Do you believe in UFOs & flying saucers ?

COVID wrote: »

Not my view, but do carry on.

One of the very earliest recorded examples was written in 200 AD by Lucian of Samosata (in eastern Turkey), a writer of satire and a practitioner of rhetoric of Assyrian descent (it is thought). Among his works is a novel called Vera Historia, or “True Story”, that details a journey to the Moon and the discovery of a multitude of life there. That lunar-life includes three headed vultures, birds made of grass with wings of leaves, humans sweating milk, and fleas the size of elephants.

Clearly the story is far from “true”, and Lucian didn’t hide that this was fantasy. In fact he was in part making a philosophical point about the impossibility of real truth, and the fallacy of other thinkers for claiming to be arbiters of truth, including hallowed folk like Plato.

But the tale is one of the earliest known where detailed alien life is imagined. The beings of the Moon are even at war with beings on the Sun. Aliens, it seems, would be susceptible to our kinds of flaws. Interestingly, the possible existence of solar life was still doing the rounds in the late 1700s and early 1800s thanks to the astronomer William Herschel. Except Herschel wasn’t writing fantasy, he really suspected that there could be living things on the Sun, on a hypothetical solid surface.

The Moon has always been a good incubator for ideas about other life. The 10th Century Japanese narrative (or monogatari) of The Tale of Princess Kaguya has versions where the titular princess has been sent to Earth from the people of the Moon during a celestial war. But this story has the aliens as human in form.

In fact, it’s interesting to see that from the earliest days, including the ideas of the ancient Greeks on cosmic pluralism, people have tended to either assume extraterrestrial life would be like us, or go for the full, bizarre alien treatment. Despite that split, more often than not there’s been a bias towards human forms, all the way up through the 1700s and 1800s where writers like Voltaire in his Micromégas has aliens from Saturn who (despite being six thousand feet tall) are basically human.

It wasn’t really until Darwin’s theory of evolution broke ground that anyone tried to imagine aliens as living things with lineages that related to the environments of their origins. Up to this point anything non-human was, like Lucian of Samosata’s funky beasts, more often than not arbitrarily fantastic.


One of the slightly more forward thinkers was the French astronomer Camille Flammarion (although he was also a pretty far-out advocate of a blend of Christianity and pluralism in which souls passed from planet to planet). In 1864 he wrote a book called Real and Imaginary Worlds, and in 1887 a fictional piece called Lumen. Between these he concocted aliens that, in many ways, had a basis in the scientific thinking of the time. There were sentient plants whose digestive and respiratory systems were combined. Mermaid-like creatures swimming in rose-colored oceans, and human-like beings with extra toes on the heels of their feet and a single, conical ear on top of their heads.

steddyeddy wrote: »

I'll repeat it's a pity that there's so much immaturity while trying to have a scientific talk about the subject. This had some great contributions from posters who unfortunately were shouted down by people who can't handle the complexity of the topic.

bangkok wrote: »

anyone remember Michael Knighton, English business man who tried to buy Manchester United...

He said him and his wife seen a UFO, was publicly mocked after he told a paper not to publish the story, had to step back then from everything as he said it wasnt fair on his family. sad to say that if you say you seen a UFO it can potentially ruin your life

maninasia wrote: »

I'm sorry if this was posted already but it's a great read.

Somebody earlier said Scientific American poo pooed the whole alien thing but here they give this Prof a good opportunity to explain thats it's actually the scientific community that is super conservative.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/astronomer-avi-loeb-says-aliens-have-visited-and-hes-not-kidding1/


Another example is the Perseverance and Curiosity Rover.
Deliberately looking for signs of extinct life...Fossils...Rather than extant life. Its quite bizarre. The last time NASA made a really decent biochemical experiment to look for living organisms on Mars was the 1970s (with inclusive results due to the experiment design and knowledge of Martian soil chemistry at that time ).

The object’s discoverers dubbed it ‘Oumuamua—a Hawaiian term that roughly translates to “scout.” The unavoidably cursory examinations of this celestial passerby showed it had several properties that defied easy natural explanation. ‘Oumuamua’s apparent shape—which was like a 100-meter-long cigar or pancake—did not closely resemble any known asteroid or comet. Neither did its brightness, which revealed ‘Oumuamua was at least 10 times more reflective than one of our solar system’s typical space rocks—shiny enough to suggest the gleam of burnished metal. Most strangely, as it zoomed off after swooping by the sun, the object sped up faster than could be explained by our star’s waning gravitational grip alone. Run-of-the-mill comets can exhibit similar accelerations because of the rocketlike effect of evaporating gases jetting from their sunlight-warmed icy surfaces. But no signs of such jets were seen around ‘Oumuamua.

To Loeb, the most plausible explanation was as obvious as it was sensational: taken together with its possibly pancakelike shape and high reflectivity, ‘Oumuamua’s anomalous acceleration made perfect sense if the object was in fact a light sail—perhaps a derelict from some long-expired galactic culture. Primed by years spent pondering how we might someday find evidence of cosmic civilizations in the sky’s depths, he became increasingly convinced that, with ‘Oumuamua, the evidence had instead found us. In late 2018 Loeb and his co-author Shmuel Bialy, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters arguing that ‘Oumuamua had been nothing less than humanity’s first contact with an artifact of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Just like going to an ATM, doing experiments can serve as a reality check. And in science, it’s essential that we have that check—that we make testable predictions and put some skin in the game—because otherwise we won’t learn anything new. I don’t think that’s properly recognized anymore.

steddyeddy wrote: »

That's an interesting idea O and fair play for putting it forward.

I don't subscribe to that theory as the object in the video hovers and then exits the weapons lockon system of the fighter jet. Flying debris don't hover, speed up, slow down and even jam radar as has been described.

olestoepoke wrote: »

I watched it again and I don't see anything different, pieces of debris entering out atmosphere. Hovers and then exits? Really? I suppose people see what they want sometimes because again all I see is debris.

EmmetSpiceland wrote: »

Research, come on. Listen, bub, you asked for potential explanations so, as I’m not “au fait” with the latest UFO encounters, I checked the Wikipedia article on the “case”. I’m hardly going to go to some Fortean site where the only potential explanation is aliens.

Frankly, I’m starting to question your scientific integrity if you, persistently, dismiss any dissenting voice that doesn’t fully back the idea that these unexplained events are alien space men flying around in spaceships. It’s like with those “doctors” or “professors” who appear on shows like ‘Ancient Aliens’.

steddyeddy wrote: »

I say we try again with a study C. Research conducted by the University of Michigan indicated that those who point out grammatical errors are more likely to be introverted and less agreeable to other humans.

Sakana wrote: »

I feel like this misspelling is intentional.

steddyeddy wrote: »

More grammar Nazism Covid?