[Dragon]

You'd be surprised how many crazy things both US and Soviet militaries researched during the Cold War. Also, a little known fact is that the UFO legends originally started as tales about secret military aircraft from either side, undoubtedly fueled by the fact there was indeed a load of secret planes flying about. It later morphed into alien stories, which was most likely quite convenient for the government.

[Flipside]

Well, the original 'Foo Fighters' were reported during WW2, but there was so much secret stuff going on, and so little understood about meteorology at the time that it's difficult to know where to classify those

[SpardaSon21]

Weather balloons.

[Flipside]

I must admit, one of the more amusing arguments from 'believers' is that "anyone who thinks we are alone in the Universe is a fool".

I don't think we are alone in the Universe, but like Arthur C Clarke and Carl Sagan, I just don't think they'd have any interest in coming here, and even if there were scientific missions coming to Earth they would have to be phenomenally incompetent to place huge banks of glowing lights on vessels that are trying to remain hidden

[Dragon]

Weather balloons.

That, or nuke detection balloons. That's what actually crashed at Roswell, and I wouldn't be surprised if the whole UFO story was at some point maintained by the government in order to lure Soviet agents away from the project. In fact, I guess most of "alien" sightings are either the likes of this or a hoax(or just a natural phenomenon or normal aircraft seen from an odd perspective and in weird lighting).

I also don't think we're alone in the universe, but only in some definitions of "alone". Aliens are more likely to resemble The Solaris, or beings behind the Master's Voice rather than Vasudans or anything from Star Trek.

[Nuke]

I must admit, one of the more amusing arguments from 'believers' is that "anyone who thinks we are alone in the Universe is a fool".

I don't think we are alone in the Universe, but like Arthur C Clarke and Carl Sagan, I just don't think they'd have any interest in coming here, and even if there were scientific missions coming to Earth they would have to be phenomenally incompetent to place huge banks of glowing lights on vessels that are trying to remain hidden

i have an easier time believing in the existence of aliens, but i have a really hard time believing that aliens have figured out how to pull off ftl travel. i kinda figure all travel will be done with generation ships. or perhaps use cryogenics. aliens may have anatomy that allows them to be frozen without damage, like certain frogs and insects which can survive winter freezing. an intelligent species may have these traits, or at least a firm understanding of biological engineering. perhaps they can extend their life span to survive a 100+ year trip from system to system and back. the question of course is why. science can be done with robots, as can scouting for candidate planets for colonization. and if i was an alien sending ships to scout a planet, i certainly wouldn't put big glowey lights on them and make them zigzag through the atmospheres of planets with intelligent life, especially if you intended to move in on such intelligent life. they would send mostly hard to spot hardware similar to our spy satellites, with passive sensors, which we would likely mistake for small space debris.

[Mongoose]

One also wonders why intelligent extraterrestrial life would be so engaged by the lower GI tract of humans.

[Nuke]

thats more a southern thing, reliving childhood trauma perhaps.

[Dragon]

I must admit, one of the more amusing arguments from 'believers' is that "anyone who thinks we are alone in the Universe is a fool".

I don't think we are alone in the Universe, but like Arthur C Clarke and Carl Sagan, I just don't think they'd have any interest in coming here, and even if there were scientific missions coming to Earth they would have to be phenomenally incompetent to place huge banks of glowing lights on vessels that are trying to remain hidden

i have an easier time believing in the existence of aliens, but i have a really hard time believing that aliens have figured out how to pull off ftl travel. i kinda figure all travel will be done with generation ships. or perhaps use cryogenics. aliens may have anatomy that allows them to be frozen without damage, like certain frogs and insects which can survive winter freezing. an intelligent species may have these traits, or at least a firm understanding of biological engineering. perhaps they can extend their life span to survive a 100+ year trip from system to system and back. the question of course is why. science can be done with robots, as can scouting for candidate planets for colonization. and if i was an alien sending ships to scout a planet, i certainly wouldn't put big glowey lights on them and make them zigzag through the atmospheres of planets with intelligent life, especially if you intended to move in on such intelligent life. they would send mostly hard to spot hardware similar to our spy satellites, with passive sensors, which we would likely mistake for small space debris.

Consider that they might simply live long enough for the 10-year flight to seem like a blink of an eye, or be able to naturally hibernate, assuming this concept would even apply to them. Space travel could be perfectly natural and pretty easy to them, sort of like flying an airplane for humans. It's unreasonable to expect human problems with space travel would apply to aliens.
IMHO, the most realistic approach to aliens distances itself from everything that makes aliens resemble humans. They'll be from a different planet, evolved in different conditions and most likely only fit the most basic definition of life. They might be able to use tools, and have their own kind of intelligence, but concept such as "civilization" or "technology" as understood by humans might be completely alien to them, just like their concepts to us. Stanislaw Lem did it really well in Solaris, and in Master's Voice he explores a very realistic (though a bit depressing) approach to the first contact. The Ocean in Solaris is really alien and it tries to establish some sort of communication with humans in a way it's familiar with (at least, that how I understood it), and the humans try to communicate with using their own ways. The result?

Spoiler:

A bunch of insane scientists and a library of rather useless books about Solaris on the Human side and a... reaction on the Ocean's side, with we can't even understand.

[Enzo03]

I'm scared.

I read the part in the article about defending against alien invaders.

And I think my IQ dropped a few points.  I'm probably no longer over 140.

I'm scared.

[Nuke]

I must admit, one of the more amusing arguments from 'believers' is that "anyone who thinks we are alone in the Universe is a fool".

I don't think we are alone in the Universe, but like Arthur C Clarke and Carl Sagan, I just don't think they'd have any interest in coming here, and even if there were scientific missions coming to Earth they would have to be phenomenally incompetent to place huge banks of glowing lights on vessels that are trying to remain hidden

i have an easier time believing in the existence of aliens, but i have a really hard time believing that aliens have figured out how to pull off ftl travel. i kinda figure all travel will be done with generation ships. or perhaps use cryogenics. aliens may have anatomy that allows them to be frozen without damage, like certain frogs and insects which can survive winter freezing. an intelligent species may have these traits, or at least a firm understanding of biological engineering. perhaps they can extend their life span to survive a 100+ year trip from system to system and back. the question of course is why. science can be done with robots, as can scouting for candidate planets for colonization. and if i was an alien sending ships to scout a planet, i certainly wouldn't put big glowey lights on them and make them zigzag through the atmospheres of planets with intelligent life, especially if you intended to move in on such intelligent life. they would send mostly hard to spot hardware similar to our spy satellites, with passive sensors, which we would likely mistake for small space debris.

Consider that they might simply live long enough for the 10-year flight to seem like a blink of an eye, or be able to naturally hibernate, assuming this concept would even apply to them. Space travel could be perfectly natural and pretty easy to them, sort of like flying an airplane for humans. It's unreasonable to expect human problems with space travel would apply to aliens.
IMHO, the most realistic approach to aliens distances itself from everything that makes aliens resemble humans. They'll be from a different planet, evolved in different conditions and most likely only fit the most basic definition of life. They might be able to use tools, and have their own kind of intelligence, but concept such as "civilization" or "technology" as understood by humans might be completely alien to them, just like their concepts to us. Stanislaw Lem did it really well in Solaris, and in Master's Voice he explores a very realistic (though a bit depressing) approach to the first contact. The Ocean in Solaris is really alien and it tries to establish some sort of communication with humans in a way it's familiar with (at least, that how I understood it), and the humans try to communicate with using their own ways. The result?

Spoiler:

A bunch of insane scientists and a library of rather useless books about Solaris on the Human side and a... reaction on the Ocean's side, with we can't even understand.

ive seen the original solaris as well as the ****ty remake. kind of an ok-ish movie though i doubt thats how alien life would be. you dont just get a planet-scale intelligence out of nothing. you might get a different chemical makeup, you might have other temperature bands where life may exist, and it may exist at different time scales, but if you look at it you would be able to define it as a life form on the spot. all you need to fuel an evolutionary process is something that can self replicate in an environment that makes survival difficult. it just takes the most basic of organisms to spark the whole process. as for what can come out of that process, that depends on the variables. but it will take a very large number iterations of life forms to develop an intelligence, and when you do you will still have other less evolved life forms around it, also once you have life in an environment, it tends to go everywhere it can.

as for how to identify or communicate with intelligent life, then things get tricky. use of tools is probibly not the best way to judge intelligence. an ape will use tools because it can, and it helps them survive. a dolphin or whale may be smarter than an ape, but because it cant use tools or perhaps doing so is not proactive to their survival. technology is an extension of tool making, again is toolmaking necessary to survival? if not you probibly wont see much in terms of technology either. self awareness? as with tools many animal species are self aware. communication? many animal species communicate, through varying degrees of audible and visual cues. so thats not really a sign of intelligence. we simply have more information to communicate. we dont really have a solid means to identify that which is intelligent. we could perhaps look for development of abstract concepts like mathematics, science, philosophy, religion, etc in other species, but would we recognize it as such?

[Flipside]

Just a thought, we should delineate between 'Unidentified Flying Objects' and 'Alien Space Ship'.

I wonder how fervent people would be if they were an 'ASS Expert' or were 'Looking for an ASS'

[headdie]

Just a thought, we should delineate between 'Unidentified Flying Objects' and 'Alien Space Ship'.

I wonder how fervent people would be if they were an 'ASS Expert' or were 'Looking for an ASS'

sounds like a handy expertise

[Nuke]

ive never considered the term ufo to mean aliens. if you see an object flying around, and cant identify it, its a ufo, even if you saw an actual alien space craft it would still be a ufo because you cannot identify something as something that you've never seen before. i dont know what an alien space ship looks like, its not like a b29 or a 747, which id recognize right off the bat. it could just as easily have been a piece of falling space junk or a lost parade balloon for that matter. i remember seeing a triangular aircraft when i was 5, we were swimming at a pool near palm springs in california, it was triangular and flied kinda wonky. i later learned that it was an f117. but because that was the late 80s noone knew what an f117 looked like back then. so any object that is flying, which you cannot identify is a ufo. identifying a new object is an exercise for the imagination, and a matter of closer examination for those of reason.

[redsniper]

Yeah, but F-117s were built using alien tech, durrrr.

[Legate Damar]

Yeah, but F-117s were built using alien tech, durrrr.

Incredibly cheap knock-offs

[redsniper]

Come on man. I asked nicely.

[Mikes]

"Communist Ufos" must have been ten times as scary as "regular" Ufos to the top brass back in the day. lol.

 As far as Alien Invasions go... there really is only one viable scenario: Aliens with easy access to intergalactic starships, virtually unlimited production capabilities and... most importantly, a wierd twisted sense of humor and a tendency for sarcasm as humans understand the terms as well as some masochistic tendency to indulge the puny human military's wet dreams. They will propably also abduct people to probe their anus because that's what people expect proper aliens to do, right?


But I do get the talk about alien invasions...   it's a perfect excuse for saber rattling and it's more political correct to talk about killing some imaginary aliens that no one can relate to with our l33t awesome military hardware (Booyeah look at those jets and missiles!!), than to talk about killing people from other nations or people with other beliefs or people with ressources we want to have.



P.S.: Here's an article by the same author: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2137449/The-real-life-X-Files-Meet-people-abducted-aliens.html  uh, yeah.
They be smoking some good stuff at the daily mail

[Nuke]

we should embrace our warlike nature and invade the aliens first.

[Legate Damar]

we should embrace our warlike nature and invade the aliens first.

Try it and we'll make what we did to Bajor look like Risa compared to what we'll do to you.