Why the M.O.D.closed its U.F.O. desk?

[Sgt.Squarehead]

"Mostly Harmless"?

[snowen250]

I would argue that the possibly very intelligent Alien life forms may realise upon visiting us that exposing themselves to us would be the single most catastrophic thing ever to happen to the human race.

Imagine the fall out as the population at large suddenly realises that we are not Gods chosen little creatures with our opposable thumbs and free will, but actually, just another species inhabiting a huge space.

In other words people would, quite literally, lose their freakin' minds.

[jetboy]

hello.i thought i better lay my cards on the line,about this subject,....as a child i read avidly,there was only books then,and the only source for books for me was the local library,and the forlorn hope ,that i might get a book i wanted for my birthday or xmas,which i sometimes did,so the only source of books on this subject was invarably,the greatest hits type books or the illustrated encyclopedia of u.f.o.s,thats just the way it was,there was no chance of verifying data,only another book which would mention a case in a previous book,so began a cycle of a minor story gaining credibility,each time it was printed,and each time it was broadened,so would gain just a little more creedance every time?and im sure many reputations of all the well known authours was made,ie the berlitzs,von danikens,the eysenck,s,the sargents,and a whole generation or two have grown up with a serious doubt,that there might be life visiting,i think most people of my age,have had that doubt,

I FREELY ADMIT,that ive read all i can on this subject,over the 45 years ive been reading,i got in early on the computer,internet usage,because of my brother,s involvement,in transmitting tv picture,s with ham radio,s and computers,and i used to go round and read avidly his printouts of all the latest sightings in the us,etc,and we both got involved in the s.e.t.i project,even downloading vast amounts of data,and scanning live feeds for years,looking for the elusive OMG signal?

But life goes on.hes gone to astronomy,ive gone to space flight as an intrest,but because of my early reading of the books etc,i still read all the new books,so keep making these authors rich?but i can now with experience of life and that wonderful thing called hindsight,and dont forget the wonderful tool that is the home computer.but as im reading a lot of these new books,more usually the abduction ones,i can see a pattern ocurring....i know because in an eventful life ive had,ive seen some weird stuff,no one on gods earth can tell me,i havnt seen them,because i have these things were as real as this keyboard im typing on,i talked to them,i interacted with them,they with me,i almost married one.....so i can see your minds going to aliens etc,but no,in my teens,i took hallucegenic substances,and a lot of them,i ve been missing days of lost time,ive talked and walked with mythical beasts,dwarve,s,goblins,aliens,and they were real to me at the time,i can still look back,and remember them as a memory,hey,not proud of it,and dont really reccomend it,but it was 30 odd years ago,and we only had 3 channels on the tv,and i had to be in bed by eight,and in the country,

So what im trying to say,possibly badly,or not,is a lot of these stories seem very reminicent of these out of my mind expereience,s,i really really believe a lot of these people are having real to them experiences,but i think our brains,have not been explored to the full potential yet,and the ufo,subject ran its course of its time,i look back on the stories that i read avidly as a child,and can see how they have grown in stature and status,and by every author,who adds just a tiny little bit every time,it just grows expedentially,...Human nature....if you notice now most ufo cases are abductions,there are not so many nuts and bolts sightings,or space conversations as they were in the 50,s 60,s 70,s,because nearly everything these abductee,s were told ihas been proved wrong,by space exploration,so it gets a bit harder now to invent new drives,space propulsion,new places,because nearly everything has been thought of?

so all newish ufo sightings,will turn out to be invarably new drones,spy satellites,spy planes,stealth technology,hoaxes,deliberate or not,we are in the home entertainment age ...you tube and such?and i think powers that be already know this,otherwise they would be trying to find out what these things are...BUT thats not to say all these sightings are earthly,i meanpeople have seen things in the air they cannot explain,ive no doubt whatsoever,but science has progressed that much in the last fifty years,i think another fifty years will see most things in our world explained?,more so now as every one and his dog,has the technology to capture these objects on cameras...

I Just think its the human way,we have to have an enemy,doesnt matter if its off this world or not?

so what do i think about ufo,s.........HAVING FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE OF MIND EXPANDING DRUGS,and natural ones,grown and picked in the country available to anyone,if nature can produce these drugs for the mind,there must be a reason why these chemicals are formed,nothing in our world is random there seems to be a reason behind everything eventually we will find out the answer,s,so the mind can be tricked by itself,and be totally believable,its in my memory as a real experience?

so am i saying everyone who see,s ufo,s is a druggie,of course not,,im saying our mind is a tool we havnt fully understood yet,and a lot of cases of abduction are false memorys,but authors seem to use this and it all gets expanded,but then they try and tell the rest of us,that this is the solid truth,and then go on to fabricate/or expand on little truths,to get a story.

I VE over the years researched all the cases ,as best i can,that i read,and enthused over as a kid,and nearly all of them could have earthly explanations,and thats just a cursory look over them. ie the lonnie zammorra casa,was it a landed ufo,on tripod legs,or was it the testing of the lunar lander?and everyones got there dates wrong?

was the roswell crash a V2 OR another type,with rhesus monkeys or even god forbid a test dwarf,as there was not a lot of room in the early test craft?i dont know but i would think that explanation would be more beleivable than a downed alien craft,reasons can be more earthly,was the rendlesham forest sighting by the base colonel,a spy craft,was the mess drinks spiked,were they tripping?i dont know i wasnt there.?but far more likely thanthe other explanation.TIME WILL TELL?

Cheers Don

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Have you read any of the the McKenna brothers stange stories at all?

I'm thinking of the part in (IIRC) Food of The Gods, where they overdo it on the Ayahuasca, just before encountering the Adamski UFO and Dennis being flown out of the country 'on medical grounds'.

One minor point though.....I'm not sure how much LSD you would need to take to generate a radar-return, quite a lot I'd imagine.

Edited June 25, 2013 by Sgt.Squarehead

[pigsty]

nothing in our world is random there seems to be a reason behind everything

Not actually true. Everything is random, if you follow the theory of evolution and the cosmology that sets up the conditions where evolution can take place. Everything nevertheless has an explanation, but that's not the same as having a reason. There is no purpose behind the universe, it simply is. And (lest anyone think this is a bleak, cold view), no less marvellous for all that.

The simplest explanation to me is: there are aliens somewhere, but we'll never, ever meet them, nor they us. As we find more and more Earth-type planets, plus stars capable of having Earth-type planets that we can't currently detect, the odds of there being intelligent life out there increase. But faster-than-light travel is impossible for any practical purpose (Einstein proved that), so the only way to travel between stars is below light speed. All the hypotheses laid out under the heading of the Fermi paradox seem to miss a couple of important points:

(i) it would take thousands and thousands of years to complete the journey. It's quite possible to plan for such a voyage, but whether anyone would is another matter. That time-frame is long enough for whole civilisations to rise and fall, so it's a bit unlikely that you could rely on Mission Control still being there for you. Even small changes, multiplied over the years, could make the project unworkable. A small example: there are serious concerns, still not resolved, about how we should label nuclear waste when we can't even be sure that the language used will still be comprehensible when the stuff is still dangerous in tens of thousands of years' time. No civilisation in the history of mankind has shown itself capable of planning more than about ten years in advance (some scientific projects being honourable exceptions); why should anyone else's be any different? I don't believe humanity is uniquely bad at being sensible.

(ii) There are other practicalities to take account of. For one thing, it's likely that a voyage of several thousand years would have to be completed by the distant descendants of the people who set off. This raises three problems immediately: A - inbreeding; B - the crew losing interest and motivation; and C - if their society is even remotely ethical, a deep reluctance effectively to decide the destinies of people who won't be born for thousands of years. Also, as our tentative pokings towards Mars are making clear to us, space is not simply an empty void where no harm can come to you so long as you remember not to open the windows.

All in all, I reckon that if there are species out there capable of imagining voyages to distant stars, they'll have concluded that it's just not practical.

As for the MOD closing its desk, the obvious one (for me) is that it was a colossal waste of time and effort, even if it only cost buttons. It seems to have had no practical value to anyone and acted simply as a place for cranks to vent their crankiness. Actual, meaningful questions of flight safety or military security were, I suspect, dealt with rationally somewhere else. People who believe aliens have been whisking them away to stick things up their bottoms may indeed believe sincerely that it happened, but the best recourse for them is medical.

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Your hypothesis rather relies on all aliens thinking in a human timescale.....Any culture that has developed a means of STL travel that is sufficiently fast will begin to encounter the effects of time dilation and thus their whole perception of time and their place in it will be changed. Combine this with the sort of anti-aging techniques we are already looking at, some moderately sophisticated nano-tech, direct neural interface technology or any of a host of other 'cusp' technologies and a species that is very much like our own could have a very different concept of time and mortality to our 'four-score years and ten'.

A two million year journey is but a step if you spend 99.999% of that time dead.

Edited June 25, 2013 by Sgt.Squarehead

[Procopius]

The thought of interstellar senior citizens flying their star-cadillacs to this planet to get into fender-benders with inanimate objects and to complain about how expensive everything is fills my heart with fear.

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Explains Roswell a treat though doesn't it.

I often wondered why these super-high-tech vessels that had allegedly travelled the stars to visit us had developed such a silly habit of flying straight into the ground.....Douglas Adams may have had some rather profound insight here too.

I'd like to comment on the 'Encountering Aliens Would Be A Disaster' concept, raised by snowen250 and touched upon in one of my earlier posts.....Why would it be so, for us as individuals? Sure it would be a disaster for some of the powers that be, their world (and certainly their domination of ours) would come to the proverbial full stop. But barring our own 'betters' lashing out and causing a calamity, most of us would probably just get on with it (and get a mobile-phone upgrade the like of which even god has never seen).

While the Aztec & Mayan civilisations didn't survive their interaction with the west, the descendants of the people of those cultures still live there and have intermingled with the colonists. Lets face it, we're all dealing with this allegedly 'oh so worrying' concept right here in this thread and nobody is freaking out.....Sure there's some teasing and some light hearted humour, but I suspect that most of us are coming to understand that the concept of this planet being a solitary pool of life in a neverending desert is just ridiculous.

The only people who need to be worried about contact is those who have something to lose.....And as most of them got it, by stealing from or intimidating the rest of us, frankly my sympathies are rather limited.

Given the age of the universe I'd say it's a certainty that there have been not one, or two, but thousands upon thousands of starfaring civilisations.....Look how much we have achieved in the barest blink of an eye on the cosmic scale. The problem, I suspect, tends to be that when two intelligent species do meet over interstellar distances, the chances are very high that they will be so far apart on the technology scale that the interaction might not even be recognised as such by one (or both) parties.

This may in turn explain why such a species might maintain a permanent presence in the home system of any lower tech culture that they were to encounter and possibly protect or even mentor that culture until it is sufficiently sophisticated to enter into a meaningful dialogue.....Having someone new to talk to is always nice (isn't it fellow forum users) and until then it's a great big safari park to take the kids to.

Welcome to the 'Monkey-House'.

Edited June 25, 2013 by Sgt.Squarehead

[jetboy]

Hi,again, how much lsd to create a radar return,...see you never read wot i rote?did you,there are things in the sky that we just dont know about yet?for instance t.l.e,s you would of thought i was barking if i told you 10 years ago there was huge transluscent jelly fish flying round above our heads,but there they are?also red sprites,elves and blue jets and trolls,we as humans have stranger things to find out yet,science is expanding?

But hey,we could all be barking.....cheers Don

[Sgt.Squarehead]

No.....I read it, I may not have understood it though.

[jetboy]

al right,they are not real jellyfish i know but they certainly look like them.?...cheers Don

[Sgt.Squarehead]

They also look quite a lot like bokeh.

I don't really want to discuss specifics of the UFO field, the cases or the sightings.....I'm more interested in the wider concept of what it is to be a (semi-)sapient species adrift in the infinite vastness of this universe and also the possibility that we are not alone in our journey and that we may never have been alone. .......

Edited June 25, 2013 by Sgt.Squarehead