Real or Fake? You make the call "Dominican Republic, Haiti UFO Videos" - Page 2

So any intelligent life out there must be mammalian? Interesting self-centric view there. Come on, the point that is being made is that we are consistently finding life forms that sit outside what we previously considered to be 'necessary for life'... and that's on *our own damned planet".

The idea that all life has to be based on the same mechanisms as ours is laughable. If there are methane-philiac microbes (and there are), then there's no reason why there can't be higher lifeforms in the same range as well. To think otherwise is just amazingly limited.

I for one welcome our immortal silicate crystal hive mind overlords.

Sorry! There is no silicon based life, at least of any complexity. Only carbon is capable of making the long chained molecules necessary to form a living creature. I don't think scientists were aware of this during Star Trek days.

Not necessarily. There is no reason why a carbon-silicon hybrid couldn't exist.

Well that's one way to look at it. However it might be like this. If they're really in advance of us it might be like Professor of Theoretical Physics Michio Kaku says : " If you're going down a road and see an ant hill do you go over and try to sell the ants trinkets and technology to improve their lives? Or do you kick it over? Just because you can. "

By the way relativity as we know it is changing every day.

Never say never.

But under current understanding it seems unlikely.


http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_quest...ID=3&topicID=2

There is a saying that goes something like: 'evolution doesn't make mistakes, it makes every mistake'. Maybe the universe is just full of mistakes and we happened to be one of the better attempts.

This could easily mean there are more life forms completely different from us but I still think that such an uncontrolled and random system is ultimately completely meaningless and worthless so I'm hoping it's not the case.

The videos are quite clearly fake, as soon as someone brings up a video of a saucer then it's immediately suspicious. It needs to be something people haven't thought of before like a glowing triangle.

Also, I don't know if people remember the effects in Independence Day but they were pretty good. For these kind of handheld quality films to appear after so many years with improvements in CGI software is not that impressive and if I'm being honest, it's getting a bit tiresome.

What I'd really like to see is someone try and fake the moon landing using equipment available in 1969 just to see if it was possible.


Apparently a lot of people believe in Jesus after having their lives transformed by him. I guess some of them would have to be right.

But can you prove them wrong? (not that I'm saying it's correct) Guess there is only one way to be truly sure, and I don't intend to find out any time soon!

I was thinking statistically, if X number of people claim to see event Y but there is no empirical evidence one way or the other, how can you prove they are 100% incorrect?

I believe there is enough evidence for UFOs. So many people have had experiences with them that I believe they are real. My question is: real what? Since the behavior of UFOs appears to defy laws of physics, they are evidently not entirely material, IMHO. We can only speculate, but I'd say they are definitely not just advanced technology. Too much like Star Trek.

So does a frog floating in mid-air, but it can be pulled off with strong magnets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rotTjRY5lRw

'Appears' to defy 'my known' laws of physics, is the phrase I think you want. An electric light bulb witnessed by primitive tribesmen is not proof of magic, after all.

Appears to defy 'our' known laws of physics. The laws of physics are well established and verified. UFOs have been observed by visual sightings and on radar to display wild trickery, such as instant sharp-angle turns and lightning like acceleration from a stand still.

It's unlikely the material could withstand such maneuvers, much less the occupants inside.



Primitives did not know much. Most of today's real technology would seem like magic.

You forgot 'constantly being updated', 'constantly under scrutiny', 'not currently able to explain every verifiable phenomena in a laboratory setting'...

What, you think they're carved in stone? Obviously, you're not a physicist.

I am.


There is a massive, huge gulf between 'unlikely' and 'impossible'. Throw in our pretty piss-poor understanding of much of physics, and things just get more fun.


BING BING BING BING BING! WE HAVE A WINNA!

From the primitive's point of view, the light bulb appears their laws of physics, as they know them. Therefore, they are 'evidently not entirely material', right? And they *must* be something other than 'advanced technology', right?

Your argument holds as much water.

I guess it's time to drag out the old Arthur Clarke chestnut, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

It's interesting to consider, given the vast transformation of "what things look like" and "how stuff works" in the past, say, thousand years, what tens of thousands of years beyond what we have now would seem to us.

I think sufficiently advanced technology could be so utterly alien (as it were) to our notions of "thingness" and "action" so as to be a kind of invisible.

I'm not talking about the urban myth that the indigenous locals "couldn't see" Columbus' ships-- while much bigger and differently configured than anything that population would have encountered, the basic idea-- big thing floating on water-- wasn't that much of a stretch. At most, I think Columbus' fleet would have caused some scale confusion, with a person never having encountered a manmade object that large assuming that they were nearer than they were, and some category confusion ("are those trees on that thing?").

But the technology of Columbus' Europe represents only around a thousand years of development beyond the circumstances of the peoples of "Hispaniola", and that thousand years doesn't include the rapid transformative acceleration engendered by the industrial revolution.

Imagine ten, or a hundred thousand years out ( and if there is any other intelligent life in the universe a civilization with a hundred thousand year jump on us is not an unreasonable expectation).

Would we be able to identify the artifacts of such a culture as technology, at all? Would such technology even take material form, or would it be mostly comprised of manipulation of the underlying forces at work in the universe?

Or what if "technology", as we express it, is an idiosyncratic artifact of human consciousness, which itself could just as easily be an offbeat type of sentience, big picture universe wise?

For all we know there are plenty of "civilizations" (whatever form that might take) making themselves known through various communications channels which are literally unthinkable, to us.

Baseless speculation is fun.

Hey, your a physicist! Great, so am I. Likely, you've got a PhD and outrank my li'l old MS. At least we are on the same wavelength, I hope.

Of course I know science is constantly changing, but some things haven't budged in a long time and are well established. Classical mechanics still holds for the observations that I mentioned. The maneuvers observed would have incredible accelerations, which would stress the structure and it's occupants beyond their breaking point.

We know better than to say impossible, and I never said that. However, it is so improbable that I'm willing to base my beliefs upon it. Everyday I risk my life on things that have higher probability, like a bridge collapsing while I'm driving across. (Portland has lots of bridges.)



Oh, come on now. the primitives did not understand anything about physics. They observed how some things happen, but to call it their science is really stretching it. They let go of a stone and it would fall to the ground. They had no idea WHY it fell or what determined how fast it fell.

I think in this context he means "their expectations of how things behave and what can be accounted for based on those expectations."

So a light bulb would be entirely inexplicable, in a number of ways (as a phenomena, in its materials, in the manner of its construction).

However, I still think that even here a light bulb has enough relationship to aspects of the primitive's world to be, if not accounted for, at least described. So: fire contained in bowl, or star fallen from sky, etc.

My thought about much more advanced tech is that we wouldn't even be able to go that far. We would literally have no idea what we were looking at, because nothing about its mechanisms or actions would refer to anything in our world.

ok...

Newton would have been shocked by a lightbulb, and like members of so called primitive cultures, would have studied it to explain it. He would have gotten most of it wrong as would the primitives. Was Newton not a scientist? Were his explanations not testable? Would the primitive culture's explanations not be testable?

Science is simply a way to explain the universe in testable statements. There is nothing advanced needed.

The greeks had the diameter of the Earth within 60 miles circa 250 B.C. I wouldn't sell them too short.

What you say could be true up to a point. But a much more advanced technology would not violate what we already know about the laws of physics. For example, when Einstein gave us the theory of relativity, it did not violate the older, classical laws of motion -- It 'extended' them. Classical mechanics still hold in the usual range of mechanisms,

So the UFO motions that I've mentioned are subject to the laws of classical mechanics. The sharp turns and sudden bursts of speed are well below light speed. Yet, it's the rates at which velocity vectors change that make many of us suspicious. It suggests to me these are not material objects, but some type of illusions or image.

The really interesting task at hand is to figure out how the UFOs are produced. They are detected by our eyes and by radar signals, yet are not material. As long as we keep insisting UFO are material object made by some super advance technology, we will get nowhere. Personally, I don't have a clue where to start.

Yet, rather than looking elsewhere, most people continue to accept UFOs as material objects made by an advanced technology, usually alien beings. Consider a similar example, the crop circles. No one could figure them out, so they were said to be the works of alien space crafts. Once the technique of producing crop circles was revealed, however, it was immediately clear. We may have a similar situation here, though it may not be a simple hoax, as were the crop circles.

The Greeks were not primitive. Theirs was a highly advanced civilization and culture.

As I said, I'm sure that it was compelling.

You're just a wonderful source of dis-information, aren't you?

Methane and ammonia from the early atmosphere were not lost to space (not primarily), they were primarily consumed by early life on the planet (bacteria). This is also where we obtained much of our oxygen: link

The reason that liquids are so volatile on Mars has less to do with gravity than it does to do with the lack of atmospheric pressure (think about the difference of boiling point at sea-level and at altitude on earth -- the force of gravity is essentially the same in both scenarios, only air-pressure is less). Mars lacks a substantiative atmosphere because it doesn't have a strong magnetic field, as the Earth does (Mars' core has long ago gone hard -- I believe that earth's core is kept molten by tidal forces from the moon), so the solar winds carry off a lot more of the gases on Mars. Someone will have to correct me if I have mis-remembered any of these details.

Eratosthenes' (276 BC - 194 BC) calculation of the circumference of the earth (and so the diameter as well -- they are linearly related) was about 16% too large. Amazing for it's time, but not quite as amazing as you claim.

Many people believe in god: their belief does not call god into existence.

If you are beginning with the assumption, "extra-terrestrial, space-faring creatures are visiting Earth, largely in secret," I'm afraid that most of what will follow is nothing more than fantasy.

Here is a completely credulous report on the phenomenon called "rods" and here is a thorough debunking of this phenomenon. Rods are a good, simple illustration of a phenomenon that is really interesting, but completely mundane. UFOs are no different, though the complexity of the explanation is higher because there are more "things" that a UFO could actually be.

The level of uncritical belief displayed in many of the posts of this thread, though not unsurprising (given the general culture of which we are all a part), is quite disturbing. We live in a scientific age, though there is just as much magical thinking present in our society as there seems to have been at any other time in history (at least we don't burn "witches" any more, though apparently some will still allow their religious beliefs to override their senses to such an extent as to choke their 3 years-old grandchildren in order to exorcise demons). Give up your childish superstitions, your conspiracy theories, and other forms of silliness. Life is really so much better: escape to reality!

I try not to be.



It looks like you are confusing two issues -- vaporization of a substance and lose of molecules to space. It's true that pressure affects the temperature at which a substance boils, or converts to a gas. (Chemistry 101)

However, we are discussing how these gases are retained on Earth, or lost to space. In the case of retaining or losing molecules, gravity is critical. Here is a quote from the very article you linked in your post:

"These gases are relatively rare on Earth compared to other places in the universe and were probably lost to space early in Earth's history because

\tEarth's gravity is not strong enough to hold lighter gases"

The very first item on the list is the importance of gravity, and says these gases were probably lost to space early on. Thanks for the supporting evidence for what I claimed.





Here you are also confused. The production of oxygen was not from consumption of methane by early bacteria. According to your reference, oxygen was produced from carbon dioxide, not methane. Quote:

"CO2 + H2O + sunlight = organic compounds + O2 - produced by cyanobacteria . . ."

Again, many thanks for supporting my thesis. Though we didn't discuss the production of oxygen, it was one of the critical processes leading to life on Earth. It took a long time, since most of the oxygen was initially used to convert metals to ores. Once this process was complete, more oxygen was available for animal life.

I've never seen anything in the sky that I could not identify very easily. I live in an area (near a mountain chain) where altocumulus lenticularis (wave) clouds are common, and some people have said that they look like "alien spacecraft" (!)... but having, to my knowledge, never seen an alien spacecraft, I wouldn't know. How common cloud formations get misidentified as "nuts and bolts" craft remains mystifying. People commonly misidentify Venus (or one of the other brighter planets) as a UFO, although it is hard to imagine how, except perhaps when in motion, the relatively changing position of (Venus) could make it appear that *it* is in motion. Some people (with a UFO obsession) have been known to claim that a perfectly commonplace, identifiable object, such as a Boeing 747 coming in to land at an airport, is an alien spacecraft. Really. I kid you not.

UFO reports are so commonplace, to the point of there being 10s of thousands of reports each year... and these do not include sightings that people don't even want to talk about or report, on account of ridicule (and other factors). 98% can be explained by mundane, or everyday reasons, and some as more unusual natural phenomena. But... there remains that 2% or so, a small minority that remain "unidentified". That does not mean to say that they are "alien" of course, just merely "unknown". Do you not think it is worthwhile that the "unknown" aspect of the field should be investigated with scientific rigor, without preconceptions, without the stupid baggage that has grown up around the subject? Even if we don't find out what people are apparently witnessing, such a study could provide potentially invaluable data on human psychology, at least. Unfortunately, the scientific community won't go there, and for reasons that appear to be somewhat unscentific... such as the fear of being "laughed at", or the fear of trashing one's career. What a shame, and a sad reflection on the state of science, where fear trumps inquiry.

The subject interests me for sure. But I have come to no conclusions either way. Re. alien spacecraft, I tend towards skepticism, mostly on account of the bounds imposed by relativity; the statistical likelihood of life existing outside our solar system doesn't even count taking the time/distance factor into consideration. However....I would love to see a real investigation, done with pure science in mind (kinda rare these days). Unfortunately, science relies on such things as "repeatability".. and UFO sightings tend not to conform. But an unbiased investigation, I guess is daydreaming and idealistic, in an age when unbiased investigations are less than fashionable, and when science now tends to be pursued only when there's a profit motive. But to trash the UFO subject, just for what it is, and conclude, without inquiry, that everyone who sees a "UFO" is lying, mistaken or hallucinating etc. by default, is not a scientific approach. Considering that many of the true "unidentifieds" are witnessed by observant people, such as pilots, police officers, military people etc... one would have thought that their eyewitness testimony is worth more than just a casual brush-off. And, when a solid radar return shows something behaving abnormally, like a sharp 90º turn without deceleration, then I believe that its worth looking into it... rather than burying one's head in the sand and lumping the entire subject alongside what's available on Fox Channel, or the Weekly World News.