September 1970, three miles ouside of Lubbock, TX, friends gathered drinking beer. Time of day was late (2200 hr or later).

Two lights appeared out of the east traveling roughly parallel to each othe across sky headed the west. Suddenly, both stop dead still. One goes north and disappears, the other moves slightly toward us and hovers, still. We start pointing and looking. Allof a sudden, it shoots off faster than anything we'd ever seen, at an acute angle from its previous path of travel

No -- we were not on acid of anything but beer that night in 1970. I recall my friend saying something about a "Feast of Booths" going on at the time.

Anpther time, in the Blue Mountains of Oregon about eight or ten years later . . .

Just last week a story appeared in the NY Times thjat made various claims supporting UFO "reality" and one is receiving deservedly extreme skepticism. That particular was an implication that the DOD is stockpiling unidentifiable metal alloys possibly or even purportedly from "alien craft". The simple fact is that any compound made from atoms is identifiable by even University students. No scientists would ever be confused by what constitutes any alloy. They might have questions as to how a particular and previously unseen alloy was accomplished, but they would determine exactly it's constituents in mere minutes.

In this case, the problem arose when Mr. Blumenthal spoke extemporaneously and did not strictly adhere to his more proper written version. Take not since this is exactly how i8nappropriate and unfounded leaps can and do occur.

Got a link for that story enorbet?

You might find it from this Scientific American response - --- SciAm Article on UFO Alloys ---

Yes, I have seen several.

Thanks for the link enorbet.

I would have to agree with you in that: I'm not convinced about the "alloys" being from an alien spaceship any more than yourself, so I would once again agree with you on that point. I also think that people (not talking about yourself) who sit there and twist story's like that to make it look as if it's proof of ET, are just as bad as the conspiracy theorists out there.

But what does not make sense to me personally is the fact that we have people from all walks of life and government who claim to have seen UFO's. It still makes no sense to me as to why a serving police officer would sit there and mistake something quite earthly for a UFO. Or for matter, claim to have seen ET's themselves and/or UFO's that are not 1000+ feet in the air. Maybe *some* of them are crazy, maybe that's true and in at least some cases, very, very likely and possible but I still do not accept that all of them are crazy or cannot tell the difference between, say for example a weather balloon and a UFO. I think it's also worth mentioning and quoting the following from the link you provided:

It's videos like this one that are what I would call "convincing". You have to remember that, air force pilots are trained to observe and determine what they are looking at. In the video I linked here you have what's clearly video shot from a air force fighter jet, with the pilots saying thing like "Look at that thing dude", "My god", etc, etc. It does not make any sense to me personally why they would be so confused and saying such things if it was just a drone or whether balloon, or similar. It's also interesting to me the message at the end of the same video, in that, at least one of those same pilots believes that the objects were from "out of this world".

In the interests of full disclosure I also found this video as well.

What do you make of the video I've linked?

My thoughts are much like the lady at 1:45 who points out that pilots are going to see things they don't understand but to leap to "not of this world" is ignorant, silly and irresponsible. Some people think of UFO literally as Unidentified Flying Object while others, those with such inclinations, use the term preferably or even exclusively for "not of this world".

It may be useful to note how much we still don't know well. Sprites were viewed and commented on as early as 1730 but not one documented photo was ever taken until 1989. Other things are less reality-based like so-called "flying rods". Check out this video ===>>> --- Flying Rods --- first and then read this --- Flying Rods (optics) --- Please note that while the phenomenon has been duplicated repeatedly and completely explained there still remain many who either don't find the facts or don't even care to.

The odds against interstellar travel at all, let alone visitors to our little podunk planet are literally astronomical. You'd be smarter to purchase lottery tickets since the odds are actually better. Better yet, bet with "The House" and don't fall for agenda-ridden, sensationalist "too good to be true" BS.

Nope, I never seen a REAL UFO...And I don't believe in them.

However, I seen many FAKE UFOs in movies, photos, and in documentaries.

Hopefully this thread isn't old enough to invoke claims of "necrophilia" but instead this post might serve as a "capper". Whether we are considering what it would take for UFOs, when defined as many do as not merely Unidentified but visiting alien craft, or just our own abilities to travel interstellar distances, the physics and costs are basically the same. We have here discussed the concept of just what it would take to make such journeys but only hinted at those requirements. Here are the current facts, some actual numbers to consider to put this in a better perspective.

When considering any journey the factors that describe it are mass (weight of the travelers, vehicle and fuel), distance ((affecting fuel, provisions for the travelers, etc) and Time (the speed required to make the distance achievable which in turn affects age and lifespan of the travelers, fuel requirements in both potency and quantity -interactive components- as well as mass and materials of the craft). Finally all of those components cost money so a feasible trip is one that is affordable when all the cost requirements are fulfilled. Greater distances require greater speed since we (or any complex lifeform we know about) only lives for several decades and requires sustenance for the trip, whether that is actual and normal provisions or the energy to sustain some not yet achievable form of hibernation. It isn't even known if such hibernation is possible.

The fastest craft ever engineered by humans is Voyager which finally also became the first man-made object to ever leave our Solar System. It achieved that speed by two (2) gravity assist "slingshot" moves that used the gravity of whole planets, and not any old measly planet but super giants Jupiter and Saturn, to accelerate the craft to a speed many times that possible just by the chemical fuel it carried. That current speed is roughly 38,000 mph. At that phenomenal speed which none of us can possibly relate to since even pilots of the Blackbird have only ever experienced less that 1/10th that speed, it will take almost 80,000 years to reach our nearest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri. So it should be obvious that chemical fuels even with the aid of super giants is nowhere near enough.

What fuel might contain enough power? The most potent fuel known to man is Anti Matter. It has roughly 2,000,000,000 (that's Billion) times the energy per unit mass of the chemical fuel that powered Voyager. However it is now and possibly may even forever be beyond our capability to research, develop, and employ it. CERN can and has created anti matter but only a few atoms at a time. Nobody knows how to contain more than that even if we could justify the cost of just creating it which is estimated at over $100,000,000,000,000 (that's Trillion) USD. The dangers of even learning how to store just a millionth of a gram are more than just the drain on economies since even a single gram makes the new 100 Megaton thermonuclear bomb developed by Russia the equivalent of the power of a feather falling on your hand.

A mere one-thousandth of a gram (0.001 g) would power a massive craft to Saturn easily assuming such a craft that could contain and control such power could be built and even handle just the waste heat without consuming itself and any occupants. Even at that condensed power level, travel to Proxima Centauri would require not grams, not kilos, but tons of anti matter.

Still, even if we assume that someday humans or aliens can possibly develop, manufacture and safely control such awesome power, it would still take over 50 years to get to the very nearest star, Proxima Centauri. Maybe, just maybe, such a craft if developmentally feasible ever, could be created soon enough to overtake Voyager on it's 80,000 year trip. When we add on to that unimaginable cost and technological advancement that even then, just who can possibly handle a 50 year voyage and be in any kind of productive shape upon arrival ?... and this is the nearest star, "only" just over four (4.2) light years (or 25,000,000,000,000 miles) away.

Conclusion - even anti matter which could take unimaginable sums of money and thousands of years, if ever, to harness is not enough by a rather wide margin even for the closest of star systems. To turn this back to the topic of this thread, just use this as a scale for just how advanced any civilization must be even for such modest travel. Now factor in how much more advanced they would have to be for such travel to be commonplace. Now factor in just how much more advanced any civilization would have to be to use such power to visit some rather commonplace, podunk solar system out in "the boonies" as ours. When you add in "to mutilate cows" and "create crop circles" just to mystify the locals, us, which would be the equivalent of us spending vast fortunes to "mess with the heads" of bacteria, you might be getting close to the scale.

To be clear, it is not my desire to crush dreams here. I fervently wish Star Trek TNG was just a few generations away, but sadly, it is not. The likelihood that it will ever be possible for anyone is not much more than the odds that it is physically impossible, that any and all lifeforms will only ever be able to physically explore only their own solar systems, if they can learn to survive that long. That's just the state of Reality as it is currently knowm.

Been gone long enough to cool off.

While I kinda sorta respect enorbets thought out logical conclusion. He spent some good thought and time on his reply. Though only thought out with what are limitations that are earth bound limitations that we know of presently.

We are not talking man here. Or so I thought. Just because we are limited in our logic. Does not mean anything not even remotely a human being. 2 arms. 2 legs. A head. Thinks like we do. Or has our physical limitations. Not being a scientist. I have no clue on how those magicians do what they do.

While some may feel this UFO thing aint real. It seems to have a good business practice with financial backing. Like Chinas humongous radio telescope they spent tons of money on building and operating. Which a very educated respected member here dissed off as:

They must of have not got the memo.

Hard to retort on that come back. Being knee jerk and all. Kinda like a F---- Y--- For the longest time. It was argued the world is not round. By respected institutions. But. They were wrong.

For the longest time. The stars and Sun revolved around the Earth. We were the center of the universe. Wrong again.

Ancient man mentions visitors from the stars. Which we put down as stories and myths. Probably. Wrong again.
Troy was found. Lost cities in the Amazon were found.
USAF Strategic Command takes this stuff seriously. I know. I've witnessed it as a kid. In a Titan missile silo in Nebraska. Going on alert. My dad was the senior NCO in charge. It was take your kid to work day.
In a hanger at Wright Patterson AFB in Ohio. MP's with guns. Saying nope. Can't look in here. But I caught a distant glimpse. Being a kid and all. No threat here.
It was not a Volkswagen Beetle. Not sure what I saw. It was mangled. But being a kid into air-planes and models and making it his passion to identify every known air craft the USA and other countries had in the skies. It was none of those either.

Think about it for a second. Big Foot sightings and legends abound for centuries. Just because you have not seen one. Does not mean they don't exist now, or were in existence in the past. I find some of naysayers logic here hilarious . Being so called educated human beings. They sound medieval in thinking to me 1/2 the time. Getting a society to agree on anything constantly for years takes a pretty good yarn I guess. Lasting centuries.

Here is the citation for my quote: It is a opinion piece that has no bearing on whether UFO's exist or not. It is mainly a budget bitch session.

http://www.decaturdaily.com/opinion/...537006e6c.html

Just be glad. They are not really malevolent and seed the air with a virus that wipes out human kind. I guess we are not worth the effort. Since they probably figured out long ago. We are our own worst enemies.
Must have humorous when we started acting like these dudes instead of logically.

https://www.indy100.com/article/remo...es-sky-7382991

Enjoy all the recent advancements in the 70 years or so. Eating steroid laced beef must make you smarter I guess. Along with mercury infused seafood.
Necrophilia can get one killed in certain societies.
I. However. Don't live in one of those societies.

Free thinking is allowed. Star Trek TNG. Ha ha ha ha. John Wayne in a space ship.
Sorry enorbet. You can be funny as hell sometimes. Without even knowing it.

Happy Trails, Rok

My link in my previous post. Negates this

It is still being funded today. Kinda makes the whole link suspect. Ya think? Even the Scientific American can be mistaken.

Heya Rok, just a few points to consider....


First off I totally agree that there is no reason to assume all or any intelligent lifeform thinks as we do. Right here on Earth, some whales and porpoises have greater neuro-density than we humans do but so far we can't even communicate anything important to each other. However it actually doesn't matter what manner of lifeform we talk about if they live in this Universe since the Laws of Physics so far (and that means not only 13 Billiion Light years distant but also a span of 13 Billion years of history since light travels at a finite speed it takes time to get to us. That's a rather big chunk of SpaceTime, so it isn't a big stretch to conclude that with the exception of time extremely close to the Big Bang, like millionths of a second, and space inside Black Holes those laws of physics are utterly pervasive. So if some alien civilization knows about and uses something more energetic than anti-matter, if that's even possible, then they had to evolve through Anti Matter to get to it, just as we didn't invent gasoline engines before we rode horses or jet engines before reciprocating piston engines and for the same kinds of reasons. Progress is always small steps over time, especially when viewed from any distance. Example - All of the base components to create a television were in place by the late 1860s but it took another 60+ years for all of that technology to come together in the first working TV.

I don't understand that person's comment at all since radio telescopes, although quite capable of picking up radio communication if any exists, are not designed with that purpose in mind. We can't see the spectrum in which radio resides, or infrared, or ultraviolt, or gravity and so on BUT we can gather signals and assign a consistent color scheme so that the data can be translated faithfully into something we can see and/or hear. It's sort of like playing a 33 1/3 rpm LP at 45 or 78 rpm. The data isn't destroyed at all just transposed equally into higher octaves, or lower if we slow it down to say 16 rpm.

However without examining Mr. Bigelow's evidence and as much as I have searched so far I haven't seen anything specific, I can't say what he saw but neither can he since it was simply a witnessed phenomenon with no way to study or duplicate it for study which is exactly why the "U" stands for "Unidentified". FTR I would love to be convinced alien visitation is an accurate conclusion but as Sagan quipped, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and so far, to my knowledge, none exists.

Here you are talking about the dawn of Science but even then the only "respected institutions" claiming the Earth was flat were religious. Nobody ever proposed the Earth is flat based on anything but Mythology. Not only was it easy for anyone watching boats come into a harbor to conclude the Earth is round, but Eratosthenes a mathematician calculated the circumference of the globe with superb accuracy and even the tilt axis angle in 100 BC. The situation was exactly similar for Geo-Centricity it just took a little technology and more time to prove it. So don't fault scientific inquiry based on non-scientific conclusions from the past. In the case of Troy and other lost cities, shoot! even in the case of Atlantis, no scientist has ever stated "They never existed" just that the likelihood was currently low so not a safe bet until some evidence beyond someone's say so was found.

I have no problem granting you the respect that even as a kid you knew a great deal about planes, probably because I did too. However all you can really conclude from that experience is that you saw something you couldn't identify and that SAC didn't want you to identify. It's a very big step from that to visiting aliens when just about anything even moderately reasonable has higher odds.

That's actually a really good article because it appears quite unbiased, telling both sides in one article. I'd like to highlight the statements of "Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute" since he is a scientist while Mr Bigelow is a businessman. If you seek advice on a bike build I'm guessing you'd rather talk to Greg Hageman or Roland Sands instead of Robert MacNamara. Field of study and experience are important.

Yes, free thinking is allowed but thinking implies study not leaping to unfounded conclusions. Even that is allowed of course but it's of very limited value at best unless it is grounded in facts.

I'm sorta glad you got a chuckle but I don't understand the analogy. I have never thought Picard was anything remotely like John Wayne but then I was using TNG as an example of an advanced society where equality was commonplace, poverty and disease were rare, war really was the last resort, and warp drive was common even on freighters owned as a family business, but even my great-great-grandchildren are not likely to live that long in my estimation.

Since the Scientific American article focused almost entirely on the alloys and your linked article said nothing about the alloys, I don't get the connection let alone negation. What did I miss?

I have no doubts that the military wants to know what these unidentified objects are. In fact I think they are right to do so no matter what it/they turn out to be. It may not be a threat but it may be a clue for stuff we don't have that could greatly improve our defenses. Either way, knowledge is good.

Just this part of your alloy link I thought was hinky since they included it to make their point.

They were misinformed about a funding timeline through no fault of their own. Just makes me wonder. What else can they be misinformed about is all.

When one thing aint so. It makes you doubt the messenger is all. You see it in politics and religion all the time. I try and keep a open mind. Kinda Hard now a days though.

The star trek thing has always been John Wayne/ Buck Rogers kind of thing for me. Dealing more with earthly moral issues than space issues. Face it. Corporations will own space travel from Earth. It is the Human mindset/culture to operate that way.
I believe more of Elysium being a future for our space program than a Star Trek type of scenario. Or even better. The Expanse. Knowing Human nature.

Where discovered alien tech is decided to be used as a weapon and bites them in the butt.

Not dry scientific stuff I know. But this scooter tramp likes his leisure time to mix with his musings and theories.

Hello again Rok
Actually the SciAm article was accurate in that OFFICIAL funding, the initial 22 Mil, was indeed for the 5 year time period of 2007-2012. It is indeed still being funded but privately, not as a State sanctioned project. Now this doesn't mean SciAm is always free from errors. They are only human after all even if very thorough, meticulous humans who are extremely aware of the scrutiny they will always be subjected to, both serious and whackjob.

I do understand why it is tempting to assume that the distant future will still be governed by the sorts of nasty human behavior still common today. However we do evolve. We are not the same sort of people that lived in past civilizations. As incredibly advanced for it's time as The Roman Empire was we are not like them in important ways. Consider National Pastimes. Gladiator events were not mere entertainment. They reinforced the concepts of their society that all are either "with us or agin' us" and if you're "agin' us" you die, usually horribly and your rotting corpse tossed in a dump or a river. While it has been surpassed by football, the original US National Pastime, baseball, demonstrated playing as a team on defense and as an individual on offense, though still with a sense of team responsibility. During The Middle Ages, nobility, including Clerics, were allowed a certain number of murders of peasants each year without even question in most cases even for such minor "offenses" as not moving off into the muddy ditches on pathways to make way for a "noble".

Since it is my estimate that we will not travel to the stars for a good 1000 years or more, we (homo sapiens) have a lot of time to evolve until then and more importantly we have a factor that the Romans and other past civilizations didn't. They had room to expand and they produced so little energy by comparison there was never a time after the earliest days of nearly 1 million years ago, where the entire race of humans was at risk. As our energy requirements and commensurate production keeps increasing we face catastrophic consequences that make The Black Plague seem like the Common Cold. Such luminaries as Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking have pointed out that if we cannot shed some of our base instincts that came from early more brutal times the odds we will destroy ourselves looms large.

In short, we will very likely need everyone to be highly educated and eminently civilized if we are to survive our own base instincts. Throughout human History people from very modest, even desperate conditions, have risen to make the world a better place for everyone. One of the reasons that the US, at least for a time, enjoyed leapfrog productivity and advancement relative to almost everyone else was exactly because it was possible for the low born to "pick themselves up by their bootstraps". At some point, and increasing population density may bring that to a head sooner rather than later, that must become obvious and that it is advantageous for all if everyone can rise up.

This has undergone dramatic changes as civilizations pass through phases. Slaves were of little use to Hunter/Gatherers and competition for hunting grounds was life-threatening so murder was a survival skill. Slavery became viable with Agriculture. A different kind of slavery became viable with Industry but whippings, murder, and breaking up of families ceased. The Information Society now coming into play will one day overtake Industry as more and more physical labor is either eliminated or taken over by automation. I think it is a pretty safe bet that even as little as 30 or 40 years from now, few of us would recognize Us. In 100 years all bets are off. We will have grown even more civilized or we will cease to exist. By the time we can manage anti matter, if we ever can, I think that implies a human race very different from the one we now know.

In the Springsteen song "Badlands" he notes "Poor man wanna be rich, Rich man wanna be King, and a King ain't satisfied till he rules everything" and while there may be considerable truth in that, it is rapidly disappearing as we can see by the simple fact that a huge percentage of Homo Sapiens literally are incapable of survival without civilization and that transformation keeps grinding away as it has for millennia and it is accelerating rapidly. If we don't become the sort of society that the Earth is in TNG, we can't get there. Frankly Klingons would have wiped themselves out at their thermonuclear era, IMHO. Vulcans, who learned to control lust and emotion, are far more likely to survive and flourish. I think Rodenberry's vision is closest to reality because most other Sci Fi "prophets" never consider the important transitions. It's like you said, John Wayne or Buck Rogers Space Opera where today's people are simply transplanted, whole cloth, into a technology but I maintain that's impossible.

I'd say "We shall see" but I probably won't live long enough to find out, though possibly we all will face that and find out, in a bad and final way, if this looming N. Korea situation goes nuclear before the Human Race even gets a chance to graduate from "Puberty".