Now, as far as ETs visiting our planet, and since I’m open-minded enough to at least listen to people as they relate their personal experiences, two people I know, my step-mom and a research scientist at Tracor, related their encounters with UFOs to me in the late 1980s. Both encounters involved sightings by multiple witnesses. Both incidences were either ignored or covered up. Both also described a similar phenomenon in which the UFO or UFOs sighted changed their metallic skin color upward through the color spectrum as they hovered.

My step-mom saw her UFO while on a commercial flight between New York and Atlanta in the mid-1970s. The pilot informed all the passengers that a UFO was up ahead and that he would turn the plane so everyone could get a look at it. My step-mom said that she saw a round, metallic craft that hovered stationary in their flight path, and as they approached at 35,000 feet, it became larger and larger, until it dwarfed the airplane. The craft’s metallic skin changed colors through the spectrum. My step-mom said it shot off into the distance until it was just a dot on the horizon, then zipped out of sight. The pilot reported the incident to the Atlanta control tower, and (because he left the intercom on) the passengers heard the air traffic controller reply that their UFO sighting was the second one he’d heard that day, with another commercial flight off the Atlantic seaboard reporting a similar sighting thirty minutes earlier.

The Tracor scientist, at a Thanksgiving Day dinner in front of his son, reported a multiple UFO sighting in the mid-1950s when he was stationed at Big Spring AFB in West Texas. Three saucer-shaped UFO crossed the electrified perimeter fence (all dipping a few feet in unison), flew to the center of the SAC runway, hovered for a few minutes (as their metallic skins changed colors through the spectrum), then rapidly shot vertically upward together, with the Tracor scientist saying that the Air Force had both visual sightings and radar coverage of the occurrence.

Anyway, I have no idea what, if anything, might have been piloting these UFOs, anymore than I have a clue what God is, but since two people I considered to be highly-credible related their eyewitness accounts to me (and in such detail), then I am much more inclined to believe them than anyone who naysays, having nothing more than their opinion to bolster their position.

Which, strangely enough, is similar to the “spirit” issue. I’m non-religious, but I’ve had enough”spirit” encounters over the years, of one sort or another, to prove, at least to me, that there is much more to all of us than meets the eye. Which is why I completely believe that our world is frequently visited by extra-terrestrials of one sort or another. Some we see or encounter, most we don’t.

I have my theories about what’s going on, but I readily admit that I have no proof, just my own version of Einstein’s “unified field theory,” but with a spiritual/extra-terrestrial twist thrown in. (Oh, and religion plays no part in my theory, which is why I tend to piss off both atheists and religious folks alike when I infrequently bring up what I believe is going on (or not) in this world. It makes for double the fun).

We have an educated guess as to a most common frequency to listen in on, but there’s still a lot of sky out there and it’s impossible, given our current technology, to listen to it all simultaneously. Our radio technology now is tantamount to pointing a telescope at a star and staring at it for a few minutes, viewing it through one frequency/color of light, before moving onto the next star … one star at a time, a few minutes at a time.

I think the likelihood that an amateur astronomer hears this transmission first is very good. And if we’re receiving regular transmissions, I would think it’d be impossible to hide them from the amateur astronomical community.

We’ve only been transmitting strong non-directional radio waves of our own for about 70 years now. The first of those radio waves have only managed to trek about 1/370th of the distance to the center of the galaxy. Only aliens in a very small portion of our galaxy could likely know of our existence at this point. Barring some technology that would allow them to traverse space or transmit to us instantly, I think it unlikely that anyone has had time to answer the cosmic phone as it were.

If I were an alient, Walmart is where I’d want to shop.

I don’t disagree about the probability of actually encountering life. My mind is open and undecided on the matter. My point was only that we haven’t traveled enough, nor do we know enough to say definitively…one way or the other.

On the other hand, i’m of the mind that the entire universe is very much alive. (not in a hippy way, more of a Buddhist way) From the starting point, the whole debate is semi-moot. I’m not even sure that we would recognize ‘life’ if we found it. We assume that ‘life’ would look like us, but i’m not so sure.

But i’m a kook, so it may be best not to listen to me. After all, my hope is that the 2012 prophecies turn out to mean the second coming of one Dr. Funkenstein and his clones of production/afronauts. Whereupon everything will be on the One.

I’m a photographer. I own a film production company. How much do you know about stopping down an exposure in bright sunlight? I can assure you that, if the moon’s surface is properly exposed, there was not a camera available in that day that could capture both properly exposed surface and stars. There probably still isn’t. We could get a star background these days by taking two exposures and then photoshopping a combined one, but that certainly wasn’t available in 1969.

The signal from the moon was triangulated. Unless there was a transmitter on the moon put there by other means, then there were actually human beings on the moon.

Could it have been faked? Maybe. Occam’s razor suggests not. But too many people would have been involved in the conspiracy by now for it to remain a secret for this long.

The reason I think having extraterrestrials here on or near the Earth is a low probability is pretty much the same as Carl Sagan’s reason. I’m like Sagan in that I would LOVE for it to be true. But I see no credible evidence that it is so, and I see enormous difficulties in long-range space travel. Yes, yes. I know about bending space, wormholes, and the like. I know that there is much we don’t know, and that some other species may have figured it out.

But I’m a skeptic. Until there is a credible way to travel interstellar distances, or at least a theory that presents a credible way (meaning at least SOME level of practicality), I have to give this a low probability.

I also don’t know if they ACTUALLY walked on the moon or not. I haven’t seen it proven. The evidence sold to the public is pretty shoddy (no stars in shots supposedly taken from the moon, which wouuld prove/disprove the scenario to astronomers).

Falling back on the excuse that they had to shoot the photos at such an exposure is nonsense. They could have adjusted exposures and shot pics that showed the position of the stars.

There should also be an abandoned car sitting up there (instead of in some bunker in Area 51). How about a Hubble view of that?

One filmmaker evidently has hard evidence that they faked some shots of the earth on the first moon mission. The astronauts literally put up a mask over the porthole to make the earth seem farther away, even though they were in a low earth orbit. This is on the web in a film called “A funny thing happened on the way to the moon.”

The NASA film was released accidentally, even though it has warnings that it should not have been made public. If it is true, it sure packs quite a punch.

Anyway there are some compelling arguments to be made that it was faked.

No astronauts reported the effects of the Van Allen radiation belt on their round trips. But, in the 1980s when one of the Space Shuttles went to a high orbit (650 miles) the astronauts could literally see particles shooting through their eyeballs with their eyes closed.

Kennedy made a presidential promise to be on the moon by decade’s end — but that may not have been feasible. So that accounts for plan B.

It’s not like Nixon would lie or get others to lie…

http://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/

We’ve managed to send people no further than our own moon. Quite a feat, but not particularly impressive when we consider the size of even the galaxy (for context).

The fundamentally religious have to scoff at the idea of alien life. If there is alien life, it pretty much ruins everything that they believe in…which is, fundamentally, egocentric. If God made aliens too, how do we know that he likes us best? And why doesn’t the Bible talk about the aliens in Genesis?

Sorry, had a moment of utter geekiness.

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that I think of extraterrestrials like, say, a friendly god or a totally blissful afterlife. It would be cool, but anyone who really knows for sure probably isn’t in a position to tell the rest of us about it.

Lara Amber