Do Advanced ET Species Know We're Here???
 

I thought I'd split the thread 'The Golden Record' before Crompsin has a cow. I'm not sayin he's a thread nazi or anything, I just dont want to see a fellow airborne brother completely stroke out.

I've taken the liberty of compiling the offending material into a barely cohesive blob of something.

While I do respect college professors, some may have closed minds when it comes to "new" ideas. I dont think its out of the realm of possibility, and it may be exceedingly difficult, just not impossible. Since he said it wouldn't be likely, that must also mean that theres a chance it is likely.

Is this another parallel universe? It seems to me beyond doubt that others exist. It seems quite likely that we're all in the same boat. -I'd really like to read some alien science fiction.

I love you, DaveMatrix!

Indeed it is! (another parallel universe, only in reverse) Just another pretext to talk about silly ass possibilities that could never be......or could they??? :orly:

I'm quite fond of you OCM, but dont say love, BOR will get jealous!! :eek:

I thought I'd throw this in, just because it has nothing to do with this thread, Ok, only slightly. I simply find Jodie Foster in this role incredibly hot..... intelligent, driven, sexy.....

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p...veMatrix/1.jpg

Setting - The VeryLargeArray in New Mexico - BASE OF TELESCOPE - PRE-DAWN

Ellie wears a pair of headsets. We hear the SOUND of the COSMOS, the background wash of empty STATIC...

...and a faint BEEPING, FADING IN and OUT of reception.

Ellie slowly swims up to consciousness. After a moment her eyes open. She sits up --

Well Said!!:)

There is, in my mind, without a doubt, intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The odds that the intelligent life developed even remotely close to Earth and survived long enough to come up with the technology necessary to communicate with us, on the other hand, are ridiculously small. I forget the math, but I'm pretty sure that it's very unlikely that any other intelligent life exists within our specific galaxy, and communicating to other galaxies is a fantastic feat indeed.

In short, "they're" out there, but neither of us (humans or aliens) are likely to survive long enough to find out about it. It's truly a shame if you ask me.

Its also possible that life is very common in the universe, yet we are simply unable to detect it. This is known as the Fermi Paradox....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI

The more data thats gathered the more we will eventually know. It may seem that life here on earth is a stroke of luck, that all the right conditions just happened to fall in place, and that this is exceedingly rare. The rare earth hypothesis does have some hard facts to back it up.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_mediocrity

This is in direct contradiction with SETI's guiding principle of mediocrity, which basically states that there is nothing special about humans or the earth.

I prefer to remain open minded and keep a 'wait and see' attitude. I certainly hope we're not all alone. :)

I beg your pardon? jealous of what? Um OCM, you can say whatever you like!

I think maybe you misunderstand what I mean DaveMatrix. I don't think Earth is special at all, speaking literally in the universal sense. If every galaxy in the universe were to have one planet with intelligent life, that would be ~100 billion+ species of intelligent life! It would also still be spaced out enough that none of them would ever likely discover the other.

I probably did misunderstand, I just woke up and quickly put together that incomprehensible pile of words.

Midnight I was only joking, as was OCM, but I will edit my post so I wont offend your delicate sensibilities. Jeeeeeezzzz.......

That is one of my favorite movies. And she is so attractive in it. A lot of it has to do with her playing a nerdy space girl. :)

http://www.drv.it/Arca/cinema/cinema...t_foster11.jpg

As to the original question, I doubt that an ET species would know that we are here. We haven't been here long enough. And if they were close enough to detect us, then we would have detected them probably.

But I do think that there is life elsewhere in the universe. Maybe even elsewhere outside of our solar system but close by in the Milky Way galaxy. But it probably isn't extremely advanced.

Yeah, speaking in terms of life, period, as opposed to intelligent life, I wouldn't be surprised if life were quite abundant. I'd speculate that life has occurred on at least a couple bodies within our very own solar system at some time (but may not necessarily exist at this very moment). The trick is having the right conditions for life to develop beyond a few cells (assuming the biology is even similar to ours). And then, after the life develops to any sort of substantial size (think animal as opposed to bacteria), it has to then develop under the right conditions to become intelligent.

So life? All over. Intelligent life? Common on the cosmic scale, extremely uncommon on the human scale.

This brings up the idea that life may have been seeded into the solar system by comets or asteroids carrying dormant bacteria, instead of spontaneously appearing from ancient pools of slime. This does seem more likely and would also mean that other parts of the galaxy may have been seeded in the same way. However each planet where life might have been seeded would evolve its own particular traits best suited for that environment.

I doubt it would be anything even close to star trek, where most species have human form with a funny looking head. We may not even know what to look for, since other life forms may not even be carbon based. I'm sure that the truth is much stranger than any fiction.

Maybe we're the offspring of extra-terrestrial garbage...at least there's enough love to go around.

...Cool thread you've created, sir!

At this point, all opinions how common or rare extraterristrial life is, intelligent ET life, and technologically advanced ET life is, and howrare or common earth-like planets are, are all speculation.

Another thing to consider is that all man-made radio transmisions are less than 100 years old. This means that unless technologocally advanced ETs are with 100 light years, or have some sort of listening post that converts electromagnetic transmissions to sub-space communicaitons or whatever (to borrow pure sci-fi term from Star Trek), the ETs don't know about us.

Any alien life will most likely be carbon based because carbon based life has the best 'chemistry' going for it.

Odds are that if we were to find an alien 'earth' the amazing thing wouldn't be the differences but the similarities.

For example, despite the last common ancestor the marsupial and placental mammals being nothing much more than a shrew, both types had/have evolved into all types of animals which fill the same niche and due to natural selection fill the niche with the same form. The Tasmanian wolf wasn't a canine but it looked like one because that 'form' fits the role for example. In fact the only major form that didn't show up among marsupials was the gazelle type, which instead has had the role filled by kangaroos. Though even there, we have rodents in Africa that while not related to kangaroos for 10's of millions of years, and whos last common ancestor didn't look like a kangaroo at all, developed the same form.

So while an alien planet may well have really cool unique forms of life, odds are it will also have a flying squirrel form, a dog form, a cat form, a horse form, a tree form, a moss form, a fish form etc, which while completely different in chemistry or evolutionary path, is doing, acting, and living the same way as their earth equivalent.

Another example are whales and dolphins which strongly resemble fish but are not related to fish at all. That suggests that any other planets with higher forms of life (even if it has a radically different chemistry and is based on a liquid other than water) are going to have fish or animals that look like fish.

I suppose this an example of convergent evolution, where animals that are not closely related develop similar characteristics, while adapting to similar environments. Another convergent pair of species would be the dolphin and the ichthyosaurs, one being a mammal and the other reptilian, yet both developed an almost identical body style, 100 million years apart.

Since we have only planet to base our theories on, all this is only speculation as Racnad said. Other planets may evolve similar evolutionary convergence, or go in some direction that know one ever dreamed of. They could not all be stranger than we imagine, they could be stranger than we can imagine.

That makes the assumption that the conditions would be similar to Earth, which I don't necessarily buy, at least as far as physical forms go. If you compare land-based and water-based life forms here, the functions that they perform are shockingly similar but the forms are dictated by the conditions - which is why sharks and dolphins have such similar body shapes. The simpler the life form, the more likely that there will be something similar-looking here. There will be an algea-form and a moss form, most likely tree- and grass-forms as well as fish-forms (making some assumptions) that look similar to what Earth has come up with. I doubt that anyone would ever be able to find something completely analogous for every niche between two planets.

Behaviors are a different issue, and we've seen that repeated over and over in the fossil record. Large plant-eaters emerge along with forms to hunt them, scavenge off the remains and on down.

While we can speculate about different chemistries supporting life, we can't really narrow down in the least how it could work practically. While I don't think all life must be in the Goldilocks zone, I think that there is an upper and lower limit to how much energy must be present.

Odds are we will be long dead (hell perhaps extinct) before these questions can be answered.

Well, this sure became boring.....this may help.....:) http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p...ix/contact.jpghttp://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p...x/contact1.jpghttp://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p...x/untitled.jpghttp://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p...e_foster_3.jpg

How'd that last one get in there??? Strange.......:orly:

Is it just me or did the last one have a date with the airbrush?

Yes, I'd say that ones airbrushed, but it does give her a nice look. Reminds me of a 'glamor shot', not that she needs it.........

Well I could score with the woman in the first two photos, the last one isn't talking to me ;)

I understand completely :crazy:

I suspect the ETs are in the same boat.

That Foster woman is uber-cool.

The ET's airbrush their females pics too??? :) That may be a universal constant...........

yes.

Care to expand on that???

It depends on who you ask and where you get your information. Some people quantify the subject in terms of the Drake Equation and Fermi's Paradox, and are content with keeping the topic well within philosophical or mathematical constraints.

Take Von Neumann machines, for example. In this hypothesis, a given civilization sends out self-replicating devices. These devices, in multiplying, each branch out in different directions. The end result is a geometric spread that covers a given space, like a galaxy, within ten thousand years. The size of the space is finite while the devices replicate, so it takes only one civilization and one self-replicating probe to blanket an enormous expanse. Given the results of the Drake Equation, it is highly likely that this phenomenon has already occurred in our own cosmic neighborhood.

However, I was not satisfied with essentially abstract musings. I dug into the UFO mythology, and while Sturgeon's Law holds sway (90% of everything is crap), I have come across some very compelling puzzle pieces. While it became quickly evident that photographic evidence is uniformly uninformative, and that there are a lot of kooks out there who need psychiatric help, there are some intriguing points of reference that endure in a sea of questionable information. Specifically, the work of Dr. Steven Greer and Stanton Friedman.

Friedman works from logical deduction and has a bulletproof scientific pedigree. Greer interviews scientists and members of the armed forces who reveal independently corroborated data -- people of professional standing who have nothing to gain and everything to lose in telling their stories.

Basically, it's like this. In the mid-1940s, our understanding of the history of the world began to split off in two different directions. On the one hand, you have the conventional wisdom: that there may be intelligent life out there, but it's never stopped by for a visit. On the other hand, you have a hidden history, where first contact has already been made, in the wake of a crash in New Mexico in June of 1947.

In this unconventional history, its revelations have been kept secret because the fruits of alien technology would bring about the global collapse of the petroleum industry and the electrical grid. Here, this group is known as the "energy cartel," led primarily by eschatological tyrants with a knee-jerk penchant for compartmentalized secrecy and a phobic response to the potential parameters of alien power -- power in terms of technology, spirituality, and sheer knowledge of the Universe. Here, benevolent aliens do not intervene because they follow a Prime Directive of sorts; their history of millions of years has taught them that if a civilization cannot lift itself to the stars by its own bootstraps, it is not cut out to stay there. Besides, "Take me to your leader" doesn't work when planet Earth is cut up into religious, political, and cultural fiefdoms. There is no true leader to approach in the first place.

So my answer is yes. After extensive research on the subject, I have come to the conclusion that they know we are here -- but humanity is not collectively prepared for the introduction.

The 10,000 years is questionable -- but if it takes 1000 years to move to a nearby star, 20% of probes that are sent make it and find suitable material to produce an industrial base, 10,000 years to bootstrap from a probe to an industrial base capable of producing a probe every 1000 years, and the industrial base collapses after an average of 10,000 years...

Then every 21,000 years the number of probes double.

There are about 100 billion stars in the milky way, which is less than 2^30. That means it takes less than 630,000 to have as many probes as there are stars in the milky way.

The universe is on the order of 10 billion years old. So this is 0.00000063% of the lifetime of the universe -- the blink of an eye.

So what are the odds that an intelligent, spacefaring race would be more advanced than us, but not sufficiently more advanced than us that they have already colonized the entire galaxy?

Of course, the above math could be tweaked -- what if it takes 1 billion years to bootstrap from a probe to an industrial base capable of building probes?

[SNIP misquoted text]

Ok this is where my bullshit detector starts to fluctuate a bit. Now I'll start with saying its a plausible story in that IF some sort of alien technology showed up then their may be people and reasons to cover it up.

But here is the rub. Why never any details of this supposed technology?

The petroleum industry is always a bugaboo for some reason. If every conspiracy theory about them were true, they have single handedly set back the progress of Western civilization by decades if not a century at least in energy use. Yet this same industry, which is able to hide such things, isn't able to stop the eminently disputable man made global warming scare which could effect its profits? I mean they can keep great scientists from speaking the truth about UFO's but can't seem to shut up a few tree hugging professors and shut up a washed up VP?

Lets think of it this way. The oil industry has some great minds working for them, not every scientist wants to make their daily bread by begging for grant money from the government, many go into private industry. While working for the oil industry I will assume one doesn't sell ones soul, and if there was a clean, renewable, cheap fuel wouldn't you want to tell the world? Plus telling the world these days, again, is simple. If some great advance were to show up anonymously on the net one day, I'd be quick to change my opinion, but so far no.

Then comes the 'well it is getting out but slowly' type of theory. People look at the current advances and think 'something' happened that made technology, which was somewhat stagnant for 2 thousand years, suddenly explode with PC's and jet planes. The problem is this explosion started not in the 40's but in the late 1870's. Evolution, electricity, geology, chemistry, medicine, all began taking great strides forward, and you can see what led to what. So either this has been going on for over 100 year or its just that people started taking science 'seriously' and the scientific method is to credit the technology explosions.

Give me SOMETHING concrete, something I can look at and say 'that ain't right', something verifiable.

Sorry UStwo -- what you quoted was a misquote by me. It was actually "Johnny Rotten" who wrote that.

Wow....Ustwo made a mistake??? I suppose he's actually a human being after all :orly: .....Too Strange :paranoid:

Well I checked my starchart and it told me not to trust what other people quoted but I just didn't listen!

And dave if you read what Yakk posted closely you will see who made the mistake ;)

Well, I think I may have overstated the case. I should clarify -- there is a certain lurid nature to the "energy cartel" theory that makes it interesting to me, if for nothing more than its dramatic nature. However, certain individuals have come forward with some compelling arguments about why advanced technologies -- regardless of their origin -- would be suppressed.

In a nutshell, the prediction is that a revolution in the energy sector would lead to the collapse of the current paradigm, which would have wide-ranging and unpredictable effects on the global economy and even society.

Stan Deyo has an interesting take on this. Skip to 59:21 in this video for the interview: .

Note that Deyo does not pinpoint the technologies as coming from alien civilizations. He does not discount the idea, but he doesn't feel it's necessary. This segment is about twenty minutes long. I find the details of his professional career to be hard to swallow, but I think it's important to see the whole interview, to get the context for his extrapolations. It was conducted thirty years ago, yet it is (in my opinion, at least) surprisingly prescient.

http://www.americanantigravity.com/categories/Research/

I just don't buy it. If tomorrow you worked out a 'Mr. Fusion' it would be an amazing boon to the economy. Imagine if energy costs went to zero? Its already been demonstrated that high energy costs hurt the economy, but I can't see the reverse doing the same. Sure it would close down refineries and oil wells, but thats a small price for free energy.

Really if I wanted to invent a plausible reason for suppressing alien technology it would be due to the danger they might pose, not because of the economy. If it was very easy to turn your 'Mr. Fusion' into a 'Mr. Fusion Bomb' then there would be a legitimate reason to suppress it, but that angle is rarely advanced. I think the reason for it is that the concept of the government protecting its citizens and the world from direct harm is boring. Its much more sexy to be talking about deeply woven conspiracies.

Well I agree that it wouldn't be necessary, but that doesn't make it true either.

[/quote]

I'm not sure what thats suppose to prove. Its writing style reminds me of conspiracy or communist web sites where they attempt to confuse the issue using vocabulary the average reader will not understand in order 'overwhelm' the reader into assuming their assumptions are correct by making the reader feel inadequate of understanding. The difference is that unlike a conspiracy or communist site, where I do understand the vocabulary, this one I do not. Too many acronyms and " This paper summarizes how electrodynamics and gravitation are coupled in a Hamiltonian formulation followed by an appropriate quantization scheme." type of articles. Mind you I am not a stupid man but I am not a physicist, as such I can't tell if the papers are either highly technical or just technobable worthy of star trek. In that I will reserve judgment.

What I don't see is how this ties in with an alien technology. If I take it at face value, something I am very skeptical about and perhaps I will do a bit of research into the site itself for fun, its simply a lot of theoretical physics. The fact that I don't understand it doesn't make it alien based, most people wouldn't understand my 'language' I use at work to do my job either.

The thing is, coal and oil form the backbone of global transportation and energy delivery. It's a multi-trillion dollar industry, and by far the most profitable one in the world. If you replaced it with wireless transmitters, millions of people across the globe would be out of work and would not have the training to join the new paradigm. The massive unemployment would lead to financial chaos and civil instability. Or so we're told.

Deyo actually did an interview with those guys, and he uses a lot of analogies to explain what's going on: http://www.americanantigravity.com/a...iew/Page1.html

It's an audio interview, about 45 minutes long. He also has a presentation floating around on Google Video that has more examples and analogies.

Deyo mentions the connections in the interview above, connections he seems less hesitant to make than in 1977.

But I do agree that we're straying from the topic. For some interesting testimony on UFOs, I would direct your attention to and .

Ok, here's my take:

Regular TV signals probably aren't reaching far enough out into space that they would be intercepted by anything that wasn't deliberately looking very intently at our particular planet.

However, While TV signals are designed to remain earthbound, sattelite uplinks are not, and they are very directed, high power, and aimed 'up.' You also have the cross talk between sattelites which both originate in space and are directed at another body in space. There is a lot of spillover that an intelligent race who bothered with such things could pick up. If they were within range.

I don't think we have really started emitting interceptable signals until the dawn of sattelite communication.

Of course, those signals have to actually reach out and get intercepted by little green men light years away. I don't think it is plausible to suggest that they are in our solar system. Why would they travel so far to hide out? The only thing our solar system has that other star systems don't is a planet full of people, squirrels, etc. Earth is the only possible attraction. If they were already here I think we would know.

I don't think interstellar space is where aliens would be found either: It is devoid of resources and not very hospitable. Why would they hang out there? In order for them to be in open space, they would have to be in the middle of a LOOOOONG journey, and they would probably not change a decades-long course for an unknown planet that is still many light-years away.

So, our signals would have to reach an occupied system that has aliens whose evolutionary development is at least comprable to our own (they have to be listening, anyways). But we are listening also, and if there is a highly advanced form of life out there that bothers to listen to radio waves, it is probably because they also use radio waves, and we should have been able to hear that. Especially since they would have to be within a couple light-decades in order for our signals to reach them.


Furthermore, in order for them to respond to our signal and come scare nutjobs with their UFO's, they would have to be no more than half the distance away from us that our radio waves have traveled (assuming they can travel at the speed of light).

So basically, they would have to be within 15 light-years of us, and capable of travelling at light-speed, and willing to do-so at the first hint of radio-signals from Earth, and they would not be creating their own radio emissions....or we would have noticed.

There aren't many stars within 15 light-years, and even less with habitable planets. What are the odds? Yep. Pretty much zero.

Furthermore, if a civilization is advanced and spans many star-systems, etc. then we would probably have been able to see cyclic-variations in all the little sub-cultures left behind. Think about it: as they spread out across the galaxy, each planet would be essentially isolated from the others by sheer distance...which leaves plenty of room for social upheaval, wars, etc. It is a process that would require many thousands of years, and endless opportunity for radio emissions, nuclear explosions, etc. Yet we look into space and see no indication of this at all.



I am sure life exists elsewhere in the universe, the universe is too big a place for it not to.

However, it is also too big for us to 'bump' into aliens.

By the time an 'alien' race is bathed by our radio-signals and is able to stop by for a chat, we will probably be long gone.

I think that's a very good point, and I struggle a lot to fit this rational conclusion into things like the Disclosure Project testimonies, Stanton Friedman's lectures, and various other bits and pieces that rise above the sea of nutjobbery and snake oil salesmen. For every person who has a believable story to tell, there's seven people saying that I can rub a magnet on a tumor to make it go away, and two more guys who say the whole UFO phenomenon is a hoax to swerve our attention away from relatively mundane, classified government projects.

Given that intelligent, spacefaring life exists elsewhere, how could they possibly have found us amidst all these stars and galaxies? It's not just finding a needle in a haystack -- it's like looking for a specific needle in a stack of needles.

From here, I can only speculate, and I've come up with two conclusions. One, that life on this planet was installed long ago by an alien race. Or two, that there is a network of probes or scanners canvassing the galaxy, looking for specific signs of life or intelligent life. Beyond that, I can't come up with anything that doesn't sound strangely mystical.

From what I've read and from the videos I've seen on the Internet, though, physical distance does not seem to be a problem. FTL travel is a matter of essentially skipping through space like a stone on the surface of a pond. And I've read of outright portals through space and even time, but that stuff is like pulp comic book material to me. It's way beyond plausability and can only be taken as an entertaining possibility.

Until about six months ago, I'd never seriously pondered any of this. But I found myself with some additional free time on my hands, and I've had a love for science fiction since childhood. I've come to the conclusion that 90% of UFOlogy is crap, but just as Project Bluebook had a percentage of cases that evaded any explanation, there are a few stories that have the ring of truth. And the more I research, the more vast that truth appears to be.

I like you. You are the first 'pro' UFO person I've seen write who wasn't a wack job about it which makes this a fun debate. Normally its like arguing with someone who believes in faith healing.

I do think in the 40’s and 50’s the government did use UFO’s as a cover for projects, it makes sense to do so, and with all the jet, rocket, nuclear tests and the emerging cold war this made sense. I think the problem was no one relized just how far people would go with those cover stories and the ‘cult’ of UFOlogy that would follow. I wouldn’t be shocked if this was still policy today if some new ‘super secret’ aircraft was compromised. Logically it makes sense as the UFO enthusiasts can think what they want, it doesn’t really affect anything, and it would keep the sighting lost in a sea of hoaxes and the like.

Now I don’t think this actually matters to the concept of alien ‘visitors’. After all the government could very well use UFO’s as a cover story and at the same time their could be real alien space ships, one does not eliminate the other.

My belief, and it is a belief, I can’t say I have proof, but I do think I have probability on my side, is that we have not been visited.

Its possible that some technologically superior alien species has been monitoring earth for scientific or nefarious reasons, but obviously so subtlety that they leave no real proof. So while possible, its no different than the tooth fairy in that I can’t really do anything to test it and it can be safely ignored unless something new emerges.

Then we have the crashed spaceship mythos. This again is also possible, but I’d have to say that safely traveling 100 light years only to crash doing something as mundane as a planetary landing would be almost comical. Now maybe this has happened but I think its sort of difficult to see how it could be covered up so well for so long. Government secrets seem a dime a dozen these days, and its been that way for a while. I would expect that there would be SOME physical evidence which could be produced, not just a guy claiming to have a PhD in physics who later turned out to be the night janitor who was fired for sleeping on the job in 1978 (and I’m just making that up, but I do recall one guy who wrote a book etc who turned out to be something very similar, I just don’t recall the details). I’d also add that some very smart people can believe some very crazy things, so even a legitimate person can be out in left field on these stories. I personally have a friend who is very intelligent, who I really like and is really a great guy. As a student he discovered a hazard in a piece of equipment which a governing body attempted to ‘repress’ his disclosing and to fudge the data to make it look less harmful. This was a real conspiracy, (though it was mild, I won’t get into details) and the problem WAS fixed but only after enough time was bought for damage control, and this time may have been bought with a large donation to said body. The problem for him is that since then he sees every conspiracy theory out there as valid. So everything from vaccines, to milk, to fluoride, to dental amalgam, to about everything in the government must be a conspiracy. I’ve never asked him about UFO’s, but I can already tell you his answer. I think its almost a form of shock, as he was so affected by what he experienced that he never really ‘recovered’. So while I’d love to believe some of these ‘confessions’, until something solid comes out of it, I have to say its possible but not probable.

I won’t even get to the alien abduction stories, and I doubt you give those any credibility either. I myself used to have a recurring nightmare as a child that was almost identical to the abduction dreams so I always get a kick out of the stories.

So I won’t say there is no possibility. Maybe FTL travel is not only possible but mundane, and some day someone will say ‘duh, how did we not see that!’ and the next thing you know we are zipping around the galaxy. Maybe there is a vast and benign galactic government who is waiting for us to ‘mature’ to a point where we can join the party, or maybe we are being secretly monitored by a reptiloid alien race who wants to turn us into meat snacks and have alien love children with us, but to me any real proof, any real technology would be just to ‘big’ to repress.

I am a big fan of the romance of conspiracy theories. I also believe that people are absolutely capable of doing horrible things and then trying to cover them up.

However, I also am a big fan of occams razor. If you want to convince me that we are being (secretly) visited by aliens, who only show themselves to members of the US government who happen to be part of a huge conspiracy, that happens to be the only institution in the world with no leaks or accidental admissions, then give me a good reason why the simpler explanation is incorrect: That aliens are figments of someones overactive imagination.

Funny how people always "see" aliens/ufo's that somehow perfectly match the science fiction/cult idea of what an alien should look like. After war of the worlds the flying saucer was in. Now it is little men with big eyes. How charmingly anthropomorphic.

Hehe, thanks. I try to stay level-headed and even-minded about the whole deal.

The story goes that Roswell was blanketed with high-powered radar. The most powerful network in the world at the time, in fact, because it was the location of the world's only nuclear stockpile. The radar interfered with the aliens' guidance systems and caused them to crash. I agree that the chances are still pretty marginal. In order for it to be probable, you have to assume a large volume of traffic in the first place -- the kind of volume that would be obvious to a casual stargazer. But we don't see that, unless these craft are largely operating in stealth.

As far as secrecy, the indication I get, mostly from the Disclosure Project testimony, is that fear, intimidation and ridicule can be used very effectively as leverage to keep people quiet. One of the witnesses talks about a form he can fill out to report a sighting, and 48 of the 50 pages is a psychological profile. Everything about you, your family, your parents, siblings, et cetera -- so that something (in his opinion) can be found that will undermine your credibility. With the military, we're also dealing with people who are loyal to their country and want to protect it. If they're told that staying quiet is the best thing for America, that's what they'll generally do.

Aside from Betty and Barney Hill, none of it really grabs me. Regressive hypnosis is pretty shaky. I've read too many stories of it being used in court and turning out to be completely false -- but the accuser fervently believed that all these crimes against them had actually been committed. It's scary. I think the majority of the phenomenon can be chalked up to mental illness, with attention-seeking being a close second. And sometimes both seem to be involved. Do I believe no one has ever been taken by ET against their will? I honestly have no idea. Even if they made a stop on the White House lawn tomorrow and proved their existence to the world, I think it would still be an open question until they themselves said otherwise.

Yeah, I think it's important to keep in mind the historical significance of the popular morphology. It seemed to actually come from pulp sci-fi movies of the 50s before it became the staple of abduction stories and Roswell claims.

On the other hand, Stan Deyo claims that Forbidden Planet is largely authentic -- that the technology featured in the film actually exists. Is it too much to extrapolate to other films and surmise that the Little Green Men aren't that far from the truth? I don't know. But that's the way I think about the whole phenomenon. I try to tie things together and see if the knot holds when I pull.

According to consensus UFO mythology, they've actually crash landed all over the world, for decades. Commonly due to mechanical failure, but sometimes due to governments testing out plasma cannons and the like. Now, I don't put much stock in Philip J. Corso's claims -- that lasers, fiber optics, kevlar and the like are based on technology retrieved from Roswell -- but I detect a kernel of truth. I keep in mind that Corso was an information officer, first and foremost. Not a scientist or someone who would be a liaison between scientists. I think he's a deflector, in fact, but that's probably another topic there. Suffice to say that the tech he claims to have ushered in was in development for decades, with no spikes that would chronologically corroborate with his claims.

There have been leaks, or purported leaks, like the Majestic/Majic 12 documents, the Cutler-Twining Memo, and a couple deathbed affidavits generally corroborating the Roswell crash. And several authorities over the decades have gone on record with statements that strongly indicate an alien presence. Of course, there's a degree of subjectivity with that last element. Statements aren't evidence anyway, although they can lead in the direction of evidence.

The problem is that the statements are uniformly downplayed, and the documents attacked. Arguments sometimes devolve to typographical deviation of timestamps on the onionskin.

Tic...we have always been here and want you because you are us. Are you not?

What are we afraid of?

Our imaginations...

...will consistently lead us to where we don't necessarily want to go.

"god" willing, we'll get there anyways.

OCM, You are the king of the one liners, and the 2 or 3 liners, but I would like to see you expand on your thoughts a little more. Your status as king will not be diminished in any way I assure you. God willing, I'll get to read a bit more....:)

Come with me, then.

Our extra-terrestrial status resides in our imaginations and will not be falsified by facts.

I love you, DaveMatrix!

The future we'll have is what we'll make, and our alien comrades are unwilling, which is not to say unable, to drag us there.