look like from a great distance that are dropped from an A-10. The kind of flares I am talking about are not roadside flares but they are much much bigger and brighter and descend on parachutes. They are used to light up a battle field and they do a mighty fine job of it. I saw show on television where they superimposed actual video footage of the lights over a daylight shot of the mountain range from the exact same perspective that the video was shot from. The "lights" disappeared one by one on the video at the same point they would have dropped below the peak of the mountain (the flares were dropped on the other side of the mountain). Really, the glove fit perfectly.

    If you don't believe me here is some more:
    http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/2007/j an/m26-005.shtml
    http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4041

  27. 400 Government/Military Witnesses - On Record by Adeptus_Luminati · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  28. Re:I just don't buy P-51s shooting down a spaceshi by robogun · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  29. Re:I just don't buy P-51s shooting down a spaceshi by aralin · · Score: 2, Insightful
    In any case, if an interstellar ship could reach the earth once, why wouldn't they have sent a rescue party looking for their fallen comrades?

    The closest star is some 4 light years away, the next one is about 10 or 12, I am not sure. Then it goes up. Lets say they are relatively on our doorstep on a star less than 50 light years away, we still have another 3 years before they will learn their aircraft was shot and about 53 years to get the war declaration message, providing we are able to receive it. And I'd say that around 70 to 100 years before their fleet shows up :)

    --
    If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
  30. A Lieutenant? by EmagGeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Suffice it to say that a Lieutenant is not exactly going to be high on the "need to know" list.

    This is a hoax.. no aliens at Roswell..

  31. Re:Comparison by (negative+video) · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Fire is right out of the question for obvious reasons ...

    Why can't our clever cephalopods put their smelters above water?

    You really need to get out of the ocean to become a tool user ...

    Not if you use rocks, which incidentally were the first tools used on land, and which are are even now used by semi-aquatic nonhumans. You can progress beyond that using glasses, crystals, and composites.

  32. Nor it this his first affidavit by mdsolar · · Score: 2, Informative

    He also swore an affidavit in 1993. It is very similar: http://roswellproof.homestead.com/Haut.html. These seem to be things he believed. I recall when Stanton Friedman http://www.stantonfriedman.com/ stayed as a guest at my home when I was a kid. He'd worked with my father, also a nuclear physicist, before and came to give a lecture on UFOs. He also believed what he was saying. I think you need to look for explanations that do not rely on impuning motive in some of these cases.

    I'm not one to want to leave behind the delicious contemplation of the Fermi Paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox, so I wait for stronger evidence, but there are many sincere people who are quite sure they've experienced something that can only be explained in this way: http://www.disclosureproject.org/.

    I think Carl Jung took an interesting stab and an alternative explanation in this book: http://www.amazon.com/Flying-Saucers-C-G-Jung/dp/1 567311210/ref=sr_1_1/105-3124676-0728448?ie=UTF8&s =books&qid=1183345880&sr=1-1
    --
    Get solar power the easy way: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

    1. Re:Nor it this his first affidavit by uvajed_ekil · · Score: 2, Funny
      Oh Boy! Just when I thought the credibility of the affidavit dude couldn't get any lower, someone alludes to him being like Stanton Friedman. Very nice comment based on personal experience and a bit o' psychiatry and good science.

      Just because somebody believes something doesn't mean it's true. (Just like how I think I'm a dork, but everyone I meet seems to love me and think I'm the greatest thing since the Commie64, and they give me money and hang out with me and tell me I'm great and that I'm a super l337 hacker, and I date chicks who model, part time when I'm not around they say, and my mom is always right, especially when she says I am smart and handsome.) I guess the dead guy in question was just one of those poor delusional, misinformed bastards.

      --
      This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
  33. Re:alien tech wouldn't defy laws of physics by illegalcortex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't quite understand why this is would be an outrageous claim Well, it's a bit like school. Remember how you always had to "show your work" to prove that you weren't cheating? No big jumps from problem to solution. Well, it's the same way with all this "current technology." Work on it has been incremental through the years. For every breakthrough you can trace the history leading up to it, and find people who almost but not quite got there. The breakthrough of silicon transistors was preceded by years of struggling with germanium transistors. That was preceded by years of trying to figure out how semiconductors worked and what they might be good for. That really picked up steam in the 1920s. And prior to the transistor, you can look at the history of vacuum tubes. They followed a parallel line of development and formed the bridge to the transistor era (early electronics and computers used vacuum tubes).

    So for such a claim to NOT be outrageous, you'd have to also claim a vast conspiracy of scientists all over the world through the decades, sitting on most of their findings while publishing just enough to give an incremental step for the next breakthroughs. Or you'd need the aliens to be directing this, handing out tiny little tidbits of information to the scientists, and either swearing them to secrecy or using some sort of mind control on them. So yes, it is quite outrageous.

    On the other hand, if next week some scientist produced working plans for a fusion generator that used a grand unified theory totally different than any proposed, now THAT would be what it would take to not be an outrageous claim of getting outside help.
  34. Re:manned flight? by RedOctober · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Lots of people put forward this ftl argument to say that it just wouldn't be possible to travel interstellar distances.

    However, we're only scratching the surface when it comes to solving the general relativity equation. For instance, one solution of the GR equation consists of a wormhole that allows one to exit this universe into... who knows? One possible solution is extensible, allowing a hypothetical space traveller to travel into a completely different universe, or potentially a different region of our own universe. Some solutions are so bizarre that causality is violated, e.g. the solution of the spinning charged black hole, which has a ring singularity and a region where "time" becomes circular and loops back on itself. Admittedly, some of these solutions are considered "unphysical", but it's not clear yet why they are unphysical, what prevents them from happening. It's not even clear that they are impossible yet. All we know is that there is some truly bizarre stuff out there and we don't understand it all.

    Sadly, though, if a traveller did ever manage to survive going through such a wormhole, the GR solutions appear to indicate that there is no way back... but as you can imagine, none of this is certain as yet. Maybe there are terms in the GR eqn that are missing. Maybe a theory of quantum gravity would prevent any of this from happening. Who knows?

  35. Just maybe... by Eric+Damron · · Score: 4, Funny

    "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."

    Maybe the contract went to the lowest bidder?

    --
    The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
  36. why show the evidence to the press officer by mark_osmd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    >Haut then tells how Colonel Blanchard took him to "Building 84" - one of >the hangars at Roswell - and showed him the craft itself. I think it's unlikely that the base commander would show something this top secret to a lowly press officer. Think of it this way, suddenly a UFO shows up, the Feds charge you as the Base Commander to clean up the site, hide the UFO and bodies and most of all, try your best to minimize the number of possible leaks of this information. So you're not going to go out of your way and show the stuff to the base press officer. He has no need to know, it would be better for you to feed him the same cover story as he's going to give the press.

  37. Nope, humanity is not ready by Weaselmancer · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm ready. I'd bet you're ready. But most of humanity is not.

    Three out of four Americans are Christians, and they're definitely not ready. So are most other people of faith - since little green men from Tau Ceti would pretty much blow their creation stories out of the water.

    It would be instant chaos. Three out of four people...or more, depending on what part of the world you're from. Suddenly, the foundation and moral code they've all built their life on - is provably false. And therefore...gone. They would go nuts.

    If these guys are smart enough to cheat physics and be here, they're probably smart enough to not go public. As a species, unfortunately...we couldn't handle it. Which is a real bummer for me, personally. I'd like to meet them if they're around. I've got nothing to lose, it wouldn't change my world views by very much at all. But for most other folks it would be simply too traumatic.

    --
    Weaselmancer
    rediculous.
    1. Re:Nope, humanity is not ready by cowscows · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I hate to spoil your deeply-researched argument, but the fact that 75% of the US considers themselves christian does not mean that 3/4 of the population is vehemently opposed to science and stuff like evolution. While some of the more extremist christians like to pretend that they speak for all of the rest of us, most of us don't care much for what they're saying. I've read some stuff about a strict creationist believers having a crisis of faith when coming across something like 10,000 year old construction, but for most of us, our belief in God (and/or Jesus/etc.) does not require us to take the Bible as 100% fact, or to assume that science is a tool of the devil to trick us.

      As a geek who strongly believes that there is a God, I find that the more I learn about the universe, the earth, biology, etc... the stronger my beliefs become. After all, what's more impressive; A god who just magically wills everything into being, or a God that oversees an incredibly rich, complex, and fascinating universe for its inhabitants to explore?

      --

      One time I threw a brick at a duck.

  38. Re:Flip side... by bladesjester · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  39. The part of the Roswell crash that never added up by ruiner13 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Many of the accounts of the crash site at Roswell and the parts recovered claim that there was a metal that despite being super thin, was flexible and impervious to damage. Ok... if they really had such a material, how the heck did the craft crash and scatter debris? If the material was that good, how did it come apart? I'd love to believe, but that part in particular has always made me a bit skeptical of the whole incident.

    --

    today is spelling optional day.

  40. TM-based levitation by Animats · · Score: 2, Funny

    Clearly, the only way we're going to get to the bottom of this is have the FAA do a full inspection on the flight-worthiness of egg-shaped saucers.

    Back in the 1980s, when the Transcendental Meditation people were claiming to teach levitation, someone asked the FAA to investigate TM as an "unlicensed flight school". The FAA actually replied, stating that FAA jurisdiction begins at 50 feet above ground level (hovercraft are thus regulated as ground vehicles), and that the TM people appeared unable to achieve sufficient altitude.

    This got some publicity, and embarrassed the TM people, who stopped selling "levitation seminars". Especially after someone established that their pictures of people levitating in lotus position were achieved by bouncing on a trampoline.

  41. I don't know, but... by Worthless_Comments · · Score: 2, Funny

    I for one welcome our new...

    Ah, shit.

  42. Re:400 Government/Military Witnesses - On Record by lawpoop · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You are correct that you really don't get hard evidence for alien spacecraft visiting Earth from watching the Disclosure Project. However, if you take the evidence that people present, from radar evidence to fighter jet scrambles to cover-ups from high-up in the chain of command, you begin to see that the world's governments and militaries are putting a lot of effort and energy into making sure that the laypeople remain ignorant and unaware of *something* that is happening in the skies and space.

    The most skeptical conclusion I can come to is that they don't really understand it -- it could be something weird like ball lightning that appears and acts like vessels -- but so far, it hasn't proved harmful or out of control enough to warrant the need to explain it to the public. The job of the military and government is to protect us. Actually, it's more than their job -- the psychological need of human beings to think that somebody is out there, protecting us from dangers, is what has allowed the institutions of military and government to exist since the dawn of humanity. People *need* the government and military, or else they would be out there all on their own in the Big Scary Universe, psychologically speaking. If the common person found out that there was some phenomenon out there that the government or military really didn't understand, but could be potentially dangerous, people would lose faith in our societal institutions. And the people in charge would fall out of power -- or at the very least, there would be a big shake up. This is why they're covering it up. Space aliens or ball lightning, it means they will have a hard time winning the next election.

    --
    Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
    -- Pablo Picasso
  43. Re:You think we are aware of all tech military has by tftp · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I say it's impossible because, assuming your premise:

    1. Not a single sample of early but almost-modern NVGs is available.
    2. NVGs are not difficult to invent, they are difficult to buy parts for.

    For example, we could have a NVG as early as 1930 because you could use the early iconoscope to capture IR light below the visible power and amplify it as much as you want. That's what TV does, basically, and it is not a surprise that some camcorders are IR-capable.

    But that NVG would weigh 200-300 lbs and wouldn't be exactly portable. To make it portable you need to advance the technology quite a lot. First portable NVGs were still vacuum tube based, but implemented in a very smart way, as a series of long parallel holes in a glass plate. The front edge, facing the field, would receive the picture, produce electrons, those electrons would then be accelerated within all the tubes and when they hit the end, facing you, the light would be both visible and bright. That worked like a "bug eye" - once the picture is focused it is transferred as if through a bunch of fibers, just with amplification.

    With semiconductors you can create far fancier, and more efficient NVGs. But we, as a society, made every single step of this path, and it is proven beyond doubt how exactly each step was made, by who (scientists like to publish!) and who stepped on shoulders of those giants and made the next advance, etc. etc.

    As other people mentioned, if you show me a working time machine, or a fusion battery of CR2032 size, or an FTL drive, then I may want to consider the idea of external help - just because no human on this planet has a foggiest idea about how to even approach any of those challenges. But the problem is that every known invention on this planet is 100% traceable to its origins, and origins of those origins, recursively.

  44. Re:The part of the Roswell crash that never added by solios · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Simple. Their magnetic bottle lost containment. Titanium may be tough (at the right thicknesses, etc) but when the jet it's attached to goes kerplooey, you don't see pristine sheets of the stuff spanging off the ground.

    Just because WE can't find a means of damaging, distorting, or otherwise rending a material doesn't mean the forces it contained weren't great enough to do so. :P

  45. Re:Comparison by TempeTerra · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Convergent evolution is very well established though. Consider dolphins and sharks - their common ancestors are further back than when pre-dolphins started living in the water, but both have developed similar hydrodynamic shapes and move through the water by wriggling their bodies. The most interesting bit is that although both creatures move using the same principles, sharks wriggle side-to-side while dolphins wriggle up-down. It is reasonable to expect that useful adaptations will be developed independantly since there are only a few good solutions to most problems.

    Eyes are another good example - they've been independantly developed several times, but there are only a couple of sensible ways to make them so unrelated eyes still usually look the same. Not always of course, I think octopi use a pinhole camera eye rather than a lens eye.

    --
    .evom ton seod gis eht
  46. One word: teenagers by voss · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why should we expect aliens flying spacecraft to be more competent than humans driving cars or flying small personal aircraft?

    There is no evidence that the roswell craft assuming it existed was anything more than a small landing craft
    quite possibly incapable of interstellar flight. Likewise most human being flying on space shuttle or commercial
    aircraft could not pilot the craft to literally save their life.

  47. Re:The part of the Roswell crash that never added by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Also they said the amterial with thin and tough. They didn't say they tried to hit it with a hammer to bend it, or blow it up or melt it.

    Also there's no telling how hard the ship hit.

  48. Re:The part of the Roswell crash that never added by Fantastic+Lad · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Also there's no telling how hard the ship hit.

    Indeed. -A ship which may well have been moving at speeds several orders of magnitude greater than any human jet was capable of at the time.


    -FL

  49. UFO's weren't classified in the 40's. by Fantastic+Lad · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Suffice it to say that a Lieutenant is not exactly going to be high on the "need to know" list.

    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

  50. F-117 or why there are no aliens visiting... by MosesJones · · Score: 3, Funny

    I believe the first F-117 Stealth (invisible to all high tech anti-air defenses)

    The "Stealth" planes are one of the greatest examples of why there are no advanced Alien Technologies. The F-117 is very visibile to most modern high-tech anti-air defense radar, its just a smaller bleep than it should be which makes it slightly trickier. This makes it difficult for crap 20+ year old radars to see it, e.g. the ones that the French, US and Brits sold to Iraq. If the F-117 was actually invisible to radar then they wouldn't be flying it at 30,000ft all the time.

    If the US really does have alien technology and it led to the F-117 I'd really suggest complaining back to the "superior" race that invented it.

    Now Stealth Ships however tend to work because they build on the radar clutter that the sea causes thus making the ships nearly impossible to make out from the background noise.

    --
    An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
  51. I think I will write a deathbed affidavit by DrXym · · Score: 2, Funny

    I will confess to being an Illuminati agent, to know who killed JFK, to have befriended the yeti, to know the warehouse where the moon landing set is stored, to be frequent visitor to Atlantis and to have the exact coordinates that lead to the centre of the Earth. After all, if it's in my affidavit and I'm not around to answer questions, it must be true. Right?

  52. Aeroflot by Savage-Rabbit · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost And how many soviet recon aircraft flew over US territory? (This is a serious question, I never heard about such incidents.) That depends on what type of recon asset you are talking about. There was frequent probing and prodding of US and NATO borders by all sorts of patrol aircraft like the Tu-95 and Tu-16 etc as well as faster recon aircraft based on jet fighters such as the MiG-25. The actual overflights however were usually conducted by much less spectacular aircraft that remarkably enough seem to have gone mostly unnoticed by the public in the US and Europe. This strategic recon force was known as Aeroflot. It seems Soviet airliners frequently made the most illogical flights simply in order to fly as close to as possible to sensitive sites or even right over them if they thought they could get away with it. They were even known to fake mechanical problems simply to be able to land in restricted areas. Later on the Soviets much preferred a combination of space based and human intelligence gathering but I don't think they ever stopped using the Aeroflot fleet for intelligence purposes. It was a much more elegant way of doing it than the U-2 and SR-71 flights were and as long the scheme remained undiscovered by the public in the west it was a far less provocative way of gathering intel. I was born well before the cold war ended and I can only recall one minor stink being raised when some journalist photographed an Aeroflot machine equipped with what looked like camera gear (presumably this aircraft had an extensive suite of well camouflaged ELINT equipment as well). Of course western intelligence services knew all about this but the public was for the most part blissfully unaware. Of course the USA and the Europeans did the exact same thing if possibly on a smaller scale.
    --
    Only to idiots, are orders laws.
    -- Henning von Tresckow
    1. Re:Aeroflot by Slashamatic · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Aeroflot by smellsofbikes · · Score: 3, Insightful

      >Of course western intelligence services knew all about this but the public was for the most part blissfully unaware. Of course the USA and the Europeans did the exact same thing if possibly on a smaller scale.

      In the book "Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb" by Richard Rhodes, he says (and provides evidence to support) that from roughly 1949 to the day Frances Gary Powers was shot down, there were US aircraft flying in Russian airspace twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. He goes on to say that every year throughout the early 1950's the US would do trial bombing runs with several dozen bombers and accompanying fighters over major Russian cities, during broad daylight, because the Russians didn't have anything that could stop them, and says that throughout the '50's the US recon aircraft were clearly visible, flying over, and the best the Russians could do was fly mass numbers of airplanes below the US recon aircraft to try and physically block views of things they wanted to keep secret. If you read a bit about Curtis LeMay, you'll end up A: amazed that WWIII didn't happen, and B: with a much better understanding of why the USSR didn't like the USA very much. We were acting like the biggest bullies on the block, unashamedly.

      --
      Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
    3. Re:Aeroflot by somersault · · Score: 2, Funny

      "We were acting like the biggest bullies on the block, unashamedly."

      Were? Sorry; that's a bit trollish, but it doesn't make it any less true! :P

      --
      which is totally what she said
    4. Re:Aeroflot by smellsofbikes · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I said that for a reason. I grant you that in the history of the USA that prior to invading Iraq we've never before launched a pre-emptive attack on a country that has not made any belligerent moves towards the USA, so the claim that we're acting like bullies *now* is reasonable. But let's make a comparison: what we did in Iraq is like beating the crap out of a kid on the playground because he was being a small bully who might some day try to trip us. What we did in the USSR was more like going over to the other elementary school and stealing every kid's lunch money, while telling the kid "I could kill you any time I want to" every day for ten years. I think that's far scarier behavior.

      --
      Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
    5. Re:Aeroflot by Qrlx · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I grant you that in the history of the USA that prior to invading Iraq we've never before launched a pre-emptive attack on a country that has not made any belligerent moves towards the USA

      Unless you count all the countries in the Carribean, Central America, and half of South America.

    6. Re:Aeroflot by IngramJames · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I grant you that in the history of the USA that prior to invading Iraq we've never before launched a pre-emptive attack on a country that has not made any belligerent moves towards the USA


      Unless you count all the countries in the Carribean, Central America, and half of South America.


      And the Native Americans themselves, of course...
      --
      'No rational religion claims "supernatural" exists, that's an atheist slander.' - seen on slashdot.
  53. This is a fascinating question. Here's the anwer: by Fantastic+Lad · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Just for the sake of argument, what if the government managed to... um ... keep a secret secret? Is it possible that we wouldn't have heard about it?

    This little logic loop is one of the sillier and yet most effective ones in circulation amongst the sceptic crowd.

    Here's the way out of the, "People can't keep secrets" trap. . .

    It's true; people really can't keep secrets. There are leaks all the time. This article is just such an example. But so what? The military industrial complex has installed a failsafe to catch these leaks. It has gone to massive effort to teach everybody from a very young age that only losers who don't get laid believe in conspiracies, UFO's do not exist, James Randi is not an ego-maniacal twit, your highschool science teacher was not just repeating the same crap they taught him, and that the material universe is the beginning and the end of everything you ever need to know.

    With all of that programming in place, when a leak does happen, (like the one in this very article), people climb over each other to rationalize it and ignore it.

    How clever is that? Programming the inmates to keep themselves locked up. It's genius.

    Interestingly, the slashdot crowd is more apt to falling for this trick because special attention is placed upon them; they're the ones with the brains to work everything out, so you have to make sure they are good and programmed. It's baked into the school system on many levels, one of the most poignant being where jocks are rewarded for bullying the geeks, the cheer leaders would never love a geek, and so the geeks are shunted away from relevance on a deeply emotional level. And so they retaliate by being smart and fearing being laughed at and seeking approval from teachers and authority figures. Any subject which taps this programming, (like UFO's,), simply cannot be argued with just reason. There's huge emotional baggage preventing rational thought from prevailing. --You have to deal with deeply buried emotional trauma and self-worth issues. Believing in UFO's gets you ridiculed, and ridicule means you will never be loved. That's emotional wall #1. It offends the science teachers, who the geeks turned to for emotional validation, so that's emotional wall #2. Two big emotional walls will not be breached with reason alone.

    Unless they shed the programming, geeks maintain pretty much a permanent handicap when it comes to TV talking heads lying to them; (talking heads who speak with authority in the same warm-fuzzy tones felt in the, "Isn't Science Nice" stage of programming in the school system).

    So realistically, even if Lieutenant Walter Haut had left a movie reel of an alien being cut open, or bits of space metal in with his testimonial, the truth would still be rejected if the Military Industrial Complex did not want it to be accepted, which they don't.

    Not until the warm-fuzzy talking TV heads, the school teachers, and the sex-drive of teen-age girls are radically altered, will such ideas become 'real'. And thus, between the church and the science teacher, you have your population under a level of control which allows you to dictate to it what it actually chooses to think and believe.


    -FL

  54. Statistically improbable by SoopahMan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A man about to die swears under penalty of law that he saw aliens. He then dies before any such legal penalty could possibly take effect. In other words, the affidavit adds absolutely no authority to these claims. But let's explore the highly unlikely possibility he's telling the truth.

    If what this guy is saying is true - the events and observations he lists - then his conclusion that these were aliens from outer space can almost certainly not be true.

    His claims are pretty consistent with the standard alien conspiracy theory:

    1) Egg-shaped machine flying featuring no external features we currently associate with flying vehicles
    2) Said machine was either taken down by our own fighters or malfunctioned and crashed
    3) Machine was built of incredibly strong light metal
    4) Creatures that are basically humans with certain features pronounced are found dead

    IF all of this really happened, then it is incredibly, highly, amazingly statistically unlikely these dead creatures were aliens.

    1) If the craft was shot down, why in the world would a craft so advanced that it flies 3x the speed of our best planes, in our atmosphere without any clear method of flight and with super-strong metal not survive attacks by such old US planes? Such a ship would either survive or at the very least escape.

    2) Why in the world would the aliens look humanoid? It's arguably unlikely they'd even be carbon-based, they may not even be primarily solid (they could be cells of gases for example). It's nearly impossible they'd be in any way similar in size or shape to us.

    The most damning part of #2 is the "like us" problem - it's essentially the same basic reason to question any God hypothesis - because nearly all God descriptions say God is essentially humanoid, which is very self-centered to assume that something so completely foreign and powerful should look anything like us. Both God and these aliens are as statistically likely to look like The Flying Spaghetti Monster as they are us, but more importantly they are MUCH more likely to look as strange as a floating cobble of spaghetti than they are to look familiar to us.

    Since statistically this conclusion is so unlikely to be true we need to consider the observations and find an alternate explanation.

    Statistically speaking, if we ever did find alien life it would be at a technological state nowhere near our own - so either way, way behind us (we found bacteria!) or way, way ahead of us. They got here so they're not that way behind us kind - so they must be leaps ahead of us. Not hundreds or thousands of years of technology but millions or billions of years ahead of us. Not the kind we shoot down with some crappy planes.

    But what does suit this set of observations is a very different conclusion: That the ships observed were ourselves, perhaps 1000 years in the future, experimenting with time travel. They appear, the vessels fail or, not being designed for war (and not having interstellar capability) are shot down, and the dead people inside are what we have evolved to look like.

    Whether time travel is actually possible is up for debate, and these observations are obviously dubious, but IF you are to accept this dying man's final words, then you cannot possibly conclude he saw aliens from outer space. He more likely saw our future selves.

  55. BS detector pegged by Peter+Simpson · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why is the only mention of this in an Australian paper and on a Roswell website? And, if you had such a document, wouldn't you scan it and make the scans available?

    Yeah. I thought so.

    Oh, and the reason the "egg" had no control surfaces, windows, etc?

    It was an escape pod. :-)

    (open the pod bay doors, please, Hal)

  56. Alien tech by hey! · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, to play devil's advocate, who is history's greatest engineer? Probably Archimedes. Now take a piece of hardware that embodies a good selection of modern technology. Since this is slashdot, let's say an iPhone. Drop it out a 10th floor window, pick up the remains and shoot it back through a time machine to Archimedes' house, say around 232 BCE.

    There is little doubt he would recognize it as a piece of advanced technology, from the materials alone. Yet, exactly how likely is it he'd glean anything that would be useful in repelling the Romans invaders who killed him twenty years later?

    --
    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  57. Re:The part of the Roswell crash that never added by BobMcD · · Score: 2, Interesting


    In my mind, they didn't crash or get shot down, but rather suffered a containment failure or other catastrophic equipment failure on one of their craft.

    If this technology weren't cutting edge or experimental, we would likely have seen a lot more of these things by now. Where are the alien opportunists, for example, if just any of them can hop in an egg and land here? No, if it is at all possible that the Roswell incident happened as described here, we're not looking at an accomplished, routinely-travels-to-earth species. Rather one like we were at the earliest crossings of the Atlantic.

    I also think that this could be why we're not seeing more and more reports of these types of incidents. This one was a fluke, and had almost nothing to do with the military being there (except perhaps some alien tourism...)

  58. These objections are easily disposed of by hey! · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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, who says they were aliens. Just because in the last 24,000 years we've had the planet to ourselves as the sole suriving species in the Homo genus doesn't make that normal. For more than 80% of our 130,000 year existence on this planet, we've shared it with other intelligent hominids. Now consider that the oldest civilization from which we can draw a line to our modern civilization would be the Egyptians. From the time agriculture was introduced to Egypt to our modern level of technological development is a mere nine thousand years, or scarcely seven percent of our species existence. And there is little reason to believe this is an exceptionally short developmental time -- quite the contrary. Humans did not even have the chimney until late medieval times. Imagine how things would have been different if movable type had been invented in Roman times.

    So it's quite possible to imagine another homo species, perhaps with a little head start, perhaps with a little more brain power, perhaps with a little more luck, producing a civilization far in advance of ours at a time when we did not have writing. And since a technologically advanced civilization has less need for raw human muscle power, their fertility rate would be low. They'd have been like distant gods to us.

    Assuming the large headed "aliens" were in fact humans of a different species, the "alien" craft would actually be terrestrial. Since these craft started appearing around the mid 20th century, it is reasonable to assume that they are indeed space exploration craft, possibly sent out to explore a nearby star system with a crew in suspended animation.

    The crash is likewise easily explained. The returning craft rendezvous in orbit, but find no trace of the Atlantean civilization that sent them. Patrols are sent out around the globe which is swarming with tiny headed barbarians. One of the patrols comes upon the Sphinx, and the dread news flashes out to all the ships in the flotilla. "You Maniacs!" cries one of the pilots, "You blew it up! Ah, damn you! Anubis damn you all to Ammit!" He commits suicide by crashing his vessel.
    --
    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  59. Re:Its not necessary to have it "shot down" by LWATCDR · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The original post said that he could see the US military shooting down such a space craft. I was pointing out that odds of a shoot down where about zero. A crash due to mechanical failure of course possible but I would say unlikely but possible.

    My best guess as to what was at Roswell if it wasn't weather ballon.
    I think it was a failed test of an ME-163. The US captured several but claim that they never did any powered tests of one. They where egg shaped. Could look like a saucer at the correct angle. And if you where flying one with fuel and it crashed you wouldn't look very human when they found you. The fuel was very nasty stuff.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  60. Re:The part of the Roswell crash that never added by Reziac · · Score: 2, Informative

    And just because someone is firing a shotgun at your steamship doesn't mean your boiler can't independently fail and explode.

    I think you're right about the early-explorer thing -- just look at where Earth is on the galactic map. The only way we could be closer to bumfuck nullspace is to leave the galaxy entirely. Why the hell would anyone come clear out here?

    1) Explorers
    2) Refugees
    3) Fleeing criminals

    And remember, our little radio envelope, only a couple hundred light years across, is but a grain of sand on a remote beach. Someone *might* trip over it, but odds are against it.

    --
    ~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
  61. Re:Its not necessary to have it "shot down" by unity100 · · Score: 2, Informative

    hm.

    but there are many incidents of unidentified aircraft appearing over white house, hovering high, and then vanishing speedily when jets take up to intercept, just about the time of the roswell incident.

    me 163 is an aircraft thats impossible not to identify. its basically a burning stick, with a very low maneuver capability. its reported that such craft can do 90 degrees turns while going over 3000 km/hour speeds without any slowing down.

  62. Who says they HAVE to come in peace? by Reziac · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What makes you think aliens are necessarily any "better" or even particularly different? In fact, it's far more likely that any aliens wandering this far out (being we're on the wrong side of the galactic tracks) WILL be aggressive.

    Exploration is a function of aggression. Maybe not overtly, but the ultimate object of exploration is expansion for your species, whether for living space, resources, or whatever.

    In fact, failure to proactively defend our planet MIGHT be interpreted as CEDING our planet to said aliens.

    We just don't KNOW. But it's foolish to assume that just because someone is exploring the Far Reaches of the Galaxy, that they necessarily come in peace and friendship. We need only look at ourselves for an example, and there is absolutely NO reason to believe that human behaviour is all that unique.

    --
    ~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
  63. never trust old people by mzs · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Just kidding :)

    But seriously my grandmother it pushing 80 years old at this point. If you just met her you would think she is a completely normal person. She walks around, talks coherently, cooks, etc, just normal old age things like needing to use the bathroom a whole lot and being a little slower and not the best memory any more. But if you get to know her really well like me, well then there is another story. She told me a while back she murdered her first husband. If you had not known her well that would have truly bothered you but consider that a month ago she told me that she was on a walk and saw a purple faced boy with bangs (yes the haircut) that she knows has been murdering and raping old women in the area.

    So I am just saying sometimes the mind of an old person become swiss cheese and you really can't believe much of anything they say unfortunately.

  64. Roswell by Alias1234 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    For what it's worth, I attended New Mexico Tech (not too far north of Roswell) in the early 1980s and as part of a paranormal psychology class I wrote a paper on the Roswell Incident. For that paper I interviewed one of the physics teachers at the school WHO LAUNCHED THE WEATHER BALLOON THEY FOUND. He showed me dozens of letters he had written over the years to authors of various UFO books explaining the science project he had attached to the balloon, showing pictures of it, etc. Of course his side of the story was never printed by any of them.

  65. Re: it was visible on an old meteorological radar. by IhuntCIA · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Just want everyone to know, it is impossible to make any aircraft "stealth" to all frequency ranges. Mind you that an aircraft must use some metal parts (conductors) as parts of the engine. The bigger the metal part the lower the frequency it reflects. The lower the frequency, the harder is to hide it from the radar beam.
    The "facts" I know ( and You will have to believe me on that )

    1. The radar was "hacked". It was an vintage radar working on VHF or UHF range.
    2. The F-117A was flying low.
    3. The F-177A was hit by an manually guided missile. There was no direct hit.
    4. The aircraft crashed down and burned down almost completely because the Serbian soldiers that came to the site did not want / did not have an order to put the fire out.

    The guy that hacked the radar was my high school friend. He said to me that the main issue with the hacked radar was slow scan time. That made guiding the missile tricky.
    The other friend of mine that was in the vicinity of the F-117A crash site and came to it said that aircraft was damaged by gunfire ( AK-47 for sure ) but the main damage was due to blast and large shrapnel's. The soldiers had an order to guard the crash site and they just let the wrecked plane burn down. Shit happens when one lives in Serbia.

    The point of this story is that the primitive tools can bring down high tech systems if they are unexpected.

    Back to topic:
    1. The article mentions the egg-shaped alien craft. This is quite odd. I taught aliens have the saucer shaped crafts. Or saucer-shaped was Nazis craft.
    2. What kept this guy silent for years ?
    3. The mentioned craft was rather small. Could it be an escape pod from the larger craft ? If it is where is the big one ?
    4. The whole Roswell story looked like an US military cover up for the spying program. Aliens fit in there like a perfect decoy. Now some old pa says it was the aliens.

    PS
    The Roses are red, the Violets are blue, in Serbian aerospace hacked radar brings down F-117@You!!!

  66. Brainwashed. by Fantastic+Lad · · Score: 2, Insightful
    This point is moronic. This is not a "leak" it is an old man with an ulterior motive, nothing more.

    I'm not going to play "clashing definitions" with you. The fact of the matter is that this represents new information from an inside source. You can choose to believe or to not, but the leak, whistle-blower, informant, whatever you choose to call him, obviously exists. He's sixty years late, but that doesn't change the fact that he is in a position to know. He's the one who researched and authored the original press release wherein the military at Roswell announced that they had recovered a crashed flying saucer.

    Why do I say this? Because if he had this information, and really felt the need to share it, he would have done so sooner. Instead he waited until it was impossible for the consequences to matter. That's all the proof I need.

    You can make a statement like that and call my reasoning moronic? You know nothing about this man or how he worked. How can you possibly make any kind of statement about how he would or would not react to the influences in his life and what those reactions mean with regard to the validity of the information he is passing on? You can't, plain and simple. From my perspective, I can see a lot of sense in his approach; while alive, as you point out, he was available to pay the consequences for not towing a military secret. How does that do anything to take away from his testimony? Your reasoning is broken.

    And calling his motives "ulterior" is even worse. That's a huge, baseless assumption and judgment based on what appears to be a strong dogmatic bias on your part.

    And save that "you've been programmed" crap. It makes sense when you're sitting around your dorm room stoned, but in the light of reason, it's just vacuous. The only thing I've been programmed to do is seek REAL evidence, and this ain't it, not by a mile.

    First of all, I don't take drugs. Secondly, the light of reason shines quite brightly in my life; The logical fallacies in your post suggest, however, that you spend less time in the same light. You say you are programmed to seek REAL evidence, and you couldn't be more correct. But who defines REAL for you? Think: you are not even considering the current information now; you are brushing it aside based on assumptions and logical fallacies without even having seen it. All you have is a second hand news report which was light on details.

    The point is, the claim may be false, and it may be real. I won't know until I see more. But I am not brushing it aside so thoughtlessly. Thoughtless and forceful rejection of an idea is one of the hallmarks of having been brainwashed.


    -FL

  67. No, Advanced = Specialized by Nerdposeur · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I can't believe the civilization as advanced as ours is full of people who can't even program a computer. It's just odd.

    It's just the opposite - the more advanced we get, the more specialized our jobs become. If you live in a tribe in the jungle, you might know everything your civilization knows. If you live in a space age civ, you can't possibly.

    Can you make your own clothes? Grow your own food? Build a telephone? Diagnose your own illnesses? Design your own car? Draft your own legislation? For everything you answer "yes," there are a hundred other jobs you can't do for yourself because there isn't time in one life to learn it all.

    My med-school-student fiance will never know how to program a computer, and doesn't care to. But you'll be glad she hasn't wasted her time on that if she's your doctor someday.

  68. I'm not the one throwing a grade-school tantrum. by Fantastic+Lad · · Score: 2
    I didn't read the rest of your post, as you're ignorant and stupid.

    Well now, I think you did read the rest of my post, albeit, you probably skimmed as quickly as you could because that's all you could manage due to the sick feeling in your gut which always hits when you have to deal with the repercussions of your actions and the possibility that somebody might make you face yourself. But that's beside the point.

    Listen, we are all ignorant at all times on many levels, yet we do the best we can to continue living with the information we have, formulating theories and testing them through application while we work to collect new information. The point you brought up is interesting and I am glad to know it, but my original post and all the points therein are not actually diminished by it, so your abusive screaming about, 'gross ignorance,' is entirely unfair. It is in fact itself ignorant behavior. Essentially, you posted with knee-jerk anger in response to my attempt at examining how kids grow up in a system where they are psychologically manipulated. When I responded to your irrational and poorly communicated points, you became even more rude and agitated and irrational. And now you have regressed to calling names and running away. How old are you, anyway?

    Maybe it is time for you to grow up and face yourself and the world squarely and without fear. Preferably before you do any more typing.


    -FL

  69. No attacks. by Fantastic+Lad · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You just love insulting people, don't you. Well, I do too. We know very little about each other and although I could make a great many assumptions about you, they would be as equally erroneous as the ones you seem to have made about me. After seeing your name, I recognized we've made comments back and forth of equally insulting nature. Would I be making an erroneous assumption that you are a disturbed individual based on the nature of your personal attacks on me?

    Either I'm a far more terrible person than I think I am, or you're mis-interpreting my comments.

    I just re-read my last post, and I really don't think I said anything which was insulting to you. I made very sure to qualify my comments in such a way that they responded only to what you were saying and to explain what might be easily inferred from what you were saying. --You told me directly in that you think it's cool and acceptable to mislead people for fun and profit. If that's not how you really feel, then why on earth would you represent yourself as such? Any insult or unhappiness you perceive from my pointing out the difficulties which result in living life in that manner is coming from within you.

    My comments about false skepticism being like sewage is I think, as I said, appropriate. Dogmatic belief doesn't allow fresh ideas in, and it allows false knowledge to grow and fester. That's what sewage is; liquid waste which isn't being flushed away by fresh water. Again, any insult taken from that is hardly my fault. I'm just holding up a mirror. And whether or not you believe me when I say it, it is true; I do not mean any disrespect towards you. And anyway, I wasn't directing the Skeptic thing at you. I was just commenting on the phenomenon at large. If you chose to take it personally, then again, that is a choice you made for some reason which only you can answer to.

    As for your thoughts regarding UFO's, I am absolutely interested. If you have information which lead you to the belief that UFOs are all 'chaf', then I really want to know it! Jeez. If you know something which is so very convincing, then it either must be really solid, (in which case, I want to know it too,) or it's faulty. However, based on the work I have put into looking at this, and all the patterns I have seen over, and over again, I am not banking on your being able to tell me anything I've not already heard and seen the flaws with, but who knows? I've been wrong before and I am not scared of being wrong again.

    When I began looking at stuff, I had very strong beliefs in how things were, and UFO's didn't fit into that mold. I come from a very strict science background. But I wanted to know more, so I started looking. Then something very interesting happened; the first and immediate thing I ran into was that I found very deeply rooted negative emotional reactions in myself to even looking at stuff outside the orthodox mainstream. I was embarrassed to say what I was doing to my peers, and whenever I did breathe word of it, I was attacked ruthlessly with ridicule and the like.

    This effectively prevented me from looking for many years.

    But the day did come when I stopped and blinked and saw that there was a logical disconnect. Very simply, strong emotions like those I described are not supposed to be part of a scientific enquiry, and since they were so overwhelmingly powerful, not just in myself, but in virtually everybody I've ever heard talk about it on the orthodox science side, I began to wonder where that intense emotional energy came from and why they were so deeply entrenched in me and the people I knew. So I tried a little experiment. --I made a deliberate effort to push past those emotional boundaries and look honestly at the 'forbidden' materials and get on with the job of measuring them. I didn't think at the time I was doing anything special, but this changed my life in a significant way. Fear no longer controls what I allow myself to think about. --And suffice it to say, that when I fin