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UFOs & Aliens

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Do aliens and UFOs exist? (Two choices which you can change.)

Aliens do exist (over 70% sure). (UFOs are manned and are not just robotic drones.)
3
18%
Aliens don't exist.
4
24%
I'm not sure about aliens.
1
6%
UFOs are alien-made (over 90% sure).
4
24%
UFOs are man-made.
3
18%
I'm not sure about UFOs.
2
12%
 
Total votes: 17

Brian-H
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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Brian-H »

heh101353 wrote: Mon Nov 09, 2020 8:46 am Always a joy to read along.

In Switzerland we have a guy called Erich von Däniken
He published books about Aliens and so forth. In 2002 he even opened a theme park called "Mystery Park" near Interlaken which unfortunately went bankrupt.
It was interesting to go there as he mixed fiction with science to support his thesis. All done in then state-of-the-art multimedia presentations.
Hans
I think that we all also get some joy writing this stuff :D

I read through that wiki on Erich von Däniken and it says that he served time for several counts of fraud or embezzlement, and wrote one of his books in prison. I'd guess that when he wrote his books it was in a time when anyone could write any nonsense and make money out of the sale of the books.

I'd say that the main problems with early "alien assistance" are
1. if planetary civilisations required assistance from more advanced alien civilisations to get kick-started, then how did the very first alien civilisation get off the ground
2. by saying that humanity required a kick-start, it does a disservice to the terrible times they lived through, and also ignores the ingenuity that they must have had

I've seen it said in several documentaries that the problems began when nomadic tribes decided to settle down and cultivate the land. In so doing, their main worries became the weather and wars with other tribes. Seems that nothing has changed.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Brian-H »

John-B wrote: Mon Nov 09, 2020 10:54 am
Brian-H wrote: Sun Nov 08, 2020 4:57 pm Depending on which pyramid and where, there are at least 3 reasons why a tomb is now empty
1. the priests robbed the tomb before sealing it (mostly so as to re-cycle the gold)
2. either the priests or tomb robbers broke into the tomb soon after it was sealed, often using a different route into the tomb
3. priests broke into the tomb much later, for the same reason as in #1, but only when they realised that gold was in short supply
Some experts disagree. Underground tombs had mummies and were decorated but most pyramids have been found to be almost completely clean and had no decoration. The great pyramid had a rough sarcophagus but was otherwise completely clean. Pyramids may have been robbed, but the mummies have never been found anywhere else.
The great pyramid has three chambers and many tunnels, what were they all for?
It seems highly unlikely that all that work would be just for an empty sarcophagus. The lowest chamber of the Great Pyramid shows signs of water damage as it was under the water table at some tome and the ducts from the Queen's chamber show signs of chemicals being poured down them. Why? Giza-chambers-and-shafts02.jpg

This https://curiosmos.com/3-startling-reaso ... ot-a-tomb/ website says
This means that we have at least five pyramids, built supposedly as tombs, that contained no mummies whatsoever. Isn’t that strange? Yes, it could be very well that the mummies were really stolen from their interior, but many consider it doubtful, arguing that the mummies were probably never there in the first place.
There has recently been several very good documentaries on BBC and also one of the other main TV channels (can't remember which one) about The Valley of the Kings. When pyramids fell out of fashion, there was a period of nearly 500 years from the 16th to 11th century BC when they started to cut tombs into the rock in two valleys near what is now Luxor. This is where Tutankhamun's tomb was discovered.

The problem throughout the history of the pharaohs was the changing politics within the dynasties and also within the priesthoods. It's a long read but it's worth reading through wiki on the Valley of the Kings

Two extracts give a good understanding of what had always been going on
21st Dynasty and decline of necropolis
The priests at Thebes grew more powerful, and they effectively administered Upper Egypt, while kings ruling from Tanis controlled Lower Egypt. The Valley began to be heavily plundered, so during the Twenty-first Dynasty the priests of Amun opened most of the tombs and moved the mummies into three tombs in order to better protect them. They removed most of the treasure in order to further protect the bodies from robbers. Most of these were later moved to a single cache near Deir el-Bahari (known as TT320). Located in the cliffs overlooking Hatshepsut's famous temple, this mass reburial contained a large number of royal mummies. They were found in a great state of disorder, many placed in other's coffins, and several are still unidentified. Other mummies were moved to the tomb of Amenhotep II, where over a dozen mummies, many of them royal, were later relocated.

Tomb robbers
The valley also seems to have suffered an official plundering during the virtual civil war, which started during the reign of Ramesses XI. The tombs were opened, all the valuables were removed, and the mummies were collected into two large caches. One in the tomb of Amenhotep II, contained sixteen, and others were hidden within Amenhotep I's tomb. A few years later most of them were moved to the Deir el-Bahari cache, containing no fewer than forty royal mummies and their coffins. Only tombs whose locations were lost (KV62, KV63 and KV46, although both KV62 and KV46 were robbed soon after their actual closure) were undisturbed during this period.


Regarding pyramids, not only do they predate the Valley of the Kings, but they will have been plundered several times and priests will have moved the mummies several times for protection. Khufu's mummy may be somewhere already found but as yet unidentified. Regarding the Great Pyramid of Giza in particular, it was redesigned several times during its construction, and then plundered several times (by cutting new passageways) and then investigated several times over several centuries in AD times (again by cutting new passageways). So overall, that pyramid is an emptied mess.


John-B wrote: Mon Nov 09, 2020 10:54 am
Brian-H wrote: Sun Nov 08, 2020 4:57 pm Regarding remnants of alien/AI craft, had they visited before recent history, it's extremely unlikely that it will be found on this planet. Reasons are
1. it would burn up as the orbit decayed
2. if not the above, it would most likely crash into the sea (MH370 springs to mind)
3. if not the above, it would crash onto land and, like all archeological remains, disappear deeper and deeper as the soil level rises
There are plenty of remains of early civilisations 10000 years ago and if UFOs and aliens had visited around that time you would expect some remains to show, but there are none, so I tend to agree that UFOs and aliens have never been here in the last 10000 years. No evidence has been found in rocks or mining operations that they came millions of years ago, but I live in hope!
But as previously said, if there has been a "visitation" several thousand years ago (or even more recently) it would be by an AI drone. With the technology that we have available today, we don't require any landing on e.g. North Korea to see what is going on, as it can be viewed and interpreted from satellites. The reasons why we send landers to other bodies in our solar system is that you can't definitively discern microbial life from a satellite. But if you're looking at what advanced life-forms are up to, you don't need to land. There's more chance of winning the lottery than finding any remnant of an alien AI drone during an archeological dig, assuming that an alien AI drone has visited and did then not fully burn up and/or crash into the sea.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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Brian-H wrote: Mon Nov 09, 2020 12:55 pm ... it was in a time when anyone could write any nonsense and make money out of the sale of the books. ...
This hasn't changed and will never change ... :o
Hans
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Brian-H
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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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^ I think I might have been trying to convince myself not to write a book on Isaac Newton being an alien (no human could have come up with his theories) :lol:

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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Imagine a TV series which is a cross between Time Team and Car SOS. They turn up at a place and try to decide, based on some dusty tyre tracks and use of a metal detector (finding a tiny scrap of metal), what car was there recently. They can then tell where the car was made and who drove the car.

That's basically the premise for UFO Hunters which is often on Blaze at 7am. So if you're awake at 7am with plenty of time to spare, and you're fed up with Piers Morgan on ITV, or Naga Munchetty on BBC, then it's either UFO Hunters on Blaze or Cheers on Channel 4. Fortunately I have the boxed set of the latter, thus I have watched some bits of the UFO Hunters, but eventually I decided that the running repeats of drug smuggling at airports in Oz and NZ on Pick TV are less guffaw-provoking when eating corn flakes.

There was one recently (S2 Ep11) which mentioned the 2006 O'Hare International Airport UFO sighting, which has a wikipedia entry.

At approximately 16:15 CST on November 7, 2006, federal authorities at Chicago O'Hare International Airport received a report that a group of twelve airport employees were witnessing a metallic, saucer-shaped craft hovering over Gate C-17.

Witnesses described the object as completely silent, 6 to 24 feet (1.8 to 7.3 m) in diameter and dark gray in color. Several independent witnesses outside of the airport also saw the object. One described a disc-shaped craft hovering over the airport, stating that it was "obviously not clouds." According to this witness, the object shot through the clouds at high velocity, leaving a clear blue hole in the cloud layer. The hole reportedly seemed to close itself shortly afterward.

According to the Chicago Tribune's Jon Hilkevitch, "The disc was visible for approximately five minutes and was seen by close to a dozen United Airlines employees, ranging from pilots to supervisors, who heard chatter on the radio and raced out to view it."

The FAA stance concludes that the sighting was caused by a “weather phenomenon” and that the agency would therefore not be investigating the incident. According to astronomer Mark Hammergren, weather conditions on the day of the sighting were right for a "hole-punch cloud", an unusual weather phenomenon.


It got me thinking that, having thoroughly debunked saucer-shaped vehicles as being totally non-viable for flight, what about just zooming up and down ?

Before looking at how aircraft such as the English Electric Lightning climb to great heights, I wondered if there's a simpler way using a lighter object - basically a hoax.

How to make a hoax
A saucer-shape "1.8 to 7.3 m" in diameter can be bought online made of plastic (see my other posts). The problem is, how to get it to rapidly ascend. Well if I hung it from a helium balloon that's high up above the clouds, supended by several thousand feet of clear nylon rope so the saucer is below the clouds, and put a motor-driven winch just beneath the balloon, then all I need is a remote control and .....woosh ....it's gone through the clouds. Clearly, doing this above an airport would be far more difficult than just that basic idea, but read my other posts about crop-circle hoaxers and it's by no means impossible to get some clever bods onto it.

I'm not saying it was a hoax (I think the FAA are correct about weather phenomena) but when you start to think about the difficulty of rapidly ascending a craft heavier than a large piece of plastic (plus the weight of the rope), it all starts to become poppycock - unless e.g. "anti-gravity" does exist.

Without "anti-gravity", the difficulties are
1. keeping the craft both rigid and lightweight
2. having a propulsion mechanism which produces "thrust" (either directly as in a rocket/jet-engine, or indirectly as with a propeller)
3. the propulsion system being able to sustain maximum thrust for the duration of the climb
4. the craft being able to carry the weight of the fuel required

It's #3 which is actually the problem.

English Electric Lightning (and other contemporary aircraft) climbing
We've probably all seen the Lightning taking off and going straight into a vertical climb as in this example

But it doesn't sustain vertical for long because soon after takeoff, the nose gets lowered for rapid acceleration to 800 km/h before initiating a non-vertical climb at a rate of approximately 100 m/s. Around 4 km the Lightning would reach Mach 0.87 (1,009 km/h) and maintain this speed until reaching the tropopause at 11 km in under 3 minutes. To climb further, it then accelerates to supersonic speed and then resumes the climb.

This 10 minute youtube documentary gives a comparison of the Lightning with the U2 spy-plane and Concorde.

However, the world record was set in 1975 by a McDonnell Douglas F-15A-6-MC 72-0119 Streak Eagle which reached 98,425 ft (30 km) in 207.8 seconds.
F-15A-streak-eagle.jpg
Note also that, during launch, the first stage (S-IC) of the Saturn V fired its engines for 168 seconds (ignition occurred about 8.9 seconds before liftoff) and at engine cutoff, the vehicle was at an altitude of about 42 miles (67 km), was downrange about 58 miles (93 km), and was moving about 7,500 feet per second (2,300 m/s) i.e. the Saturn V (and the Shuttle) did not maintain a vertical flight profile either.

Thus you can see that, without some kind of "anti-gravity" mechanism, using the only known propulsion systems in our atmosphere, it is not feasible to ascend rapidly and silently, and if using a jet engine, not without the means to obtain lift from conventional wings.

Regarding "anti-gravity" there's several areas to go into, in particular Reactionless Drive mechanisms (reactionless as in not pushing or reacting against something else i.e. ignoring Newtonian physics) and Negative Matter. But I'll leave it all for a few days.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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Brian, you're being very technical as usual. :D
I've found that self-isolation has been made easier by watching Blaze UFO and alien programmes. As I said before, the stories by the public and military viewers of strange objects are obviously genuine for them and amusing to me.

The explanations by the ufologists are even more amusing. Even I can pick holes in their arguments all the time. I like to hear about the responses of government organisations to keep the ufologists either happy by encouraging the UFO and alien myths or trying to keep black ops secret by threatening the public (Men in Black, etc.)

I find the historical and cultural facts about early human societies interesting, especially the archaeological digs and videos of stone glyphs, monuments, etc.
It seems that earlier cultures travelled widely and spread pyramid building, God myths, etc. from continent to continent much earlier than previously thought. The ufologists seem to link every old myth to ufos and aliens. A typical fact I like is that red-haired giant skeletons were found in a cave in one of the southern US states and dna testing linked them to Scandinavian humans over a thousand years ago, so they were not aliens. The Mayans took astrological recording really seriously and had a calendar that looked far into the future. Stone glyphs in Australia record a visit by two Egyptian princes, one died there, and a boomerang was found in an Egyptian tomb. No need for aliens in that case.

There must be a lot of archaeology waiting to be done in shallow sea areas which were above sea level during the last ice age, especially caves where early humans seemed to live, leaving skeletons and relics.

The four rivers meeting near the fabled Garden of Eden seem to have been identified. Two are obviously the Tigris and Euphrates and the third is probably a minor river coming from Iran (Persia). The fourth has now been identified from a satellite photo of desert and it crossed the Saudi Arabian peninsula. It dried up long ago. The four rivers joined up to run as a very large river running along the Persian Gulf which flooded after the ice age. It seems that the Gulf area and Saudi peninsula were partly full of wild animals in beautiful country like Ethiopia and partly marshland like the area now at the head of the gulf where Marsh Arabs live in houses on stilts above marshes. The flooding of the gulf may have been the source of the Great Flood myth, but areas in other continents also have flood stories so perhaps the flood wasn't a flood but a prolonged deluge for forty days and nights from some climatic event or meteorite crash. Nothing to do with Gods or aliens.

I've learnt a lot about Man's early history.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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Yesterday evening
The Hijacker Who Vanished: The Mystery of DB Cooper
from the Storyville series, was on BBC4 (available for 11 months).

It was about the hijacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 on 24th November 1971, in which a passenger showed a suitcase with dynamite in it to a stewardess while holding a button in the other hand attached by wire to the "bomb". He gave her a note to take to the pilots in which he told them to land at an airport, refuel, release all the passengers, get 4 parachutes and a ransom of $200,000 in cash (over $1 million today), take off and head south to Mexico. They did as instructed, then he asked them to reduce altitude and slow down (he gave precise instructions) then he opened the rear stairs on the Boeing 727, and bailed out, never to be seen again.

The relevance is that the documentary went over several people who claimed, some shortly before they died, that they were the hijacker. So whether someone is about to die or not, what they say stands a good chance of being fantasy. That's what I observe in all of these UFO stories on TV, people living in a fantasy world. The novel and film Billy Liar is a good depiction of such a character - they do exist in real life, more frequently than you'd think.

Just watching UFO Hunters now, same thing with these "witnesses". I suspect that the 3 main characters in the series have take their relationship from Clarkson, May, Hammond in that they each take a slightly different juxtaposition during whatever is going on.

Anyway, the early history of the various civilisations, their battles and their rise and fall in particular, are indeed very interesting. I don't know when and where I've picked it all up from, probably mostly from TV documentaries going back to the 70's. Horizon is a good example, which started in 1964. Full list of episodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Horizon_episodes "Over 1,250 episodes have been broadcast (including specials) with an average of 23 episodes per series during the 56-year run" and I reckon I've seen at least half of them. IIRC there have been several on Atlantis, which is now believed to have been where Santorini now exists. From that you get to know about the Minoans, and then from there, other Greek cultures, then the Persians, Mesopotamia, then the Romans, and meanwhile pick up on lots of other stuff about the Egyptians.

As you say, those areas were once abundant with fertilised soil and grassland, and as it changed it had an effect on which civilisation prospered.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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To return to my favourite topic in this fascinating thread, the unlikliness of the evolution of intelligent life, another obstacle to be overcome by any life on any particular planet is to experience the right number of the right type of mass extinctions. A documentary on the topic of mass extinctions on one or other docu channel the other evening made the point rather well, that most of the earth's major mass extinction events have served to generate a major change in the direction and speed of the evolution of life. The weird primitive invertebrates discovered in the Canadian Burgess shale deposits followed an early major mass extinction, and the most recent, the asteroid strike 65 million years ago, plus or minus extreme volcanic events elsewhere at around the same time, is generally believed to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and the subsequent explosion of the mammals that have subsequently dominated the planet, ourselves included of course.

So for intelligent life to evolve, anywhere, the list of exceptionally unlikely requirements starts with an exceptionally rare and stable type of star, adds an exceptionally rare and benign type of rocky planet big enough to retain an atmosphere, with huge amounts of water, plus enough internal heat, (but not too much!) produced by just the right amount of radioactive elements in order to mantain a liquid iron core which both creates a protective magnetic field and also generates plate tektonics to refresh and recycle the planet's surface, plus a large moon to stabilise its rotation and climate, plus a possibly very rare type of planetary system, on the basis of current exoplanet discoveries, that has helped to protect said rock, all of the aforementioned remaining stable for billions of years, but without the intervention of a totally sterilising nearby event such as a supernova during that time. The more requirements that are added to the list, the more that occur to the mind, alll together compounding the extent of the improbability of intelligent life, anywhere.

Which is not to say that other forms of life may not be relatively common, in particular self-replicating molecular or unicellelar varieties. Indeed the carbon compound building blocks of such life appear to exist in significant amounts in stardust that has been exposed to untraviolet and other radiation in interstellar space for millions of years. Of which we may know much more when samples of material from comets and asteroids are successfully returned to the earth for analysis within a couple or three years, (as long as material from such specimens does not turn out to be lethal). So perhaps primitive life will turn out to be relatively common where liquid water exists, but it is the many steps and billions of stable years required beyond that stage which make complex intelligent life, such as ourselves and therefore also aliens, so very unlikely in any galaxy, perhaps?

Cheers!

Fossil

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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I think that I may have seen that myself, or something similar.

The only thing that I would question is whether extinction events are "compulsory". At the time of the dinosaurs, small mammals (similar to mice etc) did exist, and I'm not convinced that the extinction of dinosaurs was required for mammals to gain the upper hand. After all, early humans were part of the extinction of woolly mammoths, so I reckon that likewise they'd have seen off dinosaurs. Indeed, as a short-cut, on another planet somewhere out there, maybe there never has been any dinosaurs or extinction events, so mammals evolved more quickly. Or possibly, some lizard-like lifeform has evolved to create flight and space travel. According to David Icke that's certainly a possibility LOL

Either way, if the time to get to the stage of capability of building flying machines is shorter (i.e. it's taken longer than necessary for humans to evolve on this planet) then several of the other pre-conditions are not necessary .

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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It does seem clear to me that a big shock is needed to create the conditions for greater intelligence, either via aliens changing DNA or changing the climate with a catastrophe.

The dinosaurs just got gradually bigger and bigger as prey got larger and predators got larger to match them. Their brains still had the same basic functions of eat, sleep, breed and protect over the entire period of hundreds of millions of years until they got wiped out. The same probably happened when earlier mass extinctions brought in the dinosaurs. So other planets might also need a shock to produce intelligent beings or existence of life there would just stay at a low level.

Were these changes by alien intervention?

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