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I all seriousness, the will to believe in something becomes more evident the more time I spend here. Maybe I'm more of a skeptic than I thought. I wish I were a government debunker/disinformation agent -- I could really use the healthcare.

If you want to reduce myth to truth or falsehood then you have to recognize that religion is more than just myth. It's an entire cultural system of symbols and behaviors that impute meaning to a particular social group. The claims people make within them may be true or false within...

I don't think that you present a very nuanced view of what religion is or the spectrum of beliefs it entails; it comes across as just another knee-jerk reaction to the 700 Club. You'll certainly never get any argument out of me that the biblical flood narrative is historically credible or...

Chris, I have a question, but must preface to say that I have not read this book, though the topic is fascinating. I know that they mention plasma as a possible scientific equivalent for folkloric accounts of "smokeless fire." Have the researchers made a connection between the "smokeless...

Given our current level of knowledge they probably can coexist but this is predicated on the fact that we really don't know much about either. It certainly stands to reason that ET's exist, and I believe they do but, IMO, it's a very large leap to suggest that the overwhelming probability...

You don't have to be religious or anti-religious to believe or disbelieve any of this stuff necessarily, and the anti-religious reflex can kick back just as strong as Bible-beating. One guy once wrote a book about how "Jesus" was actually a hallucinogenic mushroom. Far-fetched, most likely...

There can be no denying that the whatever the phenomenon is, it manifests itself in imagery and behaviors that are at the core primal and archetypal. Even if there are ET's involved in any of this, our way of processing these experiences is clearly filtered by our own expectations of what ET...

Absolutely this deserves study, but it needs to be level-headed. I think most people involved with these forums would agree with this, and this is why this is the only forum I bother with. Paranormal studies has always been "on the outside looking in" with respect to other, "mainstream"...

Thought I'd share a newsbit I picked up; it's an English version of an Egyptian newspaper article that made the rounds in ancient Near Eastern studies circles: "Nevine El-Aref Monday 7 Mar 2011 The fate of Egypt's antiquities After protests by archaeologists, the ministry for antiquities is no...

This guy's group has put up billboards all over my part of the country and hired staff to spread the word. Really not sure what would have given him the idea that Southerners might be receptive to his message.

We obviously have different standards of proof for what we find convincing and reasonable, and we aren't going to convince one another. That's cool. This issue has been turned about a lot already by people who have done more research than either of us. I don't doubt that something strange...

You have to be when thinking about this stuff! How does "something strange" make ETH, Randle's stuff, Friedman's stuff, massive government cover-up, etc. all "true" to the exclusion of other possibilities unless you take all of the testimony and "evidence" as a matter of faith? It's ok to...

I don't think that you're strange or unique in your situ, Simone. I used facebook previously to keep up with old friends and to sort of "spy" on old acquaintances. When my wife joined she pretty much "became friends" with everyone in or from the small rural town she grew up in. This was...

Under certain circumstances and in a legal context, first-hand testimony does count, but second- and third-hand testimony is considered hearsay. Under those standards almost all Roswell testimony would be inadmissible. You refer to Marcel's 1978 interview, which we can count as first had...

I'm interested in this...How do you mean? And this is where I run into issues with some ufologists. I would not impugn very many witnesses and because I believe most people are generally honest, but we must accept that when we invoke witnesses in the absence of any physical proof that it...

They couldn't cover up the fact that a president received oral sex in the oval office, nor could they hide that there turned out to be no WMD's in Iraq, and they had strong incentive for those. My thinking is that if something as profound as an ET crash occurred, that the gov't would have...

You're right in that "exhibit A" is probably anecdotal evidence about the government being so screwed up in other ways that it's unlikely to be able to engineer a cover-up and keep it this quiet for so long. I'm really dissatisfied with the ETH also, because the most common reason...

It's unlikely that the government (Really: it's thousands of separate agencies) is competent enough to have any definitive answers or even not-so-definitive answers about anything related to actual alien life. I'm not saying this to be a wise-ass, but the most reasonable scenario is that...

Thanks, Timx13. I agree with much of what you've said here, most likely because I have a similar background to yours: I'm about the same age and grew up with an interest in the paranormal, particularly UFO's, and digested the pop-culture of the 1980's and 90's. Though I have never seen a...