Mercury & Gemini Astronaut, Colonel Gordon Cooper
At Edwards Air Force Base I was having some of the cameramen film precision landings. A saucer flew right over them, put down three landing gears, and landed out on the dry lakebed. They went out there with their cameras towards the UFO. It lifted off and flew off at a very high rate of speed .I had a chance to hold it [the film] up to the window to look at it. Good close-up shots. There was no doubt in my mind that it was made someplace other than on this earth.Mexico City Senior Air Traffic Controller, Enrique Kolbeck
When you have the view of the airspace and the radar screen [and] you see the UFOs go around twenty or thirty miles a second that is very real. They can turn suddenly almost 90 degrees in a second or half a second. The UFOs can go vertically straight up very quickly.
I think it's pretty true to say that sceptics don't realise that people of this calibre have testified to being UFO witnesses by the hundred. Sceptics don't know because they don't investigate. And as discussed a few posts before, there are various willful as well as unconscious filtering processes which tend to keep such testimonies out of the mainstream media. Whereas it's often said to be the news story of the millenium. (So sceptics walk around believing there are no such highly-expert witnesses.) UFO witnesses are a complete cross-section of society in terms of age, profession, location, race, culture, gender, and even UFO-belief or non-belief.
Just as you'd expect if the phenomenon is real and objective, for anyone to see if they happen to be around at the time.
Probably the only tilt towards any kind of person more likely to see UFOs might be towards those whose work or lives have them outside at night, and especially in the early hours. Statistical studies by Jacques Vallee in the late 1960s were highly suggestive that UFOs are about (or just more likely to show up?) at night, peak times being 1-4 AM.
V
Hi Venetian
I'm going to go slightly off topic here and ask if you watched the programme The Event last night? If not you can see it here http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-event/4od#3130488
It is based on a story of a UFO crash landing in 1944 and the 97 passengers being detained in Alaska by the CIA all that time until the current (black) President decides to make this information public.
I thought it an interesting theme to be putting out to the public at this time when so many real sightings etc are being brought into the public domain. Then, when I was channel hopping afterwards there was a trailer for a film coming out (either this month or next) which was another Alien attack based story. It just made me wonder IF there are intelligent beings coming here/already here, would the 'Illuminati' or whoever has control of us now be putting out propagander about alien invasions to scare the public? Make people wary of anything 'new' arriving on the scene even if they are friendly?
Sorry if I have rambled on but it left me thinking along these lines last night:)
Love and light
reikiangel
xxx
Hi Reikiangel,
No, I didn't see that programme.
I think just from basic human memory, most people would agree that there are not more stories (fiction) of this nature being put out on the screen, to quote you "at this time", than there have ever been TBH. Going back to the 1960s (e.g. the long-running black-and-white TV series "The Invaders") there's a fairly regular output of UFO-related, aliens-related, and invasion-related s.f on the screen.
A few (well, I can think of a couple right now) of these have not been fiction, but were based upon alleged true accounts of abduction. One was Communion, based upon the autobiographical book by Whitley Streiber; the title of the other escapes me right now, about an outdoors-worker who vanished for several days.
Real witness-accounts have added greatly to the s.f. genre, from the very fact beginning in the 1950s that alien craft are often depicted in s.f. as being saucers, to the carefully-accurate representations of how UFOs tend to appear we find in Spielberg's Close Encounters...
IMHO there's nothing deliberate about this. Fact and fiction are feeding off each other I'd say. I mean, the number of factual sightings inspire science-fiction, and large doses of science-fiction inspire people to have the courage to report their sightings when otherwise they may not have done.
V
Stab at a summary of Ufology
A stab here at a very brief summary of the UFO phenomenon:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/space/aliens-ufos/what-are-ufos.htm#mkcpgn=kaw1
Two problems:
Most UFO sightings depend on fallible human accounts, imperfect footage and conspiracy theory. All of this tends to crumble under the scrutiny of scientific method, humanity's best sieve for separating reality from fantasy.
After all, scientific inquiry hinges on something called the null hypothesis, which means the burden of proof is on anyone making a positive claim. A dog ate your homework? Great, where's the testable evidence? You saw an alien spacecraft? Excellent, let's test and validate the story.
There are very many sightings involving all or some of a combination of multiple witnesses who didn't know each other, with radar validation, professional witnesses involved inclusing police, military, commercial pilots, astronauts, etc; some incidents include military confrontation (fighters scrambled to try to intercept); there's huge evidence of a cover-up so we don't have all facts to hand; and some people involved appear to have been injured, operated on, even killed.
The null hypothesis is the burden of sceptics. After all, the military establishments of a number of advanced nations HAVE admitted to the existence of UFOs and to their confrontations with them. This being the case, sceptics need to wield the null hypothesis in light of the case that militaries have called UFOs (as non-earthly craft) a fact.
Secondly, if you follow the right Ufological researchers, such as Jacques Vallee, scientific method is adhered to much more than by almost any sceptic.
Nice, if flawed, try at a summary though.
Edit to add: Oh, and while the extraterrestrial hypothesis is certainly still out there, it maybe only accounts, in its 'hard' form (spaceships from other planets in our universe) for roughly the opinions of half of Ufologists these days. There's a real overlap between UFO sightings and some of what from the past is called folklore. Ancient Indian texts write at great length regarding contact with the various races, all of whom said they came from differnet planets, but NEAR, even VERY NEAR to us in different dimensions. So that hypothesis combines different dimensions with different worlds.
The other-dimensional hypothesis was first taken up in modern times in the 1960s by the most serious of scientific researchers, who found themselves forced to consider it. People such as Jacques Vallee and Aime Michel, also John Keel. At the time I hadn't a clue why they were all making this move. Now I think it's fairly clear that we are not dealing with craft that have journeyed over untold light-years: they seem more to just appear here and then disappear, as though they are almost "from" here. And if they all came from other planets in our own universe, how come SETI has found nothing such as radio signals from our own physical universe?
V
Ancient Indian texts write at great length regarding contact with the various races, all of whom said they came from differnet planets...
Do you have any links to these David?