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CIA releases its own X-Files
Ewen writes "The Daily Telegraph in England reports that the CIA has 'released a secret history of its investigations into UFO sightings, revealing that there was more truth in the popular television series The X-Files than is often believed.' Read the full story at The Telegraph. " Truth, that is, that agents screw up and some believe and some don't. The CIA ultimately concludes that the probability of contact with extra-terrestrial life is slim. But, then again, they would, wouldn't they? /impish grin/
If we can make a fighter jet that is virtually invisible to the naked eye (F-22) and on radar, then I think aliens would have the ingenuity to not let you see them. Plus, if they wanted to be seen and known about, they could just as easily drop onto the lawn of the White House and open their doors and make some "meep-meep" noises. Besides, judging by the amount of radio emmissions we have from TV/Radio/etc. I think if there were another civilization out there with the same amount (or superior) intelligence that they'd be glowing in the radio spectrum. Of course there is always the possibility that the light hasn't reached us, or already reached us, but I doubt it.
If life does exist on other planets, I hope (for their sake) that we never meet them.
--CS Lewis (roughly quoted ;) reflecting on Europe's encounters with indigenous peoples.
2^5
As you say, "To most people" UFO sightings are a fashionable thing. That doesn't say anything about the people for whom it is not.
;-)
As for life "our there" being either more primative or more advanced than us, why not assume both? As for them using radio waves, maybe they've already learned that radio waves make you something of a beacon and, for reasons we can't yet verify, that may be a bad idea. In any event, they are kinda hard to pick up more than 10 miles out of town where I live.
Everything in the world is expainable in theory. That doesn't preclude other theories nor does it guarantee which, if any, are correct. Or, to put it more personally, just because I can explain away anything -- except new coke -- with a theory that is possible doesn't make me right.
In any event we are out there and we haven't contacted any otherworldly beings yet either. I wonder if they have concluded that we don't exist because of that.
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>The first radio waves produced by this world probably haven`t reached the nearest solar system to ours yet so this argument in particular is flawed.
So we invented radio in like 1994 then? Funny I don't remember hearing anything about it at the time.
And more to the point, it doesn't really matter when the stuff was sent out. If we listen to the sky for ten years, we will hear ten years worth of radio waves form every planet newer in years then lightyear distance to it. Since we cannot visit the ETs anyways, it hardly matters whether they created the waves now or 2 billion years ago...
A better argument would be, that if someone pointed a radio telescope at earth, the chances are one in 50,000,000 that the radio waves reaching them from earth at that time would be those from when humans were creating "intelligent" radio.
Of course, Aliens that were alive 2 billion years ago aren't likely to be kidnapping rednecks and farm animals.
Whether or not UFO's (from another planet) exist, who in their right minds would expect the CIA to tell us if they did! This isn't paranoia, but just basic common sense. The government needs to maintain the appearance of being in control, which would hardly be helped if they admitted (if it were true) that we were being visited by another life form who had technology way beyond anything we do.
If the CIA is convinced there are NOT any UFO's, then perhaps they would write an article like this as a PR exercise, or for some other reason, but if they DID have any proof there are UFO's, they could be expected to write the exact same type of article....
Conclusion: It's meaningless.
If we had the technology to visit other worlds, and we discovered a more primitive life form, what would we do?
Would we abduct some of them as specimins to examine? I'm sure that we would. And we would do what we could to supress their memories of the encounters, because we wouldn't want to disrupt their natural course of evolution too much.
It's exactly what the alledged aliens here are accused of doing.
Now I can't say for sure if it's really happening, I've never encountered anything that made me say "That has to be a UFO". But I think it is certainly possible.
Sure there is a lot of BS out there, but sometimes a given UFO event is much more plausable than the explaination given by skeptics. Example:
"The silver ball flying around the trees was simply the planet Saturn being refracted through ice crystals in the atmosphere. The light that came from the silver ball was caused by ignited swamp gases that drifted from the nearby (10 mile away) swamp. The aliens were a form of mass hallucination, and the 20 foot, perfectly round charred grass were the craft was alleged to have landed was caused by the heat of the swamp gases, and the perfect circle is just a coincidence, case closed!"
While that's not an actual debunker statement, it is similar, and as far fetched as some I've seen. It's easier to believe in UFOs than in that!
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
While I've seen a few hard-to-explain lights in the sky from my amateur astronomy days, the most impressive "evidence" I've seen for UFO's was a photograph.
When I was about 14 years old my friend Ronnie brought in a photograph that he claimed his grandmother had taken. Ron's grandmother lived in a trailer-park in the Appalachicola National Forest. Her neighborhood consisted of a clearing about 1-2 acres in size with a street light in the middle and a ring of 5 or 6 trailers around it. The photograph was a perfectly focused, night shot of a classic UFO hovering over the street light. There was another source of light from above the street light illuminating the clearing so that you could clearly see a couple of the trailers and the dark forest in the background. Ron said that there had been another UFO hovering above the first one and beaming light down on the clearing. Weird.
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I'm sure a more advanced would find radio signals a primitive technology.
I don't have a deep understanding of Quantam Mechanics/Physics, but from what I do understand, you can have two particles, separated by distance that "mirror each other" in other words if one starts to spin, the other does as well.
If my understanding is correct, then it seems that you could build transmitters based on this, and these transmitters would not leave tell-tail signals.
I know some Quantum Physicist is going to flame me for my post, but my point is, we have not yet discovered everything. Just because we use radio waves for communication doesn't mean an advanced civilization would.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Why do our scientists travel deep into the jungle, and put tags on the native wildlife?
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
2 years ago I saw a funny fake press release concerning the Mars Probe Pathfinder in which the Martian Airforce spokes-thing denied rumors of a giant ball landing on mars, which then deflated and released a robot, putting it down to delusional concpracy theorists and swamp gas.
But this stuff really didn't take off until the cold war was about over.
Even though Roswell happened in 1947, it was pretty much ignored until 1980, when some people in UFO circles started investigating. I don't think it got mass public attention until around 1990.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Even Aricebo could only just detect the most powerful military RADAR ever built on Earth at a distance of a few tens of lightyears. Not much of a range.
SETI is essentially pointless, as a means to detect alien civilisations, until the square kilometer array is completed and online. Only then will we be capable of detecting moderate-strength signals over any kind of distance. To argue any significance to SETI's not having turned up anything is like arguing that Neptune doesn't really exist because you can't see it with the naked eye.
If you don't have the technology, of course you are going to see nothing!!!
As for aliens & UFOs, I will give you the same set of questions I gave in an unsolved mysteries class I ran:
Is it possible to build a craft that can travel through space?
If not, is it possible for aliens to travel to Earth by any other means?
If aliens don't need to travel through space to get here, would they need to fly craft at all?
If they do need craft, and such craft can be built, do the descriptions of UFOs meet the constraints that would exist for such a craft?
Is there anything such a manned expedition could achieve that could not be done remotely, by radio telescopes?
How would they relay any information back, in any useful or usable time-frame?
I don't know if UFOs exist, but I do believe that any alien civilisation capable of building them would have asked itself similar questions.
If they can't get to where they want, OR can't get any useful data back, OR they can get the data by staying at home, why would they bother going? On the other hand, if it's practical to go, useful data can be collected by that means alone, and the data can be sent back before those funding the expedition die of old age, it would seem an eminently sensible approach.
We can't answer, definitely, those questions, but we can give some fairly reasonable guesses, and that can tell us a lot about how likely UFOs are to be real, or at least how advanced the technology would need to be, compared to our own, for it to be possible.
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)
You should never fall into the "I can't explain it so it must be a UFO" trap. My point was not to try to prove the existance of Alien craft, but rather to say that sometimes the debunkers and skeptics ask you to believe is more far-fetched than what they are trying to debunk.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
> they're going to make us breeding grounds for aliens, and they're all gonna look like Julia Roberts.
:)
And how, exactly, is this a bad thing?
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
With no means of finding the reality, through all the nonsense and garbage, how could anyone hope to determine what's going on?
However, some departments ARE fairly competent at cover-ups. The Roswell story was claimed to be a "weather balloon", but was recently admitted to having been a "Project Mogul balloon", for detecting Soviet nuclear tests. And we've only their word for it that this time they're telling the truth. (They've apparently destroyed all the paperwork relating to it.)
Most people knew they were covering something up. I can't blame anyone for getting paranoid, or thinking it was ET. That the skeptics, EACH TIME, took the Government at face-value, even after the Government acknowledged that it had lied in the matter, is a farce. Skeptics NEED to be skeptical of ALL groups, not just ones with pointy ears.
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)
Along with two other friends we were driving in a van back from a flea market at around 5pm in the evening -- which in September is still broad daylight. This was right after I had moved to Cincinnati, so I was new to the area.
We stopped at a gas station whereby one went in to buy gas and get a drink while the other went to the bathroom. I stepped out to smoke a butt (I was a smoker then), and walked away from the van to look around. The gas station was on the right side of the road, while on the other side just after the road a small grass covered valley dropped down and stretched out to tree covered hills several miles away.
Then I noticed what looked like a silver balloon just hovering maybe a thousand feet over the treetops, its size was about a third of my thumbnail, arms outstretched. At the time I thought it was a balloon, but didn't have anything else to look at while waiting so I paid attention to it. Then it began to slip down, sort of like a pendulum with each swing loosing altitude. I thought that was pretty weird, so while continuing to pay attention I noticed it stop moving outright, and then sort of gyrate like a top spinning in place. There it hovered for a short time, maybe 20 to 30 seconds.
At this point I was thinking that this was the weirdest balloon I'd ever seen, and was trying to figure out what kind of wind pattern might cause this behavior when the damn thing just instantly shot up and over, turned on a dime, and screamed across the sky from my left to my right side as my head panned to follow. Within less than a second it had moved a good 90 degrees of arc across the sky and went behind some nearby trees. And it didn't make a damn sound.
There are a couple of things to note:
My dad was a private pilot and he used to own an single engine airplane. I took flying lessons as a kid, landed an airplane, and all that -- almost lived in and out of airports as a kid (once we flew from southern California to Tampa Beach Florida in my dad's Cessna when I was seven). Been in helicopter, seen idiots make dangerous mistakes in ultralights and hangliders... there is absolutely no way what I saw could have been anything like a balloon, helicopter, or other prosaic craft. I'm certain of that.
But I still don't know what to make of this. I never saw the occupants, no one else witnessed the event, and I have absolutely no proof. I have trouble with the "alien craft" stuff, but I definitely believe, based on what I saw, that some silver disk shaped craft do exist, and display a performance envelope way beyond any kind of common aerodynamic craft. Beyond that, I simply don't know.
Sure. I wasn't pumping the gas, nor was I near the pump. Why not?
No sonic boom, eh? I've not heard any convincing evidence that these things are even reported as going faster than Mach 1, so I wouldn't expect a sonic boom. Besides, a sonic boom is a product of the way the air moves over an object travelling at supersonic speeds. If you were to build a ramjet, you'd get a completely different airflow, as much less air would be displaced, by a much smaller distance.
No stealth technology... Hmmmm... Why would they need it? Stealth is going to inherently take up space, which they'll need for essentials, to travel interstellar distances. It's also totally useless, unless you're familiar with the detection systems used, as you won't know what you're trying to hide -from-. It's also not going to survive interstellar travel very well, due to all the micrometeorites, space debris and space junk.
Then there's the rapid acceleration/deceleration. Maybe an illusion caused by the distance/angle of the observer. Remember, you perceive acceleration by frames of reference, not laser-based range finders. Of course, G suits and proper safety harnesses ups how high you can ramp the G forces. Then, of course, we don't know the gravitational field of any other inhabited world. What if they came from a planet that had 3x Earth's gravity, on top of all the protective gear? If people can survive 9g in Formula 1, for an instant, then someone with three times the strength of skeleton should handle 27g without much trouble.
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)
The cord is wrong era, AFAIK. There were only small traces of "blood", despite the procedure being major. The person doing the autopsy seemed to know exactly what to do - no lack of familiarity or uncertainty, despite this being a supposedly alien physiology.
Then, there are the artifacts. They don't match the description of the material the Roswell witnesses describe, which I'll give an orange flag. The writing uses a slight variation of Indo-European form, which is a bright red flag with red spots on a red background. The "words" on one object came out to "video", so not only was the lettering "modern english", so was the spelling. That, too, gets a red flag. The two hands for the control panel was lifted straight from "Foundation and Earth" (Isaac Asimov), minus the imagination of Asimov.
Then, there's the matter that the owner of the film won't permit Kodak to test it's age. Even the Shroud of Turin has been tested, by people who had less reason to care what the real age was! (Unless the autopsy film is a hoax.)
Then there's the matter of the "alien"'s physiology. There ain't no way that independent evolution would produce such a close lifeform. Sorry, not possible.
Then there's the way the autopsy was filmed. Too much light shining into the camera. Don't tell me the USAF can't handle a camera! If it was important enough to record, it was important enough to record properly. The light obscures details, very very conveniently.
Then, there's the composition of the objects. Aluminium, from the way the light reflects off them. Aluminium burns, very spectacularly, as the HMS Sheffield found out in the Falklands War. There is no way it would have survived the sort of crash that is said to have occured at Roswell. (The massive burn on the "alien"'s arm fits with the description of a massive crash & fire, but any aluminium controls would have gone up in flames in that case, taking the alien with them.)
All in all, there seems very little positive to say about the alleged autopsy film, other than to say that whoever hoaxed it has probably got far more for it than most ordinary plebs could dream of.
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)
And a pager message of the number zero travels at zero speed, while a three-dimensional TV signal travels at the cube of the speed of light.
The right answer, of course, is that they all travel at the speed of radio signals, which is approximately the speed of light (the speed of light differs between materials, and electromagnetic effects affect signals and the signal path).