Tuesday, October 4, 2005

Aliens!

I guess there's a convention for people who believe in aliens going on in Lima, Peru starting on Thursday. The news article has some interesting stories, the kind you usually only hear narrated by Jonathan Frakes.

Seeing isn't always believing. Wendelle Stevens, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, said he believed in aliens after having investigated 100 cases, despite never having seen any himself.

Stevens, thought to have the largest archive of photographs of alleged UFOs in the world, says he worked from 1947-49 in Alaska with B-29 planes fitted with special scientific instruments to "detect the visitors."

His work there began the year the U.S. military is believed by some to have hushed up two purported crashes of alien spacecraft within a month. The Air Force denies the stories.

Stevens, who said he did not believe in aliens before his work, said it was his job to debrief the crews of the B-29s and recounted how "the radio frequency spectrum went completely haywire ... and the temperature in the airplane increased. (The crew) looked out and there's a disc next door," he said.

He said the crew shot photographs with four different types of camera, but the military suppressed the pictures. No Air Force spokespersons could immediately comment on his remarks.
Do you believe in aliens? Or (more relevantly) do you believe they've visited us?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not to minimize things, but your last question(s) there seem like "Weekly Reader" (remember THOSE?!) class discussion topics.. :P Heheheheh..

Heather Meadows said...

LOL, no, actually...I was styling myself after blogs that ask their readers questions.

However, perhaps they are styling themselves after this "Weekly Reader" of which you speak!

Anonymous said...

Weekly Readers... Now there's a flashback! LOL

Yes, I believe in "Visitors". My fave line is from Contact... "If there aren't (others out there), it's be a whole lotta wasted space." I can't believe that we are the only sentient beings in space. To me it isn't logical. ;)
Shannon

Heather Meadows said...

Same here. To me, the more important question is whether or not we've ever had contact with them.

Anonymous said...

True. My (completely uninformed) opinion is that most likley, yes. However, probably only they, are government, and possibly a few lucky individuals know about it.
Shannon

Heather Meadows said...

If you assume that life progresses technologically at about the same rate, and you take into consideration Earth's location in relation to the center of the galaxy, you could maybe come up with an estimate for how much of space might be populated with beings that are more advanced than we are. Because, of course, our visitors would have to be more advanced. After that it would be a matter of figuring out how much more advanced they'd have to be. I mean, we have ideas about how we could travel enormous distances (folding space, for example), but we haven't done it yet.

Assuming there are cultures out there advanced enough to travel to Earth, would they even recognize us as intelligent beings? I've been trying to crystallize in my mind a good definition of "what separates man from the apes", and really the only things I can come up with are written communication and severely altering the environment. Would alien races have similar views on what constitutes an intelligent species?

One thing that has always intrigued me is the idea of life that is completely incompatible with life on Earth. Something that isn't based on carbon, for example. Or maybe something that exists in a parallel dimension...