Thread: OK who believes in the little green men

Yes, point taken. I was probably speaking too literally referring to myself. I should have said, "people claim to see UFOs".

I think it is interesting that if people believe in the existence of UFOs, despite never seeing them, or having any evidence as such, they are generally thought of as a bit "out there". However, it is readily accepted if people believe in a God, angels, miracles, etc.

And if people claim they have actually seen a UFO, they are deemed as having lost the plot?

What's the difference between claiming to see God etc, & not? Why would someone be deemed a crackpot if they claimed they saw God, if it's acceptable to believe in God in the first place?

Probably not explaining myself very well!

Interesting debate though!

Originally Posted by vnx205

Don't interpret this as a defence of any sort of religious belief, but surely there is a difference between believing in God and claiming to have seen a UFO.

I don't think that is a valid comparison.

A lot of people believe there is evidence for the existence of God.
Some of them are of course crackpots but others are reasonably intelligent, educated people.
The difference is that generally the sane ones don't claim to have seen God or been abducted by him and used for medical experiments.

If you say that it is possible that God exists or that life exists elsewhere in the universe, you will usually be accepted as having most of your marbles.
If you say you have seen either God or a UFO, your grip on reality will generally be considered to be tenuous.

BTW, I wonder if rather than "& yet, people see UFOs", you meant to write "& yet, people claim to see UFOs".

I've never seen one, unfortunately

Have thought of painting a sign on the roof "UFO's welcome".
However they probably don't understand english

Originally Posted by Panda

Yes, point taken. I was probably speaking too literally referring to myself. I should have said, "people claim to see UFOs".

I think it is interesting that if people believe in the existence of UFOs, despite never seeing them, or having any evidence as such, they are generally thought of as a bit "out there". However, it is readily accepted if people believe in a God, angels, miracles, etc.

And if people claim they have actually seen a UFO, they are deemed as having lost the plot?

What's the difference between claiming to see God etc, & not? Why would someone be deemed a crackpot if they claimed they saw God, if it's acceptable to believe in God in the first place?

Probably not explaining myself very well!

Interesting debate though!

Ok. Since you appear to have no trouble accepting that I don't necessarily subscribe to some of the arguments I put forward, I will continue the debate.

On a previous occasion when I put forward a view contrary to the popular one, at least one member assumed that the reason I put forward that argument was because of my personal circumstances and made all sorts of unwarranted assumptions about me and my situation.
I am quite capable of presenting an argument that I don't subscribe to and on topics like this one I am likely to take delight in presenting an unconventional view.
One of the other members has a signature that suggests the views in his posts are just his opinion. Perhaps mine should have some reference to the fact that the argument or opinions in my posts are not necessarily my own view.

However you don't seem to have made that mistake.

Now that I have got that off my chest, perhaps I should get back to the point of the debate.

There is some "evidence" for miracles, the existence of God and so on that some people accept and others dismiss as superstitious nonsense.
There is some "evidence" for UFOs that some people accept and for which others think there is some other rational explanation.

So I don't think it is necessarily correct to say that there is more evidence for the existence of UFOs than for the existence of God. I guess it depends on what sort of "evidence" you are prepared to accept.

Why should claiming to see God or UFOs make a difference?
It may not be a brilliant analogy, but don't most of us accept that atoms, protons, electrons and neutrons exist even though we can't see them with the naked eye? Scientists somehow worked out that they exist without seeing them.
If someone claimed to have seen an atom land in the paddock next door and then disappear before anyone else could see it, wouldn't that make them a crackpot?

Claiming to see something can be very different from believing that it exists.

If I have understood your question correctly about why seeing God is so different from believing in her, I suggest it is very different.
I may be on pretty shaky theological ground here, but if my memory serves me correctly there is something about the nature of God that means she is not normally visible in the way physical objects are visible.

I believe I saw a UFO many years ago... i was drivingh at night and spotted a reflection of a satelite (many of you have seen one before no doubt) and thought nothing of it. I kept an eye on it out of curiosity, when it suddenly stopped, then shot upwards (out to space) in a fantastic speed. Surely there is no technology available to be able to travel at these speeds, so what else would it be?

Originally Posted by stooge

I believe I saw a UFO many years ago... i was drivingh at night and spotted a reflection of a satelite (many of you have seen one before no doubt) and thought nothing of it. I kept an eye on it out of curiosity, when it suddenly stopped, then shot upwards (out to space) in a fantastic speed. Surely there is no technology available to be able to travel at these speeds, so what else would it be?

UFO

Originally Posted by stooge

I believe I saw a UFO many years ago... i was drivingh at night and spotted a reflection of a satelite (many of you have seen one before no doubt) and thought nothing of it. I kept an eye on it out of curiosity, when it suddenly stopped, then shot upwards (out to space) in a fantastic speed. Surely there is no technology available to be able to travel at these speeds, so what else would it be?

Have you ever noticed how often reports of UFO sightings, including at least one commented on here, are reported by someone or a group together, yet other people who would have had a different viewpoint and should have seen the same thing have reported nothing?

Have you ever seen the sort of illusion created when driving on long straight roads in outback NSW or similar places, where an approaching car seems to hover some distance above the roadway and often appears much closer than it really is?

Have you seen the bit of movie film taken from the window of a passenger plane that appeared to show quite clearly a craft travelling alongside the plane and then moving away at a speed that no aircraft could achieve? The film was not doctored in any way, but closer investigation showed there was a perfectly simple explanation.

Put all those things together and you have a possible explanation for your experience.

Investigators found that when they sat in the same aircraft seat as the one used to shoot the UFO, when they looked through the right part of the window at the right angle, a small imperfection in the glass worked like a lens and produced an isolated image of part of the aircraft itself that appeared to just hover alongside.
As they moved their point of view very slightly, they were looking through the imperfection at a different angle and the image rapidly shrank in size, thus appearing to move away. They reproduced an identical piece of footage from the same window of the same aircraft.

Most people would have seen a similar illusion when looking through something transparent that is not perfectly flat, like glass with a bit of a ripple in it. I have certainly seen the same effect dozens if not hundreds of times.

A similar effect on a different scale can be produced in the air under certain atmospheric conditions.

The air above a hot road has patches of air at different temperatures. These can sometimes produce a similar effect to a lens when light passes through them. A car in the distance may appear to be separated from the land and may appear bigger and therefore closer. Some people have no trouble recognising this as an illusion, but are not ready to accept that the same phenomenon can make something that is interpreted as a UFO appear where it isn't and rapidly change in size.

That would certainly explain the very common phenomenon of these things only being visible from a particular angle. People viewing from a different angle are not viewing through the primitive lens created in the atmosphere by patches or currents of air at different temperatures.

People are notoriously bad at judging size and distance when they don't have some sort of scale to assist, so it is quite easy for a person the be quite wrong about just how big an object in the air was or how far away it was. A tiny object like the "floaties" you sometimes get on the surface of your eyeball can appear as a big object in space some distance away.

Another example of how bad people are at judging size of objects in space is the "rising full moon phenomenon". Have you ever noticed how big the moon looks as it comes up over the horizon? It isn't magnified by the atmosphere as was once thought. It registers exactly the same size on your retina as it does when it is overhead. Yet everybody "sees" it bigger on the horizon.

The bit in your description of the object shooting off at tremendous speed is the clue that shows that it was almost certainly the result of the sort of optical aberration I have described in the examples above. It certainly looks real at the time.

Originally Posted by vnx205

Have you ever noticed how often reports of UFO sightings, including at least one commented on here, are reported by someone or a group together, yet other people who would have had a different viewpoint and should have seen the same thing have reported nothing?

Have you ever seen the sort of illusion created when driving on long straight roads in outback NSW or similar places, where an approaching car seems to hover some distance above the roadway and often appears much closer than it really is?

Have you seen the bit of movie film taken from the window of a passenger plane that appeared to show quite clearly a craft travelling alongside the plane and then moving away at a speed that no aircraft could achieve? The film was not doctored in any way, but closer investigation showed there was a perfectly simple explanation.

Put all those things together and you have a possible explanation for your experience.

Investigators found that when they sat in the same aircraft seat as the one used to shoot the UFO, when they looked through the right part of the window at the right angle, a small imperfection in the glass worked like a lens and produced an isolated image of part of the aircraft itself that appeared to just hover alongside.
As they moved their point of view very slightly, they were looking through the imperfection at a different angle and the image rapidly shrank in size, thus appearing to move away. They reproduced an identical piece of footage from the same window of the same aircraft.

Most people would have seen a similar illusion when looking through something transparent that is not perfectly flat, like glass with a bit of a ripple in it. I have certainly seen the same effect dozens if not hundreds of times.

A similar effect on a different scale can be produced in the air under certain atmospheric conditions.

The air above a hot road has patches of air at different temperatures. These can sometimes produce a similar effect to a lens when light passes through them. A car in the distance may appear to be separated from the land and may appear bigger and therefore closer. Some people have no trouble recognising this as an illusion, but are not ready to accept that the same phenomenon can make something that is interpreted as a UFO appear where it isn't and rapidly change in size.

That would certainly explain the very common phenomenon of these things only being visible from a particular angle. People viewing from a different angle are not viewing through the primitive lens created in the atmosphere by patches or currents of air at different temperatures.

People are notoriously bad at judging size and distance when they don't have some sort of scale to assist, so it is quite easy for a person the be quite wrong about just how big an object in the air was or how far away it was. A tiny object like the "floaties" you sometimes get on the surface of your eyeball can appear as a big object in space some distance away.

Another example of how bad people are at judging size of objects in space is the "rising full moon phenomenon". Have you ever noticed how big the moon looks as it comes up over the horizon? It isn't magnified by the atmosphere as was once thought. It registers exactly the same size on your retina as it does when it is overhead. Yet everybody "sees" it bigger on the horizon.

The bit in your description of the object shooting off at tremendous speed is the clue that shows that it was almost certainly the result of the sort of optical aberration I have described in the examples above. It certainly looks real at the time.

Sorry, I don't buy that

Monday, June 13, 2005
The Tully "daylight disc" & "saucer nest" effect

The Tully "daylight disk" and what it did: I constructed this montage to show what farmer George Pedley saw at 9 a.m. January 19 1966. The UFO drawing is Pedley's original witness sketch. It is superimposed over a photo of the "nest" effect - a clockwise tight spiral of interwoven sword grass approximately about 32 feet by 25 feet . Initially Pedley only saw a darkened swirling lagoon surface. The "nest" surfaced after a short time and had the quality of a floating elliptical bed of reeds. George Pedley saw the UFO initially about 25 feet directly above the lagoon surface. It rose up vertically about another 25 feet then appeared to depart towards a south west direction, initially dipping slightly and taking off at roughly a 45 degree angle.

Many explanations have been put forward - mating birds such as brolgas, mating crocodiles, upside down helicopters, a "willy willy" (Australian term for a mini-tornado wind vortex - the official Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) explanation) lifting the reeds into a saucer shape, a hoax (with little evidence author John Van Tiggelin tilts at the idea it was a hoax by Pedley that got out of hand - see his book "Mango Country" (2003)) , and a "plasma vortex"(my friend Jenny Randles argued for this - the same model used to "explain" crop circles) . None of these explanations are tenable.

My conclusion: "The 1966 Tully UFO physical trace case still stands as a classic example of the impressive physical dimensions of the UFO phenomenon."
Bill Chalker