Hey! I just saw some UFOs and I don't even believe in them.
There were three red lights staying still, then a bigger one moved up to them and then away again. Defo not planets or satellites or planes. When I went to get my camera there was only one left and it didn't photograph very well.
I'm buggered if I can think of a rational explanation.
Anyway, just of to be gang-probed.
Quote from: Aaron A Aardvark on 07 August, 2010, 10:32:51 PM
Defo not planets or satellites or planes.
Helicopters then.
I read on MSN the other day that Churchill had reports of a Second World War UFO sighting suppressed. He apparently took its morale implications quite seriously. There's a potential
Vector Thirteen Past Imperfect story there.
A few typically baffling readers' comments on the article, like we'll never know for sure that there aren't aliens visiting our planet until they confirm it by producing one on live TV.
Interestingly, RAF jets were scrambled 200 times a year to investigate UFOs during the Cold War, but sightings virtually stopped after the Soviet Union fell apart. Evidently we were a bit more worried about hostile foreign powers invading our airspace back then. I throw down the gauntlet to conspiracy theorists to come up with a more complicated and less plausible explanation.
;)
Thought I finally seen one after staying in UFO central(Bonnybridge) for 11 years,turns out there is a Chinese Resturant in the neighbouring village Denny releasing Lanterns into the sky.
filip
You're a nutter. Come out of the house with your hands up.
Quote from: flip-r mk2 on 07 August, 2010, 11:04:25 PM
Thought I finally seen one after staying in UFO central(Bonnybridge) for 11 years,turns out there is a Chinese Resturant in the neighbouring village Denny releasing Lanterns into the sky.
filip
I was tricked by chinese Lanterns once when i was convinced they were UFOs.
*
I am not even into believing in UFOs as they are not my area of interest but there have been instances where i cannot explain what i was seeing satisfactorily.So yes i have seen UFOs.
Quote from: House of Usher on 07 August, 2010, 10:55:25 PM
A few typically baffling readers' comments on the article, like we'll never know for sure that there aren't aliens visiting our planet until they confirm it by producing one on live TV.
;)
I am going to need a lot more convincing that something is genuine than if it is just shown on live TV and if it was some kind of massive spectacle that was being televised and claimed as being aliens i would need convincing that what i was looking at wasnt some kind of holographic image or something like that.
I saw dozens of Chinese lanterns go overhead on New Years Eve - I was very impressed at the spectacle and could see that, out of context, they'd make very convincing UFOs.
Quote from: Aaron A Aardvark on 07 August, 2010, 10:32:51 PM
Hey! I just saw some UFOs and I don't even believe in them.
There were three red lights staying still, then a bigger one moved up to them and then away again. Defo not planets or satellites or planes. When I went to get my camera there was only one left and it didn't photograph very well.
I'm buggered if I can think of a rational explanation.
Still doesn't mean there wasn't one though and you'd need a lot more evidence to jump from an object in the sky you can't identify to it being an alien spaceship.
Ball lightning. And quite possibly spike planes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag-resistant_aerospike), which certainly get my vote for the thing a Scandinavian radar station clocked coming out of Soviet airspace at Mach 13 a few years back.
Cheers!
Jim
There are probably two generations of UAV out there and more experimental aircraft than you can shake a stick at.
www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2006-10/top-secret-warplanes-area-51
http://science.howstuffworks.com/space/aliens-ufos/area-515.htm
www.area51zone.com/aircraft/summary.shtml#BM_p11
Granted that most UFOs are misidentifications but mixed in there are secret military projects, which is why military intelligence have been involved with flaying saucer spotters since the early days.
Of course, there may be alien spaceships mixed in there, but random lights in the sky aren't really enough to be going on with. But if anyone gets their hands on metal from a UFO I can get it tested, so don't be shy about chipping a bit off if you see one of those intergalactic perverts has landed nearby.
Behold! Our new alien overlords!
(http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll10/robertcornell68/UFO_img.jpg)
They were a LOT more impressive in real life.
Don't worry. It's merely the Vogan Constructer fleet come to demolish the Earth to make way for an Interstellar by pass. :D
seen a few since moving to leyland ,best one was at elaines car boot a while back .A silver ball hanging in the sky near the moron church looked at it through some binoculars but weirdly couldnt see it except with the naked eye!
i'm in the camp as not to dismiss anything, after all ,big f'in galaxy,let alone universe so why not?
TBH if I was an advanced alien race I wouldn't bother visiting this overpopulated dying mud ball.
V
The reason I cannot keep an open mind about beings from outer space visiting our planet is that aliens would be limited by the same physical constraints we face ourselves regarding space travel: a vast interstellar gulf of space to cross, the improbability of achieving faster than light travel, the vast amounts of energy needed to sustain space flight at any kind of a worthwhile speed, and the sheer volume of supplies a vehicle would have to carry to sustain a crew for travel over the long periods of time necessary to travel from one star to another.
Enthusiasts of the implausible would say that you only need to imagine aliens that have invented a faster-than-light drive or some means of creating and utilising worm-holes, and a way of producing unlimited energy for free, who don't eat, and who have a vastly greater lifespan than our own. That's four major 'ifs' right there.
One shortcut is to just say the aliens are magic in some way that means they don't need to have invented anything to get them about. They might be giant space whales that can 'see' worm holes and fly through them, or they might be super-evolved beings made of pure energy who no longer have need of physical bodies, a bit like angels, for whom time and distance mean nothing.
Then you just have to solve questions like why they should be so interested in our world that they keep coming back and why they should deliberately keep the public unaware of their existence.
Quote from: House of Usher on 08 August, 2010, 01:41:39 PM
Then you just have to solve questions like why they should be so interested in our world that they keep coming back and why they should deliberately keep the public unaware of their existence.
Yeah, this is basically my beef with all UFO conspiracy theories. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that extraterrestrial life exists -- this is simple maths. If it does, some of it must be intelligent, although not necessarily in a way we would immediately recognize.
However, if the aliens are capable of interstellar travel then there is simply no way we would ever know about them, unless they explicitly wished us to do so. If they wished us to do so, then I can't believe that they'd be fucking about appearing on blurry amateur video footage when they could park on the White House lawn and there's be fuck all anyone could do about it.
Cheers!
Jim
I remember Arthur C Clarke was asked about UFOs once and he said if you'd seen as many as him, you no longer assumed they were aliens spacehips, and if you'd never seen one, you just weren't looking up enough!
Quote from: Aaron A Aardvark on 08 August, 2010, 06:48:51 AM
Behold! Our new alien overlords!
(http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll10/robertcornell68/UFO_img.jpg)
They were a LOT more impressive in real life.
It's one of those Chinese lantern things...
Quote from: vzzbux on 08 August, 2010, 12:37:22 PM
TBH if I was an advanced alien race I wouldn't bother visiting this overpopulated dying mud ball.
V
This planet is not overpopulated generally speaking but it is within areas of high population densities like the UK for instance.
Quote from: House of Usher on 08 August, 2010, 01:41:39 PM
The reason I cannot keep an open mind about beings from outer space visiting our planet is that aliens would be limited by the same physical constraints we face ourselves regarding space travel: a vast interstellar gulf of space to cross, the improbability of achieving faster than light travel, the vast amounts of energy needed to sustain space flight at any kind of a worthwhile speed, and the sheer volume of supplies a vehicle would have to carry to sustain a crew for travel over the long periods of time necessary to travel from one star to another.
Enthusiasts of the implausible would say that you only need to imagine aliens that have invented a faster-than-light drive or some means of creating and utilising worm-holes, and a way of producing unlimited energy for free, who don't eat, and who have a vastly greater lifespan than our own. That's four major 'ifs' right there.
I am not an enthusiast of UFOs but what you are doing is transposing your understanding or the general understanding of physics etc onto the entire universe and presuming that aliens if they exist would be subject to the same restraints when in reality its probably not a simple as that.
100 years ago you would have said that space travel would be absolutely impossible or implausible to any extent and therefore aliens would be even more implausible in theory than they are now which is slightly less implausible.
Something that you say is implausible is only based on your understanding of life and the universe or mine for that matter but it cannot be 100 percent ruled out because mankind is in no position to make those kinds of claims or assertions as it cannot be proved that X dont exist and Y is simply not possible etc etc.
This is where hypothesising and speculation and theorising somehow becomes fact when it isnt.
NASA footage :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7IzXHsym7k&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJyuQVIFdKo&feature=related
Quote from: vzzbux on 08 August, 2010, 12:37:22 PM
TBH if I was an advanced alien race I wouldn't bother visiting this overpopulated dying mud ball.
Assuming they are here to speak to we primitive land mammals...
Quote from: Peter Wolf on 08 August, 2010, 02:59:42 PM
I am not an enthusiast of UFOs but what you are doing is transposing your understanding or the general understanding of physics etc onto the entire universe and presuming that aliens if they exist would be subject to the same restraints when in reality its probably not a simple as that.
No, I did specifically mention magic aliens that can circumvent the laws of physics as we understand them. Science fiction is full of them. Real life isn't.
Quote from: Peter Wolf on 08 August, 2010, 02:59:42 PM
100 years ago you would have said that space travel would be absolutely impossible or implausible to any extent and therefore aliens would be even more implausible in theory than they are now which is slightly less implausible.
That's quite an assertion. Chances are, 100 years ago I might have been reading the science fiction of the time and thinking about the moon not being especially far away and supposing that it might be possible somehow to manufacture a vehicle capable of crossing the distance.
Quote from: Peter Wolf on 08 August, 2010, 02:59:42 PM
This is where hypothesising and speculation and theorising somehow becomes fact when it isnt.
Hmm. All I can say to that is I have seen enough Star Trek to know that there is a theoretical basis for faster-than-light travel, time travel and teleportation. Just because any of those things is theoretically possible doesn't mean that they are
literally possible in any real sense.
Quote from: House of Usher on 08 August, 2010, 04:28:33 PM
Quote from: Peter Wolf on 08 August, 2010, 02:59:42 PM
I am not an enthusiast of UFOs but what you are doing is transposing your understanding or the general understanding of physics etc onto the entire universe and presuming that aliens if they exist would be subject to the same restraints when in reality its probably not a simple as that.
No, I did specifically mention magic aliens that can circumvent the laws of physics as we understand them. Science fiction is full of them. Real life isn't.
Thats not quite what you said but if you had said "aliens that can circumvent the laws of physics as we know them" instead of saying "magic aliens" i wouldnt have felt the need to reply to that part of your comment as that is what i was saying in my reply.
Quote from: House of Usher on 08 August, 2010, 04:28:33 PM
Quote from: Peter Wolf on 08 August, 2010, 02:59:42 PM
100 years ago you would have said that space travel would be absolutely impossible or implausible to any extent and therefore aliens would be even more implausible in theory than they are now which is slightly less implausible.
That's quite an assertion. Chances are, 100 years ago I might have been reading the science fiction of the time and thinking about the moon not being especially far away and supposing that it might be possible somehow to manufacture a vehicle capable of crossing the distance.
Its not an assertion.
You are making my point for me here perfectly and i should have really said 200 yrs ago or more when the idea of travelling to the moon was utterly proposterous.Anyway the idea was there at that point but actually doing it is another thing altogether.
Quote from: Peter Wolf on 08 August, 2010, 02:59:42 PM
This is where hypothesising and speculation and theorising somehow becomes fact when it isnt.
Quote
Hmm. All I can say to that is I have seen enough Star Trek to know that there is a theoretical basis for faster-than-light travel, time travel and teleportation. Just because any of those things is theoretically possible doesn't mean that they are literally possible in any real sense.
I dont watch Star Trek so i have no idea how much of Star Trek which is fiction is based on current understanding of faster than light travel etc.
What you really should be saying is faster-than-light travel isnt literally possible at this point in time going by the current understanding of physics.
What i meant by my comment was that aliens and space travel cannot be *totally* ruled out and i am not going to "solve questions" or speculate or anything else because ultimately no one knows officially speaking so ultimately you have to be open minded to a certain extent to the idea rather than trying to rationalise it and dismiss it out of hand.You can rationalise it as much as you like but it cant be ruled out.
I appreciate all of that. You are quite right that 200 years ago I might have believed space travel, even to the moon, to be totally impossible. I would not even have begun to understand what might be involved. The reason I currently believe intersteller travel in a spacecraft to be impossible is because I have a reasonable understanding of distances in space and the likely duration of journeys at speeds up to and including light speed. To go any faster than that you have to somehow bring two points in space closer together than they would be were you not travelling between them. They do it all the time in Star Trek. I happen not to believe it to be possible.
I'm only putting forward a rational argument for the non-existence of alien visitors from another world; I haven't tested it empirically.
Whilst it's great to be open-minded about everything, most of us get by with just a working model of how we believe the world to be. That involves some of us not believing in things we have no evidence for and which it is not useful for us to believe in. Conversely, some people choose to believe in things they have no evidence for because it is serves some purpose for them to believe in those things.
To put it bluntly, people who believe that UFOs are the spacecraft of extraterrestrial visitors believe it because for some reason they want it to be true.
The old adage is: causality, relativity, faster than light - any two from three. Causality looks cast in stone and Relativity has stood up to everything that's been thrown at it so FTL has to go. (Star Trek cheats.)
Anyway, I like those paper balloons for my UFOs. Right speed, right colour, right size/distance, etc.
But they really creeped me out.
About 1979, when UFOlogy was coming to the end of another spell of being fashionable again (I think it went out of fashion altogether in the '80s), my family was returning home from a weekend at my grandparents'. The driver, who went on the become my stepfather, saw some strange lights in the sky (helicopters with searchlights), and stopped the car on the Hollingbury golf course to get closer and have a proper look at the 'UFOs,' which he thought might be 'flying saucers.'
I didn't like the idea at all. First of all I didn't believe in flying saucers, so I thought it was silly to be entertaining daft ideas like that when it was late and I had school the next morning. If it had been bats or a fox I might have been more interested. Secondly, I had seen This Island Earth and quite a lot of The Invaders on TV, and I reasoned that if my mother's future husband thought the lights might be alien spacecraft, then it wasn't sensible to go presenting yourself as a target for abduction or heat ray vaporisation.
:lol:
Quote from: House of Usher on 08 August, 2010, 06:20:44 PM
Whilst it's great to be open-minded about everything, most of us get by with just a working model of how we believe the world to be. That involves some of us not believing in things we have no evidence for and which it is not useful for us to believe in. Conversely, some people choose to believe in things they have no evidence for because it is serves some purpose for them to believe in those things.
To put it bluntly, people who believe that UFOs are the spacecraft of extraterrestrial visitors believe it because for some reason they want it to be true.
Thats true enough.Talking for myself i couldnt care less if they exist or not and i find there are enough things going on down here that are are far more important to think about than thinking about or researching space aliens.
I have seen a couple of things that cannot be explained as easily as being paper lanterns.One of which was a red object or very bright red light that was on the top of an area of the South Downs next to Alfriston.It was dark so i couldnt make out an actual object as such only the red light was visible.I was watching from the direction of the church facing east.The object took off from the top of the hill at 45 degrees with the red light going off intermittently until it continued upwards at the same angle until disappeared.There was no sound from the object and it was a clear sky.
I had been drinking but nowhere near enough to impair judgement.It was Xmas Eve and we had a lock in in this pub and i only went out for some fresh air and a short walk down to the church.I kind of had an "urging" to go for a walk right there and then as well.Of course no one else believed a word of it when i went back to the pub but there clearly was something odd going on.
The really curious thing was over to the right of the object there was a helicopter overhead that was circling the area and hovering as if it was observing the object.The helicopter was the kind that is used by the police.
The only footage i have seen that is convincing if taken at face value is the NASA footage.I havent seen any amateur footage that is convincingly a UFO.
I have to say my main disappointment has been with the aliens people claim to meet, as they don't really seem that... alien. Most of them wouldn't look out of place in early 20th Century sci-fi. It is pretty likely they'd be so far beyond us they'd not even consider us worth talking to:
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/33
We'd also be more likely to encounter some kind of Bracewell/Von Neumann probe as they'd be an easy way to seed the galaxy and could survive long after their cretors are gone. Just pray they aren't Berserker probes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe
Yes, it's pretty clear that by the far the most likely scenario for alien contact will be with a Von Neumann machine of some kind.
Our own planet's space programme seems to be going that way, and looking at those that think a lot about these things, for the 'no-hyperspace' hard SF writers interstellar travel is now overwhelmingly non-biological. The most promising scenario is a tiny near-lightspeed probe (the smallest possible payload atop some elaborate reactive drive) that contains nano tech and AI sufficient to use local materials to build a viable avatar, or even make a biological form that can have a stored consciousness implanted into it. Something like Charles Stross' 'star wisps'.
As SF authors like Baxter make painfully clear, space travel for biological entities is an exercise in impossibly difficult plumbing.
Got a taxi ride home to my new house, just outside guilford on Friday night. The cabbie informed me there were UFO sightings in the mid 60s at a nearby railway bridge!
Id just like to point out what nonsense you all do speak. Space aliens, what with their space technology and shit, will not be bound by physics, which was invented on Earth, after all. Their spaceships just go really fast and that. Dont you people know anything?
SBT
Most people assume that the aliens (if aliens there are) come from other solar systems.
They may come from other dimensions.
They may come from Venus or Mars - from the past or the future.
They may be a Terrestrial species who live underground or in the deep oceans.
They may not even exist at all.
For my part, I simply don't know what to make of it.
So the Dalek construct 'Edwin Bracewell' was a knowing reference to this sort of thing that would have tipped off viewers who are well versed in hard SF that he was a Dalek plant and therefore not to be completely trusted?
Quote from: House of Usher on 08 August, 2010, 01:41:39 PM
The reason I cannot keep an open mind about beings from outer space visiting our planet is that aliens would be limited by the same physical constraints we face ourselves regarding space travel: a vast interstellar gulf of space to cross, the improbability of achieving faster than light travel, the vast amounts of energy needed to sustain space flight at any kind of a worthwhile speed, and the sheer volume of supplies a vehicle would have to carry to sustain a crew for travel over the long periods of time necessary to travel from one star to another.
Enthusiasts of the implausible would say that you only need to imagine aliens that have invented a faster-than-light drive or some means of creating and utilising worm-holes, and a way of producing unlimited energy for free, who don't eat, and who have a vastly greater lifespan than our own. That's four major 'ifs' right there.
One shortcut is to just say the aliens are magic in some way that means they don't need to have invented anything to get them about. They might be giant space whales that can 'see' worm holes and fly through them, or they might be super-evolved beings made of pure energy who no longer have need of physical bodies, a bit like angels, for whom time and distance mean nothing.
Then you just have to solve questions like why they should be so interested in our world that they keep coming back and why they should deliberately keep the public unaware of their existence.
What if they could bend time and use that as a source for travelling ?
Dimension jumping is the way forward.
The only way for interstellar travel would be to download your concious into a machine or store it onto a chip and on approach to destination down load it into cloned replica's on oneself.
V
Quote from: JudgeGumpty on 08 August, 2010, 08:53:26 PM
What if they could bend time and use that as a source for travelling ?
Cheating.
Quote from: vzzbux on 08 August, 2010, 08:59:29 PM
Dimension jumping is the way forward.
Also cheating.
Quote from: vzzbux on 08 August, 2010, 08:59:29 PM
The only way for interstellar travel would be to download your concious into a machine or store it onto a chip and on approach to destination down load it into cloned replica's on oneself.
That's viable, but what do you get out of it? You'll be long dead on your homeworld by the time your duplicate arrives. It won't be able to get back home again to report back to you (but you died a thousand years ago anyway), and your consciousness downloaded onto a chip isn't you, it's just a recording of you, effectively a new A.I. person that knows how to whistle your greatest hits.