Aliens: As in extra terrestrial life:

[beecee]

UFO sightings! There have been literally thousands of them!! While around 95% have been explained by weird weather phenomena, military aircraft of sorts, refraction/reflection of light, cloud formations, sprites, vivid imaginations, hallucinations, illusions, skullduggery and trickery etc, there is that lingering 5% that remained unexplained.

Have we been visited by Aliens? The best we can say is that at this time, we have no convincing evidence to show earth has been visited or that any life actually exists off this earth at all.

In saying that, let me state that I firmly accept that life off this Earth, must exist at some time and/or in some other place. The extent of the universe...the content, the billions of billions of stars, and even more planets...the stuff of life being everywhere we have looked.    One of mankind's greatest unanswered question is "are we alone": Most scientists I'm pretty sure would answer that with no, with the proviso that at this point in time, we still do not have any evidence for any existence of extra terrestrial life from of this Earth.

But to say that Aliens have visited Earth, to claim that a UFO is of Alien origins, to accept that Earth people have been kidnapped and anally probed by these Alien beings, is by any standards an Amazing, extraordinary claim. And as such requires amazing, extraordinary evidence. eg: Parts of a space ship or Saucer, a tool that is alien to us, excreta or other body parts/waste. The so called crop circles, the lights in the sky, etc, no matter how bizzare   is just not good enough to accept as evidence of Aliens.

Perhaps Aliens have visited Earth. but we can never really be certain. But I ask myself, if that was true, and Aliens had visited Earth at some time, obviously they would be far in advance of us. So they would have no reason to be afraid of us. They would not really want of anything, as everything found on Earth is found elsewhere, particularly that very common stuff we call water. Why are they coming, just flittering in and then flittering out again? Why don't they land on the forecourts of the Sydney Opera House, or the lawns of Westminster castle, or on the White House lawns in the US? I certainly do not agree with one top notch scientist I admire tremendously Professor Stephen Hawking with regards to aggression. I like to believe that the more advanced we are, and the  knowledge gained, the less chance of any aggressive "Klingon" like nature.

Have I ever seen a UFO? Yep, about 25 years ago when I was driving along the shores of Botany Bay in Sydney. I saw a slow moving blue disk, about the apparent size of the Sun, low on the distant horizon. It lasted for around 5 seconds before dipping below the horizon. I went home, went to bed thinking about it and wondering what do do. I arose next morning, put on the news and brought the paper....no headlines, no mention of Earth being invaded, nothing, zilch, nada. I thought about it a bit more and simply put it down to one of those unexplained things. I did not jump to any conclusions re Aliens, even though one of my greatest wishes before I kick the bucket, would be for the verification and validation of ETL off this Earth. 

It is encouraging though that SETI and many other scientists are now confident that the required extraordinary evidence may be found within the next decade. Europa and Enceladus stand out as possible habitats for possible basic life forms right in our own system.   

So ending on that score, I implore any Aliens out there who may have access to our Internet, and possibly this forum, please! make yourself know to us! Stop hiding and playing games! I know you're there,                                           

Edited March 1, 2018 by beecee

[Moontanman]

Bullwinkle is an alien! No really, UFOs are are a subject of considerable or at least questionable debate. 

Before we really go down this road we should decide how much evidence would be required to justify a scientific study. Some studies have been done but to say they were highly questionable is putting it mildly. To a great extent the USAF is directly responsible for this area of study to be questionable and ridiculed by the scientific community. 

How ever the main or most famous study "The Condon Report" has been poked full of holes the often touted reason for this was the total lack of scientific rigor applied and the assumption from the beginning there was nothing to the phenomena. 

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Low memo controversy[edit]

In July 1967, James E. McDonald, a confirmed believer in the validity of UFO sightings, learned from a Committee member about a memo Low had written on August 9, 1966, in which he reassured two University of Colorado administrators that they could expect the study to demonstrate that UFO observations had no basis in reality.[15]McDonald, after locating a copy of the memo in the project's open files, wrote to Condon, quoting a few lines from it.[2]

In response to the memo, on April 30, 1968, NICAP severed its ties with the Committee and Keyhoe circulated copies of Low's memo. Press coverage included an article in the May 1968 issue of Look, "Flying Saucer Fiasco", that presented interviews with Saunders and Levine, detailed the controversy, and described the project as a "$500,000 trick."[16] Condon responded that the article contained "falsehoods and misrepresentations."[17] Scientific and technical journals reported the controversy.[18]Representative J. Edward Roush said the Look article raised "grave doubts as to the scientific profundity and objectivity of the project."[19] He held a hearing dominated by critics of the Project.[20] Low resigned from the Project in May 1968.[21]

Some later critics of the Committee's work saw little reason to make much of the memo. Committee member David Saunders wrote that "to present Low as a plotter or conspirator is unfair and hardly accurate."[22] Project investigator Roy Craig's later wrote that the memo did not trouble him because Condon had not known of the Low memo for eighteen months and it did not reflect his views.[23] Condon wrote in the Project's Final Report that the memo's description of the Project as emphasizing the "psychology and sociology" of those who report UFO sightings showed how completely Low misunderstood the Project when he wrote the memo.[24]

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Principal critics[edit]

Astronomer J. Allen Hynek wrote that "The Condon Report settled nothing."[4] He called Condon's introduction "singularly slanted" and wrote that it "avoided mentioning that there was embedded within the bowels of the report a remaining mystery; that the committee had been unable to furnish adequate explanations for more than a quarter of the cases examined."[4] Hynek contended that "Condon did not understand the nature and scope of the problem" he was studying[4] and objected to the idea that only extraterrestrial life could explain UFO activity. By focusing on this hypothesis, he wrote, the Report "did not try to establish whether UFOs really constituted a problem for the scientist, whether physical or social."[4]

Astrophysicist Peter A. Sturrock wrote that "critical reviews...came from scientists who had actually carried out research in the UFO area, while the laudatory reviews came from scientists who had not carried out such research."[49] As an example, Sturrock noted a case in which an allegedly supersonic UFO did not produce a sonic boom. He notes that "we should not assume that a more advanced civilization could not find some way at traveling with supersonic speeds without producing a sonic boom."[50]

The truth of the matter is still an unknown and may always be unknown but there are sighting that suffer from an absolute embarrassment of data that still have no probable explanation. The most unusual case for me is the 1952 Washington, DC "merry go round" case. 

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Publicity and Air Force reaction[edit]

The sightings of July 19–20, 1952, made front-page headlines in newspapers around the nation. A typical example was the headline from the Cedar Rapids Gazette in Iowa. It read "SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL" in large black type.[8] By coincidence, USAF Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the supervisor of the Air Force's Project Blue Book investigation into UFO sightings, was in Washington at the time. However, he did not learn about the sightings until Monday, July 21, when he read the headlines in a Washington-area newspaper.[9] After talking with intelligence officers at the Pentagon about the sightings, Ruppelt spent several hours trying to obtain a staff car so he could travel around Washington to investigate the sightings, but was refused as only generals and senior colonels could use staff cars. He was told that he could rent a taxicab with his own money; by this point Ruppelt was so frustrated that he left Washington and flew back to Blue Book's headquarters at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio.[10] Upon returning to Dayton, Ruppelt spoke with an Air Force radar specialist, Captain Roy James, who felt that unusual weather conditions could have caused the unknown radar targets.[11]

Many independent witnesses both military and civilian saw the phenomena as did multiple radars both civilian and military. 

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Criticisms of the Air Force explanation[edit]

Almost from the moment of General Samford's press conference, eyewitnesses, UFO researchers, and Air Force personnel came forward to criticize the temperature inversion/mirage explanation. Captain Ruppelt noted that Major Fournet and Lt. Holcomb, who disagreed with the Air Force's explanation, were not in attendance at Samford's press conference. Ruppelt himself discovered that "hardly a night passed in June, July, and August in 1952 that there wasn't a [temperature] inversion in Washington, yet the slow-moving, solid radar targets appeared on only a few nights."[25]

According to a story printed by INS, the United States Weather Bureau also disagreed with the temperature inversion hypothesis, one official stating that "such an inversion ordinarily would appear on a radar screen as a steady line, rather than as single objects as were sighted on the airport radarscope."

Also, according to Ruppelt, when he was able to interview the radar and control tower personnel at Washington National Airport, not a single person agreed with the Air Force explanation. Michael Wertheimer, a researcher for the government-funded Condon Report, investigated the case in 1966. He found that the radar witnesses still disputed the Air Force explanation, but that did not stop the report from agreeing with the temperature inversion/mirage explanation.[30] Ruppelt related that on July 27 the control tower at Washington National had called the control tower at Andrews AFB and notified them that their radar had an unknown object just south of the Andrews control tower, directly over the Andrews AFB radio range station. According to Ruppelt, when the Andrews control tower personnel looked they all saw "a huge fiery-orange sphere" hovering over the range station.[7] When Ruppelt interviewed the tower personnel several days later, they insisted that they had been mistaken and had merely seen a bright star. However, when Ruppelt checked an astronomical chart he found that there were no bright stars over the station that night, and that he had "heard from a good source that the tower men had been 'persuaded' a bit" by superior officers to claim that their sighting was merely a star.[24]

There were also witnesses who claimed to see structured craft and not merely "glows" or bright lights. On July 19 an Army artillery officer, Joseph Gigandet, was sitting on the front porch of his home in Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington. At 9:30 p.m. he claimed to see "a red cigar-shaped object" which sailed slowly over his house. Gigandet estimated the object's size as comparable to a DC-7 airplane at about 10,000 feet altitude; he also claimed that the object had a "series of lights very closely set together" on its sides. The object eventually flew back over his house a second time, which led Gigandet to assume that it was circling the area.[31] When the object flew away a second time, it turned a deeper red color and moved over the city of Washington itself; this occurred less than two hours before Edward Nugent first spotted the unknown objects on his radar at Washington National.[31] Dr. James E. McDonald, a physicist at the University of Arizona and a prominent ufologist in the 1960s, did his own analysis of the Washington sightings, including speaking with four pilots and five radar personnel who were involved with the 1952 Washington incident.[32] McDonald discussed his conclusions before the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the US House of Representatives. He told the committee that the temperature inversion theory used to explain the unknown radar traces was "quite untenable" and that, in his opinion, the 1952 Washington UFO incident was "an instance of unidentified aerial objects over our Capital."[33] Howard Cocklin, who was interviewed by McDonald about the incident, told a Washington Post reporter in 2002 that he was still "convinced that he saw an object over Washington National...I saw it on the [radar] screen and out the window...it was a whitish-blue object. Not a light - a solid form...a saucer-shaped object."[3]

Still there are people on both sides who say the other is wrong or exaggerated. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertson_Panel

https://www.gaia.com/article/1952-washington-dc-ufo-incident-explained

https://science.howstuffworks.com/space/aliens-ufos/ufo-government5.htm

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As papers, politicians, and public clamored for answers, the Air Force hosted the biggest press conference in history. A transcript shows that the spokesperson engaged in what amounted to double-talk, but the reporters, desperate for something to show their editors, picked up on Capt. Roy James' off-the-cuff suggestion that temperature inversions had caused the radar blips. James, a UFO skeptic, had arrived in Washington only that morning and had not participated in the ongoing investigation.

Nonetheless, headlines across the country echoed the sentiments expressed in the Washington Daily News: "SAUCER" ALARM DISCOUNTED BY PENTAGON; RADAR OBJECTS LAID TO COLD AIR FORMATIONS. This "explanation" got absolutely no support from those who had seen the objects either in the air or on the radar screens, and the U.S. Weather Bureau, in a little-noted statement, rejected the theory. In fact, the official Air Force position, which it had successfully obscured, was that the objects were "unknowns."

The 1952 Washington sighting suffers from both sides cherry picking the data to support their case. There are people in the scientific community that have supported the need for study and even supported the ET hypothesis.

I think the entire phenomena is interesting if for no other reason the "modern mythology"  aspects and the "me too" phenomena people seem to ascribe to. But to say it is all bunk or that aliens are definitely visiting us cannot be supported in any meaningful way. On the other hand no really scientific study has ever been done and the studies that have been done were by people or groups with an axe to grind on both sides of the issue. 

Edited March 1, 2018 by Moontanman