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Apollo 14 Moonwalker Claims Aliens Exist
An anonymous reader writes "Former NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell — a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission — has stunningly claimed aliens exist. And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions — but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades. Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as 'little people who look strange to us.'"
If its as well covered up as he says it is, why did they let him talk? They're obviously allowing him to go public so he'll appear as a crackpot and give credibility to the opposing view.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
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Tom Cruise worships L. Ron Hubbard.
Jim Carey think vaccinations give you autism.
Just because you're famous doesn't mean you can't be a total crackpot. Its too bad this time its somebody more science-related.
We don't. Just like we don't know if there was ever really a flying spaghetti monster.
Besides. Since when do Conspiracy Theorist care if somebody who is telling them something is an insider or not?
People who refuse to believe we landed on the moon refuse to listen to insiders. It doesn't matter how many facts or how much proof you heap upon them. They still don't believe.
Only when it works to their advantage do they "believe" what an insider has to say.
People who believe aliens have been to earth don't believe insiders when they say it didn't happen and they claim that the insiders are covering everything up but when one insider says it happened all the believers point to it as ultimate proof because it's from "an insider".
Give me a break.
They choose when to believe and when not to believe depending on what best supports their Theory.
It's like arguing with a Religious person.
Why does it seem so many assume that this is something he have started believing now at this late age; and that is it connected to dementia?
Edgar Mitchell have been involved with fringe science for a long time, and have made statements proclamation his belief in UFOs for a long time. It is his belief; if he seen something to make him believe this I do not know. But to say that this is simply old age and senility is unkind and inaccurate.
The Long Now Foundation
I find it impossible to believe that the government is capable of keeping conspiracies secret. They couldn't keep 5 guys breaking into the DNC office a secret (Watergate), but somehow they can orchestrate an elaborate conspiracy involving thousands of people over the course of 6 decades and not a single shred of credible evidence has been leaked. I'm sorry but deathbed confessions don't count.
That's ridiculous. That's like saying an airline pilot knows about the latest top secret fighter plane designs. Personally, I find it a bit hard to believe that a civilization is smart enough to travel interstellar distances but too stupid to use basic camouflage.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Discard the most unlikely alternative and you'll always find yourself statistically closer to the most likely one.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
You know what is confusing me about these aliens? Why do they always contact governments when they come to Earth so they can cover it up?
I can only applaud our governments, they are doing an excellent job. If they are capable of covering up moon hoaxes, 9/11 plans and aliens crash landing, I'd just wish they were able to do their job just as fine with, say, the war in Iraq?
This is what always gets me about these people, they talk as if the government is a body of competent people. Last time I checked, they aren't! Private corporations could run most countries better.
A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned.
Clicked pie.
Is it truly so remarkable a concept that there is alien life? And, would this man not be in a position to perhaps know the truth? Why do so many of you dismiss him so quickly? There have been so many "close encounters" and the like in the last several decades to certainly make me a believer.
Not to mention, I've met many people that believe weird things without being able to blame dementia/alzheimers/any diagnosed mental illness.
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Keep in mind that Apollo astronauts weren't selected because they were good scientists. They were chosen because they were good pilots.
How do all these aliens actually pull off the secrecy... amidst all these people that LUST for its exposure?
Don't tell me that "Take me to your leader." actually works!!!
Absolutely. Of course, if you're going to fall into the NASA conspiracy you want to be true, shouldn't you at least acknowledge the NASA consipracy you don't want to be true? Maybe?
Without lending credence to either conspiracy theory, one of the metrics you should use when judging the likelihood of a conspiracy being true is the number of individuals required to be complicit.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
require extraordinary proof. Regrettably, there is none.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
yet none of the several dozen other space travelers have backed him on this ...
One of the most common reasons for not revealing the existence of aliens, is because the top leaders of the world are afraid that the population of earth will panic. I don't think that is the case, I think most people would say something like "yes, I knew there really were aliens". The only ones I think would panic is the religious nut-jobs, although you would think that the would be used to have their view of the world shattered at least once every hundred year or so.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Wrong. I think you'll find that one of the biggest problems with the US government is that there's way too much control by private corporations. There's too many laws to help out corporations, and too many laws restricting the rights of the individual. The countries that seem to work the best, are the ones that put the rights and living conditions of people above the well being of corporations.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Or land their crates safely after traveling for billions of miles, or at least crash somewhere else but in the middle of nowhere, midwest USA.
One could imagine that they're either more subtle when they try to remain under cover than leaving mutilated cattle and anally probed people lying around after their departure, or that they'd be more choosy when trying to reveal themselves than to show themselves only to some moonshine-swigging hicks. Why not land in the middle of the Superbowl finals, now THAT's revealing!
Seriously, for such an advanced species, they make very little sense.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It seems far more likely to me that the government is covering up things they themselves do than the actions of aliens. Furthermore, why would an intelligent species meet with what I consider to be generally the most violent portion of supposedly civilized society, find reason to return, but not take stuff from us.
Unless all they want are our bees and ozone.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Being in space or not does NOT lend any extra credibility to any claim. If you think he's credible on this, then fine, but "ZOMG he's been to the MOON!!11" doesn't make him an expert on extraterrestrial life and government cover-ups. Even if it did, it's still only a statement. Without any evidence to back it up, it has no real value.
Mitchell has been into fringe (or pseudo, take your pick) science for a long time now, and believes in things like remote healing, ESP, as well. Should we start to believe in that as well?
I get paid by NASA too, and frankly, I'd be more worried someone there would fake evidence that there IS life in space in order to get a bigger slice of the declining NASA science budget (which is getting cut 20% this year if GWB gets his way).
I think he just had a case of the senility.
The aliens don't have to find you if they put you on your planet.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
As Michael Shermer has observed, "smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons." A humble reminder that you can have a degree in aeronautical engineering, a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics, and also walk on the fucking moon, and still have totally pseudoscientific, non-evidence-based views about the world just because you personally want them to be true.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
I would imagine it would be pretty hard to walk on the moon and NOT have a religious experience.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Unless they had the interstellar equivalent of a flat tire, why would they stop here? Certainly not to learn anything from us - about us, perhaps; but any race capable of overcoming the obstacle that is interstellar space would hardly be interested in our coal/oil/uranium fired technologies.
I don't know... ask an archaeologist if they would like to have a time machine to observe ancient civilizations directly. I would imagine that in a galaxy even fairly dense with sentient life, finding one right on the dawn of a industrial/atomic/information age would be a pretty rare thing and would be something hypothetical alien xenoarchaeologists would really want to observe.
I hope that we're not alone. The idea that this is the only planet with sentient life anywhere in the Universe isn't just a waste of space. It chills me to the core to think that there's no Others out there. I hope they're waiting for us. "Hey, humans, you made it! We thought you'd never get out of that singularity."
Let's also assume that they have different physics and that FTL travel is possible and routine.
If there were aliens that were aware of our existence, it's likely that they would watch us to see what we would want them to do.
"Hmm. There's genocide here and here, 40 000 of their offspring starve to death each day. They do not interfere. We should not interfere with their development.
"They are afraid of things which are different. We are different. We should not show ourselves."
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Seriously, for such an advanced species, they make very little sense.
What makes you think an alien species shares your notion of "sense?"
Wow, I cannot believe I am playing Devil' advocate for little green men . . .
That's ridiculous.
Really? Picture this scenario: Aliens are real. You know it, and you're about to send an Astronaut to the moon, where you feel it is likely they may encounter aliens. Would you NOT brief said Astronauts beforehand? No procedures, no protocol, not even a heads-up? Really?
I think that THIS would be the ridiculous position.
Personally, I find it a bit hard to believe that a civilization is smart enough to travel interstellar distances but too stupid to use basic camouflage.
What stupidity would be required? Again, imagine you're an alien. You know these inferior beings represent no threat to you at all. Likewise, you know their civilization will deny your existence. Why, then, would you waste any spare cycles on camo?
Your assumptions seem to be based on excluding the possibility that aliens do, in fact, exist. There's nothing wrong with that, as an opinion, except that it limits the opposite conclusion unnecessarily.
To paraphrase Murphy's law, shit happens. Small things like a drop of condensation bringing down a B2 stealth bomber even though the thing costs 2 Billion, with many more in R&D costs.
If our basic understanding of logic is correct, one can actually prove that one cannot think of everything that can go wrong and thus prevent shit from happening to you.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Just because they're advanced doesn't mean the have the same notions of importance as we as human being do. Add in language, cultural, and technological barriers, and it isn't so strange at all that aliens could do some really dumb things by human logic. Perhaps aliens use biotechnology we haven't dreamed of, or have never heard of radio waves, etc etc.
this
I'd love to play with this a bit:
1. There's a lot less to crash into during space travel than when you're at or near a planet. We did a lot more crashing of probes into Mars than in the space between here and Mars.
2. The mutilated cattle and anal probes are probably being done by people and being blamed on aliens. That never had to be UFOs, and it can still be someone covering up for their sick relatives.
3. Why not land in the middle of the superbowl? What if they deemed our civilization was not secure enough for open contact. What are the odds that enough scared people with the means of launching a missle would be interested in doing so out of fear. Pre-emptive strike ring any bells? From that perspective, landing in desolate areas makes logical sense. Although it would probably make more sense for a water landing if possible. Easier to hide.
4. We need more gratuitous references to our typical /. memes
I for one welcome our alien brethren/overlords
1. mutilate cows
2. anal probe astronauts
3. flashy thing people
4. ???
5. profit!
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
No, they can't.
If you actually research it, you would find that Government agencies are almost always on target.
There are three things to remember.
1)I corporation can fail at 99 project, and succeed at one. No one will talk about the failures, and they will hype the success. Where as with a government agency they can do 99 projects right, and miss one and that one gets hyped all through the media.
2) Go to the library and look at the fiscal records, almost all projects are done on time and within budget.
3) Government agencies have for more accountability then corporation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Exactly. I say it's promotional material for the movie and this guy was flipped a few bucks for it. I seriously doubt that all of these so-called governments would keep their mouth shut for this long.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Attempts to expand Godel's incompleteness theorems to anything beyond their original scope are foolish. From the Wikipedia article you cited: Authors such as J. R. Lucas have argued that the theorems have implications in wider areas of philosophy and even cognitive science as well as preventing any complete theory of everything from being found in physics, but these claims are not generally accepted. Don't make poor Godel into a sociologist!
Yeah, the seemingly logical human brain makes all kinds of silly blunders.
Such as inserting a naive interpretation of Godel's theorem into a debate that isn't about the derivable elements of a formal system.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Actually, it does. That' how it works, see? There might be a pink elephant on top of the Eiffel tower (a small one, that hides whenever someone looks directly at it - or maybe even an invisible pink elephant!). But if it does exist, its existence is so flimsy, so irrelevant, and has such a small impact on the rest of reality, that it's not worth taking into account.
When something that is as actively sought as "little gray men in flying saucers" is supported by exactly zero evidence, it's pretty safe to say that it doesn't exist.
If you read my post, I wrote that there is a high probability of alien life. Just not alien humanoid life, visiting the Earth. We would have noticed it (where by "we" I mean sane people, with cameras and radars and telescopes).
Over 10 people filmed the airplanes hitting the towers on 9/11, and they weren't actively looking for airplanes hitting skyscrapers. There are thousands of people looking through telescopes, analysing data from radars and just recording video of the sky. Many of them are actually actively looking for alien spaceships and little gray men visiting the Earth. Grand total of evidence? Zero.
When something is the subject of so much observation, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It's not proof, of course, but you can't really prove anything, outside the domain of pure maths. Everything else can, at best, be "undisproved".
The crazies are the ones whose judgment is enough impaired that they make the mistake of talking about it.
Sane people see a lot of weird stuff over a lifetime, but we keep our mouths shut because (a) we want to be able to keep a job and pay the bills, and (b) no one wants to hear you talk about the weird stuff except the crazies. See, other sane people either (a) never saw the weird stuff, so they think you are crazy, or (b) they have, and they know better than to talk about it in public, so they think you're one of the crazies for talking about it. Either way, they back away quickly and you find that no one sane wants to talk to you.
The first rule about the Weird Stuff is we don't talk about the Weird Stuff.
---dragoness
I would say it is more like an air force test pilot knowing about the latest top secret airplane designs. He might no know how to build one from parts, but he knows its there and he probably knows SOMETHING about its capabilities.
This doesn't seem to be that far from the truth. It might even be straight up fact.
Also playing devil's advocate for little green men:
If they knew our culture they'd know nobody would believe they exist without overwhelming physical evidence, so there would be no point in going through a great deal of effort to hide themselves, and it would be safe to conduct activities that would leave them vulnerable to being observed.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Seriously, for such an advanced species, they make very little sense.
Yep. It's almost like they're, you know, alien or something.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Although improbable, there has to be a first civilization in our galaxy, and maybe we are the most advanced life form in our galaxy so far. Regarding the age of the universe, it is possible, because the matter of the solar system had to go through 2 or 3 supernovae before having enough high period elements, and it took the universe about 5 billion years alone to create us since our planet was created, which is more than a third of the age of the universe.
This leaves us with a number of possibilities:
- we are the first
- intelligent life is very rare or very fragile and volatile in our universe
- the guy is right and they are already here and among us (maybe they are criminals hiding on a primitive planet)
- interstellar distances are simply to big to be overcome, or no one wants to pay for the energy
- evil alien predators are already on their way to blow us out of the sky before we become serious competitors
- we live in a zoo and are just being watched
- everything is just a big illusion, and our reality is only virtual
p.
Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
Oh really now.
Does anyone here find this all that surprising?
The odds are other life does exist, get over it.
Not only that, I bet they are better than we are, absolutely laugh at our television broadcasts of our "top" scientists BY DECREE, telling us that the distances between blah blah blah and that is totally impossible to cross such distances....blah blah blah....
Really lets put this in perspective.
In less than 120 years, we went from Orville and Co, to the moon.
Our basic understanding of the very structure of the universe and the forces and materials of things go together is infantile at best.
I mean, we have no concept of what gravity is, although we know enough to describe it and how it acts on objects.
We have no clue about the various types of materials the universe is made out of or their properties. I mean dark energy, matter etc have practically just been discovered for example.
Now take a sentient being other than humans, and instead of 150 years to figure out how to travel in space, give them say an extra million years. Even, dare I say a BILLION years of time.
Point is, you no longer have just ET's, you have gods with a small g walking around up there.
If we can do this rate of advance in just 150 years, imagine what ET's could have done with a billion years.
What is possible would be pretty much fantasy to us.
If there are ET's and Earth is not a rare occurrence, they must be all over the place.
I bet we are just the ants in their backyards. :-)
-Hack
PS: I hope there is something better than humans out there. We suck.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
"NASA has edited or deliberately taken at lower resolutions"
Cite
"And if you read though the Apollo transcripts, there are some really bizarre comments that only make sense if you take them in the setting of discovering alien ruins or debris on the moon."
Completely false.
"And if you look at the history of the UFOs and alleged government cover-ups, you see that the few that have broken their silence on the matter have effectively been death bed confessions. Others that have done so have just disappeared (i.e. Bob Lazar)."
Non sensible.
"then why address the issue at all?"
there are't sweeping anyting under the rug, they are responding to the public, like they're supposed to. The fact that there is nothing there doesn't mean their' hiding anything, it means you are wrong.
I used to really be into this, I ahve looked at every piece of information available, read the transcripts, and there is no evidence, at all of aliens.
Plus it doesn't even pass any rule of thumb.
There is no gain in covering this up anyways.
Imagine how much money NASA would get if they found something?
For example, if they had evidence that the face on Mars was an artifact created by another race, we would have people there by now.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If the airline pilot were a fighter jet pilot who spent their career being briefed on top-secret fighter designs, because their job was to test them, then of course his saying that he'd been briefed on some alien aerospace tech would be credible, though of course still subject to debate. Not mere dismissal with an analogy that supports him.
Especially since this particular pilot was indeed an astronaut, who not only tested America's most advanced aerospace research, but was actually out in space, where the aliens come from.
And why do you think that the aliens he's saying are known to exist are too "stupid" to use camouflage? Maybe they don't mind being seen when they're seen. Maybe they use camouflage the rest of the time. Maybe they want to be seen. How can you pretend to know, and to be smarter than them when you know less than nothing about them?
--
make install -not war
Ah....and me with no mod points.
This is the whole point isn't it. The old 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' (Sagan, boy, I miss him).
At the least, he needs to give details that could be either verified or corroborated in some way. Just saying 'we have them' and 'Roswell is real' does not do anybody any good. If he claims that he has knowledge of something like their anatomy, he should tell us exactly how he knows that their anatomy is like that.
Specific events could be something along the lines of "Col. Green from Special Command gave us a brief on this day prior to liftoff. The brief covered X. Also present were astronauts Y and Z." Being briefed on aliens, or viewing aliens, or some similar event would leave such an indelible mark in his memory that he should be able to tell you everything about the event. I remember where I was when I saw the Challenger explode. I remember where I was on 9/11. If I was briefed on aliens, I'd remember it so well I could reproduce it almost verbatim. Absent this sort of information, I call bullshit.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Seriously, for such an advanced species, they make very little sense.
oh really !? ... and landing over superbowl is actually the kind of thing that a complete retard with big boots will do.
an advanced, smart species will act EXACTLY the way you describe above
if you find a new civilization, you just cannot go in head-first like some sort of bush-junior-junior ... if you wanna do some hands-on testing on a few specimens, you have to choose precisely the ones that noone will believe in case they remember something.
.. or that it's just not a good thing for them to do it?
you would take your time and study the place thoroughly and do all possible experiments, as stealthy as possible
and after you done your homework, you may wanna start to give them clues, like crop-circles or whatever stuff may seem strange for them and see how they react.
and only after that you may try to approach them more directly, in a manner that you figured out would be the least disruptive for their civilization.
have you ever thought that there may be many alien species which are studying as for centuries already but figured we are not ready for contact
why would you think that alien species are so dying to see you asap?
anyway, it is quite disturbing to see you got moderated +5 for the above commentary.
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In a statement, a spokesman said: "NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe.
Of course NASA isn't involved in that. INS division 6 handles extra-terrestrial contact.
Anyways, am I the only one that found it odd that in each sentence he specifically state that NASA wasn't involved? He didn't say that the US government doesn't track or cover up such things. This leaves it open to any other group or department. The spokesperson did not flat out say NASA has not encountered any evidence of extra-terrestrial life forms visiting Earth. The closest thing he said is "we do not share his opinions on the issue." If I was wearing my tin-foil hat, I would say it is odd that in every other sentence he was very precise in stating that 'NASA' does not handle a particular activity or procedure, but in the last statement he is not as precise and says, "...we do not share his opinions on this issue." The word "we" could refer to different groups or sub-departments. What opinions are they referring to? If they are referring to the belief that they have visited several times, I would have to say that several is not a quantitative term and what I see as several, others would view as "many" or "a few." That is a difference in opinion. Oh well... maybe I should just take off my tinfoil hat now.
I think he just had a case of the senility.
Probably. But the lack of evidence of aliens doesn't mean they don't exist. Notice that I said there is a lack of evidence of aliens. Read that again. Now again. Okay now you understand that I am not claiming any evidence of aliens nor that I have any experience with them. Think about that, hard. That's what I said. Now that I've said that, consider that if you were a highly sophisticated life form and could travel interstellar space, you might have a heightened sense of the maxim: don't fuck with the wildlife.
Just callin' it like I see it.
I am disappointed in the way people who know nothing about the subject can be so quick to dismiss the possibility we are not alone . Skeptics are smart asses who are afraid to be wrong. This is the biggest thing in history , it is happening right around us and our myopic view of the world is making us blind. How arrogant to think we are alone. People used to know the world was flat. People used to know we cant go to the moon. We really know nothing. The truth is we are not alone and we never have been.
Besides the fact that the demolitions were completely obvious,
Only to people who haven't bothered to seriously examine films of real demolitions and compare their features with film of the 9/11 events.
and the presence of molten steel for weeks afterward completely indicates incendiaries,
1. There was no molten steel for weeks afterwards. This is a lie spread by the 9/11 conspiracy theory movement. The fire was hot enough to melt aluminum, and also hot enough to severely weaken exposed structural steel, but it was not hot enough to actually melt steel.
2. If there was molten metal of any type, how would that prove incendiaries? Incendiaries are small devices which ignite fires in other material. Even if we assume that fires on 9/11 were started by incendiaries, the incendiaries themselves would not be responsible for the heat required to melt any molten metal found in the ruins; rather, the burning of fuel ignited by incendiaries would be responsible for that, meaning that the metal would be molten regardless of the origin of the fire. But we do not need incendiaries to explain why fires started on 9/11 because GIANT AIRLINERS CRASHED INTO WTC 1 AND WTC 2, DUMBASS.
the put-options and stock market chicanery are well well documented,
And have been shown to be ordinary stock market transactions, not chicanery. Once more, you believe lies spread by the troothers. The entire 9/11 'truth' movement is a farce.
and the owner of the buildings was even quoted directly, "I was talking to the fire Marshall, and I said, 'We've had such a terrible loss of life, maybe the best idea is just to pull it.' So that's what we did, we made the decision to pull."
You are repeating a conspirawacko-edited version of the quote designed to make it sound more suspicious. Please see this link for an accurate transcription of the quote:
http://wtc7lies.googlepages.com/larrysilverstein's%22pullit%22quote
"I remember getting a call from the fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.' And they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse."
Note that 'THEY' (as in the fire department) made the decision. Not Larry Silverstein. And in this context 'pull' clearly means 'pull out', as in get firefighting personnel out, stop all efforts to fight the fire, and just let the building collapse, rather than kill more firemen in a lost cause.
Pull being a well known demolition term meaning "Bring the building down",
More conspiracy loon BS. See:
http://wtc7lies.googlepages.com/is%22pullusedbydemolitionsprostomean%22demol
and then watching video of the WTC7 coming down... combined with the fact that news sources including the BBC somehow knew it was going to collapse ahead of time..
Yet another carbon copy conspiracy loon lie. Seriously, every last one of these supposedly damning points has been debunked years ago, yet you assholes keep repeating them again and again and again. I've seen them brought up and shot down dozens of times at the JREF message boards (www.randi.org, but the message boards seem to be down at the moment). If you want the answer to this one, search the JREF forums once they're up, or browse the wtc7lies site (I'm sure he's covered it somewhere in there, he demolishes all the standard WTC 7 talking points).
At the very least there is clearly complicity and fore-knowledge and a cover up regarding WTC7.
No, there isn't.
It doesn't really stand to reason that the other rather incre
Right, but this is just religion, with aliens standing in for gods.
Currently, the number of planets we know have ever sustained life is one. We can disprove the theory that Earth is unique by finding evidence of life on e.g. Mars, but that would just shift the goalposts -- we still wouldn't have any evidence from which to argue that life has ever existed outside our solar system, and we still wouldn't have any evidence from which to argue that sentient life has ever existed other than on Earth.
Face it: we have no meaningful data at all on how widespread life is in the universe, and there is no realistic prospect that we will get it any time in the foreseeable future. What this means is that speculation on the existence of intelligent alien life can only be just that: speculation. You can make personal arguments about how unlikely you think it is that life is unique to Earth, and you can make emotive arguments about how silly you think it is to assume that humans are "special" or "unique", but the fact remains that we have no evidence either for or against this position.
[Roswell crash] Or land their crates safely after traveling for billions of miles
The thing is that aliens may be subject to the same "laws" of economics that we are. Fancy technology does not mean one has a fancy budget. It may have been a cheap, worn-out saucer that nobody wanted to spend resources to replace. And maybe there were many successful flights that we never hear about. Just because one crashed does not necessarily mean they only visited once.
Table-ized A.I.
Just to establish, up front, that I do NOT believe aliens have visited earth. But, supposing they do:
If you were an alien, where would you land your craft? In the middle of nowhere, where there is no one around to mess with you or your stuff, or in the right in the middle of Central Park, where the Bloods or the Crips might gank you and jack your ride?
Why, exactly, would they care whether we knew about them or not? Suppose that proof is found that aliens exist. They have the technology to cross interstellar distances, so it's a fair bet that they are massively more advanced than us. What are we gonna do about it? I'm pretty sure whales are aware that humans exist, but there's fuck all they can do to stop the Japanese whaling fleet.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
It's only the teasers that we get to see on Earth. These are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for level 5 planets and buzz them, meaning that they find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one's going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.
Advanced species know that Earth is mostly harmless, so they tend not to bother with it.
I'm a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar...
-Lucy-
If you have the technology to handle the incredibly, stupidly huge energies needed to travel between the stars, all the missiles on Earth don't mean a thing to you.
I disagree. A modern supersonic F-22 Raptor Fighter Jet armed with missiles, bombs, 20mm rotary canon, etc is orders of magnitude beyond say, a 1000 year old trebuchet. The jet utterly dominates and controls every aspect of the engagement... its just absurd to contemplate such a 'battle'.
Yet even so, if the pilot were to land the jet within range of the trebuchet to say hi to the locals, a barrage of 300lb rocks crashing into it is still going to break it.
Point is: just because something is fantastically advanced technology doesn't automatically mean it can't be smashed by a big rock.
1. There's also the possibility that they are messing with us. I can see benefits to a first contact scenario in which you fake a crash and come off looking all helpless, and a lot less scary. If I can see the benefits, then so too might alien-thinking aliens. It amazes me how many intelligent rational people will implicitly assert that aliens don't exist unless they behave like humans would expect them too. ("aliens can't be real because if they were then they would surely be doing _____")
2. There was a documentary done a while back that made a very good case for cattle mutiliation being a government black op to monitor radiation absorption levels in areas near where secret nuclear testing and uranium mining has been done. Apparently the tissue (lips, anus) which are most frequently removed from mutilated cattle are the ones that also provide good indication of radiation absorption.
3. See my rant in point 1. Aliens look alien. Aliens think alien. You can't assess their likelihood of existing based on a priori assumptions about what you expect their behavior should be.
4. That's a given
A coverup? A massive worldwide coverup? C'mon. Is there anyone really believing that governments are capable of it? Do you remember stories about Word documents with metadata that revealed more than intented? Governments aren't capable of covering much simpler things, let alone UFOs.
We know next to nothing (and in some cases, I'd bet we know EXACTLY nothing) about a great many of the universe's more detailed workings.
Thanks Captain Obvious but I think you're projecting there. All YOU can be sure of is that YOU know nothing and that the knowledge of others is beyond your knowledge. Humans understand a lot more than you realise and I can tell how little you realise by the tone of your post and it's inappropriate and overly simplistic analogies.
Debian FTW
The new X Files movie was just released today in Australia.. TFA is on an aussie news site .. is the good doctor on the payroll or is it just a happy coincidence?? ;)
Currently, the number of planets we know have ever sustained life is one.
So what? We're so primitive that I can count on two hands the total number of planets that we can actually see, and they're all orbiting the same star, one of billions in this galaxy (which is one of thousands of galaxies that we can currently see). Only in the past decade have we even been able to detect exosolar planets, and even then we can only detect them by their effects on their host stars, not by direct observation (so we can only detect the massive gas giants, not the small rocky planets more likely to have life like ours). Making any assumptions based on our observations of the universe is outright idiocy in my opinion, since we know so little.
Face it: we have no meaningful data at all on how widespread life is in the universe, and there is no realistic prospect that we will get it any time in the foreseeable future. What this means is that speculation on the existence of intelligent alien life can only be just that: speculation.
True, but the vastness of the universe indicates that it's extremely likely that other life exists out there. The idea that, out of probably quadrillions of planets out there, there is no other life but that on Earth, seems rather silly to me. Yes, it's just speculation, but given the choice between saying 1) it's likely we're the only planet with life, or 2) it's likely that we're NOT the only planet with life, choice #2 is the only one that makes any sense. It's possible #1 is true, but it's far less likely than #2.
and you can make emotive arguments about how silly you think it is to assume that humans are "special" or "unique"
There's no emotion involved here. It's pure numbers and probability. If there's 1E12 stars out there that we know of alone based on our primitive astronomy, and an unknown number of planets in the "habitable zone" around those stars, what are the chances that life never evolved on other worlds? Given that we've already shown experimentally how cell-like structures can spontaneously evolve given the right mixture of materials, pressure, and temperature (normally seen on planets in this habitable zone), it seems pretty obvious that the chances are extremely low that we're the only world to have any life. And that's just assuming that our hydrocarbon-based life is the only viable kind, instead of considering totally alien lifeforms which may evolve in totally different environments.
Agreed. Nuclear weapons can produce million degree plasma. No material fails to vaporize. Aliens will still be vulnerable to weapons like nukes because they will be constrained by the limitations of physical matter. Oh, you say, aliens will make their ships out of pure energy! Well, to that I would say "that's stupid" and move on, because energy fields don't DO certain things that materials do. Materials have limits. I think there's an upper boundary to technology, called the Laws of Physics, which may be refined, clarified, but won't be broken outright.
I think the point the OP is trying to make is that the aliens always, mysteriously land in the US. You're continuing the assumption made by most in your country that it is the centre of the world and an alien couldn't possibly want to land anywhere else.
If you really want to think like an alien, you'd realise they don't give a fuck about nations and their boundaries. The US is too populated a country to land in, I'd go for north Canada, Russia, the Australian outback, African desert or somewhere like that.
They're probably just Teasers. :)
I think there's an upper boundary to technology, called the Laws of Physics, which may be refined, clarified, but won't be broken outright.
True but we don't know all the Laws of Physics yet so how can we say categorically that something is impossible? If you look at String Theory then they have models which just about break every concept we hold dear: that it is not to say that any of these bizarre models are correct but if you can come up with a theory which allows you to break things like Lorentz and unitarity in a manner not yet contradicted by experiment I don't think that you can be too certain what may eventually be possible!
Actually, tourists are the least likely candidate, because they would be proceeded by a significant amount of explorers first and entrepreneurs later. Let's suppose our race discovers to warp through the universe and gets to visit other planets.. you'd see local infrastructure long before any serious tourism and surveys long before investments in local infrastructure.
We're just monkeys so they don't feel the need to hide, wouldn't you expect them to have built a nice resort for their tourists?
If they did decide to hide, tourists would be the last aliens you'd see. Our system would be off-limits except for maybe with their governing body. Perhaps we'll meet some refugees or renegades, though.
Even if there were tourism but we're not that popular (or one of too many options), we can be sure that there has never been an incident (such as a crash) for surely they'd storm in to investigate - without caring much if the monkeys notice.
And seriously, since when are tourists the modest kind? Surely there would be at least one of them to ignore the "do not feed the animals/do not knock on the glass" signs to see our reaction. Most of our planet is not North Korea so if just one of them was craving our mass attention I'm sure they could come up with a few ideas that we couldn't possibly cover up.
After all, unless they all believe in intelligent design, they should be intelligent enough to recognise where we are in evolution.
The first aliens we'll meet are going to be explorers, just like our explorers will be the first to visit other star systems.
Provided you're right, I guess the "Jesus experiment" was considered a failure, considering what we made out of the experience. Seriously, the atrocities you mention, a lot of them have been justified in the name of some religion. Forced conversions, religious prosecutions, crusades, I guess that's not what he had in mind.
If anything, religion is one of the leading causes of war. I think if Jesus could see what we made out of his religion, he'd have stayed a carpenter and shut up. Well, I would have, put in his boots.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
project disclosure always says the same thing for years - that full disclosure is right around the corner...over and over again.
that he believes in aliens is not news!
that it is in the news is what makes it news...
big things in the REAL world are unfolding, so it's best that you look at UFOs, JFK, .. and i'm waiting for a big elvis story to complete the trio of redirection...
war anyone? economic shocks on the way? oh look! aliens!!!