Do you believe?

"I don't believe in ghosts, but have a ghost story."

I was on the island of Tinian, in the CNMI, training with my light infantry unit. This island saw a pretty fair size battle when liberated in 1944. The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan were loaded on the bombers there.

Over the course of a couple nights on the island we continued to hear bolts sliding forward on rifles, safety's being switched off, whispers, snickers, things you may or may not hear around soldiers. Someone would always blame someone else about noise discipline and everyone accused would deny it was them.

One night I was scouting some lines when I came back to the main area where people were sleeping. The whole place was in total chaos. People I trusted swore they woke up to find themselves being carried off by three or four people. One man was crying, happy to be alive, believing that he had been bayoneted. Almost everyone frantic that they had been under attack by people in the area, pulled from their place of rest. None of the sentrys spotted anyone coming or going from our area. A call in to Command Center confirmed we were alone and off harassment status.

The next morning at the Command Center, the news got back to the hire ups. I was there. The XO (executive officer) mentioned he got up to take a leak and didn't hear anything around that time of night. One of the OPFOR (Opposing Force) guys who was out all night came in to report and get a cup of coffee. He over heard the XO mention the potty break and remarked, "Yessir, good thing you had your security team with you. You were almost pissing on my gilly suit. If you'd have been alone, I'd have taken you out."

The XO said, "I was alone. I don't have a security team." After a few moments of silence, everyone sort of went their own way and there was no more 'odd' doings the rest of the time there.

I don't believe in ghost, but I got a ghost story all right.

How about you guys? Every witness something unexplainable in the back country?

out in the back country, old lighthouses, ships, everywhere

While out on a trail testing nightvision equipment a friend and I had a weird experience. With a thermographic camera I caught a massive mountain lion looking thing walking along with us on a ledge above. I asked my friend "What the ** is that?" and directed him to look at the cat (the size of a brown bear). He looked with a light amplification scope and saw nothing.

I didn't believe him so we swapped and sure enough there was nothing in the visible spectrum (we were only testing one thermographic camera). The ?lion? kept walking along and we both clearly saw it. I had the presence of mind to record and we played it back again and again and sure enough it was there (or its heat was)

Let's forget about it being invisible (there was nothing visible even in clearings)...that aside... the region I was in has nothing like that. I grew up in the area and I've never even heard of anything like that. I just can't explain it and to this day it sits there just kind of tickling my version of reality. If there wasn't a witness I think I would have totally dismissed it -even with the recording.

The ?lion? type thing eventually walked away and we weren't the least bit alarmed (just VERY confused) as there wasn't a hope in hell of seeing any sort of lion in this area as it is the wrong ecosystem and surrounded by city....that and again, the invisible thing really let us feel calm

I later saw some "ghost hunters" who used a thermographic camera and did catch ghosts on it. I wonder if what we saw was a ghost of a cat. No offense to cats, but that's pretty lame. That's like the greatest ghost you see in your life being a bug or something. At least it wasn't terrifying!

That's all! Put another log on the fire and tell your own experience.

-NIM

Hi Comms,

Thats why my ETS name is Am Fear Liath Mor....

Several friends of mine have seen and fired upon big cats in the Arkansas state area. Many people have seen big cats (mostly black panther types) in the woods.

No one knows how many "idiots" throughout the world have gotten imported animals when they were young and then released them when they got bigger than the apt that they were living in.

That's how come there are "crocogators" in Florida now.

I've seen enough to know that with my science and engineering background that what we know is the iceberg of existence. Anyone who says we can explain it all isn't paying attention, even if we can explain the majority.

Sleeping (or trying to) in a tent one night, high in the Sierra Nevada Mtns, we (there were two of us) heard something large and fast run by, right next to the tent. Next morning, look as we might, no tracks of any kind in the soft dirt...

Nope. There is no credible evidence of ghosts, spirits, angels, deities.

Humans are used to sound and light acting in a predictable linear fashion. Mostly it does. At least it does under normal conditions and within our expected range.

Other times both sound and light have surprising quirks.

One of the local 'lover's lanes' where I used to live was on the side of a slight hill near a swamp where the wind came in off the water. At that location the sound of a concert in a stadium over a half mile away could be heard quite clearly. So loud and clear that sitting in car with the windows down you, if you didn't know better, swear that you were parked in the stadium. The kids who couldn't afford the cost of a concert ticket would go park. In some ways it was better than actually going to the concert. You could bring your favorite intoxicants, there wasn't any crowd, security or parking hassles, you could get a little squeeze and the night sky over the water was as good as any light show.

People during the civil war noted similar situations where sound would carry and concentrate at certain locations. Battles miles away would sound like they were right there. It was sometimes called acoustic lensing and it believed to be caused by differences of air density, moisture content, wind and the landscape causing the sounds to bend and concentrate.

Light is also subject to being bent, combined, recombined and distorted. Mirages are the result. Lights can appear to be much closer than they really are. They can also be made to seem to 'wander'.

Of course, there are many details of light, sound and the rest of the EM spectrum that are pretty much impossible to nail down in anything but a tightly controlled environment. And many things we have incomplete knowledge of. That isn't to say not knowing implies the existence of spirits or supernatural forces or entities.

So far the evidence for anything resembling the supernatural is completely unconvincing.

This is only made more unconvincing because humans are remarkably poor observers and are both highly suggestible and subject to memory drift. Numerous studies have demonstrated just how poor recorders we really are.

I have always believed in life in other worlds (UFO's) probably because my father claims to have seen one as a young man and because the universe is so vast. But it was not until fairly recently that I started to believe in this parallel dimension / time-shift sort of stuff. I had an occurence with "something" that I cannot explain, but like NIM mentioned, I was not afraid of it at all. I was alone at the time except for the family cat, and the cat also reacted to it; I have no answers.

Mike

Art in Fl wrote
'Nope. There is no credible evidence of ghosts, spirits, angels, deities'

Of course you are right. But what good does that do me when the nephews want terrifying with stories around the camp fire?
Keep em coming folks!
The Sock

I'm sorry, but this is one of my pet peeves. Unidentified Flying Object means exactly that -- unidentified. By calling it an alien you are claiming to have identified it. I would like to know how you make the huge leap from "I don't know what it is" to "it's an alien."

Patient named Bill came into the ER via ambulance, chief complaint ventricular fibrillation, defibrillated successfully at scene by shock, and 4 more times en route. During the ER stay, he fibrillated 6 more times, before banging him with the paddles for third time, I said, to myself and to the code team, " Dammit, Bill, knock it off!" He promptly converted to a healthy rhythm. He converted from fib to healthy rhythm 3 more times on verbal command.

This is not supposed to happen.

We transferred him to ICU.He was not talking during the ambulance and er segments of the stay, but woke up in the ICU. and I looked in on him a couple of days later. He said that he had heard me calling him back each time, and reported experiencing the 'walk toward the light' phenomenon. He continued to be fibrillate periodically, and died after a 5 day ICU stay.

Ghost story? Dunno. Ironraven says it best.

Hi CBGW,

I agree with your comment on UFO's.

What my father (and his friend) claims to have seen in the early 1950's is a circular metal object with flashing lights on it. It settled over a railway yard in a small southern Ontario town, then flew away so fast it was like it disappeared.

The reason he believes it was from another world is because he has no earthly explanation for it?

Mike

My buddy and I were sitting about 400 yards into JaR cave near Mt. Adams middday. We were taking a break from climbing over the big break down boulders. The cave is one in a series of long lava tubes from a flow several thousand years back. We turned off our flashlights to conserve, as light was unnecessary for communication. About 7 minutes into the break, I notice a dimly flickering light downhole about 70 feet or so. The rough lava really sucks up the lumens, and the light was initially so dim I thought my eyes were maybe a little screwball, so I asked my buddy if he could see it. After a moment, he confirmed it wasn't just me, so we wondered if maybe someone else was in the cave ahead of us and coming back our way. We sat and watched the light flicker and dance on the walls of the cave, noting that it didn't seem to be getting any closer or farther from us, nor changing in average intensity. After a couple minutes of this, we decided to hail the other spelunkers, and shouted out a greeting, but got no response. We did it again, and the light went out. We decided someone was playing around with us, so we turned on our flashlights and proceeded down the cave.

After about 10 minutes, we'd traveled another couple hundred yards or so, and encountered no one, nor found any sign of any other activity. We decided to turn off our lights and sit in the dark again and see if we could detect the light. As we sat there in the dark, looking ahead of us, we saw nothing. I turned back to my friend, and noticed a faint flutter of light over his shoulder. It was the same sort of light we saw before, but now it was behind us. I told him to look to confirm, and when he did, we both got real quiet. The light was a dim yellow, and danced like a candle flame in a gentle breeze. We were perplexed.

We decided to creep back to the light in the dark, which is not easy because you can't see where you are going and the breakdown is as bad as jetty rock, so it is slow going. As soon as we started back out the cave, the light quit. We stopped and waited for about 15 minutes, but the light did not return. We turned on our lights and proceeded to where we figured the light was, and sat with our lights off again, but no more light returned.

What you have to understand about these caves is that they are a very sterile environment. Basically it is a hollow lava tube 40 feet or so under the ground running more or less in parallel with the surface. The temperature is around 40 degrees, and the humidity is saturated, with water almost continously dripping from the roof. The mineral content of the soil is very poor, so leaching is practically non-existent, except for the occasional silica nodules hanging an inch or so down off the roof. Bats will occupy space near the threshold where outside atmosphere penetrates enough, but past 50 feet or so, nothing dwells in there, no plants, no animals, no insects. No one we've talked to in the grotto (a spelunking group or club in the region) has ever seen any sign of life beyond the threshold area, and certainly nothing that self luminates. Likewise, our examination of the area in the cave where we felt the lightsource must have been revealed nothing that would lead us to believe an ambient light source was present.

We never saw the flickering light in that or any other cave in the system since then, though we've been downhole dozens of times. We concluded that whatever made that light wasn't something you would expect to find in the cave, and never returned.

Absolutely.

I would cite to the wisdom of Socrates, in claiming to know nothing. "[W]hereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know."

And as far as the original question, Yes. Not sure if i can say ghosts are real or not, but I believe there are things that science as we consider it, cannot explain.

There was a time when people had no earthly explanation for lightning, and so they dreamed up some story about Thor's Hammer.



Following along the same line of thought as others in this thread:

Science doesn't claim to know everything. On the contrary, the scientific endeavor is to learn more than what we currently know. And an important part of the scientific method is not to reach conclusions without sufficient evidence.

The question, then, becomes a philosophical one, that being in the absence of empirical evidence, can a person accept the notion that reality is something other than what can be proven or disproven. Our existence, for the most part, seems divided between what we all can agree through consistent measure is real, and what we individually accept as the most likely explanation at the time for things we cannot consistently measure. The lure of such shows as ghost hunter, in search of, and all the other metaphysical inquiries have at least some basis in science, even if the conclusions reached by some remain quite speculative. Even in science there is a certain amount of creative, subjective influence in order for new discoveries to even be considered. For instance, is the currently accepted explanation of the existence of black holes the only explanation? Of course not, but for now it makes the most sense. Eventually technology will develop to the point where the reality of black holes can be more solidly measured, confirmed, and explained. Likewise, the notion of the atom is something we can still only experience indirectly, lacking the means to verifiably study such small particles through direct observation. We can do the math that establishes the likelihood that such phenomena are as we describe them, but again, it is not the only explanation, and often times future events serve to redefine our original notions and thus improve our understanding of our own existence in some small way.

Back in high school I was confronted with a most Socratic assertion; that being what is the proportion of the sum total of mankind's knowledge to date in relation to all that can be known? The logical conclusion being that mankind's current knowledgebase is relatively insignificant when compared to all knowledge. Therefore, in the vast amount of information not presently available to us, there must exist the knowledge of a reality we can barely even imagine in the slightest amount (even if your surname is Serling). Therefore, to say our existence is somehow limited by the breadth of only what we know in our lifetime is to discount all the possibilities of what our existence could be, while simultaneously affirming that we can never become more than what we can hope to know while we are alive.

Yes, that is what is called a paradox. Such is the essence of mortality.

If you really want to be scared, learn more science. Link is screwy. At this page click on the subject titled "Stop", third row down, far right side.

There a whole lot of spookiness in what we DO know.

-Blast

Uh, Blast, that page says that the universe appears to be fine-tuned, almost, shall we say, designed by someone?

I think we have a name for that someone.

Anyone?

Anyone?

My name for that entity is: God.

This statement in no way places any limitations on the methodology that God uses or the logic that he/she employs, or the time system that he/she utilizes. Furthermore, my affiliation with my God is strictly in the Request and Thankfulness departments of his organization of which said organization remains unknown to myself although others may claim to have an inside template of it all.

For the record, I feel that what we do know (facts), are but 1 grain of sand when compared to all of the grains of sand that make up this Biological Entity that we refer to as: Earth

Same here. The more I learn the more I Believe. After accepting an electron is both a particle and a wave Catholic doctrines are easy.

-Blast

Speculation is fine. It's impossible to go through life without guessing. But what you shouldn't do is make the leap from speculation to conclusion without the evidence to support it.

A scientist will often say "I think" or "This could be." But he/she cannot say "I know" until it is proven.

This is a good site with photos of abandoned mental hospitals. Most interesting thing is that many of them were self-sustaining facilities at one time with things like a barbershop, morgue, dental office, etc. Some images are downright creepy.


http://www.darkpassage.com/hopscotch.htm

There are vast area of reality that are unexplored. There are even things we simply can't know. Anyone interested might profit from a review of "Heisenberg's uncertainty principle", "Schroedinger's Cat" and the limits of knowledge.

But, as you point out, just because there are wide swaths of area we know little about and some things we cannot know this doesn't justify or excuse a headlong leap into supernaturalism, wild speculation and superstition.

Best disclaimer ever.

My policy on UFOs as well.

I don't know what they are. I've got a pretty good idea of what they aren't. And I know what I REALLY don't want them to be.

We aren't ready for that, not yet.

My guess is that there is other life somewhere in the universe. There are billions of planets orbiting billions of stars in the galaxy. And there are billions of galaxies in the universe. Any Las Vegas odds maker worth his job would have to bet on this one planet not being the only place where life took hold.

Some say it's amazing that life exists here. I say it would be amazing if life only exists here.

But the enormous size of the universe means that we'll never be able to explore all of it, and if there is life elsewhere, they're probably having the same problem.

Not everybody has been so limited, I can assure you of that!

Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive. Many of the great scientists in the world were also men of faith. Making a "headlong leap" is a strawman.

Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote a great article on this subject for Natural History magazine. You can read it here:

http://research.amnh.org/~tyson/PerimeterOfIgnorance.php

The point he makes is that scientists such as Newton only invoked god when they had reached the limits of their own knowledge. Basically, they copped out.

Not something in the back country........right in our kitchen.

Our youngest son's birthday....It is the day after the anniversary of my mother's death. Wife and her mom in the kitchen chatting (several other people present and witnessed the event). On the other side of the kitchen, sitting in the middle of the counter (no physical way it could 'fall') was our son's lunchbox.....all of a sudden it flew off the counter and landed on the middle of the kitchen floor.......not one word was said by anyone....

My wife and I later figured it was 'my' moms way of saying Happy Birthday....


Ah...boo.

I don't believe in the supernatural, because when something comes into existence, it becomes "natural" by default. Heard some second-hand experiences, never had one myself.

Wish I had, though.

'and I will not go back there again by myself I know.'.

A sentiment I have learn't the hard way. Oh and I will admit that I was absolutely terrified! BTW the term 'queer' had a different meaning back in the 1920s

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/opencountry_20070113.shtml

Then of course there are the strange rumours about the 2 unfortunate USAF F15s chasing UFOs over Ben Macdui a few years ago as well.

Something similar perhaps,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC0ZBAjREOM

Two incidents, one that made me wonder if I had gone to sleep, and one that was just funny:

I had moved to Las Vegas to fix up my Mom's house and yard so she could sell it more easily and get a decent price. I had been there a few months.

I went to bed and as I lay down, turned off the light, and noticed the clock said 11:00. I had left the bedroom door open, and there was light in the living room where my mother was still reading.

In a couple of minutes, my dog Dixie came into the bedroom just like she always did, tags jingling slightly, and she came to the bed for her goodnight head pat, I rubbed behind her ears and told her goodnight, and she circled a couple of times and lay down beside my bed, and sighed. I turned over and the clock said 11:02.

Then I remembered that I had had to have Dixie put to sleep the previous week due to liver cancer. I turned the light on and looked at the floor. Then I went into the living room, and asked Mom if she had noticed anything. She said no, then hesitated, and said it had almost sounded like Dixie's collar tags jingling a minute ago, but it must have been something else.

I still don't know if it was a dream.

An acquaintance had moved to a farm area of Oregon. Late one afternoon in winter, she walked down the road to visit someone. She didn't leave until well after dark, and the fog had moved in. She was about halfway home, on the edge of the road, and she suddenly realized that someone was walking behind her. She stopped, the footsteps stopped. She started and the footsteps started again. She stopped, and after a moment or two, the footsteps stopped, too. She looked around for a house, any house, but there were just fences and fields, no lights. She started running, then slipped on the gravel and fell. The footsteps didn't stop, they just kept coming.

Then......

"MOOOOOOOO!"

Sue

I guess that's one way of looking at it... Most people that write about such topics have an axe to grind, one way or another.

I'm a mathematician, and reading Newton et. al. (Gauss is my favorite), these people had some very serious intelligence. Gauss, in particular. He didn't cop out of *anything*, and could pretty much reduce his detractors to ashes without much trouble. He could probably do that in today's society, were he still alive.

But it's all theoretical, since they aren't around to defend themselves.

There is not sufficient space on this forum to relate all of my experiences. A quick rundown includes, but is not limited to:

7 of us being followed for 6 hrs by a UFO in 1965,

A most unusual UFO sighting in 1969,

Multiple sightings of UFO's during 1975 - 1976,

A demonic experience in 1976,

Many, many UFO sightings from 1990 - 1993,

Many UFO sightings between then and now,

Many, many other ethereal sightings between then and now.

I've actually started trying to sort them all out and getting the experiences down in writing.

I don't know if you read the article, but I thought this paragraph was especially notable:

"There may be a limit to what the human mind can figure out about our universe. But how presumptuous it would be for me to claim that if I can't solve a problem, neither can any other person who has ever lived or who will ever be born. Suppose Galileo and Laplace had felt that way? Better yet, what if Newton had not? He might then have solved Laplace's problem a century earlier, making it possible for Laplace to cross the next frontier of ignorance."

He is refering to the story earlier in the article about how Laplace solved the problem that Newton had answered with an unsatisfactory "god does it." So yes, Newton did cop out. There was more knowledge to be had, but he found it too difficult and quit.

I believe; and here's one of the reasons why:

I was once visited by two ghosts in my apartment. One was a little boy and the other a little girl. They appeared as very faint ethereal-like images. They were friendly and claimed to be brother and sister. In talking to them, they said they came to stay with me until such time as I met their father. They told me that the only way to connect with him was through someone who truly believes. They told me they wouldn't remain visible all the time, but they wanted me to know they were there, and would be with me until they made their connection with their father. As silly as it sounds, I told them they were welcome to stay with me as long as they needed. For the most part, I forgot about them and generally attributed the apparitions to my over-active imagination. They showed themselves very seldomly, and not for very long, only every now and then, but always in a friendly and excited manner, and while treating the whole experience as though it was happening, I kept telling myself to grow up and just stop believing in these "ghosts" that my mind might be just making up. But I'm a good guy, and I didn't want to intefere with the other side in its attempt to connect with their living family, so I continued to believe. Although to be more honest, I don't think I have ever had any real choice in the matter.
Well, after about a month or two I did meet a guy through a mutual friend. After becoming closer friends, we were both drinking alcohol one night with a few other friends, and he told us all some of his life story. His interest turned solely to me, as everybody else was enjoying the company of others in their drinking and socializing. As I was the only one who stayed interested in his life-story, he told me all kinds of details about crimes he had commited and girlfriends of his. Then he told me about a woman he had a couple of kids with years before and the car accident that killed her (if I recall correctly) and their two young children, a boy and a girl, who were all in the car. He wasn't with them. He was very solemn, and as he continued his story I could not help but feel overwhelmed by the desire to tell him about the ghosts. He told me about how many times he played Russian Roulette with his revolver, if I recall correctly, dozens of times, and other things. As much as I wanted to tell him, I thought he would think I was making fun of his misfortunate life, so I did not ever mention the ghosts of his children to him. Anyways, not many days after (I can't recall exactly as this happened about fifteen years ago) having that conversation with him (mostly just listening though), the two appeared to me again and thanked me for "having them", what I took to mean enduring their stay or something. I told them that I was glad to be of help, and that they were welcome to visit me anytime.

I have grappled with the possibility that my mind made up the ghosts, and that the guy I met, somehow overheard my conversations with those two ghosts via telepathy before I met him, and was relating his story of his children as deception, just to deceive me into believing in ghosts, as a sort of prank. If that were the case, then he could surely not have been the only one to have "overheard". I don't know, and it really doesn't matter anyways, because I have had many encounters with things unexplained, telepathic and otherwise, and I do honestly think, hope, and whatever, that I believe.

So one person recognized his limits in one particular instance. I would hardly call that a cop out. We can just agree to disagree.

"What does it take to change a man? Time."

In time, all things will be revealed. In time, our puny brains will evolve into something capable of realizing what we presently cannot. In time, we may yet learn how to define the indefinite.

Our real challenge is to find a way for civilzation to survive, so that we don't once again have to start over, as we have so many times before. Our knowledge is built and closely tied to our civilization. Neither can exist without the other. We cannot hope to preserve one if the other should perish.

There are other explanations for "fine-tuning" than God.

Let's continue down the path of the universe being a "dream": in a dream, everything makes perfect sense. One of mine once ended with Lenin singing the International on top of a wreck pile and I thought it was the most natural thing for him to do.

Okay, bad example. That actually does make metaphorical sense.

Still, dreams follow their own, subjective logic. They are governed by laws perfectly fitting to advance the dream's "plot". Again: Unless outside circumstances intervene (that's a horror story for another day), the events and characters involved will progress in your mind smoothly, without violating any local laws of physics or logic. Depending on your level of immersion, the plot-line can change and evolve. And yet, at no point will the fabric of your dream "tear", unless you suddenly wake up. Almost like it was all "fine-tuned"...

I suppose one could claim that a single mind being responsible for the universe is God by default. Okay then.



Personally, I don't view the laws of physics as fine-tuned to us. More like we're fine-tuned to them; of course we are, otherwise we wouldn't be here. All "fine-tuning" is retrospective: that is, once a person becomes self-aware, they understand (or at least have the chance to) the myriad events that had to happen in just the right way for their specific personality to be created. Mind-blowing, but not suspect.

This is very true. One explanation is that Unverses (Universi?) pop into existence all the time and each one has different physical constants determined strictly by chance. It just so happens that this universe ended up with physical constants benefitial for the creation of life. No Guiding Hand was involved, just chance.

But I like the idea of the Guiding Hand better.

-Blast

Google "Drake's Equation" as to those odds.

It seems to me that not only is the Universe stranger than we imagine, it must be stranger than we CAN imagine.

It also seems to me that there is more to this realm than that which fits neatly within our present understanding of logic and reason, and that there may be forces acting on or in our physical and temporal universe that we are wholly unequipped to sense, detect or measure. Likewise, I beleive that life in its broader sense is more than a complex assembly of organic biological and neuroelectric processes.

Ghosts, UFOs and such? I dunno, but I've seen some mighty strange stuff in my day, that's fer sure!

Jeff

I guess I just find it amusing that some people would readily accept the concept that we may exist only the computer of some aliens yet scoff at the idea that we exist in the mind of God.

Reminds me of and interview with a scientist who was developing a robotic fish. He expounded at lenght on the complexity of a real fish and trailed off saying "...and it's almost as if, as if, well, as if someone errr, someTHING, well, err, designed it..."

Most orbits are unstable. Entire galaxies are colliding. Supernovas, gamma rays, and black holes are destroying anything close to them (and in terms of the universe, "close" is a few thousand lightyears). And, oh yeah, there are countless comets and asteroids speeding around without a thought or care as to what they crash into.

I wouldn't call the universe "fine tuned" at all.

My father happened to be a scary brilliant man and he spent his career doing very highly classified design and engineering work involving space surveillance radars and satellite communications (as I understood it). He never, ever, discussed anything at all about his work at home, of course. But some offhand comments he once made left me with the distinct impression that HE took UFOs of the alien origin variety to be a more or less established fact, and he was mo'definitely in a position to KNOW.

For whatever thats worth.

PS: He could also design and build kick-ass antennas. We had the best TV reception in town, CBs that could routinely talk hundreds of miles, etc.

Jeff

Confidence is no substitute for empirical evidence. There are too many people claiming to know something, but no one proving it.

Order is not death. It is life.

A lot of people know a lot of things in as near an absolute manner as a person can, and we'll be none the wiser until they feel it's necessary to prove it to us.

If they ever feel it's necessary at all...

[/quote]Confidence is no substitute for empirical evidence. There are too many people claiming to know something, but no one proving it. [/quote]

It's all part of a multi-national, multi-generational conspiracy, you see. I hear the Bilderburgers and the Trilateral Commission are behind it. ;-)

"Proof" is a slippery thing. I'm a lawyer, I should know. Some things that have been proved to pretty much everyone's satisfaction in the past dsiplayed a nasty habit of suddenly getting unproved at a later date. Moreover, I'm claiming no particular state of facts, merely citing the apparent opinion of a well-qualified expert in the field, which is, indeed, a credible form of evidence.

As for "empirical evidence," of UFOs, I submit that that is about all we have, at least in the sense of evidence gained by operation of human sensory organs.

Many things now commonly accepted as proved in the scientific community began as someone's "nutty, whacko" and certainly minority-view theory.

What quantum of proof is required? There are many who believe the Apollo Moon landing were faked on a sound stage, and the Flat-Earth Society is still out there (It's turtles, turtles all the way down) How many otherwise bright, sane people don't "believe" in evolution?

In any case, it's the sort of thing that sparks the imagination, and the concept of UFOs is fun to play with,

Now, returning, sort of, to the general theme of this forum, what should we do and say when the aliens land?

We will know nothing but waht they want to tell us of their motives and intentions, and of the civilization from whence they came. They could be pirates, or mercantilists, out to exploit us. They could be official representatives of a benevolent civilization, who only want to help us, or the opposite. Or they could represent a losing side in a galactic conflict, seeking refuge or aid. But we won't KNOW.

I submit that the only thing we can, or should, say to them is "please go away for, say, 100 years. We aren't ready to deal with you yet. But please feel free to leave an Encyclopedia Galactica and a communications device behind. We'll call you; don't call us."

Either they will comply, or they won't. But their response will tell us pretty much everything we need to know their nature and intentions, won't it?

Comments?

Jeff

No. "They" could have millenia on their hands and readily comply, leaving behind whatever "treasures" the primitives negotiators requested as proof of good faith. When they come back, you're back to square one.

I think the bottom line here is that it's pretty much impossible for a toddler to plan a viable defense against the adults' schemes.

And I don't even believe in UFOs...

Good points, but putting things off as long as possible is often a good strategy.

Suppose the First Americans had slaughtered Columbus and his crew on the beach, and every explorer or conquestador thereafter, for some time, and used that time to contemplate, study and prepare for European contact with better understanding and insight into what it might mean for them? Suppose they had been able to bargain between Spain and England, for example? Might we be seeing an Aztec controlled Mexico today?

Human experience shows what happens whenever a truly inferior civilization comes into contact with a vastly superior one, very bad things happen to the inferior one. So how do we avoid or mitigate this?

Also, let's not make the same mistakes the Incas made in overestimating the Conquistadors. First Contact may well be followed shortly by Second Contact with somebody different, and Third Contact, etc. . .

Jeff

So what you're saying is basically...

kill them all?



I like your style.

Ahhh... Human experience. But we're not talking about humans, are we? I think it would be presumptuous of us to assume they think like us.

Well, If I were National Security Advisor to any of the Meso-Americans circa 1492, that's what I'd recommend (less a few hostages and study samples).

At least, that is the lesson I've drawn from their subsequent experience of being slaughtered themselves and having their entire civilizations wiped out.

I even recall reading a legitimate government think piece that advocated slagging the first, and all subsequent UFOs that land without asking nicely first, with nukes, and made a pretty convincing argument for it, too. Alas, that is lost to the dim mists of my memory. I'd love to re-read it.

Jeff

You got any OTHER experiences we could consider?

Jeff

Nope. That's why we can never understand the mind of an alien unless we actually meet them. My analogy is that we are monkeys trying to think like jelly fish.

Aren't squid and octopus (octopi?) suspected of a high degree of "alien" like intelligence?

Maybe the space aliens don't find us that interesting, or maybe they find us carnivores repulsive and Earth a "Nightmare planet" so they leave us mostly alone, or, like your monkeys and jellyfish, there's just no potential zone of interaction or commonality to make meaningful contact either feasible or worthwhile.

Still, suppose a flying saucer descends on the White House Lawn. The President calls you for advice because of the noticable brilliance you've displayed in this forum. What do you tell him. Or

You are walking through the woods one day and encounter a "little green man" obviously not of this Earth. What's your next move?

Anyone? Buehler?

Jeff

All possibilities. I wouldn't rule any of them out until I had a good reason to.



I tell him to walk softly and carry a big stick. They could turn out to be friendly, in which case we have a fantastic learning opportunity. Or they could turn out to be hostile. There's simply no way to know until you start communicating.



I sh-t my pants.

From ghosts to aliens... not a bad bit of topic drift :P

There are really only three reasons to leave one's solar system:

-Acreage with good air and water. There is a LOT of water and metal and methane and for all we know light hydrocarbons out there in the form of comets and asteroids. And there is plenty of acreage out there if you use grow lights and green houses and constructs of various types. But it won't be beach front.

-Precious and unique luxury trades. Spices, drugs, and organics like textiles, woods and perfumes that can't be synthesized worth a damn. Maybe antimatter, on a NIMBY principle. Everything else.... if you can get FTL or even sleeper ships, you can harvest those asteroids and comets. You only trade trinkets like fish hooks and belt buckles and the cure for cancer with the local primitives because the don't know the true value of their worth.

-Spreading the word. Yes, I'm talking about witnessing the miracle of Humf'slurch to the ignorant and backwards primates who are too innocent to know the truth. And while we're doing that, we'll be using them as cheap labor and janissary troops, while trading them cheap trinkets. And if they give us too much grief, slaughter the brave and loud, and make slaves of the rest. Or lunch. Or we'll have a one way sleeper ship that has two choice- take slaves or be slaves, and either way they'll try to beat us down.

None of that is exactly Starfleet issue sweetness and light. Yes, I'm a cynic. Again, I don't know what you UFOs are, but I know what I hope they aren't.

BTW, Jeff, Nightmare Planet? You wouldn't have read Hogan's Giant's Trilogy by chance?

I'll add a fourth:

-Curiosity

I can think of several other reasons to leave one's solar system: Sport/competition/personal accomplishment and scientific or cultural curiousity leap to mind.

I don't recall reading or even hearing of Hogan's Trilogy, but I'm sure I stole that phrase from somewhere, rather than thinking of it myself.

Although I see carnovorism as offering certain evolutionary efficiencies in accreting sufficient high quality nutrition, I've also thought that predators and prey seem to expend an awful lot of energy running around chasing and evading that could otherwise be used for more productive pursuits, and wondered if perhaps nature could have found another way to create evolutionary pressure.

Jeff

I'd tell him not to [censored] off Gort.

I agree it is there, but I don't see it being a major driving force when stacked against economic ones.

LOL!!!!

-Blast

I'd give that advice to any one.

HAHA!

"That's why we can never understand the mind of an alien unless we actually meet them."

That's no guarantee at all. Think 'job interview' or 'courtship'. Nice behavior up front, really lousy on a daily basis afterward. How would we know if they were lying or telling the truth?

We don't even know how cats think, and we've been around them for a few thousand years, at least.

I do remember a comment from many years ago, something about "we suspect that aliens are smarter than we are, but not as good-looking". In a country where the people are trained to evaluate other people based on their appearance, if the aliens are handsome or cute, we don't have a prayer.

Sue

I think that is the most powerful reason. Humans want to know. We want to know and not just know in the form of pictures and data streams. We want to know what it feels like to be there. We want to know the effect of unique locations, and the trip getting there, has on a person.

This is a very deep desire.

While we do go to expand territory, profit from natives and recruit new believers this is not true of many of the most difficult explorations and travels. The travels to the moon, Everest and both the north and south poles don't fit into the exploration for profit model.

There were no natives to browbeat into compliance. No natives to trade with. No great wealth to plunder. No reasonable hopes of opening large territories to to provide living space for a crowded nation.

The late George Carlin had a line about how people would buy just about anything: 'Nail two things together that haven't ever been nailed together before, and some schmuck will buy it from you'. Uniqueness has an intrinsic value in the human mind. Unique places are also assumed to have value. Not so much for collection or resale. But as an alchemical ingredient to effect the human mind.

I am reminded of Q's admonition to Picard about the importance of exploration inward being of greater value than that of the cosmos. I would tend to concur, that self exploration and discovery are pre-eminant, and whatever interest we have in the great wide open should be pursued only to the extent that it will increase our understanding of ourselves more. Before we go shucking out big bucks to deploy yet another space program to the moon, maybe we should consider how that money can be better spent taking care of fundamental needs a little closer to home. In other words, if going to the moon will somehow help us find a cure for cancer that much quicker, then maybe the investment is worth it. Otherwise, for the budget needed to do that sort of thing, I would think the same amount of money applied to laboraty r&d here at home might go a helluva lot further.

I would agree, except....

Humans are nomadic. Even if it is little more than a side show (aka, better than Apollo but nothing serious), it might be needed from a cultural morale purpose.

Or maybe just for bread and circuses purposes.

I read one study years ago that showed the return on investment from the space program up through Apollo was huge, much more than any other type of government spending, and paid for itself many times over just in tax revenue from new and spin-off industry and technology. I think we have been foolish not to make more investments of public tax money in fundamental and long term science and physics research and education.

Jeff

Space funding was one of the things offered up on the altar of the benighted Vietnam war, police action. The programs were allowed to wind down once the infrastructure and technology to land on the moon was formalized. The last few Apollo missions were lackluster, blunted in enthusiasm and overshadowed by the understanding, backed by layoffs and budget cuts, that there were no major goals left on the agenda announced by Kennedy and no political will or vision to establish more.

Vietnam was financed by printing money. Which inevitably led to inflation, recession, stagnation and deflation. Iraq has been financed by taking out loans from the rest of the world. This may be better. We owe the rest of the world about three trillion dollars. So much in fact that they can't afford to call it in for fear of triggering our collapse. Which would trigger theirs. The answer, so far, has been a great collective, world wide, whistling in unison past the graveyard.

Vietnam was also largely the reason why if you buy anything electronic it is produced in Asia. Japan was dumping TVs in the US and making good their losses by keeping US TVs out of Japan while overpricing Japanese made TVs. The US electronics producers were about to take the Japanese to the world court. It was a case that was about impossible for us to lose.

Of course there was another case advancing through the UN. That was a call for US withdrawal from Vietnam on the basis that the war was illegal. The opponents to the Vietnam war were going to win that one. The US couldn't must the votes to stop it.

What happened was that a deal was made. The US government would block the case against the Japanese electronics industry and the Japanese would vote our way so we could continue with our fun and games in SE Asia. It is a case of 'be careful what you ask for' and a stand for political expediency over principle.

Had we lost the UN vote we might have gotten out of Vietnam a few years earlier. We wouldn't have had to print so much money to finance the war. there would have been less of a chance we would have run away inflation. More available cash would have meant a better chance NASA wouldn't have its budget cut. And the US electronics industry would have won their case, kept Japanese consumer electronics out of the US and killed the newborn Japanese electronics industry in its cradle.

Of course most Americans don't really understand what Vietnam cost us. That it would hobble our economy for a decade and we still are paying a price now.

The moon landings and our trips into space were real and tangible evidence that we were the good guys striving in a huge and challenging national goal. A goal no other nation could accomplish. We went out unarmed in the name of mankind and openly published what we saw. When the astronauts were in trouble the world prayed for them. The moon landings were watched world-wide. One of the first events to be seen live across the globe.

Even if there were no financial benefit; even if there were no practical benefit for doing such things; I still think having a large national goal to focus our peaceful and benevolent energies on would would be reason enough to justify the expense.

I'd agree that the initial push into space and the moon did accomplish great things insofaras getting the physics of the previous 200 years engineered into modern society. There was a lot of great ideas floating around that had little chance of developing until such need as what the space program initially compelled us to produce. Those days are for the most part done. There are still a few novel physics concepts to iron out that almost uniquely require a platform such as space exploration, but there will be no big leaps and bounds like what we saw going from the early 50s to the 70s.

I believe the far bigger cost for this country in the Vietnam conflict/war/police action was the loss of a lot of good men for purely political reasons, in the end failing miserably to meet our objectives.

As for the here and now, I believe there is an abundance of much more suitable peaceful and benevolant objectives upon which we can focus our energies as a national goal that have nothing to do with space exploration, and for which continued investment in space exploration at this time would seriously detract from.

Sorry guys I am replying to the original question

Do I believe in ghosts ? not really. But I was once spooked by something very strange. I had agreed with someone to have a meeting every Tuesday evening. Well, first Tuesday I received a phone call from DD1 to come get her from a relative house. She was with mom and other kids in their grandparents house far away and she decided to cut the visit and come back with a relative who dropped her in another relative house 15 miles away, and I had to go and bring her home.

That was no more than an inconvenience and I offered my apology for missing the meeting. OK, next Tuesday evening, mom arrived by train with kids and LOTS of baggagge and called me to come and pick them up. Frustrating but it was no more than a coincidence.

To make short story shorter, this "inconvenience" repeated itself six times, every time with a different story.

Yes, I was spooked and cancelled the scheduled meeting that never took place.

We have computers. We can even speculate in some detail about how existing in one might work. This isn't completely falsifiable, but there are hard edges to the enquiry and it leads onto new ideas. It's fun and intellectually stimulating.

Where-as the "mind of god" thing is also not falsifiable and tends to lead nowhere and discourages inquiry. It's not so much fun, and mostly leads to people trying to kill each other over who has the better imaginary friend.

That would be evolution.

Yes, that's the crucial factor. Especially if you accept the speed of light restriction (and if you don't, you aren't really doing science any more).

In addition, there's a big difference between life and intelligent life. Life appeared on this planet as soon as conditions made it possible, but life capable of, eg, building a radio telescope for communication only appear very recently, and we have no guarantee it will not go extinct within a thousand years of achieving that. So the chances of getting two species, within 200 light years of each other, both capable of communicating/travelling across that gap, and both appearing at the same time, may be vanishingly small.

I want to hang with you...