Back in the 1920's an American president was quoted as declaring that everything which could be invented was already in existence.

Today, "conventional wisdom" informs us that the laws of gravity can only be mitigated but never violated by any known technology, and yet, a long the list of credible observers, including numerous airline and military pilots, claim to have witnessed other-worldly air vehicles under intelligent control, performing aerobatic maneuvers that go far beyond the capabilities of all known military or civilian aircraft.

A man named Robert Lazar claimed back in the '80's to have worked inside the uber-secretive military base, Area 51, out in the Nevada desert. Mr. Lazar described alien craft that had crashed and been retrieved by the military, and which were being test-flown and reverse-engineered by scentists at that fabled facility. Witnesses peering at the night sky just outside the Area 51 restricted area have described seeing wildly zig-zagging lights in the night sky, whipping about in a manner that simply could not be replicated by any known conventional aircraft.

Naturally, the official response to Mr. Lazar's claims was one of dismissive ridicule, but, bearing in mind that yesterday's science fiction often morphs into contemporary technology, one wonders if there indeed may be some basis to the seemingly outlandish claims made by Mr. Lazar, which included a description of gravity-countracting technology that lies well beyond the realms of anything currently in existence on Earth.

Since electronics does occupy the leading edge of technological advancement, I thought it would be interesting to hear a few opinions on the subject of UFO's in general, here at the world's most heavily visited electronics website.

So, what do y'all think ? Is planet Earth truly the only celestial body occupied by living critters, or could there be others that may in fact be home to civilizations that are technologically superior to the human race ?

 

I have a slightly open mind on the subject, but looking at the web I see way too many crackpots that feed on each others paranoia and madness. In this worlds billions of people it is all too easy to find thousands that believe in literally anything, be it the US government downed the twin towers for a nefarious agenda, to magic that actually works (the latter is probably millions, maybe approaching a billion).

So in the absence of real proof I intend to remain a skeptic. I accept nothing as valid unless there is credible proof (and I define credible proof) when I see stuff like this.

IMO we are not the only intelligent species. This is a matter of faith in numbers. While they could have visited us, those same numbers are not favorable, which explains why I insist on the proof.

 

I agree with the need for physical evidence of alien visitation to finally convince even the most jaded of skeptics, myself included, yet, the sheer number of mass UFO viewings that have been recorded in recent decades almost seem to suggest that such irrefutable physical evidence could actually materialize in our lifetimes.

Over the past decade alone, thousands of residents of Mexico City and Phoenix Arizona stared skyward in awe, as huge formations of intelligently controlled light-emmitting objects defied all known laws of aerodynamics, while radar operators scanning the area reported multiple hits maneuvering at ridiculous speeds.

On the other hand, even with Area 51's solid wall of secrecy, the fact that Robert Lazar is so far the only purported former employee of that facility claiming to have worked on "captured" saucuers, suggests the whole story might have been made up for the usual reasons - publicity and money.

Demonstrable evidence that such craft exist would call into question numerous previously sacrosanct assumptions and theorems about our own planet, but realistically I just can't see every single one of Area 51's retirees keeping mum for life on a secret with such monumental implications for mankind, suggesting that Lazar may after all be the fantasist many claim.

Yes I know, it is a slow day when talk turns to aliens. Maybe I should cancel my subscription to the National Enquirer.

 

You have to remember UFO means Unidentified Flying Object. To many people equate UFO = alien. We are already doing some strange stuff in the skies (all the governments, not just the USA). Like that unidentified missile launch off the coast of California around 6 months ago, there are many agendas out there, some are scary.

 

Here's one take on the topic. It's summarized by the statement that the evidence to date is inconclusive, given that both human testimony and (today) photographic evidence are so low on the credibility totem pole.

Given that the "rewards" (e.g., prestige, attention, funding, complete control over members of the opposite sex, unlimited cash, and all the other things that motivate people) of presenting a convincing case for any discovery of non-terrestrial life, you'd think that any credible extant evidence would have leaked out. It hasn't.

One of my pet peeves is that the quasi-sentient echinoderms that think up these visitation/interaction stories are completely, totally unimaginative. The "aliens" depicted are so incredibly anthropomorphic. In fact, I automatically assign such thinking to the fraud bin in precisely the same way that Benford's Law is used to uncover fraud. Look at the incredible variety of life on this planet, including the number of species in both the current and fossil record. And that's what's been produced with only one geology/biology. Furthermore, it's conceivable that we might not even recognize alien life if we tripped over it -- it might operate at temporal or physical scales outside our ken. Lemme give some examples.

About 20 years ago I had an epiphany standing on the crater's edge at Crater Lake, Oregon. Why, I don't know, but it's etched into my brain. I imagined that all the trees I saw for miles around me in the forest and to the horizon were part of a huge organism and were analogous to neurons in a brain. These "neurons" communicated chemically through the soil. This, of course, would be on a time scale vastly different than what we're accustomed to. Of course, such a thing could be tested experimentally if one had a credible hypothesis and was willing to wait. I doubt anyone will be doing such work anytime soon though. Yet it's an interesting thought that there could be a form of intelligent life there that we don't begin to recognize.

Another thought is that alien life forms could be tiny and escape our notice. If you've ever read the book Engines of Creation and similar stuff, you know that theoretically an enormous amount of machinery, computation, and other stuff can be packed into a space the size of a cell. If there were such things around us, would we notice them? And the distinction between life and an intelligent computer in a cell blur things even more -- could we recognize either?

Here's another thing -- our profound ignorance of the universe. Looking at photons just doesn't cut it -- you've got to go there to understand it and experience it. The attached picture shows a typical face-on spiral galaxy roughly the size of the Milky Way galaxy with SI units showing the size. If this was the Milky Way, the sun would be about at the dot in one of the spiral arms. Now, if you assume there's an electromagnetic wavefront expanding at about 100 light years from the solar system, that's mankind's sole effect on the galaxy. The diameter of that spherical wavefront is far too small to show on this picture -- it's smaller than the thickness of the thin lines (and of course humans have explored only a space many orders of magnitude smaller). This definitely pegs the ignorance meter in my opinion. And when you think that our one galaxy is a billionth of a percent of the galaxies in the known universe, we've got a long ways to go.

Note I'm NOT a defeatist in wanting to understand this stuff -- I've always felt that knowing whether the universe was teeming with life was the most interesting question we could ask (30 or 40 years ago I read and was fascinated by the book by Sagan and Shklovskii). But we should not forget that we have a long, long way to go in understanding this stuff.

 

my thoughts are that 'life' has the unique ability to inhabit every niche that is inhabitibal. As a previous post relates to small, one can also concieve large. Vegetation in the galactic order.

One thing though, if a far intellegant being is out there, it hasn't made itself known to us, even with possibly millions of years head start over us. This makes me conclude that either life has some relative constraint, or that technology is not the measure of success.

I refuse to believe for a moment, that we could operate an alien craft based on technologies foriegn to us. That only happens in 'Independence Day' (give of take a few other far fetched space flicks).

 

The notion that extre-terrestrial life may not necessarily take the form of standard Hollywood-issue bi-pedal humanoids is an intriguing one, Someonesdad.

There have been reports over the years of rainfall in some parts of the world which was stained with reddish gelatinous material that some speculate may be of extra-terrestrial origin, though I can't understand how such particulate matter could survive entry into Earth's atmosphere, or whether living micro-organisms could indeed hitch ride in as well.

All told, I hope one day Uncle Sam will give us a sneak peek into Area 51, so as to quell at least some of the speculation about that place, and about nearby Groom Lake. I won't hold my breath on that one though.

 

So, what do y'all think ? Is planet Earth truly the only celestial body occupied by living critters, or could there be others that may in fact be home to civilizations that are technologically superior to the human race ?

I see that as an entirely separate question from the one the rest of your post infers, that being "Has alien life visited our planet?".

To the first, the only logical answer is that there is alien life somewhere out there in the rest of the universe. Given the truly incomprehensible number of galaxies, solar systems, and planets out there, I simply see no way to believe that our planet would be the only one in the entire universe that contains life.

So yes, there is life out there somewhere else. Has any of it ever intentionally (or even unintentionally) visited our planet? To me it seems unlikely, even improbable, but the reality is there's simply no way to definitively say no to that question. Now if incontrovertible evidence existed to prove that aliens were on our planet, then we could definitively answer yes. That evidence may exist somewhere, but is being held in secret. And yes, I firmly believe that there are a whole variety of organizations out there that would absolutely keep such evidence secret, whether it be government or private.

 

I just want to share one latest news in this context :
First habitable planet discovered

A planet 20 light years away is the first outside our solar system to be declared ‘habitable’ by scientists.

The rocky ‘exoplanet’ Gliese 581d meets key requirements for sustaining Earth-like life, including rainfall and possibly even watery oceans.

The planet orbits a red-dwarf star similarly called Gliese 581, on its outer fringes called the ‘Goldilocks zone’, where the temperature is not so hot that water boils away, nor so cold that water is perpetually frozen.

But even though it may be technically habitable, the Gliese 581d would not make a comfortable dwelling for humans.

Gravity is twice what is on Earth, doubling the weight of anyone standing on the surface, and the atmosphere is dense with carbon dioxide.

With a mass of at least 5.6 times that of Earth, Gliese 581d is classified as a ‘super-Earth’.

The discovery caught scientists by surprise because the planet was previously ruled out as a habitable country.

But a new computer model with the capacity to simulate extraterrestrial climates has confirmed that Gliese 581d really could harbour life, showing the prior assumption to be wrong.

"This discovery is important because it's the first time climate modellers have proved that the planet is potentially habitable, and all observers agree that the exoplanet exists,” said Dr Robin Wordsworth, a member of the French team from the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in Paris.

"If you look at the history of the search for habitable planets, there's been at least two instances so far when scientists have announced that a habitable world has been discovered, only to have the claim contradicted later, either by climate experts or by other observers.”

On average, the light that Gliese 581d receives from its star has about 30 per cent of the intensity of sunlight on Earth.

While that temperature seems too cold to support liquid water, the atmosphere’s high production of greenhouse gases significantly heats the planet.

It may also be "tidally locked", meaning that one side of it always faces the sun, which would give it permanent dayside and nightside.

More than 500 planets orbiting other stars have been recorded since 1995, detected mostly by a tiny wobble in stellar light.

Exoplanets are named after their star and listed alphabetically, in order of discovery.

Until now, the big interest in Gliese 581's roster of planets focused on Gliese 581g.

It swept the headlines last year as ‘Zarmina's World’, after its observers announced it had roughly the same mass as Earth's and was also close to the ‘Goldilocks zone’.

But that discovery has since been discounted by many, with some experts suspecting the Gliese 581g may not even exist.

 

Bullocks.......There ain't any aliens. Period.