[RonB]

I know I am laying myself open for all sorts of quips and one liners with this but has anyone ever seen a UFO?

For the most part I was a skeptic regarding UFO's until my brother, a straight laced ultra conservative, who I have nothing in common with,
told me he and his co-workers had several visits by large glowing discs over several days during the construction of a nuclear power plant in rural northern Illinois.
I thought it was interesting and he really made nothing of it either way, accepting it as an experience and that was it.

But recently while driving through Nevada, around 2 in the morning on a fishing trip to the Midwest, a buddy and I saw a string of large bright lights rise up and plunge into a huge cumulus
cloud way off in the distance. The lights followed each other like roller coaster cars and when they went through a portion of the cloud it lite up from them. They existed from the cloud and past over us very high up and at an incredible speed. They were huge and as they passed over lit the ground all around.

I threw together this little movie of what we saw. Excluding the movement of the car and the lighting of the area as they passed over, we both agreed this is what we saw.

http://www.dahothouse.com/work/UFO.mov

Now I am interested in this stuff...

[ivox3]

They're real.

Skeptics can be skeptics all day long, it's fine, they're belief systems have won't allow anything less than what they believe to be 'empirical' evidence to stand as truth. But that same belief system will ironically colorize the presence of that empirical evidence when it does appear as untruth.

Whatever...

Here's one thing that has been going on for awhile ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H82KV2Gf ... re=related , yet despite coming from USAF officers and broadcast on LARRY KING, .. the depth in which this has penetrated public awareness is relatively shallow for the very reason you began your post with.

So this, ...one of just thousands and thousands of global incidents reported...

This rabbit hole is pretty damn deep... . Enjoy the ride ..

Nice ani..

[Maximus3D]

That's ofcourse a interesting observation Ron, not sure what to think of it but who knows..

Here's one sequence shot recently, a couple of days ago by a man in Sweden who were testing his new videocamera. He picked up two very fastmoving lightsources
traveling along a line, switching positions with eachother all the time during their flight when no other aircraft was reported to be in the same airspace. I have no clue
what this is but it's something and it's unidentified.

http://www.aftonbladet.se/webbtv/nyhete ... 5755083.ab

/ Max

[Fernando Tella]

I've never seen anything, but I want to believe!

[Calico Jack]

I haven't seen ufo's but these chinese dudes has: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldne ... alone.html

I think it's pretty good material.

[-Adrian]

I have seen a cluster of maybe 7-9 lights over Paris at night. They were pretty much straight above me when i spotted them, moving very slowly from my point of view. Luckily i had buildings around to get a motion reference. I guessed their altitude at several km, like common air traffic, which relativizes the observed speed. Their appearance was steady and weak, no blinking, pulsing, fading. Nothing you would stop to look at in a light polluted city, if you hadn't already been stargazing at that patch of sky.

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So far nothing interesting beside being a formation, and unusually slow.

But then the whole cluster seemed to come to halt, and turn around a central axis while retaining all distances so that your mind constructs one big object instead. In that moment my guess switched from jet formation to helicopter formation and i watched it continue its slow journey in the new direction until it was too far away to see.

It was my only sighting of that kind, but left me very impressed. The helicopter explanation obviously isn't satisfying, because of the rotation and absence of sound.

Still, i remain very skeptic regarding the nature of UFOs. Unidentified flying objects, that remain such, are well documented. But i'm still fully open to the idea, that natural, and well explainable causes are behind sightings.

Either way, very exciting topic.

[yolk]

nah..don't believe in ufo's..werewolves on the other hand..
to this day i suspect my ex was a werewolf. she definitely snored like one

[Bubbaloo]

Ivox3: I do honestly hope the E.T.'s are monitoring our missiles. We need someone smarter than government agencies overseeing these things. And that's why they cover up these things. It's an embarrassment for them.

RonB: I have never seen one, but I would sure like to.

[ivox3]

Bubba .. I have to say, I think they are. I've been tracking info on this for 5+ --- and have read mountains of material on the subject. Think about this, ... all the witnesses we are talking about are from the armed forces who would naturally have access to these highly guarded installations. So were not talking about Joe Toothless on the evening news who says he saw something funny in the sky. No, ..were are talking military personnel and if you've had the pleasure to know any personally, ...especially brass, ... they generally don't get too humorous on matters that could undermine their career/livelihood etc. There's a high credibility factor here..

Let's just get crazy for a moment here and make some assumptions here:

Other life exists.
High probability it has been evolving a lot longer than ours.
In their evolution, a natural understanding of unity has been achieved -- long term survival depends on it, or there will always be a proclivity towards self-destruction in any species.
They are aware of us.
They're aware of our level of evolution as essentially low due to our methods of solving problems, ..not to mention that we'll scramble F-15's at the drop of hat and take shots at them and ask questions later ... That's not very hospitable now is it ? ... lol. Still, they help us, ... now that's evolved. We're not talking about those little guys abducting folks --- that's a different thread.
They have the ability to solve those problems, but choose not to in the hope that Earth can evolve to higher understanding on it's own. This serves the purpose of allowing humans to temper its technological achievements with a lasting wisdom in how to apply it (currently all scientific/technological advances are checked for military implications first, as in, the most efficient methods for killing -- it's how we roll, no?). This is not evolved.
So in order to do this, ...on their part an overall hands off approach or light touch is required and in whatever assistance that is extended by them, that it be be largely away from the public awareness. You see, ...the horse can be brought to the water, but if you force it to drink, well, in this case, ..humans --- if you force them to drink, ... the wisdom of why will NOT accompany the reasoning for drinking in the first place and nothing is gained.

Now, that's if we have friends out there ....

The story continues ....

[JDHill]

A seemingly-unrelated question: if you look up in the sky at night, where does the single line you are looking along end?

[ivox3]

It is as long as your best telescope can see.

[glebe digital]

A seemingly-unrelated question: if you look up in the sky at night, where does the single line you are looking along end?

If you're telescope was powerful enough, you'd be looking at yourself.

[Mihai]

Wouldn't these evolved aliens have some sort of cloaking device, or do they turn it off sometimes to mess with our minds, what's more flying in formation for fun? This is what makes me most skeptical about what these sightings actually are. They have the technology to travel, not even at lightspeed which would still take thousands of years, but take shortcuts through parallel universes, you name it, but when they arrive here, they stroll around in our atmosphere from time to time for unknown reasons. Would be more science fiction for me to know what equipment and projects the military now has when half a decade ago they went to the moon.

[Luca_Studioaltieri]

dont'worry because.. "the empire is on the verge of success, soon peace and order will be restored throughout the galaxy."

[JDHill]

Chris - if that's the case, then I'd tend to think it unlikely. I'd suggest that the main prerequisites, in ascending order of probability, might be:

a. that life exists elsewhere
b. that it has become aware of us
c. that it would desire to visit us, and has
d. that it accomplishes this by unknown means

If the line is finite, especially to a distance as limited as telescope range, then these things all being true seems highly improbable. The more it tends toward infinite length, the more probable is the possibility that they could be true. If it's actually infinite, then statistics cease to do us much good - along a truly infinite line, we should even find infinite copies of our own earth, just as we know it at this moment...pretty much the same as what Stu said.

Regarding item (d) though, I think this is where we run into a tough issue. Once we admit extra-physical phenomenon (meaning, outside the physics of all known worlds), then I think we are really walking into the realm of faith. We can talk about parallel universes, wormholes, etc., but strictly speaking, those are still fictions which exists to satisfy unsolvable variables in the mathematician's equations. It is a simple exercise in probability to say that the universe is huge and that, therefore, life likely exists elsewhere; we may then quite reasonably imagine whatever we wish about the possible nature of that life. It is another thing altogether, though, to say that this life travels here by unknown methods. Personally, I don't see how saying 'unexplainable beings travel to earth by unexplainable means' can be much different than saying 'the universe was created from nothing'; in terms of our current understanding of reality, they are both pure conjecture. It's not that I mean to make any judgment on that - what people believe is their prerogative alone - but I think it's pretty easy to say 'I saw a UFO and it was from another planet' without considering the depth of what you are actually implying.

That's how it seems to me anyway...