Is it not coincidental that the rise of UFO (and alien) sightings roughly follows the global growth of two technologies. - Television (with programs like Flash Gordon/Lost in Space etc) - Commercial flight (Increase in shiney aircraft into and over areas they had not previously been seen)
And there also seems to be some propensity for sightings to occur in North America... or is this just a media thing.
I'm also bemused why most Alien encounters include a Proctology examination...
But hey I haven't read the reference article (primarily due to its length) and have been known to attempt to send eggs into orbit (for purely scientific reasons, of course).
i always wonder why every sighting is in the middle of nowhere , if they were really keen on studying human life , wouldnt it make sense to head to an area where there was a large human population.
OK, so the article is about the government management of the public's perception of UFOs, not whether aliens exist as such or not.
UFOs can have many possible explanations. If you ever see some of the crazy things the US Air Force was flying in the '60s many of those could have been mistaken for a space ship from another planet.
I would say govts try to manage the perceptions because if there were aliens among us then they would constitute a direct challenge to established order, and a pretty big challenge at that.
Also it is possible govts don't want us getting to many ideas that we should be exploring the stars as it is expensive.
But Elon Musk may have a way around that, who knows.
vexxxboy: i always wonder why every sighting is in the middle of nowhere , if they were really keen on studying human life , wouldnt it make sense to head to an area where there was a large human population.
I've managed to skim half of it (on a short break)... quite a lot to digest. So far, my baloney detector is swaying into the red.
I gather it's mostly about the idea that governments might be trying to alter our perception of UFOs via the media, by downplaying content that is supposedly based on real "research." This doesn't wash with me, simply because the UFO meme is rife in movies & TV, and ALL OVER the internet. Heck, even mainstream Documentary channels show doco's on already debunked cases (treating them as if they're real)... even the Daleks ships in the new Doctor Who look like classic George Adamski ufos.
I think the truth is more along the lines that the media and current technology has actually shaped the UFO culture/meme. In the early 1900s we had zeppelin-like airships, in the 40s/50s it was saucers (even though Kenneth Arnold said he saw objects more boomerang-like), and after Whitley Strieber wrote Communion and the movie came out in the 80s, we had "greys" showing up all over earth, sneaking into our bedrooms and scaring the pants off us.
'Are there aliens and what would they be like?' is a more interesting conversation than 'Would the government deceive us about the existence of aliens, For Our Own Good'?
Aptenodytes forsteri are aliens in New Zealand (and pretty much everywhere else except Antarctica), but there's reliable reports they've captured one and are holding it in isolation in a quasi government facility in Wellington.
They've even performed operations on it to determine its diet... and... there's talk they're going to let it go in some remote place so they don't have to deal with the whole 'we killed the alien thing'.
Be interested in reading 'the offical files' on this alien visitor when they're released in 50years or so. Or maybe it'll be too late by then and the Penguins will be all over us.....
I've been to Roswell, NM, but I won't use that as my proof. I do have proof, though that there is life on other planets. For every planet in existence in the universe, Earth is their "life is in other planets"
As far as aliens coming here, there is no doubt that by weight of numbers, there will be other life forms, and intelligent lifeforms. But physics does not change. The nearest planets are thousands of lightyears away. You cannot travel faster than light, so we are too far away for other space-travelling lifeforms to come here.
Personally I'm fascinated by beliefs, especially fringe ones like belief in psychics, UFOs, dowsing etc. The way UFO enthusiasts keep falling for the hoaxes without ever looking for signs of fakery (much like Derren brown fooling a bunch of psychics - nobody once asks, "are you using tricks?") True belief isn't open to reason and the more realistic, mundane explanations.
When I look at the evidence for so many of these "phenomenon" (remember, I was a UFO believer for years) all there seems to be is anecdote upon anecdote upon anecdote... and the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." I see guys like Stephen Greer of the Disclosure Project, waving bits of paper around that have blanked out bits... blanked out because it's usually really sensitive military info! Penn & Teller did a great episode on Roswell, and how secrets breed urban myths conspiracy theories.
Some of the articles out there on conspiracy sites and "alternative media" sites are so long-winded, even by geeky sciency standards, layer upon layer upon layer of myths and misunderstandings, propping each other up - it makes it sooooo hard to go through them all and research every point.
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