Released Videos From The Pentagon's First Batch Of UFO Files

[Lance Payette]

I'm sure there are certain military craft that are responsible for some of these events.  Many are also fakes or bizarre weather events.  I heard someone say that the most likely source of proof of any alien existence will be the discovery of some type of abandoned alien vehicle/space junk that has been orbiting the universe for eons.  That sounds about right.  But they are not visiting Earth.  Even if they had some type of currently unimaginable technology that allowed them to transverse enormous distances, the odds of this coinciding in time with our own existence must be trillions to one.  Like the JFK conspiracy, many UFO types take the lack of evidence to reverse engineer a theory that still allows them to maintain some basis to believe.  Often not only baseless but insane.

I wonder how many people are aware that Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, once thought it was likely that the human species was the product of seeding by ETs ("directed panspermia"). Famed atheist biologist Richard Dawkins has also conceded this possibility. As you may or may not know, the origin of life on Earth is as big a mystery today as it was 50 years ago (in some ways, more of a mystery). I'm not pushing the ET notion here, but I don't see the time problem that you describe as being significant. Given the age of the universe, and what humans have accomplished in just the last 5,000 years, an alien civilization could be unfathomably more advanced. One could have been visiting the Earth for millions of years. The idea of an unfathomably advanced ET civilization is basically the premise of the movie Contact, based on Carl Sagan's novel.

I would somewhat turn your logic back on you: Yes, some UFO enthusiasts do use a lack of evidence to "reverse engineer" some pet theory, but an equally problematic phenomenon is the tendency of many people to view the UFO phenomenon as though ETs were basically humans and subject them to the same limitations. "Impossible for us and therefore impossible for them." One of the truest statements was that of Stanislaw Lem, author of the novel Solaris: If we encounter an alien race, we may never understand what it is doing or why and may not even realize we have encountered it. Or, as Arthur C. Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is likely to be indistinguishable from magic. The UFO phenomenon has to be taken on its own terms, not anthropomorphic notions of what we think it should be like or what we think is possible or impossible.

Well, I think I've beaten this subject to death. I wonder why Duncan started a UFO thread?

[John Corbett]

If John didn’t exist, I’d have to invent him because he provides such a perfect foil. The sort of rigid, dogmatic thinking he exemplifies, here and in his responses to anyone who dares not to share his views about the JFKA, is encountered across the entire spectrum of what I lovingly call Weirdness, which includes the UFO phenomenon and even the JFKA. This "don't confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up, I'm right and you're wrong" mindset is all too common.

Facts? What facts? I've been waiting for 62 years for someone to present credible evidence of a conspiracy to assassinate JFK. The only credible evidence that we have all points to LHO as the assassin and no one else. I have no expectations that anyone will ever present such compelling evidence, but if someone does, I will be most interested. Surprise me. Come up with such evidence and you will see my attitude change.

I feel the same way regarding UFOs. I am not willing to believe all these sightings are of extraterrestrial visitors or any other supernatural explanation unless someone presents me with compelling evidence of that. Your tale does not constitute such evidence. It's just an unexplained phenomenon. If you want to base your beliefs on faith alone, you are free to do so. Don't expect me to buy into it.

Duncan may be regretting he ever started this thread, but I shall persist because this is way more interesting for me than whether Oswald was carrying curtain rods into the TSBD …

John doesn't know what I saw, but by God he knows what it wasn't!

I don't know what you saw and apparently neither do you. You seem willing to assume what you saw was something supernatural. I am not. As with the JFKA, I am not willing to believe in things for which there is no evidence. Show me some hard evidence and I assure you I will be interested. Until then,
I will remain skeptical.

Do my posts suggest I "assume" anything at all about my experience? Did I not make quite clear that I have no firm position as to what it was or wasn't? The nature of the experience leads me to a provisional belief that it was non-mundane, but I would be prepared to be disabused of that belief by compelling evidence to the contrary. My belief that it was non-mundane is bolstered by numerous anecdotal reports of similar experiences by other sane and credible persons. My provisional belief that it was not a nuts-and-bolts ET craft is based on 60+ years of study of the UFO phenomenon, but I would be prepared to be disabused of that belief as well by compelling evidence of ET craft.

Does anything in my posts suggest I assume my experience involved "space aliens"? Quite the contrary. In my first post, I made clear that (1) I thought the UAP Disclosure movement was badly misguided for focusing on this angle, and (2) among experienced ufologists the ET hypothesis is regarded as among the most unlikely. I also made clear that I did not think my own experience involved an ET craft. (That being said, there are a vast number of UFO reports, including some of the best, for which an ET craft seems at first blush the most likely explanation; the problem is that there are just too many such cases unless Earth is the Disneyland of the universe and, moreover, there are aspects of the phenomenon that just don't mesh with the ET hypothesis.)

Does anything in my posts suggest I think my experience was a "supernatural" event or that the UFO phenomenon is a "supernatural" one? I used the term "non-mundane," meaning "not easily explainable in terms of our present understanding of reality." No, I don't think my experience involved angels or demons, which is about the only supernatural UFO hypothesis.

John appears to know pretty close to nothing about the UFO phenomenon, but he somehow knows there is "zero credible evidence." Ditto for whatever he means by the supernatural - a term that I do not use unless talking about theology because "anomalous" and "non-mundane" are more precise. I have spent 60+ years deeply involved in these subjects, to some minor extent as an experiencer. Although I don't happen to buy into the ET hypothesis, I would strongly dispute the statement that there is zero credible evidence. There is a great deal of credible evidence for which ET visitation is at least a plausible hypothesis. For the supernatural - i.e., anomalous - I would say flatly that John doesn't know what he's talking about. There are mountains of evidence, including laboratory PSI studies, that cannot be explained by conventional science.

The problem with folks like John is that he thinks he gets to be the sole arbiter of what is credible.

I am the sole arbiter of what is credible to me. If you expect me to belief something, show me your evidence. I'm not wiilling to believe you saw something extraordinary just because you saw something you don't understand.

I wish it worked that way, too - but it doesn't. I get to be the arbiter of what I find credible and so do you, but that's as far as it goes. If 999 out of 1000 people disagree with me, then I probably do need to take a closer look and reconsider.

I have no problem with someone who has studied the UFO phenomenon or any area of the anomalous as diligently and for as long as I have and who reaches entirely different conclusions and convictions. I do have a problem with someone who seems to be speaking from a position of near-total ignorance telling me my own conclusions and convictions are "completely illogical" and supported by "zero credible evidence."

One wonders if John knows that his hero Sagan wrote a scholarly article in 1963 in which he speculated that the earth had been visited by ETs numerous times in the past and possibly within the historical era: "Direct contact among galactic civilizations by relativistic interstellar spaceflight," Planetary and Space Science, Volume 11, Issue 5, May 1963, Pages 485-498. Using the Drake equation for the likelihood of ET life, he estimated the frequency of extraterrestrial visitation. Based on his estimates, he hypothesized that Earth had been visited many - perhaps hundreds - of times during geological time and possibly once during historical times. He went on to state, "It is not out of the question that artifacts of these visits still exist, or even that some kind of base is maintained (possibly automatically) within the solar system to provide continuity for successive expeditions."

I believed many things when I was younger that I don't believe now. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Dr. Sagan's experience was similar to mine. I have become much more discerning as to what I find credible.

Once he became a highly paid spokesman for atheism and the materialistic paradigm, he did his best to suppress this paper and distance himself from it. The fact is, the tales of his intellectual dishonesty and manipulation are legendary. But I digress ...

Dr. Sagan was not an atheist and he said so on numerous occasions. He was an agnostic. He once expressed the idea that both believers and non-believers exhibit a certitude that science does not support. He said, "I don't want to believe. I want to know.". That pretty much sums up my position.

No, the "extraordinary claims" shiboleth was popularized by Sagan but predates him by 300 years.

I was very careful not to claim that Dr. Sagan was the originator of that idea, only that he was a proponent of it. So am I.{quote]

It is akin to a logical fallacy. The obvious problems are: Who gets to decide when a claim is "extraordinary" and who gets to decide when the quantum of evidence is "extraordinary"? In reality, this is little more than a tool for intellectually dishonest skeptics and debunkers to keep saying, "Sorry, you're nowhere near the 'extraordinary' standard yet. In fact, your claim is so 'extraordinary' we don't see how you could ever get there." As Thomas Kuhn suggested in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it's also a tool to insulate a prevailing paradigm against challenge - anything that contravenes the prevailing paradigm is ipso facto "extraordinary."
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We all get to decide that for ourselves.

As Garry P. Nolan, an immunologist and the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor Endowed Chair in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine, has stated: "Science doesn’t care whether the claim is extraordinary or not. It simply arbitrates if the evidence is sufficient. The extraordinary claims/evidence meme is pretentious nonsense."

I have seen no evidence that the explanation for UFOs is, to use your term, non-mundane.

Many UFO hypotheses and other claims regarding the anomalous are "extraordinary" only in the sense that they are inexplicable given the prevailing materialistic paradigm, which itself is fast crumbling. If reality happens to be fundamentally different from what we now understand it to be, these hypotheses and claims may not seem extraordinary at all. Indeed, perhaps the evidence for UFOs and anomalous phenomena is a very large clue that our present understanding of reality is incorrect.

It is the hallmark of good science to be constantly re-evaluating one's beliefs. I am perfectly willing to do that if presented with evidence that UFO sightings have an extraordinary, or if you prefer, non-mundane explanation. Until I see such evidence, I am not willing to believe it that is the case. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, a protege of Dr. Sagan's, has recently expressed a viewpoint similar to mine. Skepticism is also a hallmark of good science, to the point that a true scientist will go so far as to question his own findings. He will subject his findings to peer review.

Given the size of the cosmos, I find it probable that there is intelligent life somewhere out there. I have no idea what the odds are of intelligent life forming in any given cosmic body or system. Where it has formed, there is no way to tell how advanced or primitive such life forms are. There may have been countless other examples of intelligent life that developed and have since gone extinct. It's also possible there are lifeforms that are in the same stage of development as the earliest forms of life on our planet and which in a billion or more years could produce a race far more advanced than we are now. I have no expectation I will see evidence of such life forms in my brief existence. I'm not going to spend what remaining time I have left pondering such a question because I have more important things to concern myself with, such as improving my golf game.