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| quote: | Originally posted by Dj Smitty20
but meteors and comets don't appear, disappear and then reappear. They don't travel at 7000 miles per hour and they don't suddenly change direction away from our planet. And Why would comets take up a circular formation and put on a light show? |
Ever heard of this thing called gravity? Celestial objects don't fly perfectly straight. You might want to learn a few things about physics before spouting bullshit.
| quote: | | And since WW2 there have been THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of sightings in EVERY COUNTRY ACROSS THE WORLD. |
And virtually all of them are subjective experiences with no supporting evidence. In fact, there's always a rash of these "sightings" whenever one gets media attention. It's a known human phenomenon - people see things all the time that they can't quite make sense of, so they try to relate it to their own personal experience (which often tends to be something they saw on TV or print media). Some of these accounts are even obtained by techniques known to be bogus like regression therapy.
Not only that, but the way the "sightings" are described is known to follow popular fiction. Early accounts in the 60s and 70s were remarkably similar to sci-fi comics. Then they started to become more like what people saw on TV shows like the X-files. It's reasonable to state that for every so-called sighting there are over a hundred copycats. It's no different from the sudden spurts of suicide attempts or copycat murders that happen whenever one is widely publicized - well, no different aside from being less fatal.
It's because of the copycat phenomenon, because people are sheep, that the quantity of accounts is almost totally irrelevant. How many thousands upon thousands of people claim that Jesus appeared in their grilled cheese sandwiches? None of that makes it true.
| quote: | | Have you ever considered the possiblity that it the world governments haven't come fully clean with us about all this is, just maybe, they're afraid how people will take it and how it will change our society? We as a race of people have always feared what we do not understand. |
As a skeptic, one must consider all possibilities, but that is simply not a rational one. People feared the Patriot Act and the War in Iraq a lot more than they feared aliens. We've been exposed to the notion of extraterrestrials through pop culture for so long that it would be ridiculous to suggest that anyone is truly "afraid".
More to the point, it's not a question of whether or not "world governments" would want to cover up something like this, it's a question of whether or not they would be physically capable of doing it, and the historical record presents us with an emphatic "NO" answer. Like I said before, if the U.S. government can't cover up something so simple as a blowjob in the office or a drunken car crash, where they'd only have to hush up maybe 10 people and a couple of low-paid reporters, what could possibly inspire you to believe that they'd be able to plug a leak from thousands if not millions of citizens in concert with any number of federal agencies, private agencies, and several foreign governments thoroughly hostile to the USA?
| quote: | | the level of trust that some people put in our governments is a little startling, I have to be honest. |
I trust our government and other governments only marginally more than I trust the lunatics reporting on their anal probes (and I'm sure these demographics have major intersections anyway).
But even a cynic of DigiNut-proportion has to recognize the complete bumbling incompetence of any large bureaucracy. They'd simply never be able to pull off such an act. If they couldn't stop a couple of dirt-poor Islamic terrorists with box cutters from crashing commercial airliners into major populated landmarks (oh, I'm sorry, that was a coverup too, right?), then how could they possibly stop an alien spacecraft traveling at near-lightspeed from landing in the middle of Times Square and demanding to speak with our leaders?
I haven't even gotten to the burden-of-proof issue yet. Which is to say that, if you refuse to believe the government's explanation, that is fine skepticism (if not perhaps a little paranoid). But what makes the other theories any more likely or valid? Again I equate this to the creationist argument that because there's this frail evidence against Darwinism, we therefore must throw it out and accept Intelligent Design. It doesn't work that way, because there's even less evidence for ID, just as there's even less evidence for every or any UFO involving visitors from another galaxy.
If you want us to believe your hypothesis, you can't simply poke holes in the mainstream theory, you have to prove your hypothesis. In order for it to be even remotely plausible in a scientific sense, it must meet the three basic criteria:
a) It has to adequately explain everything that the mainstream theory already explains (UFOlogists have already failed at this step);
b) It has to explain the observations that the mainstream theory does not account for (technically they do, but I would argue that the explanations are not consistent enough to meet this criteria);
c) The alternative hypothesis has to be positive, testable, and falsifiable. UFOlogists have absolutely failed to address this one.
More generally, your argument in this thread consists almost exclusively of appeal to authority. Appeal to authority is legitimate when the authorities themselves are legitimate experts on the subject matter (in this case, some could be considered experts, though certainly not most). However, the primary difficulty with even the legitimate authorities is that they are all making vague and contradictory claims. The secondary difficulty is that it is not a majority of experts agreeing on these points, but rather a few fringe groups.
If a government-employed surgeon came out and said "I was the one who did the alien autopsy" and proceeded to dish out a lengthy account of every facet of this event, that would be evidence worth looking at (this actually happened but it turned out to be fake). If a jet pilot came out and said "we were pulled in by a tractor beam and boarded by reptillian humanoids", and proceeded to describe a whiteboard discussion they had on how to build a Warp Drive or Flux Capacitor, that would be evidence worth looking at.
But that isn't what we have. We have people saying they saw lights, or were followed by lights, or saw a crop circle in the morning, or some nonsense like that. It doesn't matter how many millions of intelligent people say this, it doesn't prove that these phenomena aren't either natural or man-made (or wholly imagined).
I hate to break it to you but there's more than a fine line between narrow-mindedness and healthy skepticism. Believing in extraterrestrial visitors flying UFOs and flashing lights at us in an vain attempt to communicate while every single world government tries to cover it up does not make you open-minded, it makes you a fool.
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is a creationist concocted term itself. 
