Since they all suck anyway, stop watching that crap and come watch Superjail with me instead.

Thevillageatheist - 03 July 2012 03:49 PM

Yep, there’s just so many ways to examine the remains of the Titanic. That’s about all they have been showing lately. What happened to the informative programs on nature and space? Where do we go from here when all of the Ed. Channels become infotainment to compete with the reality shows? It seems that the networks are now piling on more of this crap. No more documentaries, except reruns of the Titanic sinking, snorrrrre!

The really tragic thing is an entire generation growing up thinking this crap is real because they see it on one of the “educational” channels.  It was bad enough when I was growing up in the 70s, and this paranormal stuff was so far off the mainstream you had to hunt for it.  Now it’s everywhere.  It’s beginning to look like before long, every single program on television will be about the paranormal.

advocatus - 30 June 2012 06:49 AM

Well, er… sorry to have given you a bum steer, but this was incredibly disappointing!  It turns out not to be an investigation at all.  The “team” consists of one skeptic, one believer, and one “skeliever”.  She claims this means “skeptical believer”, but I saw no evidence of this.  In practise, it means “skews believer”.  It didn’t make any difference because all they did was collect UFO anecdotes.  Next thing you know, they’re out there in the dark Ghost Hunters style with those stupid cameras mounted on their necks to record their faces as they jump at every noise and every stray light they see.  At one point, they dig through newspaper archives and come up with a report of a meteorite which exploded over the town in 1891.  For some bizarre reason, they instantly assume that it wasn’t a meteorite at all but an alien spacecraft.  Sure enough they go with their metal detectors and Geiger counters looking for traces of it in the middle of the night!  What a crock this was!

I watched it yesterday and I totally agree with your assessment. It was a HUGE disappointment. Not just because the science was pretty much non-existent but because it was just a rip-off of all the other stupid reality type shows where they try to inject drama where there is none. I get so sick of this crap. They wasted so much time on stupid shit like hearing a wild boar and acting all scared and the aborted plane landing. That’s the lind of crap that used to wind up on the cutting room floor. Now it takes center stage. Just pathetic.

hed it yesterday and I totally agree with your assessment. It was a HUGE disappointment. Not just because the science was pretty much non-existent but because it was just a rip-off of all the other stupid reality type shows where they try to inject drama where there is none. I get so sick of this crap. They wasted so much time on stupid shit like hearing a wild boar and acting all scared and the aborted plane landing. That’s the lind of crap that used to wind up on the cutting room floor. Now it takes center stage. Just pathetic

Get ready for it Free: the latest reality garbage show with intense music and gotcha scenes filmed with starlight scopes! Here it comes ladies and gentlemen, gasppppp, Haunted Highway! Oooooooh OMG what was that? 200 people have seen the apparition so it must be real!.

Cap’t Jack

Thevillageatheist - 01 July 2012 04:07 PM

Occam’s right. Much to my chagrin the History channel as been showing a program on Nazi aliens! What crap! They used to run quality shows but now they’re interspersed with garbage. I wrote to them but received no reply. From hard core history to” what if” entertainment. They’re only interest now is to sell soap (old TV expression).

Cap’t Jack

Nazi aliens????  All I ever see when I turn on the History Channel anymore are things like Ice Road Truckers or American Pawnshop.

skuld - 13 July 2012 08:28 PM

Thevillageatheist - 01 July 2012 04:07 PM

Occam’s right. Much to my chagrin the History channel as been showing a program on Nazi aliens! What crap! They used to run quality shows but now they’re interspersed with garbage. I wrote to them but received no reply. From hard core history to” what if” entertainment. They’re only interest now is to sell soap (old TV expression).

Cap’t Jack

Nazi aliens????  All I ever see when I turn on the History Channel anymore are things like Ice Road Truckers or American Pawnshop.

Don’t forget “Swamp People”.

These shows sound like cheesy horror movie titles.  How about a show about the white collar American working stiff?  Call it Cubicle Porn Watchers or something!

aliens????  All I ever see when I turn on the History Channel anymore are things like Ice Road Truckers or American Pawnshop.

My students got so fed up with this trash they started calling it the Nazi Channel! Now they’re branching out to even more non historical crap with the reality shows. I told the kids to turn off the tube and read a book. It’s far more entertaining. We’re on the road to idiocracy.

Cap’t Jack

Thevillageatheist - 14 July 2012 04:50 AM

My students got so fed up with this trash they started calling it the Nazi Channel! Now they’re branching out to even more non historical crap with the reality shows. I told the kids to turn off the tube and read a book. It’s far more entertaining. We’re on the road to idiocracy.

Cap’t Jack

Hell, I wish ‘History’ Channel would go back to WWII stuff. At least it was history! 

Take care,

Derek

That’s the problem, they aren’t showing much pure history any more. Now there has to be a twist with the “what if” crap. Hence the Nazi alien motif. What if Hitler had a flying saucer during the war? What if aliens gave the Nazis a super weapon blah blah. No problem with World War II but there’s more to history than drum and trumpet. How about a documentary on the voyage of the Beagle for ex? Damn. Now that would be exciting!!!

Cap’t Jack

Thevillageatheist - 15 July 2012 08:59 AM

That’s the problem, they aren’t showing much pure history any more. Now there has to be a twist with the “what if” crap. Hence the Nazi alien motif. What if Hitler had a flying saucer during the war? What if aliens gave the Nazis a super weapon blah blah. No problem with World War II but there’s more to history than drum and trumpet. How about a documentary on the voyage of the Beagle for ex? Damn. Now that would be exciting!!!

Cap’t Jack

Granted this isn’t the ‘What are you reading thread?’ but have you ever read The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad? The premise is that it was written by a young Adolf Hitler who immigrated to the US in the ‘30’s to write sci-fi.

Take care,

Derek

Granted this isn’t the ‘What are you reading thread?’ but have you ever read The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad? The premise is that it was written by a young Adolf Hitler who immigrated to the US in the ‘30’s to write sci-fi.

No but Psychy will be on this with the gusto of a hound dog on a pork chop. He seems to love sci fI!

Cap’t Jack

Interesting. I ended up here on a search for Julio Miguel Guerra - from a sighting in 1982.

I read Leslie Kean’s book on the subject recently after having a thought the caused me to think about alien visitation again.  Until then, I had dismissed it entirely as nonsense.
What caused me to rethink the possibility is the program we have now where we are indirectly observing planets around other stars. We can infer their atmospheric composition, size, distance, temperature and so on using very primitive equipment.

If we had much more advanced equipment - say observational equipment hundreds of thousand of times more sensitive, we would be able to identify distant planets with the potential for life to very fine detail.

Here’s the interesting thing about that. Earth could have been easily identified as a good candidate for life 2.5 billion years ago - Before that, probably, but surely for the last 2.5 billion years it’s been a lush place, albeit devoid of meaningful life until 500 million years ago

A lot of previous ideas on alien visitation were based on the idea that aliens might visit the planet after receiving intelligent electromagnetic waves from Earth - thus showing our ‘technology’. This requires super luminal speeds and can be dismissed. If, however, Earth was observed a billion years ago as a good candidate for life, then another civilization would have plenty of time to send a robotic vessel to investigate.

So, I’m open to the possibility as it does not require amazing technology

But this would lead to the following conclusions if such a vessel visited
1) It would be a robotic vessel. It would not contain biological pilots - just as we would not send our pilots on a 200k year journey. It’s just impossible to imagine for many reasons
2) The robotic vessel would be on a one way ticket. It would likely not be sending any messages back home or have any plan to return home
3) It might have intelligent robots of some kind, and it’s hard to figure how they were programmed, but I have to think it would just come and land

This backs us into a corner a bit. We sent the Voyagers on one way ticket out of the solar system, and they do send transmissions, but would we send a robotic vessel on a one way ticket. How could the cost be justified?
A lingering question.

As far as the observations of UFOs. If you investigate these, you can dismiss most of them straight away. The only ones that interest me are military sightings or sightings by people who have a lot of responsibility in their government.
And by people who are well trained with no prior interest in UFOs - who have an encounter that cannot be ‘jupiter’ or ‘mercury’.  If you throw all of the ones out that do not meet this criteria, there are still many dozens of sightings left. And many of them cannot be dismissed easily.
They also cannot be simply chalked up as advanced US or Russian technology - such as the case I mentioned at the top of this post.

The only conclusion you can arrive at, given the detail of military pilots and other pilots and of mass sightings, is that they are simply lying. They go into too much detail for it to be a star or US jet.
In one case, the case of Halt (you can look it up as Halt UFO), I think he saw a lighthouse and cannot admit it. But there are many more that are not so easily shrugged off.

How many times have we been visited by robots - if we ever were? Maybe only a handful. Maybe only once. One of these sightings might be legitimate in modern times.
Then we are tasked with answering the question: where did the vessel go?  Where else is there to go in our solar system? No where. All the action is here.

I think it’s ridiculous to invest a lot in eye witness accounts or blurry photos. There is no doubt about it. But it’s even more ridiculous to invest in 3rd hand accounts of events (a messiah) that happened 2000 or more years ago, yet many people believe in Jesus.
I think alien UFO hypotheses are less ridiculous than any religious belief because, if nothing else, alien UFO hypotheses can be falsified.

I don’t dismiss the idea out of hand, it’s just that anecdotal “evidence” is too uncertain to base a decision on.  LIke Carl Sagan said, it really is okay to wait until all the evidence is in before you make up your mind.

macgyver - 11 April 2012 06:43 PM

I agree completely with Occam. Also you need to ask yourself do you believe in UFO’s because the evidence is truly compelling and more so than any alternate explanation or do you believe because you want to believe.

There are a number of reasons to question the idea that UFOs are alien visitors.

1) Interstellar distances are enormous and while I would love to believe that we might someday develop the technology to cross those distances everything we know about physics says that it most likely will never be possible.

2) If an alien species somehow did find a way to cross the immense void between star systems why would they spend 60 years flitting around our skies, abducting and examining us and not doing anything else. If they really are so advanced that they are just studying us with no interest in contacting us why have they been sloppy and stupid enough to be glimpsed hundreds of times. Why do they fly over populated cities at night with bright lights on or in the middle of the day in broad daylight.

3) Why after 60 years is there no solid evidence of the existence of aliens. Every photo ever taken of a UFO is fuzzy and out of focus despite the ubiquitous presence of cameras and good photographers all over the world. We have amazing photos of virtually every other natural and man made phenomena, even those which are extremely rare, but not a single great photo of a UFO that isnt clearly faked. Why is there no physical evidence of any of the landings or contacts. I’m talking about solid undeniable evidence like biological samples which are clearly of extraterrestrial origin not depressions in the soft ground that supposedly have traces of “unidentifiable alloys” in them.

None of this makes any logical sense when there are more rational explanations.  If you have a strong desire to believe in aliens then you can come up with a number of unlikely ways to explain away these problems with the alien hypothesis but you would be doing so because its what you want to believe not because its the explanation that best fits the events.

I agree completely. Why don’t these aliens make their presence known? What do they have to fear from us? I’d guess nothing considering they’ve got the technology to get here from who-knows-how-far-away.

Of course there are Unidentified Flying Objects.  There are probably millions of them.  Add to those all the imaginary ones.  What has never been established is that they are evidence of anything other than moving objects that have never been identified or figments of someone’s imagination. Why would anyone think there was some alien life force attached to them?  Every time there is a sighting a conspiracy theory pops up that somehow the US military is supressong evidence about it. You people need to get a life and stop reading science fiction and watching science fiction movies. Take a course in astrophysics instead., if you have enough sense for it.

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