Dennis Kucinich and the UFOs

Me too.

Seeing an Unidentified Flying Object is very well and good. After all who knows what is really out there but please Shirely MacLaine's description of what happened doesn't exactly give me much confidence in Kucinich's mental stability.

"Dennis found his encounter extremely moving. The smell of roses drew him out to my balcony where, when he looked up, he saw a gigantic triangular craft, silent, and observing him.

"It hovered, soundless, for 10 minutes or so, and sped away with a speed he couldn't comprehend. He said he felt a connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind."

I mean we are talking about the guy who said this:

"Spirit merges with matter to sanctify the universe. Matter transcends to return to spirit. The interchangeability of matter and spirit means the starlit magic of the outermost life of our universe becomes the soul-light magic of the innermost life of our self. The energy of the stars becomes us. We become the energy of the stars. Stardust and spirit unite and we begin: One with the universe. Whole and holy. From one source, endless creative energy, bursting forth, kinetic, elemental. We, the earth, air, water and fire-source of nearly fifteen billion years of cosmic spiraling."

Probably Russians testing our air defenses and having fun with the natives.

It is really interesting that C. S. Lewis, in his so-called "Space Trilogy" was really perfectly at ease with the idea of life on other planets. Lewis apparently felt that the more we think of the universe as imbued with the life, the more wondrous God is and the more it makes plausible that the universe had to have been created. The more life there is in the universe, the more inexplicable it is on naturalistic terms, since the emergence of life is so hard to account for.

Whether or not anyone accepts or likes his reasoning, it is interesting that this great 20th century apologist for Christian faith took a different approach to the question that many today. He did not seem to need to assert the Earth's uniqueness to see the story of God's care for our planet and the human race as marvelous and mysterious. This is an approach that presents not only theists and Christian believers with an interesting point of view, but presents non-theists with a different issue... not the mystery of life, but the possibility that the universe could indeed be rife with it. That would, Lewis might argue, require a God even more so.

As for UFO's well......they are obviously unidentified and flying and objects, but beyond that who knows.

Elizabeth, How do you know that's what I believe? But yes I do think Kucinich's beliefs are daffy.

Yes, everybody just LOVES to make fun of Dennis Kucinich.
Go ahead and take your cheap shots.
But regarding the invasion of Iraq, he was right, and he tells the truth.
I respect him far more than the loud clowns who got us into Iraq: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and too many brilliant pundits to name.
God bless Dennis Kucinich.
Rev. Paul McKay
Allen, TX

Although, Steve, Lewis recognized the particularity of humankind owing to the Incarnation. My recollection of the Space Trilogy is that all non-human rational beings were created prior to the Incarnation.

Either way, I'm not sure Lewis was any more wedded to the idea of actual bird people living on Mars then Tolkien was of Elves kicking back in Beleriand.

You are, of course, right, Loudon about Lewis not being wed to the idea of bird people on Mars, or a blue (?) woman on Venus. But the point is not about that. Rather, his view is quite consistent with orthodoxy and with the possibility (let me emphasize that word) that there could be life on other planets.

It's all fun to think about.

I don't have any strong opinions on the subject of UFOs, but it is a pretty interesting topic of conversation.

I'd like to mention a fun book my husband picked up not long after we moved to Texas: "The Great Texas Airship Mystery" by Wallace O. Chariton. This book tells the story of "Airship Fever" that hit Texas (and a few other states) mainly in April and May of 1897, when newspaper stringers began to pick up and report the sightings of strange lighted crafts hovering over the sky, supposedly seen by dozens of people at a time. One of the chapters details the "crash landing" of one of these ships in Aurora, Texas, and the belief that the "alien" pilot is buried in the cemetery there--there's a historical marker at the site which mentions the legend.

Texas tall tale, or bits of truth? An interesting footnote to the stories is that William Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry, may have referenced the myths in his short story "The Skylight Room" (which was published in a collection of stories "The Four Million" in 1906):

"As Mrs. Parker's roomers sat thus one summer's evening, Miss Leeson looked up into the firmament and cried with her little gay laugh:

"Why, there's Billy Jackson! I can see him from down here, too."

All looked up--some at the windows of skyscrapers, some casting about for an airship, Jackson-guided.

"It's that star," explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger. "Not the big one that twinkles--the steady blue one near it. I can see it every night through my skylight. I named it Billy Jackson.""

As I said, it's an interesting topic--quite fun to go back in history and see how often stories of odd flying objects have surfaced.

OF COURSE I'm a believer in Roswell.

I'm a heterosexual male. And that show gave Katherine Heigl to the world ;-P

I don't want to lend any credibility to Dennis Kucinich, but I think that it's fair to say he saw a UFO, not a spaceship. A UFO is an Unidentified Flying Object, which is to say that he couldn't identify what he saw. I have Unidentified Refrigerator Objects, Unidentified Desk Drawer Objects, some keys I can't identify, and some co-workers of whom I'm suspicious.

But more specifically, 56% of Americans believe in Extraterrestrial Life and 48% of Americans believe the ETs have visited earth (2002 Roper; www.scifi.com/ufo/roper/05.html).

Contrast that with the number of Americans who believe the President is doing a good job in office: 36% (Fox/Opinion Dynamics, Dec 18, 2007; www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm).

Then consider:
approval of the US Congress (46%),
would support a Hispanic Presidency (46%),
people who say they are pro-life (37%),
fans of professional baseball (34%),
approve of the handling of the Iraq War (33%),
approve of the job Nancy Pelosi is doing (29%),
thinks China makes safe toys (27%),
-or-
have a favorable opinion of Dennis Kucinich (04%).
(all from www.pollingreport.com, various dates)

"But, apparently, it's okay to "love making fun of Dennis Kucinich" and his "daffy" ideas, and question his "mental stability", eh. Just wish those criteria were applied to the president you currently have and not just to the ones who want to replace him."

Hey thanks for the Straw Man. I didn't vote the current president either. Providing the keynote address at the 2002 The Dubrovnik Conference on the Alchemy of Peacebuilding is the kind of foreign policy experience we need in the next president.

I hope he includes fellow The Dubrovnik Conference on the Alchemy of Peacebuilding alums Will Keepin and Molly Dwyer in his cabinet because I don't think our nation is putting enough effort into "The Alchemy of Gender Reconciliation Transforming gender relations between feminine and masculine dimensions of human society is fundamental to creating lasting peace."

I'm not making any of this up.
http://www.praxispeace.org/day_by_day.html
http://www.co-intelligence.org/CIPol_DKucinich6.12.html

If Mitt Romney's Mormon faith can be called into question even though he hasn't made his faith the centerpiece of his campaign than I think the beliefs of Dennis Kucinich, who wears his spiritual world-view on his sleeve, deserve equal scrutiny. After all that is what the Kucinich supporters want isn't? To have their candidate be taken seriously as a major candidate.

Simon, the material that started that thread started with: "Spirit merges with matter to sanctify the universe. ..."

That's pretty religious, no? Nothing about a spacecraft in that paragraph. Just to keep clear what we were talking about there.

I've seen a UFO. Although not with the weird spooky stuff, just something in the sky that looked like a star, or possibly a planet, until it suddenly decided to fly away at amazing speed totally silently. I don't have any idea what that was.

People have actually been seeing inexplicable things flying around in the sky forever. (It just used to be assumed to be occult or heavenly.)

And it's worth remembering, at one point, 'inexplicable things' included meteors, which no one could explain and people who shows up with melted rocks from the sky were assumed to be liars and lunatics.

But the idea that aliens would show up to just screw around with us is is unlikely in the extreme. And the idea that it's our military is an interesting, but wrong, idea, because UFO phenomenon actually pre-dates flight...it's only in recent times that it's been linked with supposed extraterrestrials. (Of course, some of them could be military. Just not all.)

OTOH, I've had 'spooky' incidences without UFOs, and they were weird enough that if I were to experience one of them at the same time as that incident, I'd probably have totally freaked. People who have experienced 'spooky' before know what I'm talking about. Everything seems totally wrong, including the passage of time, there's a weird stillness, it's just...spooky. (Best way to get rid of it...find some people being normal and talk to them about normal stuff.)

I suspect that's some sort of fleeting dissociative state we don't understand yet. This would be like, but not identical to when you suddenly realize you can't remember what you were thinking about or the last several minutes of your life. This is most obvious when you're driving, and clearly you were paying attention to the road as you're not in a ditch, and you even made the correct turns, but simply cannot remember driving that stretch of road.

I use to, and many people still do, think it is merely a memory lapse, but many neurologists disagree and think it is a very mild and normal form of what people with 'multiple identities', aka, dissociative disorder, experience.

We like to think our brain is constantly sitting thinking about what to do next, and then doing it, but brains do not actually work that way. Sometimes they happily continues to think 'without us', which is a truly surreal experience. Consciousness is a good deal weirder than people think. (Metaphysical question: If our body operates separate from our consciousness, does that imply our consciousness operates separate from our body?)

Anyway, there is some state our mind can end up in that make us focus on peace and harmony, and some other state where we focus on the opposite, where we have goosebumps for no reason and we think someone is watching us. And deja vu, which is probably also dissociative.

Add a mental state like that to some weird lights in the sky, who know what you get?

"All of those beliefs assert extraordinary divine intervention into the order of nature. One can choose to believe or not believe, but ultimately such supernatural claims cannot be disproven. The assertion that UFOs are alien spacecraft, by contrast, is explicitly a claim about natural phenomena, and it is preposterous in the extreme."

Too funny, the contortions one will go through to protect their cognitive dissonance.

There is no "cognitive dissonance" involved in that distinction. Belief in the supernatural is simply not the same thing as belief in alleged natural phenomena that are empirically false.

To assert that aliens are currently visiting the earth (while appearing only to a handful of individuals and leaving no generally verifiable traces of their existence to anyone else at all) is akin to claiming that the earth is flat. Those claims are preposterous. The fact that they are preposterous does not require one to accept agnostic materialism or to deny the possibility of miraculous phenomena.

There is no "cognitive dissonance" involved in that distinction. Belief in the supernatural is simply not the same thing as belief in alleged natural phenomena that are empirically false.

Empirically false? If we take the alien example and couch it in "what if's" (like all good apologetics do), then the ability to demonstrate them would approach nil. We're going to be able to prove/disprove it about as easily as the eternal procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, and even that is in dispute.

Father Seraphim Rose wrote a book with a chapter about UFO's and concluded from bpth patristic and psychological evidence that they are modern version of demons. I used to think maybe there were benevolent ones (what have they done that's good?)and evil ones, but even before reading Fr. Rose's book, whose name I forget at the moment, I'd begun to feel they were negative forces.
I"m not able to get into detail at the moment, but if you're interested, check out Fr. Rose's book. Yeah, he can be gloomy sometimes but I think he's onto something with UFOs.

You know, for a cover-up, it seems to be a very very bad one. I mean, everyone knows what's going on, even if they don't believe it.

I'm reminded of an episode of Kim Possible where they discover the secret of Area 51 was that...they had aliens and alien technology there and were doing research on them.

Kim: But that means all the rumors are true.
Gen. Simms: Every last one of them. We've implemented a double-negative cover story. We make sure only to leak out information that is one-hundred percent accurate.
Ron: But then it's not really secret!
Gen. Simms: That's exactly what we want you to believe.