Reply #94: They report them all the time. [View All]

[smoogatz]

It's true: highly credible people who spend a lot of time looking at the sky occasionally see weird shit they can't explain. When such incidents are reported in the media, UFO enthusiasts (a highly excitable lot, generally) immediately claim that any sighting of weird, unexplained stuff in the sky is proof that aliens are visiting earth. Then meteorologists and astronomers and Air Force colonels and other actual experts in studying weird stuff in the sky generally offer an explanation: it was a weather phenomenon or asteroid or the planet Venus or maybe an experimental aircraft that can do some crazy, unconventional stuff. The public says "Oh, okay," and goes on about its collective life. The UFO enthusiasts, never satisfied, claim that any rational explanation of such events is bogus, and further evidence of a conspiracy to suppress the truth, i.e., that hundreds (if not thousands) of extremely shy aliens in hundreds (if not thousands) of highly advanced spacecraft have been visiting earth for an unspecified length of time (since antiquity, maybe) for unspecified purposes (they find humans delicious when properly prepared?), traveling across vast reaches of space/time in order to do so. Every leader of every developed country since Eisenhower has been in on the conspiracy, as have many of their cabinet members, every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hundreds of congressmen and senators over time, hundreds of high-level staffers, and thousands of need-to-know federal employees at the Pentagon and the CIA. The "fact" of UFO visitation is, in fact, the longest held secret in the history of ANY government (that we know about!). Of course, keeping the secret is made easier by the aliens themselves, who prefer (for reaons unknown) to keep their presence secret, except when they engage in showy nocturnal aerobatics over major cities, of course. Strangely, no alien spacecraft has ever crashed (except the one in Roswell!) or been captured (ditto!) or even definitively photographed, filmed or videotaped, despite the near ubiquity of cameras/camcorders in all corners of the globe. On the other hand, thousands upon thousands of verified fakes have been exposed as such, and hundreds (if not thousands) of hoaxsters and scam-artists have found ways to make a living by selling the UFO myth to gullible and unstable people. That being the case, the rational response is probably to withhold judgment pending further/better evidence. Yes, it's theoretically possible; yes, there's a lot of weird unexplained shit going on in the sky; no, that doesn't mean we're being visited by alien spacecraft.