I think it's incredibly important to remember that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
Honestly, where is the barrier between the two? I'm not suggesting it doesn't exist, just genuinely asking where it is, or at least where it's near?
While I am personally on the fence about believing the accounts any gov has - clearly we know basically nothing of the universe relative to its size and existence.... so I will withhold judgement in any form - but lets look at the examples through history:
The earth is flat. The Sun revolves around the earth. Germs dont exist. What is this radiation malarky? There are no other planets in the universe. There are no other solar systems like ours in the universe. Lets kill eachother over imaginary rulers and their rules. etc etc etc
People are STUPID.
So, are there UFOs? No idea - but I have sen weird stuff and I will never let another human tell me what the limits to the universe are. I'd prefer to just keep seeking, keep experiencing life and the wonders of all that is.
The fact that Humans exist proves there is some intelligence in the Universe, lets just hope we are not the pinnacle as that would be rather sad.
Let's say you're proto-L. Ron Hubbard from the Marcab planet. You're a racecar driver, things are going great. Bang. You get recruited into Super Crush All Known Physics Astronaut Troope. You're commander, Xenu (ok I'm playing loose with Scientology fiction), decides "Hey, we rock and can travel at (speed of light)^1000000000 in our massless spaceships (not DC-10s, for those playing at home), so why don't we travel Earth (can't spell the Tegeeak word), and camoflauge as either several little balls of light, or 1950s inspired discs and just fly around at Subsonic speeds in Earth's atmosphere and just invite wide speculation as to what we are and maybe let the little creature's weird "government system" scurry around to hide all the evidence that we exist to the other the little creatures."
Does this even make sense? If you were proto-L. Ron Hubbard, wouldn't you say "Hey Xenu, we're the freaking masters of the universe, we can fold all of space time into our cool PDAs and play mega awesome Minecraft like games with, why would we do something stupid like that?"
I would suggest rather than depend on personal observation and anecdotal evidence you listen to groups of others who are actively seeking out information.
We no longer believe the earth is flat because of a consistent and large amount of data has told as otherwise.
We have already sent probes beyond our system and to many planets within our system and we only discovered FLIGHT 100 years ago.
Just imagine 1,000 years from now.
http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
We have already sent probes beyond our system and to many planets within our system and we only discovered FLIGHT 100 years ago.
Just imagine 1,000 years from now.
I think it's just as likely that technological development will follow an S curve as remain exponential. Look at Moore's Law -- the laws of physics provide a hard ceiling for certain kinds of technological progress.
> Just imagine 1,000 years from now
> So, are there UFOs?
Think about it. 500 years we were not even able to push something called electricity through a cable; today we push gigabits of data through the air using wi-fi.
Just thinking where we will stand technologically in next 1000 years just blows my mind. If you have a thinking organisms similar to human that were left alone to evolve in timeframe of 500 million years, its unimaginable what those creatures could come up with. Unimaginable!
The very idea that there are these EVIDENTALLY POINTLESS light shows or bumbling crafts in the sky that very clearly look like 1950s SciFi is emanating from some supposed hyper intelligent species that can travel many, many orders of magnitude faster than light or vaguely somehow travels through wormholes, or comes from some other dimension, just play little games of hide and seek is just ludicrous. I find solipsism less fantastic than that. The scale of the universe is incomprehendible. These "speeds" tales about go way beyond "space debris." I don't want to ve a kill joy, but really look at the physics of this stuff. It's very satisfying to say "ya but people used to think fire was made of phlogiston," but I claim that are scientific knowledge is of a fundamental different quality than previous. It's the difference between believing babies come from storks versus detailed biological blah blah knowledge.
Having presidents and the like pay lip service to these ideas is not really a big. I mean, Sarah Palin of all things, was almost VP. Also, there is something called the Nobel Syndrome, where even Nobel prize winners believe the stupidest things you can imagine, such as homeopathy, and the like (also MD disease for people like Dr. Oz).
Do you really state that modern science does not violate any principle of what was considered the best of physics knowledge 500 years ago? We are talking about 1512 here, the year Copernicus started writing what would turn into De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. It would take practically another 150 years for people to start thinking about explaining the motion of planets with an inverse square law.
For the record, the classical period of witch hunt was 1480-1750, and many of the things that are part of our daily life would have sent us directly to be burnt at the stake back in 1512:
- Creating light without fire
- Driving vehicles that move without being drawn by an animal, in a devilish smell
- Watching talking heads in a box
- Speaking to people who are over a mile away
- Resurrecting dead people (at least, "dead" as far as 1512 physicians could tell)
The problem with your reasoning is that you filter ancient "science" according to today's knowledge, instead of considering what was considered knowledge back then. As a result, you don't see a contradiction between what we know today and what was known back then, when there really is one.
Here is a great example. Isaac Newton today is considered as a great scientist. Yet to him, his physics work was secondary to his alchemy work. Do you think Newton was stupid not to know that alchemy was a "pseudo science"? Or does that indicate that back then, alchemy was as valid a field of research as the motion of planets? For that reason alone, I claim that our current technological advancements "categorically violate principles of physics" as they were known at the time of Newton.
A more recent example is the theory of aether, which was considered perfectly legitimate less than 150 years ago. And let's not even talk about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which even Einstein had trouble digesting, or Goedel's theorem, which was the exact opposite of what leading 1900-era mathematicians like Poincarre were expecting.
Science is a belief system. What makes it strong is that it changes over time. Unfortunately, some take science as a complete and eternal belief system, i.e. what is not scientific provable cannot be taken seriously, and what we know today constrains what we will know tomorrow. Both arguments are often used by "skeptics" as a "rationale" against God or UFOs. The truth is that science is not complete: what we cannot experiment with is not scientific. That includes, in the current state of know-how, both God and UFOs. Self-proclaimed "skeptics" should take a hard look at past "knowledgeable people" who fought Pasteur, Einstein, Galileo or other revolutionaries based on established knowledge.
Let me finish with the fact that UFO observations do not violate known physics laws. Some people observe what appears to be devices traveling at high velocity, with very high accelerations and often without emitting (much) sound, and with an intent (if not an intelligence). Often, observations are made by a sufficiently large body of people and correlated with enough physical evidence to make it as solid as the advance of Mercury's perihelion. Occam's razor recommends that we take the simplest explanation. If it flies like an alien spaceship and quacks like an alien spaceship, then it is likely to be an alien spaceship.
While we do not know how to build such devices, there is no theoretical impossibility that I'm aware of. Even assuming an intelligent extraterrestrial origin does not violate laws of physics. We observe that we are the third most intelligent species on this planet, but nothing dictates that we have to be even in the top 10 in the universe. At worst, faster-than-light travel violates special relativity, which is an outdated understanding of the structure of space-time by today's standards. Many serious physicists have proposed ways to travel faster than light. And even if there is no practical way to travel faster than light, there's nothing to say that extraterrestrial don't have extremely long lifespans.
In short, deciding to dismiss UFOs out of hand is highly non-scientific. It seems to be little more than a deep-rooted fear of the unknown. There is evidence for UFOs, not just sociological, but also a few rare leftovers (e.g. radar recording, radioactivity in the soil, etc). It's not enough data to be able to build solid science yet, but then, that was the case for planetary motion data 500 years ago.
And thus you shouldn't believe it. The fact that you add the yet at the end of your sentence shows that you have already made up your mind and believe that there are ETs and you are looking for the evidence to prove it, instead of looking at the evidence coming to a conclusion from the available evidence.
Also you have to think in probabilities: what is more likely - that a radars fail and people misinterpret readings or that there is actually faster-than-light travel and ETs are almost stealthily looking at us, trying not to be seen but still failing? The available evidence strongly converges to the first hypothesis.
I find it odd that a crazy-advanced civilization would do such boring and mundane thing like hovering in the sky and sometimes land on earth. What would be the agenda?
If there is some reality in this phenomenon, it is possible to find evidences in the testimonies that can be indirectly objectively checked. This is science process.
So we have to believe 1) ET doesn't want us to know about him and 2) ET is mega advanced but is so stupid that a bunch of rednecks and believers in woo/psi have discovered him (not that every "believer" is like that but clearly Joe Bob has discovered, so ET is evidently a mega physicist but sucks at basic hide and seek even with dimension traveling technology?). It's just too much nonsense.
1) ET doesn't know how to communicate with us. We don't know how to communicate with most animals on the planet, yet they share most of our DNA. How would you communicate with a being that has no notion of sound, has a sense of smell based on silicon biology, can't touch you without dying or killing you, and has a vision only in deep infrared?
2) Interstellar travel, while possible, is very expensive, so scientific expeditions behave like our own expensive scientific expeditions say, to the moon: touch, collect samples, and go.
3) There's a sort of prime directive or at least an attempt at letting us evolve in our own way.
As for the faking argument, it's like saying that because there's been a few Titanic movies, the Titanic didn't exist... It's the opposite: there's interest in faking it only because there is something. Otherwise, we'd also routinely see fake witches, fake angels and daemons, fake faeries, fake invisible people and fake ghosts.
Now, before you say it doesnt matter whether you travel at the speed of light, faster or slower, the moment you catch up with space debris, you become a crashed and burnt debris yourself. If all physical objects vibrate at some rate, then as wild as my imagination can go, it may be possible to speed up this rotation of a physical object so much that would eventually become... a wave.
Consider the age of the universe: 14.6 billion years. Earth was formed about 10 billion years after the universe, and it took 5.4 billion years for the Earth to see the emergence of a civilized species, which has existed for an absolutely microscopic amount of time compared to those enormous intervals.
How long does a species last, realistically? Counting from its "space age", would a species survive a thousand years, ten thousand? Extinction from natural disasters, epidemics, war and the like could be averted by scattering oneself across a solar system or wider. How many civilizations could reach that stage?
I have absolutely no doubt that a myriad of alien life exists. But I think the chances that there exists alien species that:
* has evolved before us or roughly at the same time,
* has not driven themselves to extinction
* achieved the technological capability for crossing galaxies, and
* is willing to do so
…is exceedingly slim. Even if a species develops space-faring tech needed to visit Earth, I think it's extremely unlikely that their existence will coincidence with us. They are either all dead by now, or they will be dead before we/they develop the tech to visit, or they don't exist yet, and we will all be dead first.
In the near future, not only we will continue to stretch average life expectancy, but we will continue to mesh technology with living tissue. Today we can have metal bones, joints, metal plates in human brain, porcelain teeth, all sort of signal strengtheners (fake eye, hearing devices, etc), nothing tells we will stop developing those more in the future. No, we have a long way before we could live forever, but definitely mechanical devices that can least 500 years (fake heart, lever, lungs, etc etc) will stretch our lives X-fold. I would assume if some civilization flies UFO crafts, they most likely advanced on other fields as well.
[1] http://blog.ted.com/2011/03/07/printing-a-human-kidney-antho...
Now, this is obviously a simplistic breakdown. Broadly speaking, however, this is usually what we see in such debates. (With typically much ridicule being thrown about by both sides.) Files like these, though, give even the most hardened skeptics room for wonder. While I do not doubt the logical validity of the skeptics positions, there is nevertheless a large body of evidence (circumstantial though it may be) which becomes difficult to deny when taken in the aggregate.
These files are, unfortunately, just more in the circumstantial category. Although they have the "official" seal of approval they are still, at root, not hard evidence. It is frustrating to those of us who are curious about this that nothing beyond eyewitness reports ever seems to surface, no matter the source. I think most people at least pay attention to these news items, but do not know what to make of them beyond raising more questions.