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British "X-files" Released to Public
Smivs writes "Britain's Ministry of Defence has just released files regarding investigations into UFO sightings between 1978 to 1987. Over the next three or four years, 160 files will be handed over to the
National Archives. The first group of eight files, one of which is more than 450 pages long,
is available today.
The Guardian newspaper details many of the events in question, some interesting and many just bizarre.
A similar release of UFO files by France's national space agency last year attracted more than 220,000 users on its first day, causing it to crash. To avoid such problems, the National Archives is using an external hosting company which can add extra capacity as needed to handle the web traffic."
This was reported on BBC Radio 4 this morning. They had an interview with a "UFO Expert" who suggested that they had only released the files that conained no real evidence and that they were holding back much more than they had released.
He, and his colleagues, knew all along that this is what would happen. Apparently.
The interviewer tried to get him to say "the truth is out there" but he wouldn't bite!
simon
I thought the British X-Files was called 'Torchwood'?
steampunk web design
Finally! Undeniable proof in the existance of Santa Claus! I knew it!
What are you saying? Religion is really behind all the probing of young boys? We already knew that.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Everything regarding UFOs, paranormal effects, and such, is like that. They always claim that something is being hidden, and how can you possibly prove that some file is not being hidden somewhere?
I once tried to counteract that, asking for an UFO expert to give me the very best case they had for UFOs. He answered with a case that is cited in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as being one of the most reliable cases for the existence of UFOs: in August 13, 1956 RAF jets were sent after some objects that were detected by radar, coming from above the Soviet Union at very high speed. Those objects disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean. My answer: that sighting coincides exactly with the Perseid meteor shower. Those UFOs had the same behavior that would be expected from a meteoroid. And that's one of the "best established and most puzzling" UFO sightings, according to the Britannica.
To sum up, we cannot prove that "real evidence" isn't being hidden somewhere. But if one of the most respected publications in the world cannot give us one single example of an UFO sighting that cannot be trivially explained with five minutes of research, then I really cannot believe that any stronger evidence exists.
UFO nuts: Release the secret document that prove aliens are here!
(UFO documents are released)
UFO nuts: Those documents don't offer the evidence we wanted! Therefore, there must be more documents somewhere that do! Release more documents!
(rinse, repeat)
This cycle has been going on for 50 years. If there was anything to this, some country somewhere would have released documents proving something by now.
And just because the government investigated UFO sightings, it doesn't mean aliens are visiting. The government investigated ESP too, and it's still hogwash.
Jimmy Carter was on the Skeptics Guide podcast not long ago and they brought up the UFO incident, as he is often cited by the conspiracy theorists as 'proof' that aliens are among us and the government is covering it up. No, I can't explain their logic. Carter was unaware that he'd been coopted in this manner and quite forcefully noted that what he saw was indeed a UFO because he couldn't identify what it was, making it unidentified. He was at the same time quite sure that it was likely not an alien craft of any sort. It's one of the few times I've heard someone make the point that because you don't know what it is, then by definition it's an unidentified flying object. A conclusion that has no relation whatsoever to the *nature* of the object (e.g. alien, human).
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Yes. The pattern leads you to being one of the ufo nuts.
No alien civilization is expending the mammoth amount of resources needed to traverse the vast distances of interstellar space just to stick a probe up your ass. Deal with it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
When I was young I thought I had seen a UFO in our backyard. I was utterly convinced. I started to do research on it and couldn't understand why so many things (lochness monster, bigfoot) were not better explained and explored when man seemed to understand so many other things (elements of nature, physics, genetics). I though I was on to something big.
As I matured it began to dawn on me. My experience, had it been real, would have been reported by somebody else. The memory was from my childhood, it could have been a dream before I understood the difference.
The more I tried to relive the memory, the more an unnerving recognition hit me. Shit, I had seen the spaceship from ET in my backyard! It had been a dream created by my overactive imagination.
I had wanted it to be true I swore that it was, because the memory backed me up, but my own memory betrayed me.
Looking back I see that misconceptions are common human fallicies, and that is why scientific data, which is checked and doubled checked by many people is so critical in the search for truth.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Way back in a previous life, when I was a USAF Recruiter working out of the Reno, Nevada office on Moana Lane, I would occasionally get a UFO report from an excited member of the public. The recruiting office was the only number listed under U.S. Air Force in the Reno phone book because the nearest Air Force base was located across the Sierra Nevada mountains in Sacramento, California.
At first, I tried to explain that the local Air Force recruiting office wasn't the right place to report a UFO sighting, but then I realized what a gift these calls were.
From then on, whenever a UFO report came in, I got as excited as the caller, asking them for details, etc. Then I explained I wasn't the correct office to report UFOs to and then gave them the number to the Nevada Air National Guard's base operations office.
And I always told the caller to not take "no" as answer from whoever answered the phone.
What?
Article from May 13th regarding Catholicism and aliens:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080513/ap_on_re_eu/vatican_aliens
When I was younger I had a couple of these, and I could absolutely see how people could interpret it as aliens/ghosts. It's such a feeling of overwhelming terror and/or dread with sometimes dreamlike "hallucinations," if that's the right word.