From: jaguar@arkham.wimsey.bc.ca (Jeremy Reimer)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
Subject: UFO articles, and their relevance
Date: 11 Apr 91 08:54:09 GMT
Organization: Chez Cthulhu +1 604 983 3546  "Caterers to the Elder Gods"



This is in response to the various UFO articles posted earlier on this group,
and is not a flame to the author(s) or the person who posted them.

I'd just like to point out:  isn't it more than a little strange that virtally
ALL of these reports have featured:

a) Flying spacecraft CONSISTANTLY saucer shaped despite the obvious limitations
   of such a design, with "human" characteristics such as "windows", etc.

b) Aliens that are nearly always short, thin, with green/grayish skin and big
   heads, who appear (remarkably) to share exactly the same human physiology
   and genetic structure save for melanin content, head size and growth rates.

c) Testimonials from people living almost exclusively in rural or nearly
   uninhabited areas

...and the list goes on.  One of the articles attempts to steer away from this
problem by suggesting that these sightings have been going on for some 50,000
years.  I doubt very much if testimonials from the Middle Ages and farther back
in history can be taken seriously.  People living at this time were uneducated
and believed very  much in the supernatural, which consumed most of their time
for telling tales of "unexplained events"  Flying saucers did not figure too
highly in those times.  Suddenly, in the twentieth century, not a single year
after the word "flying saucer" is coined, the rate of UFO reports skyrockets
from almost nil to an all-consuming passion.

It seems that people have an inexplicable desire to belive in something higher
than their own existance, and the UFO craze fills that niche.  Indeed, in a
poll taken a few years ago in Britain, it was found that more people believed
in "flying saucers" than believed in God.

Tales of abduction must be taken with a grain of salt.  Anyone who has watched
even a smattering of science fiction on television knows of the standard
routine where aliens abduct an unsuspecting human, perform some unknown tests
on him/her, than wipe his memory and return him to earth.  Yet consistantly
reports of abduction feature exactly this tale.  It seems to me to project a
profound lack imagination on behalf of humanity that such reports happen again
and again.

Why is it, that from the thousands of reported abductions, not one has reported
a detailed description of a spacecraft's interior (something of greater
complexity than a typical Star Trek set)?   Or retrieved some fragment from a
crashed spacecraft, something that could be easily identified as being of alien
origin?  Or described an extraterrestrial that is not human in form (large
heads and big black eyes don't count.) The human form is an accident which
occurred after over a billion years of evolution.  The chances of such
"convergent evolution" happening elsewhere are almost non-existant.

Why is it so hard, if as some people would state that UFOs visit the planet
daily, to produce ONE SINGLE PIECE of concrete evidence?  Even aliens can make
mistakes.  The "crashed spacecraft" story featured in one of the articles is
particularly intriguing.  Why was there no attempt made to recover something
from the wreckage?  Or take a photograph?  Again, all we are left with is one
person's testimony.

As always, alternative explainations abound.  Most UFO's are natural phenomena,
and are uninteresting (clouds, artificial lights, etc.)  The interesting
phenomena, paradoxically, is never well documented or witnessed by large groups
of people.  The human mind being the fragile thing it is, it is much easier to
assume that one person hallucinated (people do it daily, many times illegally)
than to construct an elaborate hypothesis of alien visitation.

A side note:  the document from the USAF is obviously false.  The Air Force did
a comprehensive study in the 50's called Project Blue Book designed to look
into every report by pilots of UFO encounters to try and see if there was a
basis for such events.  The project was abandoned after the reports were
labelled "too inconclusive", and there has been little follow-up since.

I'd be interested to see other people's views on this (no flames on spelling,
writing style, or anything of that nature, please.  I haven't taken English
since 1st year, where I did end up with an A, thank-you)... Does anyone on the
net have a personal tale of such an experience? (abduction or otherwise)  I'd
be very interested to see it.




_____________------======jaguar@arkham.wimsey.bc.ca======------____________
Jeremy Reimer aka The Jaguar\ "Right.  When you call for/Sunny Vancouver BC
(The Car,The Cat,The Lunatic)\ ale, I pass water."     //Canada, where it's
Known to be Armed and Cynical\\    - Baldric          // fun,fun,fun..
===========================================================================
            Remember kids: Try this at home and you're dead meat!


Article 3958 of alt.conspiracy: