White House Says Aliens Have Not Visited Earth

[Anderton]

 

I hate to go all logic on your backside, but it really is different to say "we have no credible evidence of an extraterrestrial presence" and to say "we have credible evidence that aliens have not visited earth."

 

 

Yes, but the opinion expressed was that of the White House. If they believe there is no credible evidence of extraterrestrial presence (not "an" extraterrestrial presence), then the follow-up question would hardly be "so you think aliens have visited earth?" Their statement really closes off the possibility of, in their opinion, any kind of extraterrestrial interaction with the planet.

 

But as you say, there are certainly a lot of, shall we say, unexplained things. Whether they're extraterrestrial or not in origin...who knows?

[Anderton]

 

The point being that if you WANT to believe in ghost, magic, demons, angels and UFOs, you'll accept what you see non-critically. If you don't your perception will be quite different.

 

 

Check out Project Blue Book sometime, it makes for fascinating reading. Despite the rigorous nature of the investigation, and the fact that the vast majority of reports were debunked, there were several documented cases involving credible witnesses for which there was no explanation. Now, maybe the explanation was something prosaic; just because something's unsolved doesn't mean it's magical or extraterrestrial in origin. But, it is unsolved.

 

Pilots are trained to see and analyze what's in the sky because their lives depend on it. Radar was invented to track objects in the sky. When both are documented as registering large objects traveling at high rates of speed and doing maneuvers considered impossible by conventional aircraft, it doesn't mean we're dealing with extraterrestrial thingies. But, it cannot be dismissed as simply a product of the human imagination, and the fact is no one knows the answer...or if they do, they're not telling.

[yanktar]

Give me a {censored}ING BREAK! Project Blue Book was around in 1967---we 12 year olds were fascinated by it....but we were 12!

 

You wanna believe that {censored}, go ahead, but SETI came up totally empty. Zippo. Zilch. Nada. Rien. Gornischt.

[UstadKhanAli]

 

Give me a {censored}ING BREAK! Project Blue Book was around in 1967---we 12 year olds were fascinated by it....but we were 12! You wanna believe that {censored}, go ahead, but SETI came up totally empty. Zippo. Zilch. Nada. Rien. Gornischt.

 

 

That's a rather strident tone, all for something you don't believe in.

 

BTW, a UFO is any UNIDENTIFIED flying object, and therefore exists by that very definition...it's just simply something that is unidentified. It doesn't mean anything more. It doesn't mean it's extraterrestrial or magic or demons or interdimensional or from the center of the earth or anything else.

[Anderton]

Give me a {censored}ING BREAK! Project Blue Book was around in 1967---we 12 year olds were fascinated by it....but we were 12!

 

So, because it was old, those 50,000 government documents don't mean anything? The Air Force is just a bunch of crackpots? The government's national archives of Project Blue Book, now available under the Freedom of Information act, are imaginary and not just one click away?

 

Project Blue Book was started in 1952 with the main goal of determining if unidentified flying objects were a threat to national security. A secondary goal was analyzing UFO reports to serve the primary goal.

 

Over 12,000 reports were analyzed. Most were explainable to the satisfaction of the investigators and the Air Force, but around 700 - a statistically significant amount - were not despite thorough analysis brought to bear by the resources of the Air Force and US government. The conclusion on these was that "there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as 'unidentified' are extraterrestrial vehicles" but there was no evidence indicating what they were. The Air Force simply concluded that they did not know, but we probably didn't need to worry about them. That is why they are called "unidentified" flying objects.

 

Project Blue Book was not a science fiction movie. It was a government project that lasted for 17 years, and was terminated when it was decided that no evidence showed UFOs were a threat to national security, and that the unexplained sightings would remain unexplained.

 

You still haven't addressed the issue of why pilots who, out of official duty, filed reports of anomalous objects weren't grounded, and the control tower personnel that confirmed the existence of anomalous objects were not relieved of their duties for incompetence at interpreting radar data. That doesn't mean it's little green men from Alpha Centauri. But it DOES mean that there's something. A previously unknown, uncategorized natural phenomenon that could explain these events would be just as ground-breaking as any extraterrestrial explanation. But what that something is, no one knows.

 

Here's a link to one of the earliest incidents involving veteran pilots, anamolous sightings, corroborative witnesses, an Air Force investigation, a flip-flop on the possible causes, and the internal politics surrounding the investigation. It's one of many and like Project Blue Book itself, most probably have prosaic explanations - but not all.

 

These are facts. You can interpret them however you want, but you can't dismiss them. If you believe the pilots and control tower people are psychotic, be my guest...but in that case, I would advise not flying.

 

You wanna believe that {censored}, go ahead, but SETI came up totally empty. Zippo. Zilch. Nada. Rien. Gornischt.

As to SETI, I would not expect dipping a thimble in the ocean to bring home a fish for dinner, either.

[Goobers]

You still haven't addressed the issue of why pilots who, out of official duty, filed reports of anomalous objects weren't grounded

 

 

Why should they be?

 

That they saw something they don't understand doesn't mean they're crazy, or that they saw an alien.

[Goobers]

 

I don't accept any of that bull{censored}. I have STOOD with people who shuttered with terror at what they thought was a ghost and to me was no more than a play of lights in the distance. Your mind can fool you but only if you let it. Do you remember a particularly cheesy Star Trek episode where they were so hard up for money they used partial sets? It was set on some planet but they were back in Tombstone, AZ, facing the Earps, Wyatt, Virgil and Doc Holliday. Spock realizes it's all a deception, nothing is real (just like The Matrix) and is thus is unhurtable. He has to use the Vulcan Mind Meld to convince the others to be as relentlessly dubious and skeptical as he is. The point being that if you WANT to believe in ghost, magic, demons, angels and UFOs, you'll accept what you see non-critically. If you don't your perception will be quite different. Ghosts don't scare me one bit. Live psychopaths scare me.

 

 

The problem is when people think they're seeing the Enterprise from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (which is a friggin TV show!!!! Derrrrrr!!!! It's NOT REAL!!!), when all they're seeing is the Enterprise from "Star Trek," the original series, which, you know, is real.

 

This really chaps my basket.

 

Study after study shows proof that the original Star Trek was real. In fact, one night I was walking in a cornfield with a few of my closest friends and we ran into the original Star Trek crew eating corn a few feet from one of those mini space vans they used on away missions. When the crew saw us, they hastily finished eating, washed up, got back in their little space van, and shuttled up to the Enterprise which was hovering above. Strangely, none of us ever mentioned this again, nor do we ever talk about the history of corn and corn by-products, so vital to the history of our nation. But all of us know what we saw! And it wasn't some classically trained brit actor prancing about pretending to be a "starship captain!"

[Wide]

In 1973, my grandparents were driving from Great Bend, Kansas to Topeka, Kansas to stay with my family for a week. Near Junction City they saw two silver flying saucers, one larger than the other flying near ground level. My grandma says "look George aren't they cute", then they see them fly high in the sky still following along the highway (I-70). Two cars request they pull over and phone numbers are exchanged, but by this time they are really freaked out. They got to our house and my parents won't let my brothers and I see them until the following day. We knew something was really wrong but no one would tell us what.

An article appeared in the Junction City newspaper but they wouldn't have anything to do with the reporters or other witnesses, and they never would talk about the incident again the rest of their lives. There is an army base fairly close by, Ft. Riley. Could have been military, could have been soviet spy planes...we'll never know.

[Jeff da Weasel]

ghost, magic, demons, angels and UFOs

 

There's at least one item in the grouping above that doesn't fit with the rest.

 

UFO stands for "Unidentified Flying Object". It doesn't mean "extraterrestrial aliens". Science is based on the admission of not knowing what something is. Since we don't know what the reported sightings of flying objects are -- often by credible witnesses -- we have to call them "UFOs". By saying you don't believe that there are unidentified objects, you are tramping on the tenants of science. There are lots of unidentified things in the universe. It doesn't mean that they don't exist; it's merely that we don't understand what they are or have names for them yet.

[nat whilk II]

Yes. The observations, the empirical stuff, is all over the place.

The next move after the observation is to speculate on "wazzat". Our brains are stuffed with images and stories and assumptions and so on that come out of our particular cultural context. People from the space race era tend to fill in the blanks out of of sci-fi and popular science and so on. People from the bronze age era we assume filled in with gods and spirits and such.

We dress up the unknown in the ready-to-hand images and notions that present themselves so quickly and conveniently, that it's hard to be aware that one is in fact leaping by faith over a huge chasm when we think that we are drawing a "reasonable conclusion".

Pattern-makers. Explanation-vacuum haters. Worldview constructors. That's us, the ol humanoid race.

nat whilk ii

[blue2blue]

 

Yes, but the opinion expressed was that of the White House. If they believe there is no credible evidence of extraterrestrial presence (not "an" extraterrestrial presence), then the follow-up question would hardly be "so you think aliens have visited earth?" Their statement really closes off the possibility of, in their opinion, any kind of extraterrestrial interaction with the planet. But as you say, there are certainly a lot of, shall we say, unexplained things. Whether they're extraterrestrial or not in origin...who knows?

Again, just because this or any other White House makes a carefully crafted statement -- which seems like a reasonable enough statement from the hard, credible evidence I have seen -- does not mean a) that they really don't have such evidence -- after all, one thing we very much do have is hard, credible evidence that the USG and presidential administrations going back beyond the living memory of anyone in this forum and probably on the planet do lie and lie quite often about issues small and large -- often for no reason that, in retrospect, when those lies have been revealed, makes any sort of practical sense at all (from the facts as they are revealed) or b) that they don't have plenty of suggestive evidence which has not been explained at any other way.

 

We have to be careful about misapplication of Occam's Razor -- powerful supernatural beings living in the clouds must have seemed like the most direct, logical explanation for many natural phenomena to early man -- but, at the same time, there is a lot of suggestive evidence that appears (from what is known to the general public and scientific community) to resist satisfying explanation.

 

Mind you, I don't believe that we're necessarily being visited by extraterrestrials. But having read Project Blue Book and fitfully followed reports of UFO phenomena -- as well as having looked at the history of obfuscation and outright lies from the US government on the topic of UFO phenomena, as well as all sorts of other, considerably less exotic lies and obfuscation, I certainly do not rule something like that out.

 

And, I gotta tell you, I've never been able to come up with a satisfying explanation for the lights I saw -- which were remarkably similar to some other "light show" type UFOs -- highly geometric, symmetric, precisely defined, moving patterns of lights. I'm well aware of various refraction/reflection phenomena* and what I saw seems to defy explanations such as reflection of ground lights in vapor layers and so on. Now, I don't necessarily think it was a sign of extraterrestrials -- teenage extraterrestrials out for a joy ride saying Hey, kids, let's put on a light show for the humanoids! strikes me as more than a bit iffy -- but I don't know any reasonable explanations that fit with what I saw either.

 

*I will say, however, that those lights were moving in the opposite direction as our car -- but did appear to be moving more quickly (still, the perception of speed would/could be related to the perception of altitude). That said, such light display UFOs have been observed and filmed/taped in areas where there wouldn't seem to be sufficient lights to 'feed' such an elaborate reflection -- and have also been reported and filmed by people from stationary ground positions.

[blue2blue]

 

Give me a {censored}ING BREAK! Project Blue Book was around in 1967---we 12 year olds were fascinated by it....but we were 12! You wanna believe that {censored}, go ahead, but SETI came up totally empty. Zippo. Zilch. Nada. Rien. Gornischt.

It also fascinated the people who created the atomic bomb and who directed the nation's defenses. They took it seriously but never -- if we are to believe the official history -- came to a conclusion.

 

The macho man, you're all nuts if you believe that kiddie fantasy stuff, write-off of unexplained phenomena strikes me very much as posturing.

 

 

EDIT: I see Craig addressed this at length. So my comments are superfluous.

[blue2blue]

Of course SETI came up quiet.The deal was they paid off Oliver with funding for his project so he would keep quiet. He already knew what was up, before SETI was even conceptualized. SETI: Essentially a cover up paid for by the same people who bring you 51... Misdirection is the oldest trick in the book to throw others off the trail of something potentially devastating, as has been used by the USG and MSM for centuries. We already have their tech and toys, and have had it now for at least 75-100yrs. How else do you think stealth got developed? Or sattelites? or Nuclear tech? Or the medical technology to reanimate life? Don't think so? Brain transplants are just the beginning. You really don't want to know what grows in the underground. Why the world economy is running about 4 trillion in the red right now? As compared to this time say 25 years ago...They needed money to pay for all this new development that these new advances in technology allow for. I guarantee you this, none of these career college boys are that {censored}ing smart by themselves, or in groups. Or maybe they are and the whole {censored}ing army of these freaks just pulled off the biggest fraud in human history: from the systematic raping of our treasury & financial institutions to the middle east, to the con of 9/11, and all throughout the Gov't, Job 1 is bent on taking over the planet. And no I'm not paraphrasing the XFRMR's storyboard either.... You know what frightens me? Mofos that are all mind and no matter. Touch'e bitches.

I'd need to see a lot more credible evidence. A lot.

[blue2blue]

The problem is when people think they're seeing the Enterprise from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (which is a friggin TV show!!!! Derrrrrr!!!! It's NOT REAL!!!), when all they're seeing is the Enterprise from "Star Trek," the original series, which, you know, is real. This really chaps my basket. Study after study shows proof that the original Star Trek was real. In fact, one night I was walking in a cornfield with a few of my closest friends and we ran into the original Star Trek crew eating corn a few feet from one of those mini space vans they used on away missions. When the crew saw us, they hastily finished eating, washed up, got back in their little space van, and shuttled up to the Enterprise which was hovering above. Strangely, none of us ever mentioned this again, nor do we ever talk about the history of corn and corn by-products, so vital to the history of our nation. But all of us know what we saw! And it wasn't some classically trained brit actor prancing about pretending to be a "starship captain!"

Did Captain Kirk's pot belly look as dumpling-esque in person?

[blue2blue]

Yes. The observations, the empirical stuff, is all over the place. The next move after the observation is to speculate on "wazzat". Our brains are stuffed with images and stories and assumptions and so on that come out of our particular cultural context. People from the space race era tend to fill in the blanks out of of sci-fi and popular science and so on. People from the bronze age era we assume filled in with gods and spirits and such. We dress up the unknown in the ready-to-hand images and notions that present themselves so quickly and conveniently, that it's hard to be aware that one is in fact leaping by faith over a huge chasm when we think that we are drawing a "reasonable conclusion". Pattern-makers. Explanation-vacuum haters. Worldview constructors. That's us, the ol humanoid race. nat whilk ii

You bet. There was what sounded like a really interesting book within the last 10 or 15 years (I think) that surveyed "anomalous events and observations" that didn't fit into our current understanding of the natural world (for a Berkelian idealist, I'm making the big assumption that there is a natural world, flow of time, etc; I hope my fellow ultra-skeptics can go along for the ride)... and the author built his book around our mind's* seemingly relentless quest to contextualize and explain phenomena and perceptions -- and the demonstrable fact that most of us tend to contextualize such anomalous phenomena within what we already know -- or think we know -- of the world. So the same phenomenon that might have struck primitive man as some sort of god or angel or demon is perceived in a much different way by an individual in another time, place, and culture. It's not an angel! It's just a space alien!

 

 

*Note perhaps provocative use of the singular.

[blue2blue]

If you want to read about some really incredible perceived phenomena, and some wildly fanciful explanations for them, you should hang out in some recording forums I'm familiar with elsewhere. Talk about your outer limits...

[Anderton]

 

Why should they be? That they saw something they don't understand doesn't mean they're crazy, or that they saw an alien.

 

 

Because obviously, giant cigar-shaped objects doing unexplained maneuvers can't be real. Therefore, the people seeing them are at least hallucinating, and possibly believe in demons and angels, too.

 

Actually, I tend to favor the "advanced terrestrial technology we don't know about yet" for a lot of UFO reports. Project Skyhook could have explained a lot of the early sightings. But still...there are a lot of reports that do seem outside the boundaries of what we believe to be physically possible. They're the ones that are intriguing.

[BushmasterM4]

In 1980, two friends and I saw a "giant geometric light display" type unidentified object(s) moving silently through the sky over LA toward the Hollywood Hills about 3 am. One (who is easily stressed) kept insisting it had to be the Goodyear blimp -- there was only one working blimp in the US at the time -- but it was clearly not the blimp, which is a very familiar sight in So Cal skies; there was no outline. The display was huge and 'flat' in the sense that it seemed to be horizontal and covering an area that was at least several a hundred yards across and there were no tow planes in sight. My friends both agreed that if the GY blimp was at its mooring further down the freeway when we passed by, that we had seen something HIGHLY UNUSUAL. The blimp was at the mooring, all lights, out no activity, no one around. There was no mention of it in the LA Times the next few days nor did I talk to anyone who'd seen it. The next day one of my friends would barely talk about it (he's extremely sensitive to disturbing stuff) and the other admitted we'd seen something . I've since seen a number of videos of such "light display" UFO in various locales that were of extremely similar nature. What they are/were, I really don't have a clue. But I definitely saw something very unusual and unexplainable then or since.

 

 

 

OMG !!! It was 1980 when we saw it !!!!! To look at it, it was not aerodynamic. It was just there. But we could see details. Metal, light, it was not your typical smooth object. It was quite large. The Star Wars "Battle Cruiser" with the nose gone (rectangle) analogy is the best description. Without the gun turrents.

[nat whilk II]

I'd need to see a lot more credible evidence. A lot.

 

 

Before we get to the evidence part, I'm looking first for something like rational coherency.

 

I'm picky that way.

 

nat whilk ii

[blue2blue]

You aren't even looking then. Google D.U.M.B. Just be sure to open your third eye...

Have you googled D.U.M.B. lately? On my first pass, I just got a lot of returns but none that I could see fitting into this (rather expansive) conversation. But on my second try, browsing through frequent search strings, I found D.U.M.B. Underground and I'm figuring that's what I was supposed to be looking for.

 

But I sorta stopped reading when I got to this one:

[2011 Aug] Illuminati Pedophilia - A Victim's Memoir by Carolyn Hamlett Some of those memories were of an underground facility. I suspect it was somewhere at Mac Dill Air Force Base in Tampa, which was close to where I lived. What I remember most about this possible underground facility is seeing children in cages...kept like animals. Most of them were about my age.

-- http://www.whale.to/b/underground_h.html

 

I've followed the "International Satanic Conspiracy" stuff since the 1980s and, I have to say that nothing slams closed my credulity like that stuff. Yes there are Satanists. Yes, there are child molesters -- and yes, some of them 'network.' Yes, there are institutions where child molestation has historically been tolerated. Yes, there are monstrous individuals who do unimaginably evil things. But, no, there is no credible evidence of such a huge, widespread, international, Satanist, child-enslaving/torturing/molesting/cannibalizing conspiracy.

 

Unfortunately, a number of seriously misguided therapists did inadvertantly plant such nonsense in the minds of a number of already seriously damaged individuals -- that process has been well investigated and documented and responsible professional organizations have done much work to try to mitigate some of the damage caused by those misguided professionals as well as retrain them when possible or remove them from positions where they can do further damage -- or at least remove their professional certifications and/or licenses -- when nothing else could be done.

[WRGKMC]

Aliens have to be real and denied they exist.

It is a key ingrediant in all SiFy movies that have earned movie studios billions of dollars.

I'm just surprised how many suckers out there believe all those SiFi movies are real.

they have no concept that man can think the unthinkable and apply it to a story in a way

that makes it believeable. The stories play on all the common emotional feelings people

associate with seeking the truth, but they all either lack the scientific facts, or cant comprehend

them if they had them.

 

Even if a craft could travel at the speed of light, the time it would take a visitor to come from

a favorable system would be so long, both their suns and ours would be burned out before

the trip could be completed. Many stars we see now no longer exist because it takes so long

for their light to get to us. The only hope of those distance being covered would be to fold space

or create a worm hole. Both are more Sci Fi at the moment because the quantoms being used to

think up such theories are just that, theories that lack fact.

[Bookumdano2]

Here's what I personally think is going on-

The nazi tech stuff that was dragged back here included lots of designs which have been tested and worked on at area 51 and other places since the end of ww2. One of those turned into the stealth concept. Didn't germany have a wooden stealth plane that eerily looks exactly like the one we have now? Except the nazis didn't get enough time to develop their engines (or something). That's probably what a lot of people were seeing flying around (among other things) at various test points in earlier decades.

Of course, one of the other designs dragged back from Germany is indeed the flying saucer type that can hover, bolt around rapidly etc. The engine/navigation technology isn't perfected yet ... even after all these decades...on that but from time to time, pilots, farmers, drivers on the freeway etc, see ongoing test flights here and there.

Seems people have been seeing more of the "first it's hovering here and a millisecond later, it's speeding way over there" To me, that at least means that progress must be being made with the technology. So that's cool. Stands to reason the test flights are lit up too. After all, if you're hovering stationary at 10,000 feet as a test flight, and then instantly zipping left at 800mph, , you want to be lit up so that an airliner doesn't plow into you. Nice of the army/whatever to add the lights.

And when it gets down to it, what does the government care that a few people see the test flights at night? No one's gonna seriously take the claims seriously. Government has nothing to lose with the tests. Sounds like most of the government doesn't even know what's going on at area 51... in fact... who exactly in the government DOES get to know that info?

I'm all for area 51 going on with whatever it is they're doing. Just means that when they get the bugs worked out of the silent saucers, we'll have a cool new technology.

[blue2blue]

Aliens have to be real and denied they exist. It is a key ingrediant in all SiFy movies that have earned movie studios billions of dollars. I'm just surprised how many suckers out there believe all those SiFi movies are real. they have no concept that man can think the unthinkable and apply it to a story in a way that makes it believeable. The stories play on all the common emotional feelings people associate with seeking the truth, but they all either lack the scientific facts, or cant comprehend them if they had them. Even if a craft could travel at the speed of light, the time it would take a visitor to come from a favorable system would be so long, both their suns and ours would be burned out before the trip could be completed. Many stars we see now no longer exist because it takes so long for their light to get to us. The only hope of those distance being covered would be to fold space or create a worm hole. Both are more Sci Fi at the moment because the quantoms being used to think up such theories are just that, theories that lack fact.

So, wait a second... are you really suggesting a flying disk spacecraft didn't land in the middle of a Washington Senators baseball game in 1951 with a passenger clearly genetically designed to look like the respected actor Michael Rennie?

 

Come now.

 

I'm all for reasonable skepticism but everyone knows that's true. It's the main reason we haven't blown each other up yet, I'm pretty sure.

[Bookumdano2]

 

So, wait a second... are you really suggesting a flying disk spacecraft didn't land in the middle of a Washington Senators baseball game in 1951 with a passenger clearly genetically designed to look like the respected actor Michael Rennie?

 

 

That really happened. But no one remembers that Gort broke down and stayed behind. Needed oil from an oil can or something. The dudes at area 51, tore him apart and many decades later, came up with this-

 

[Jeff da Weasel]

Many stars we see now no longer exist because it takes so long for their light to get to us.

 

That's not true at all. Most stars we can see, especially those you see with your naked eye from here on Earth, are very much in existence. Typical stars (like our sun) live for about 10 billion years. You have to understand the scale of a number that big.

 

Some well known stars and their distances:

 

- Arcturus is 37 light years away. The light you see was from 37 years ago.

- Sirius is 8.6 light years away.

- Vega is 25 light years away.

- Betelgeuse is pretty far away... 640 light years. Still, 640 years is a drop in the bucket in the life of a star.

- Rigel is even further away at 770 light years. Not a big deal in galactic terms, though.

 

So basically, almost every single star you see is still alive and well.