Astronaut says aliens are among us

Anybody here ever had a close encounter with a UFO?

To that I'll add/ask: Anybody here have an alien abduction experience?

I think there are genuine encounters with UFO's, but keep in mind that "UFO" is "unidentified flying object", and not necessarily synonymous with "alien spaceship".

Both John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies and the late J. Allen Hynek, UFOlogist and coiner of the term "close encounters" took UFO phenomena seriously but tended to be skeptical or agnostic about their being ships of extraterrestrial origin. Keel thinks the phenomena originate from physical manifestations of unknown aspects of the human psyche, or from supra-human, extradimensional, or supernatural intelligences. He says that humans interpret the phenomenon, whatever it is, according to their belief system and culture, and does not postulate any particular "reason" for the UFO phenomena.

Hynek, one of the most thorough and scientific of UFO researchers went from complete skepticism to belief in UFOs as originating from extraterrestrial intelligences, to a belief similar to Keel's, that they may be of extradimensional, psychic, or other non-physical origin.

Given the physics of space travel, the huge distances involved and the Fermi Paradox, I believe the liklihood of literal aliens who have come here from other planets to be nearly zero. That this current claim is being made by an astronaut makes it a little bit more plausible, but a chance of two out of a billion is not much more than one out of a billion. I'm sure the government is covering up plenty of stuff, but I don't think aliens among us are one of them.

To the extent that I have an opinion about UFO phenomenon (at least the small number that are still inexplicable by normal means), given the lack of clear evidence, I'd tend to go along more with Keel and Hynek, at least in regard to some UFO events.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this news story plays out. Just in case, Klaatu barada nikto!

"Aliens: Why they are here" by Bryan Appleyard is an interesting read. He seems to remain agnostic about whether they literally exist, but, in full postmodernist mode, he also blurs the edges between existing and not existing.

The alien visitors account doesn't really fit all that well with scientific materialism - physics of space travel, etc.

Intelligent extraterrestrial life doesn't fit all that well with traditional Christianity. If, on the other hand, aliens are extracosmic, that also doesn't fit all that well with Christianity, which tends to picture angels and demons as being directly aligned with the central drama of humanity, rather than having interests of their own that are only tangentially concerned with humanity.

It is in fairy folklore that the nearest historical parallels are to be found.

Many christian writers have made the connection that UFO/alien related encounters are demonic in origin, given the often terrifying nature and associated mental problems such encounters cause. The relatively benign encounters seem to have messages of universalism, which is also anathema to traditional christianity.

The guy also says his (self-diagnosed) kidney cancer was healed by a teenage shaman / remote healer.

He's a kook.

"However, if you believe God created this world, why would we believe that it's the only world he ever created? What, he's existed for eternity doing whatever a God would do and one day on a whim creates this earth and then quits? "

For theism, I take your point. In Christianity, however, there seems to be a reasonable case against the existence of other intelligent life within this space-time continuum:

(a) If the Fall was a cosmic event, then extraterrestrials would have to have fallen at the same time as humans, despite Adam having been human. This seems to give humans a special position. Admittedly, this assumes a fundamentalist form of Christianity.

(b) Either extraterrestrials will have to be redeemed by the earthly crucifixion, in which case it will be necessary to contact them, or they will have their own redemption dramas, which seems odd to say the least (vast numbers of Christs?).

Maybe a Chrstian could fill this in a bit, though.

I'm intrigued by the idea of spiritual/supernatural/extracosmic beings that are really only peripherally interested in humans, rather analogously to wild animals, although perhaps much more good, powerful or intelligent than humans. Christian ideas strike me as being as pre-Copernican on other planes as they traditionally were on the material plane.

The chances for intelligent alien life have grown exceedingly smaller since the days of "Cosmos" and Carl Sagan, when science took it as a given that it must be all over the universe. Since then works like "Rare Earth" have shown quite the opposite - if anything, reinforcing traditional Christian theology.

thomps: Yes, the phenomenon you mention (sleep paralysis) is well-documented and has often figured in explanations of abduction phenomena: see here, for example. See also this article about machine elves which are very similar in many ways to descriptions of purported aliens.

I listened to the Mitchell clip and read some print articles about his statements, and he believes the Roswell incident was genuine. It was debunked a few years ago when the Air Force admittedd that it was a balloon, after all, and that the government had allowed the "flying saucer" rumors to propagate since they served as a good distraction from the actual (and at that time classified) military research going on. There is still much debate about Roswell on both sides, but I'm inclined to agree (in this case!) with the government's story. It wouldn't surprise me if the government is happily allowing UFO conspiracy theories to distract us from whatever it is they don't want us to see down here on Earth.

I teach physics on and off, and really, most people just don't grasp the staggering difficulties inherent in interstellar travel. There is just no way, given our understanding of physics, that travel faster than light in any meaninful or attainable sense is or ever will be possible (yes, I'm familiar with such things as the Alcubierre Drive and others, but the complicated and bizarre requirements for such postulated mechanisms, to say nothing of the energy requirements, are thousands of years off, if attainable at all). At sub-light dilation), to say nothing of radiation, energy issues, and so on and on and on. I don't rule out the possibility of interstellar travel, but based on all current data, I don't see it as likely at all, now or ever, for us or anybody else.

Having said that, I think Reader John's take is interesting. Almost forty years ago John Keel, whom I mentioned in my last post, noticed the high correlation of psychic and other paranormal phenomena, as well as quasi-religious experiences, with UFO sightings. This, as well as his increased understanding of the constraints imposed by physics, is largely what lead him to doubt extraterrestrial origin of these phenomena. I don't know that UFO's are demonic, but as a believer both in Christianity and modern physics, I would be much more willing to buy a supernatural explanation of UFO's than a spaceship-from-other-planets explanation. If you read enough of UFO encounters, it's hard not to notice that psychologically, there often is a creepy "flavor" to such encounters. Perhaps Fr. Rose had a point, in some cases, at least.

rombald -

There is also option (c) The Fall occurred only on Earth, and if aliens exist, they exist in a state of prelapsarian innocence.

Of course, your option (b) is largely the point of Narnia. And my option (c) is largely the point of the Space Trilogy. C. S. Lewis seemed to be intrigued by the intersection of Christianity and other worlds. I'm not sure if anyone has tried to deal with (a) in any serious way yet. And see also James Blish's "A Case of Conscience" for an intersection of option (c) with the theory of aliens as being of demonic origin.

Suffice it to say that Christian writers of science fiction have been speculating about this stuff for a century now. And sorry for dorking up the com-box ;)

Last message was mine.

I agree with thomps and Turmarion, esp. on the Fermi Paradox, and the similarities between UFO abduction stories, and other types of altered states of consciousness.

One additional datum, drawn from comparative religion: "sacred places," places where the "sacred" tends to erupt or manifest itself (think Delphi, Medugorie, Guadeloupe) seem to be able to adapt that "energy" to the religious beliefs of the recipient.

E.g., many European churches and Christian shrines were built over pagan sacred places, and the Virgin Mary of Guadeloupe appeared where previously an Aztec goddess had manifested herself.

Extending that observation, spiritual phenomenon tend to adapt themselves to the beliefs, the conceptual framework, of the person experiencing them. So UFOs and alien abductions are simply ancient experiences (succubi and incubi, e.g.,) reinterpreting themselves in modes acceptable to the modern "scientific" mind.

Though there is not a shred of evidence to support this, I do believe that there is life elsewhere in the universe, and that it could be abundant. I think intelligent life is probably rare, and civilizations able to travel vast distances to other life-bearing worlds is even rarer. Civilizations with this technology would indeed be very very old. They would have had to have been extremely lucky not to be wiped out by some natural catastrosphe, like an asteroid impact. Moreover, they would have had to survive what's been called "technological adolescence." This term is defined as having the technology to destroy ourselves (like we do on Earth) and somehow surviving that.

I do not think we have been visted, although the prospect of having been so would be marvelous. The Earth is a tiny speck on the outer reaches of the galaxy, one of billions in the universe. The chances of being found are incredibly remote.

rombald
It is in fairy folklore that the nearest historical parallels are to be found.

Indeed. Although the closest parallel to 'alien abduction' are succubus and incubus, and other demons that lay on your chest while you're sleeping and suck the life out of you. (I seem to remember there were fairy that could do that too. Also cats.)

That is probably caused by a known psychological phenomenon where you can wake up and be unable to move...you essentially feel you have been pinned to the bed, and you fall back asleep and rarely remember it when you wake up. (I forget the name of this. Essentially your mind turns back on from sleep, but your body doesn't.)

But sometimes you do remember it, and people have always imagined 'people and things' during that time. As machinery was invented, the 'things' became clockwork, and now everyone sees the 'people' as aliens too, thanks to countless movies, whereas before they were either odd people, or demons.

As for the lights...look, there are things in the sky that act really weird. They dart at insane angles at insane speeds and sometimes appear to follow airplanes and cars. They might be 'real' objects, something like ball lightning, or they might be extremely odd optical illusion, I don't know, but anyone who thinks these lights don't exist is crazier than people who think they're aliens.

Granted, some UFO sightings are known causes, such as airplanes, and some are suspected-but-unprovable causes like military testing. But lights moving oddly in the sky inexplicable by any of the objects that could conceivably be up there has happened too often, and been observed by too many people, to be just silliness.

It's worth pointing out that we don't actually know the rules of ball lightning, or how it even happens. It was actually consider a hoax until recently, and considering we know nothing about it, it could actually explain almost all the sightings.

There is also option (c) The Fall occurred only on Earth, and if aliens exist, they exist in a state of prelapsarian innocence.

Of course, your option (b) is largely the point of Narnia. And my option (c) is largely the point of the Space Trilogy. C. S. Lewis seemed to be intrigued by the intersection of Christianity and other worlds. I'm not sure if anyone has tried to deal with (a) in any serious way yet. And see also James Blish's "A Case of Conscience" for an intersection of option (c) with the theory of aliens as being of demonic origin.

Suffice it to say that Christian writers of science fiction have been speculating about this stuff for a century now. And sorry for dorking up the com-box ;)

AND THIS!

In Medieval cosmology, the Fall traditionally was understood to affect only the sublunary sphere of Earth, not the heavenly spheres (this is somewhat related to the reference to Earth as "the Silent Planet", which C. S. Lewis picked up from one of the Medievals - I think it was Adam of St. Victor, but don't quote me on that). Now, I realize that most people these days would consider this whole line of thought discredited, since nobody really buys Platonic/pre-Modern cosmology anymore. But if the traditional understanding of the Fall says that it only affects Earth, I don't know that the organization of the rest of the cosmos *necessarily* matters.

Posted by: Petellius | July 28

Petullius! My hero! Thanks for dorking up the combox. It needed it. That last bit explains for me the line from A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. I wasn't ever sure what sublunary meant:

"Dull sublunary lovers' love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it."

I see no reason why Christianity should preclude there being intelligent aliens, but then I'm familiar with C.S. Lewis' take on the subject. There are a number of possibilities. (There needn't be multiple Christs, he has reconciled the world to himself, and quite possibly the Cosmos if they needed it. How this story is encountered by a dozen different theoretical alien races could be beyond our comprehension.)

At any rate there could be aliens. It seems statistically unlikely, but then, space is really really big, as Douglas Adams once said.

Now as far as them coming here, in interstellar spacecraft, and zipping around and abducting folks and somehow covering it up from some 200 sovereign nations? That seems rather more unlikely. I don't believe it's happened. I'll give it a vanishingly small maybe, just because it hasn't been outright disproven.

I've seen flying things I can't identify. Anyone who logs a lot of hours under the stars will see some pretty interesting things. Shooting stars are cool. Meteors close enough to you that their red streak from atmospheric burn-off was very large and practically audible are even cooler. I've seen Iridium Flare satellites, various satellites I couldn't identify, variable stars, four planets, a galaxy or two, and the International Space Station in motion. And I've seen the Pleiades star cluster through a small telescope.. I mean no disrespect in my reaction to THAT, My God. Pleiades is ... I can't even say it in words.

I've also seen a lot of aircraft, including military aircraft. And I think that's what a lot of these UFOs are. Test craft. Maybe they are testing new engines, or radar cloaking device. I recently read a description of tests using a plasma field to shield from radar. That could produce some interesting light phenomena.

I saw one aircraft that I swear was turning at near right angles. This was the night of Y2K when everyone was convinced our society would collapse. There were in fact precious few aircraft aloft that night. I was in Iowa and there are nearly always aircraft flying high over Iowa due to it being the very definition of "flyover country." So I thought it'd be cool to see the night sky with few aircraft. At any rate this aircraft behaved oddly, like I said, it turned at near right angles and it did it smoothly, with no curvature at all and no obvious de- or acceleration. It wasn't normal and it didn't look natural. I concluded it was likely a military test aircraft of some sort.

Other UFO sightings may have been Northern Lights-like phenomena, or odd formations of lightning. Truth be known, there are likely a dozen different explanations, all of which are physically possibly and not unlikely. I see no reason to conclude that any of these things is truly inexplicable, just because we can't explain them.

Demons? Maybe. I don't think they often make their presence visibly known. They are far more effective going about their business undercover, so to speak, under the guise of depression, suicidal thoughts, addiction, and assistants to that human proclivity to cruelty, depravity and despair.

What cracks me up about assertions like this is that the US government is somehow in charge of keeping a secret from all of humanity. Aren't there other governments out there that would like to embarrass the US government by blowing the lid off something like this? Why would only the US government have this kind of evidence, or why would other governments want to do along with this kind of coverup?

(For that matter, it's only American chauvinist that assumes that if aliens have visited Earth, they must of course have landed in the United States. But that's another issue.)

This is why I find assertions like the ones made in the DaVinci Cod laughable on their face. The Catholic Church has covering something up for centuries? Fine. But wouldn't the Orthodox Church also have something to say about the question of whether Jesus had living descendants? What about some Protestant Churches or even non-Christian groups who have no vested interest in the this, but who might like to embarrass the Catholic Church? The Catholic Church, all by itself, has been able, for centuries, to keep a lid on a "secret" that was apparently known to quite a few people? Puh-leeze.

In addition, and more importantly, an assertion like this implies that the US government has a level of competence that I'm not willing to grant it. I mean, the US government couldn't keep the Soviets from getting atomic bomb secrets for more than five years. It couldn't keep the Watergate burglary secret for even a fraction of that time. It couldn't even determine that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And yet we're supposed to believe that the government has successfully covered up alien visits for over 60 years? I say that we should find the officials in charge of this coverup and put them in charge of the economy or foreign intelligence or the war in Iraq, since they are the only government officials who seem to be really good at their jobs!

I don't think it's possible, based purely on Christian theology (traditional or otherwise), to make a priori assumptions about extraterrestrial life, including its existence or nonexistence and its status before God.

While Scholastic theology is admirable and one of the great intellectual acheivements of mankind, I think its great weakness (manifested more and more in the theologians following St. Thomas) is its tendency to try to define intrinsically mysterious aspects of Christian faith (such as Original Sin, the Trinity, &c.) to the nth degree as if dissecting a frog. Not that we're necessarily talking Scholasticism, but I think all of us Westerners, Catholic, Protestant, agnostic, and atheist ultimately are heirs of the Scholastic method in thinking that with enough analysis (scientific or other) we can fully understand anything.

Though I'm Catholic, the older I get, the more I think that Orthodox theology got it better. Yes, there are definitions and analyses and such, but the East is much more content to leave things in the realm of mystery (in the theological sense) and not to get too worked up about having to know the details (or even thinking we can know the details) of every last thing. I think a lot of the problems in Western Christianity (and by extension in the Western civilization derived from it, whether believing or not) go back to bad philsophical choices made in the Middle Ages or even earlier. I think Rod has spoken to this awhile back, in fact.

Thus, I think the best Christian attitude to extraterrestrials is, "Who knows? Let's find 'em first, and then we'll figure it out!"

We haven't detected radio from aliens because frankly it is a microscopic needle in a really large haystack. If they exist and are trying to contact us it would be hard and could take centuries.

There's also the likely disparity in technology levels. Unless life and civilizations on similar planets develop in similar ways and at similiar rates (on the old Star Trek they called it "Hodgkins' Law of Parallel Planet Development", a convenient plot device), why should we expect that an alien civilization would be at anything like the same or similar technological stage that we are? We've been able to send and receive radio signals for only about 100 years, which is barely an instant in galactic time; the odds are that any alien civilization capable of doing so would thus likely be more technologically advanced than we are, maybe to the point where they no longer use radio but use something else we haven't discovered yet. Maybe we are receiving messages from them but we have no way to recognize them for what they are. For that matter, maybe there was an alien civilization trying to send us radio signals 1000 years ago, when we wouldn't have been able to pick them up. What if there is a civilization out there that is at, say, Roman Empire level of technology? We're not going to be able to send or receive messages from them, either.

I mean, even here on Earth we've seen societies developing technology at different rates, and this is a place where meeting and sharing of technology among different societies is at least possible.

MI, malevolent civilization are a neat speculation. The short story "A Colder War" is on the web and mixes this concept with the Cthulu mythos. It's free and worth a read. Thanks for the book pointers.

Personally I think if malevolent civilization existed we would be dead already. With a big enough telescope (like the proposed terrestrial planet finder) they could see that Earth had molecular oxygen in its atmosphere which is a dead giveaway. They wouldn't know intelligent life existed here, but just in case they would have millions of years to exterminate, colonize, or lock us in a zoo.

But as Turmarion said it's all speculation.

Posted by: MI | July 28, 2008 1:46 PM was actually by MH. Darn typos and having to retype the name field.

If they exist and don't want to contact us it is a lost cause as any advanced signal encoding can't be distinguished from noise at the kinds of distances we're talking about.

I don't think we even have to talk about interstellar distances or advanced signal encoding. I remember hearing a story on NPR several months ago about just this topic, and the scientist being interviewed said that the problem with the whole scenario portrayed in Contact (an alien civilization detecting the radio/TV signals we've been broadcasting for awhile) is that, thanks to the inverse-square rule for the dispersion of electromagnetic energy, everything we send out becomes pretty much indistinguishable from ambient radio noise by the time it gets out to about the orbit of Pluto.

Beyond Fermi's Paradox, which is reason enough for most thinking people to dismiss UFOs, there are several questions I have never heard a UFO conspiracy theorist answer credibly.

If the U.S. Government really knew about alien visitations to earth:

1. What compelling interest would the government have in keeping such information top secret? "To prevent panic" is so far fetched it's laughable.

2. Does anyone seriously believe the U.S. government is capable of keeping that information secret for decades? Seems to me that such a belief can be held only by people whose acquaintance with the Federal workforce and the ways of Washington in general is, um, rather limited.

3. Why wouldn't many foreign countries, especially those with large geographic territories (Russia, Canada, China, Brazil, the EU, etc.) have similar information? If they do have such information, could ALL of those foreign governments simultaneously keep the same secrets for years and decades? How? Why?

"go back to bad philsophical choices made in the Middle Ages or even earlier." Turmarion

TR: They must not have been that bad in one way. It was Western Christianity that had the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, and did most of the religious conversion in the world. For all its wonderful qualities the Eastern Christian world is mostly poorer, less democratic, and more violent. (As in murder rates plus abortion rates, also wars.)

I think the most likely explanation for many UFOs is that they come from Earth, out of the military R&D labs of various countries. This has been revealed to be the case in at least one famous incident - the small object found at Roswell. The government initially claimed it was a weather balloon, then more recently admitted it had in fact been a crashed missile defense satellite, part of a then-classified experimental program. I wouldn't be surprised, in fact, if the UFO meme was started or at least encouraged in an attempt to misdirect attention away from 'leaks' such as this, or undermine the credibility of people who report strange goings-on.

Report of UFO sighting have been made by aircraft pilots from several countries.Typically they experienced disturbance ranging from interferences to total failures in their navigational system such as transponder,radar contact,gyro-compass,automatic direction finders and the functioning of the aircraft when those UFO are near by. Some reports suggests that those UFO are able to neutralize weapons system aboard military aircraft as well as earth based weapon systems. Some believes that those E.T. have advanced technology and are able to manipulate time and space.
Currently,anyone who claims to have seen an Extra Terrestrial being or an UFO is taxed as crazy.
In 1977 the Premier Minister of Grenada,West Indies, Sir. Eric Gary asked the United Nations to set up an agency to investigate the phenomenon.Gary was the only government official that publicly acknowledges the existence of UFO.Rumors have it that In 1988 the U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the President of the Soviet Union Mikhal Gorbachev discussed in private, a military alliance against an hypothetical E.T. attack. In May 2008 Father Funes reported in the Vatican paper, L'osservatore Romano,that Extra terrestrial life cannot be disproved and does not contradict the Catholic faith.Monsignor Balducci from the Vatican beleive that E.T. might exist.
So,If E.T. don't exist why on July 16,1969 the US Government passed the "Extra Terrestrial Exposure" law. Title 14,Section 1211 of the code of the Federal Regulations states that it is illegal for the public to come into contact with extra terrestrials or their vehicles.Anyone found guilty could face up one year imprisonment as well as a fine of $ 5000 and could be quarantined under armed guard by NASA Administrator without a hearing.
I feels that the world network of satellites and surveillance cameras might be able to show their pictures sometime in the future.Meanwhile, scientists continue to work with the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox in quest of an answer.

I think what he is referring to is detailed at http://www.snopes.com/legal/et.asp

lol, why doesn't the government step up already? Every one knows the truth except the harden sceptics the will never believe anything until the peers tell them to. They are not protecting us from keeping this information, it is only kept for reasons of power and greed, releasing this information and technology will create millions of jobs well saving the planet. They are literally suppression our natural evolution. And at the same time creating more and more distrust of governments every day.

Give up the information already, geesh.