Moontanman

So-called? Seriously?

Feel free to define it...

I think it should also be pointed out that ionizing radiation doesn't necessarily mean radioactivity or radioactive particles, EM is ionizing as well... and friction produces EM radiation... An object hitting the Earth at 18,000 mph would have to produce some intense friction...

I ask again, a little more directly, what would it take to confirm such a thing? On top of that even evolution by natural selection cannot be positively concluded, a great deal of that theory, until quite recently, was nothing but deductive reasoning yet it is the most well supported theory in science... Why simply wave away the problem of inexplicable UFO sightings? I am not of the opinion it was an alien space craft either... When i first heard of it I was young and a UFO nut and i still figured it was man made technology of some sort, these things can be sorted out as to likely explanations but not all of them fit the mold... Been there done that, I must have 100 rolls of undeveloped film, i most photographed nature, i tamed a wasps nest once just so i could take close ups of the mean little bastards but again i digress, but you will have to show that "most photographers" is sufficient to show there are no alien space craft visiting the earth... it is not... it is in fact not evidence of anything positive or negative... I am straw manning? You don't see the problem with asserting one unknown as an explanation for yet another unknown even in some cases to be a bit dishonest?

This topic is evidently being bandied about but the idea at this time is closer to pure speculation than reality according to this article. http://us.cnn.com/2013/01/24/opinion/caplan-neanderthal-baby/index.html?hpt=hp_c3 But if we can should we? Clone one? A small group? Could neanderthal DNA added back to our gene pool increase the over all fitness of the human race? Is there any defensible reason to do so? Would anyone even notice?

Thank you... thank you very much... I'll do my best to make sure you are among those executed in a painless and orderly manor when the alien over lords assume control... No, so far they have been a series of possibly related but unexplained phenomena that are being investigated... Far more evidence of UFOs exists than for Ball lightning yet ball lightning is assumed to be real enough to explain UFOs? Get real... Ball lightning is ok to speculate about, investigate, but UFOs are not worthy of consideration? That is a seriously weak argument...

Your assertion is falsified by the simple fact that liquid water does not mean we could live there and not being able to eat the local wild life is the least of our worries. A few percentage points differences in the minor gas constituents from Earth normal would be a deal breaker. In fact humans couldn't have lived on the earth 800 million years ago due to the differences in atmospheric gas, liquid water may indeed be a prerequisite for life but it doesn't guarantee we could live there. Ever see the movie Avatar?

By your own definition there can be no conformation of alien space craft because photos are not evidence , first had multiple reports are no good, radar contacts are no good so no condition other than a space craft landing on the white house lawn could possibly satisfy you. http://www.ufocasebook.com/Pineywoods.html Sam... this is simply horse feathers, a typical photographer? You are not making sense, what is a typical photographer and why would you expect them to be at the site of a UFO sighting? Ball lightning is a UFO... damn....

No one is asking you to bet, i am just asking you if you think it's right to simply wave away reports that cannot in all honesty be explained and to understand that the odds have nothing to do with the problem... you wave your arms i'll wave mine so much fun... Actually in this case it was deadly, the women and boy had been exposed to enough radiation to cause horrific problems with the woman who got out her car eventually dying... it wasn't paint... but it was probably a experimental aircraft of the US So all pictures are lens flares... Are you going to mention Hitler next? bTW Sam you invoked ball lightning to explain UFOs, invoking on mystery to solve yet another is a bit much don't you think? ,maybe ball lightning is alien probes... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

Sigh... you didn't buy it, you weren't looking for it was just there You do understand quite a bit of lotto money has been won that way, I'm not sure if it was ever the jackpot but it happens enough to make it worth your while to check. To be honest, in the spirit of full disclosure most of the military i am talking about was well before the current military we have now but since the government of the USA admitted to a spy satellite seeing the object or something odd in the same place that falsifies your assertion. sometimes it takes years to get out but they do get out. I will admit that many solved ufo cases have come out due to various military test vehicles, one UFO favorite of the true believers is the case where two woman and little boy witnessed a UFO surrounded by helicopters flying low over head, the ufo was leaking molten material and the women felt a huge wave of heat. only one had left the car but she had radiation sickness. The path the ufo had taken when it came close to the women was old pavement, with a few days all of it was dug up and replaced with new pavement. The women and the little boy were suffering to some degree with radiation sickness. The government has refused to acknowledge this happened... well they still do, Alien space craft or nuclear powered experimental aircraft? I don't assert that unexplained ufos are alien space craft, what i do know is the US government played an intense game of disinformation from the very beginning, people do come forward but their stories are so wild at first blush they can't be true... can they? it used to be a common claim from the debunkers that if these things were being covered up why hasn't anyone come forward? , then we find out that people have been coming forward, then we hear they must be cranks... Hummm I think there was a joke too, something about the government couldn't keep a secret in a bucket... Oh yes, i agree, that can't be disputed if you accept that paradigm... I do not... I have a little pet hypothesis that negates that problem. It is often said that if there are aliens... where are they? Fermi's paradox I think it's called. it is difficult to get through until you realize that for us to detect the earth from the nearest star would require we send a powerful signal directly at them other wise all the electronic noise gets absorbed by the interstellar medium. on two occasions strong signals have been received by radioscopes and they resembled a military radar but it was short lived and never repeated a prerequisite of any signal on it's way to being considered an alien signal. but the only signals of ours that could be easily received by an alien planet would be a random sweep of a military radar.. kinda makes you go hmmm. but anyway my theory says they are not only here they are everywhere... it has been said that even our civilization, maybe a few decades more advanced, could colonize the entire galaxy in a few million years. by constructing slow ships, generational ships designed to take hundreds if not thousands of years to get to another star but once they get there they have spent many generations living inside the space ship which would have evolved in design from artificial habitats used to colonize the ort cloud objects in their star system. i think space faring species evolve from species that colonize the most productive areas of their own star, once you have generations growing up inside huge rotating habitats using them to travel to another star taking many generations would seem to follow but they would colonize areas like asteroid belts and Kuiper belts and ort clouds, why bother with gravity wells when everything you need is all around you? i think their civilization will be based on carbon the way ours is based on steel. but i digress, just meandering about how i think this situation could have come about. but the galaxy is huge and so are ort clouds, ours stretches almost half way to the nearest star, i can see a very slow steady progression of stars being colonized in this manner and planets being ignored unless they held an emerging species, not all of then would care but there are always those specialists that want to track down the primitive tribe and study it. i think this might solve the ufo problem but unlike just a horse feathers story this can be falsified... I really thought WISE would show no infra red anomalies and i could go back to being... skeptical... I now know the WISE wasn't able to focus on such small objects that far away. so this hypothesis remains if for no other reason that it's better than ideas that violate the laws of physics and reason...

why did they not stop it way before it came close to earth or divert it?

Let me see if i get your logic correctly, there is a lottery, you know it's extremely unlikely any individual ticket is a winner but among all the possibilities you know there is a winner eventually. you are walking along and see a lottery ticket blowing by in the wind... since the likely hood that ticket is a winner is so outrageous you let the ticket blow by never even considering going after it? if you do pick it up do you throw it away because it's so worthless? Or do you look at it, determine which game it is and loot it up and see if it is a winner? Which person are you? And by the way, the odds thing you keep talking about is just as meaningless as asserting it as the source of life.... There is evidence, even militarys admit to this, a great deal of it is just silly, stuff that anyone with reasonable vision would see right away as an explainable probability. No one disputes this... Some of it is stuff that attracts your attention but it just can't be completely trusted ie Billy Joe Jim Bob and his cousin Earl were abducted by aliens while they were fishing, there was some odd radar traffic in the area but few make the connection and those that do are sure it was just false returns... A nothing story, a campfire tale... An unknown glowing object hovers over several under ground nuclear missile sites... The missiles shut down, there is widespread failure of equipment. the glowing object rises up and begins to show on radar, a passing B52 Bomber carrying Nuclear bombs which is scheduled to land at a nearby military base is rerouted to see what the object was, a civilian air liner in the area is also asked to report anything. The B52's radar picks up the object and records it on a tape. The pilots see the object estimated to be bigger than the bomber by a wide margin. The civilian airliner also picks up the object but they can't see it visually due to a cloud bank. Hoax? by your line of reasoning it has to be...

I do admit that the most reasonable explanation of some reports is some type of craft not of this world but I am willing to review new interpretations of the data as long as the proposed explanation is not impossible. ie slow meteors, super sonic pelicans ect... I think the subject deserves and requires serious scientific study not ridicule and derision... Assuming from the get go that the aliens explanation is impossible and shouldn't even be considered is simply wrong... every bit as wrong as ridiculing people who thought rocks fell from the sky...

It would all depend on the size of the impactor. The K/T extinction killed off 75% of all species. the Earth has been hit just as many times as the moon but erosion wipes out the evidence of craters on the earth the moon has no such erosion and bears it's scars for billions of years... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event There is some evidence of a multiple impact event and not just one...

The impact that supposedly killed the dinosaurs was orders of magnitude bigger than the explosion of Krakatoa...

Again, your long odds assertion is meaningless if aliens are really visiting us, you assert it like it is gospel but in fact there are reasonable explanations for UFOs being in our solar system that have nothing to do with us and don't require magical technology that defies the laws of physics. I don't want to assume anything but i don't want to drive a square peg into a round hole either... And ball lightning is poorly understood at best and has no supporting evidence other than what people say they saw... just because something is outside the conventional world view it doesn't mean it is horse feathers... No, even today such a large object capable of expending enough energy to travel that fast, hover, and accelerate away like that object did is beyond us even today... Sam, just because you haven't heard of UFOs from someplace other than the US doesn't mean they are not sighted all over the world, in fact all the places you mentioned have been the sites of a great many inexplicable UFO sightings... They have been seen all over the planet from pole to pole but pilots, scientists, law enforcement, and lots of ordinary people...

Sam, what was the object that was sighted in the Coyne helicopter case? what was it that hovered over the helicopter for several minutes and shown a green light into the cock pit, what was it that was seen by witnesses on the ground near the helicopter? what was it that caused the helicopter to gain altitude when it was in a dive? Philip J. Klass, the most famous UFO debunker said it was a slow moving meteor, do you think that's a reasonable explanation it was the best they had but was it reasonable?

Sam your "explanations" do hot hold water, they cannot be used to explain the really inexplicable cases, yes they explain the vast majority but not all. As i said before, ridicule does nothing to explain what is going on. there are no supersonic pelicans, no slow meteorites, and there are sightings that are simply inexplicable and not because of lack of data. Radar returns off physical objects that are viewed by multiple sources cannot be explained away by the things you assert. Did you bother to read the Iranian sighting? it was seen by a covert top secrete military surveillance satellite, something real is going on, I cannot yet assert what it is for sure but it deserves real investigation not ridicule...

that is not entirely accurate, there were many types of flying birds before the extinction event at the K/T boundary...

No Sam, you assume that UFOs have to be explainable in terrestrial terms, you think any answer is more likely than aliens no matter silly the answer is. there are no supersonic pelicans, no slow moving meteors, and sometimes there is an embarrassing amount of data but no answers that fit your narrow world view. Expand your mind but stay skeptical. Being skeptical doesn't mean rejecting everything but it does require that answers make sense in the light of the evidence... . If no answer makes sense despite the data then you say it's unknown, you don't desperately try to pound a square peg into a round hole because you can't let your self believe in round pegs... This UFO documentary is probably the best One I've ever seen, they cover the subject relatively neutral and go out of their way to point out the silly as well as the sublime. I recommend it for anyone with even a passing interest in UFOs...

I guess my mind just isn't flexible enough, it seems to be a time dilation problem not an actual distance problem...

No, but if it can't be explained hanging something flat out impossible on it as an explanation is not science... slow moving meteor my grandmas ass... I can live with "it's not explainable for now" but ridicule is not going to find a reasonable answer... This is a very good sighting, very difficult to explain... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Tehran_UFO_incident

I can't see your graphic but this one shows Venus as not always within and sometimes outside the habitable zone, the earth can be said to be very close to too close... i think that the idea that Ceres is part of the habitable zone is misleading due to the fact the habitable zone is geared toward a planet with an atmosphere... a planet that far away would have to have a very dense CO2 rich atmosphere to have liquid water. From your wiki link: A chart I can't show on here for some reason follows that data on the same site but it indicates that the Earth is far closer to a ragged edge than indicated by these illustrations and to have liquid water would mean significant changes to earths atmosphere... From your other wiki link: I know it's Fox news but... Venus may have been formed by a giant collision bigger than the one that formed the moon. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,334108,00.html

In 1950 yes... Seriously Sam, that picture has been subjected to more scientific scrutiny that is possible to represent... it was not a bird a weather balloon, a slow meteor, a frisby, a pie tin, or anything else explainable, it is simply inexplicable... He was a pilot, he flew that route routinely, he was aware of the distance, he used a watch to time them over a course he knew the distance of, between two mountain peaks, he estimation of 1800 mph disturbed him so much he cut it down to 1200 to adjust for possible error. he thought they were experimental aircraft from the US he was not a UFO nut, they were not super sonic pelicans... No one knows what they were but no reasonable explanation fits the observed facts. Now how about the Coyne helicopter incident? If anything it is even harder to explain...

that picture is actually a photo shopped picture of a high powered rifle bullet going through an apple, no connection what so ever to a neutron stars going through the earth, but as you say it is funny.. Ok that explains the discrepancy for some reason i had thought they were of comparable size.