Close Encounter?

I think we are trapped in our thinking that science and/or technology must be limited to, or follow, what we believe to be true. But I disagree. I think there are near limitless possibilities out there that would make everything we consider to be set-in-stone about physics and the Laws of Nature obsolete.

We are limited by our thought process and our ties with the very physical world.

I think there could very well be beings in the universe that have no physical form at all, unless they wish to, or beings of pure energy, or beings that can be both within our physical realm, and also within their "dimension" be it physical, spiritual or some unknown energy type.

Perhaps our minds interpet what we see in the best way they can, but incompletely, as we are unable to comprehend or translate the complete picture of some other-world visitors.

Does the astral plane truly exsist? Certainly there has been countless testimonies that it does and that people have had "out of body" experiences. I myself have had such, as have both of my parents, two of my uncles, and several friends. We aren't religious nutjobs, or fanatics, but ordinairy people. Yet we've all had vivd and memorable "out of body" experiences, with no real explanation other than it happened.

If these experiences are indeed true, what would the limitations of such travel be? Seemly, it is dicated by simple thought or emotion and can instantly transport someone thousands of miles in the blink of an eye.

So if we, as rather primitive humans, can leave our bodies and travel in a non-physical form, why couldn't an alien race either make use of this method to travel, or entirely live within this other plane of exsistance.

There are just such a vast number of possibilites out there, that it seems very likely, by playing the odds, that there are not only more advanced races out there, but that some have probably peeked at us for whatever reason.

I agree in a way -- I don't think "Laws of nature" are really ironclad laws but more "statements of probability". The laws of nature only define what we can reasonably expect in most circumstances, not what is absolutely guaranteed to happen.

However, having said that I also think that our future is going to depend on Science. In other words, our ability to observe phenomena, describe it, and then search for answers as to why it behaves like it does. Those provisional answers form theories which must then face testing, peer review and falsafiability in order to be accepted in our body of knowledge about the universe.


If that ever happens, I want to be there


Interestingly, the drug ketamine will cause you to have an out of body experience. So I'm thinking it's mostly just a brain chemistry event rather than an impression of reality.


And think how easy it will be just to go to the grocery store!


Possible, yes. But right now we have a data sample of "1" so we can't really make any intelligent surmises. Mathematically speaking it's just as likely that we are among the more advanced species in our galaxy (older ones in other galaxies?) and we'll be the ones flying the dish-shaped vessels to other planets.

Which Star Trek movie was it that had Kirk & Co. go back in time to visit 20th century earth? We may actually end up being our own UFOs.

*gets a headache*

Clear cut victory for Cindy.

When CERN finishes the Large Hadron Collider in a year or so then chances are very good that we will have hard evidence as to whether string theory, or M theory specifically, is at least on the right track or not. It's quite possible that the LHC could prove that there are higher dimensions, if certain things are observed in the collisions it creates.

As it is now, there is plenty of evidence to suggest M theory is on the right track. No hard experimental evidence, but evidence none the less.

What does sticking things up human asses have to do with the originally posted article?

What a silly, meaningless tangent.

Also, I wanted to say ...

Vares, please don't take offense, but you seem to be emotionally opposed to the idea of "aliens" to the point of making assertions (that they can't be) with essentially no evidence, nor even moderately good reasons. It's like seeing the exact, mirror opposite of the "I choose to believe" crowd.

The facts are simply this: these astronauts claim to have clearly seen something they can't explain. There really isn't much more to say about it one way or another at the moment, at least for us. Unless you're going to try to make a case that they're either lying or were wholly incompetent at the time, it seems reasonable to assume that they must seen something not easily explained. Do we know what? No, obviously. We certainly can't assert that it was something like an "alien spacecraft," but then again, we can't reasonably assert that it was not, either. Why would we? Where is our evidence of that?

In my personal opinion, the only proper way to deal with a subject like this is to remain as detached and as focused on known facts as possible. Bringing your bias -- what you "want" to believe -- into it only clouds your judgement.

Thats the thing about string theory...theres no experiment that can be done, theres no observation that can be made that can say"string theory is wrong...you have a built in safety lock...your theory is safe because theres ABSOLUTELY no way to prove it is..or isnt....i find alot of religious zealots conform to this line of thinking as well...
I ask you, is that a theory of physics or a philosophy?..granted...string theory is a "form" of physics...but it is an NON-TESTABLE form ...It does not make predictions that have anything to do with experiments that can be done in the laboratory.

String theory in and of itself has failed in its goal to take what we already know
into a consistent theory that explains gravity as well. The new theory MUST include the old theory and say something more. String theory has not done this. String theory does not include the details of the structure that came before it...

Any theory that does not make a prediction that is verifiable by observational data, is not science!!!what all theories have in common is that their predictions are eventually tested in experiments, where nature determines which inspirations are right and which are wrong.

I suppose this thread was the place to bring up the string theory debate..since it is as mythical and unprovable as "UFO's"

string theory is at its best an assumption

"All of the time. Are you unaware of the existence of National Geographic?"

Galactic Geographic! Hehe.

"These aren't foil-hat-wearing bloggers drooling over the very notion of alien visits -- rather, they're famous and respected astronauts who've actually, you know, been "out there.""

In your country, you recently had a senator refer to the internet as "a series of tubes". Can you please not just assume that people in prominent positions know what they're talking about?

Ignore the person speaking and concentrate on what they say, and if they are saying "aliens visit us", then you should, as a sensible person with the capacity for reasoned thinking, respond, "that is a possibility, and there is evidence to support your claim, but there is also evidence against the claim, and there currently lacks any conclusive evidence that would, say, satisfy a court or scientific scrutiny, in confirming or denying your claim. Therefore, in my mind it must remain a possibility, and nothing more certain than that."

Musuko.

AGAIN..for those who have trouble understanding...if a theory cannot be TESTED,and OBSERVED...its an assumption....show me your evidence...thats the thing here..you always hear words like....SUGGEST, and QUITE POSSIBLE with the string theory
crowd...it was quite POSSIBLE the earth was flat at one time as well...

and by the way Vares...no one needs you to play referee and declare a "winner" in my conversations...keep those assumptions as well..to your self

the funny thing is..YOU GAVE NO OPINIONS...you were asked your opinion...but you refused to GIVE IT..instead...piece by piece you diseminate my opinion...come..give us yours for once instead of telling everyone whats wrong with thiers....

oh..and yes..ill "await" your response..no arm , leg, or ego waving ...please

Yep, and I've had one on Ketamine (don't try this at home kids). There was also a recent study done on psilocybin in relation to spiritual experiences which was very interesting. Many of the participants in the study who were given psylocybin and not the control reported profound spiritual experiences. Brain chemistry can produce some pretty cool things, and they have nothing to do with there actually being such things as a spritual realm or astral projection.

What?! Non-testable? And what's this about not being able to prove string theory...that's not just applicable to string theory, that's applicable to any statement in science! As with any theory, with string theory you look at the predictions the theory makes and see if those predictions match what you see in nature. You, Maerl, are not even describing the method properly. For a theory such as this (that actually starts as a collections of hypotheses) scientists don't perform experiments to prove the theory is correct. That would imply that the theory becomes fact...and that's just not true. What scientists do--and if someone else can say this more eloquently, please jump in--what scientists do is perform experiments to test aspects of a theory. If the experiment matches that aspect of the theory then the status of the theory doesn't change. Even if an experiment, or even a hundred experiments, or a million experiments, matches a prediction or predictions of a theory scientists can not (honestly) say that the theory has been proven. The best they can say is that the theory has not been disproven. Of course if even one experiment shows that nature does not follow even one prediction in the theory then the theory is disproven.

Unfortunately, this means scientists are handicapped from the beginning when trying to explain things to certain other people. If you want to discuss religious zealots...I've encountered some that use that self-handicapping against scientists much in the way you are. They say, "What Mr. Scientist? You say you can't actually prove your theory is correct?" The honest scientist then admits that the very nature of science means that no, one can never actually prove a theory to be correct, to which the zealot then replies, "Ha ha ha, your science is worthless, you can't even prove what you say is right whereas I can prove God (or whatever diety) exists." Then the zealot unloads a string of fallacies that is meant to prove something that also is unprovable, at least in this life.

Vares already mentioned one line of experiments planned to test aspects of string theory. Next-generation super-colliders will be used--in a laboratory setting, mind you--to conduct the highest-energy collisions humans have yet to create. Two things scientists will be looking for (and there may be more, I don't know) are more particles that uphold the supersymmetry predictions of string theory and also if all of the energy put into the collision is accounted for once the collision occurs.

Yeah. I'm probably going to get slammed for even poking my uneducated head into this brain swinging contest but this rather stood out.

Why does reptillian not equate to humanoid for you? for one. and for two. Is not a human hair just a modified scale? Just as the feather has been postulated to be? they now believe that most dinosaurs,pre cataclysm higher species were warm blooded. We are warm blooded. Where did that first mammal come from? Bet she had scales. Meh My two cents.

As for the OP. I'm all for UFO's, Course. I'm an uneducated hillbilly living out in the middle of a massive desert downwind from 50's era nuclear test sites.(See wtf is up with those sheep!) I also drive along dirt roads in the middle of nowhere at night generally looking up. Dunno if you urban dwellers can still see whats up there anymore but it sure is pretty.
ah well. I'm done.

Flame on talking heads.

Clear cut victory for Vares.

Well no one can deny UFOs. If something is flying and you don't know what it is, then it's an unidentified flying object. The problem in my mind is automatically equating UFOs with alien spoacecraft.

Good point about the dinosaurs, by the way. I don't why there couldn't be humanoid reptilian beings. I've never actually looked at the accepted definition of humanoid either...I've just taken it to mean having a human shape. Skin texturing doesn't have a bearing.

No offense taken, silly. I welcome comments on my posts. That's why I post them!

I should probably restate my beliefs to say that I don't think it's impossible that aliens are visiting Earth, I just think that other explanations are much more likely to be true. I lump aliens in with ghosts. People see something and jump to conclusions about what it is. Basically when it comes to either, I will only believe it when I see it for myself. And even then I will be skeptical that it's really a UFO and not just my mind playing tricks on me.

I probably haven't been really clear on all the reasons I don't believe that aliens are visiting the Earth. They are actually based in reason and not emotion. I base my belief on deduction.

Imagine someone takes a grain of sand and engraves you name on it with a very fine laser. They then take this grain of sand and drop it at random somewhere in the Sahara desert. It's now your task to go and find it. Let's say they even put a super small radio transmitter in the grain of sand to help you find it. The prob is that the signal is so weak that you need to get your detector within an inch of it to pick up the signal.

What do you think the odds are of you finding “your” grain of sand?

Now take that example and multiply the scale by a billion. Then multiply that by another billion. Do that about 10 or 15 times and you are still not even close to seeing how tiny the Earth is in relation to the Universe.

So I find it implausible that they would ever even find us.

I do tend to get a little tense when people say things like “well they just have technology that lets them find us.” That's pretty much the same thing as saying “well God exists just because he does.” Why not just say that aliens are really Angels visiting Earth to check up on us? I would not assume that aliens had technology to defy gravity and inertia. In fact, based on the nature of the Universe as we currently understand it, I would assume that they don't have that kind of technology.

I do agree with you that those men did see something while in space. But I disagree when you say that we can't reasonably assert that it was not an alien spacecraft. I believe it's reasonable to say that there are many more likely explanations for what they saw and to speculate that it was a UFO would be the equivalent to saying that it was a ghost. Both seem just as unreasonable to me since there is absolutely no scientific basis for that belief. Whereas there are plenty of ways to explain what they saw that are based in science fact. Perhaps it was radiation affecting the visual centers of their brains. Perhaps it was light reflections. Perhaps it was an optical illusion of some sort. I really don't know but any of those sounds much more plausible than a UFO.

I was actually trying to go so far as to say they wouldn't even be humanoid in shape. Maybe they would be avian. Octopus and cuttlefish have been shown to be pretty intelligent, so maybe they would be cephalopodian?

My point was that they don't have to look like humans to be intelligent.

However, such inward experience certainly don't explain how someone can perfectly describe the interior of a house miles away, when they have never stepped into it in a physical form, or someone waking to find a ghostly (astral) figure of a loved one standing next to their bed moments before getting a call telling them about a fatal accident...or even just looking down at your own sleeping form and seeing a sliver cord..or folks being operated on and looking down at the doctors and nurses and their own unconcious or possibly even momentarily dead form and hearing everything said and seeing everything that is done. Or the sensation of realizing you are rising upward..passing through solid surfaces, seeing your surroundings and then being yanked (reeled back) into your body with heart-pounding force.

There is a remarkably large collection of shared experiences dealing with out of body experiences, amongst both innocent bystanders so to speak, as well as researchers. It has been a common experience through all of recorded history, and the testimonies involved have often been remarkable.

As I've said, I've experienced myself, and so have quite a few of my family, and we aren't overly weird (ok..well I am), just your basic middle-class family, and I am usually not one to believe things without at least some evidence.

So while I'm still up in the air about an afterlife, I am willing, almost reluctantly, to admit that there are probably other planes or life forms that may not be as physical as our realm, or at least not the same physical, and I could certainly carry that further to wonder if an advanced race might have a far greater understanding of such, and the ability to travel in ways we can't comprehend.

Here, I find a problem: basically, you're assuming that we have even the slightest, vaguest concept of what might be possible to accomplish with superior technology. An intellectual thousands of years ago might have scoffed at the notion that we could ever successfully cross oceans, or that there would be anything to find if we did. Yet recently, we've been to the moon, which is so far beyond mere ocean travel as to be beyond comparison.

Nor is it merely a problem of scale. An ancient would not even have had any concept of a thing called "computer" or a thing called "Internet," nor any notion of what either might be used to accomplish. It's not merely that he or she would have been unable to imagine something as good at doing what a computer does as a computer; rather, it's that he or she would have been unable to envision anything like a computer at all. For all we know, the same might easily apply to us with respect to what technology could do -- that is, we might not even have any concept of what's possible ... even to the point of being able to discuss it intelligently at all.

Granted, this is sheer speculation, but I think at least that it's supported by precedent. So when we speak of this grain of sand, in my opinion at least, we're speaking from ignorance. We're making statements about what's possible that really are baseless because we very possibly have not the slightest concept of what's possible. What we're really saying is, "If we're pretty close to or already at a total understanding of the universe and what is technologly possible, ever, then this hypothetical grain of sand would be all but impossible to locate."

Personally, that strikes me as a rather large assumption.



And here, in fact, you basically state that assumption yourself.



Wow. Now you're really reaching. These are the kinds of "explanations" people resort to when they're looking for a reason, any reason, to dispense with an observed phenomenon that makes them uncomfortable.

I mean, come on. Would you really apply this kind of reasoning to anything else in your life? If we assumed every time we saw something that it might just be light reflections or radiation affecting the visual centers of our brains, we'd be killed the first time we encountered a busy street! Certainly scientific inquiry would become wholly impossible since any unexpected result would immediately be dismissed as "caused by radiation affecting us" or "light reflections." We'd be utterly paralyzed, in fact, incapable of ever doing anything meaningful.

I'm not saying it couldn't be any of those things (after all, optical illusions do exist), but there's no better reason to assume that it was that than anything else. The moment anyone attempts to declare that it was an optical illusion, I'm going to demand evidence, just as I would for any other explanation. No evidence? Then consider it wholly disregarded.

Comparing our societies with those of 1000 years ago doesn't work for me. They had pretty much no understanding of how the Universe works, hence their belief in magic. We, on the other hand, have a pretty good idea of how the Universe works. So to say that their not having any concept of computers isn't the same as saying we don't have any concept of what technology aliens might have.

We actually do have the slightest, vaguest concept of what might be possible to accomplish with superior technology, whereas they didn't.

Again, saying “well they just can” isn't enough for me personally.



I said it was an assumption, but it's an assumption based on science, not an assumption based on wishful thinking, i.e. "they just can".



There is a lot of experimentally verifiable evidence that the human mind can easily be tricked into thinking that something we see is one thing, when in fact it's something totally different. Or that chemical and radiological influences can very easily affect what we see and hear.

There is zero experimentally verifiable evidence that UFOs (or ghosts) exist.

So it's more plausible to believe that what they saw was a trick of the mind (based on verifiable science) than to believe it was a UFO (or a ghost) (based entirely on speculation).

Yes, it's at least possible that it was aliens in a UFO. All I am saying is that I am going to go with the knowledge that we actually do have, and not depend on idle speculations that have no basis in fact.

In my case my perception (and along with it, seemingly, my head) floated several feet over my body for a few hours. Something else that happened during that experience was seeing what was happening in my livingroom on television while the person I was with who was in the same condition did also. Don't underestimate the power of chemicals in the brain to alter perception. Our brains are fickle things.

The experiences themselves can be truly remarkable while the underlying causes can be quite mundane. I don't rule out pyschic phenomena. I've had some bizarre experiences with foreknowledge that are difficult to explain indeed. By themselves they offer no proof of anything other than that I had them. I've had some truly freaky experiences with shared experiences across distances of miles while on LSD. The problem is that when we attempt to explain these things the temptation to romaticize, anthropomorphize, and evoke the supernatural and "god of the gaps" explanations is huge. It doesn't mean any of it is warranted or has anything at all to do with what actually happened.

The above anecdotes were wholly the products of heavy duty drugs on the brain, but these kinds of things can happen without anyone knowingly taking narcotics. Certain types of molds can produce some freaky perceptual experiences. There's a mold associated with rye breads that could easily be consumed by a lot of people in the same general area unknowingly that could account for mass halucinations that may have factored heavily into the development of early mythologies or even things like wide belief in witches, werewolves, and similar mass fear in Europe and the early Americas.

Then there's crazy seeming things like synaesthesia (seeing numbers and sounds as colors among other things), sleep paralysis, and on and on. There's a whole lot of perceptual stuff we don't fully understand. "can't explain" doesn't equal "supernatural." That's the god of the gaps.

The Romans actually had rather advanced technology, and there's evidence that technologies and understandings, if not perhaps on the present level, have been gained and lost more than once.



No, we really don't know that. We know what we can do now, and we know what we think we can do, and that is it. There may very well be things completely beyond our present imagining. We just. Don't. Know.



It's an assumption based on nothing more than present knowledge and the reckless presumption that present knowledge is pretty much as far as it goes.



Your logic seems to demand that we stop dead any time something new arises because it's probably just a "trick of the light." The would be the death of scientific inquiry, don't you think?

And the way I read it, they saw this thing for a while. How long does someone have to stare at something before you'll at least consider that it was there? Would you argue a trick of the light if they said they saw rocks instead?

I'm not going to go with any speculations at all, myself, positive or negative. Just the facts, please.

If there weould be aliens, with the technology to actually come and visit, surely they can decypher the millions of radio waves we send into space, such as TV and radio signals and whatnot. Of course, they would come close, study us from space, leeching and learning from our signals.

They would definately know what us Earthlings are like, and of course bing higly advanced and smart creatures (one has to be smart for loooong distance space travel) they'd be smart enough to stay the HELL away from meeting with us, as they know how insane and dangerous we are as a race.

They may be out there, but if they are, they will NEVER show their faces. Or their ships...

I don't know if there's aliens who cruise our airspace, I don't believe there are, but if I'm ever proven wrong on that, I surely hope they will look like furries ^^ (prolly not, but one can fantasise...)

It would be cool if the aliens were like monkey people. We could breed them and use them to help do menial chores.

I was thinking the Twilight Zone episode where aliens come down and teach us all sorts of stuff like to end world hunger and stuff, then eat us

It's a cookbook!