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The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis : Fact and Fallacy


Thomas R Morrison

Paranormal Adept
To date, the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) is not only the most scientifically and logically defensible explanation for the class of observations commonly known as “ufo sightings" (and it's a hypothesis that we've seen grow more probable over the decades as we've acquired more and better scientific data), but it’s also the only fully intelligible hypothesis on the table.

The prevailing alternative hypothesis that we’ve heard about frequently, especially on The Paracast, has been coined “the co-creation hypothesis.” But this hasn’t actually risen to the level of a valid hypothesis yet because its basic tenet - that the human mind can somehow produce physical objects that can be tracked on radar - defies every fundamental physical principle and observation in the canon of science. We’ve never detected a single electron being created by the human mind, and in fact the well-proven conservation laws of physics such as the conservation of lepton number and the conservation of energy, prohibit such a thing from ever occurring.

And yet we’ve been frequently hearing a common and apparently virulent meme (in fact we just heard it again in the latest interview with Col. John Alexander) that the ETH can’t be the correct explanation because “it’s too simple.”

This is a formal logical fallacy called the “conjunction fallacy.” And it’s troubling that so many intelligent and educated people have fallen prey to it with regard to this subject. So I’m going to explain this fallacy so that everyone can understand it, and hopefully we can begin digging our minds out of this trap.

Most proponents of the ETH, such as myself, argue that some of the solid and metallic devices reported in our skies – those which perform maneuvers radically more adroit than any known conventional man-made device, appear to be advanced technological devices produced by non-human civilizations. This is a very defensible notion, given what we know about ourselves and the ubiquity of water and biological molecules in space and warm Earth-like planets throughout our galaxy and cosmos.

But many Paracast guests and forum members, and some hosts, often proclaim that the ETH is “too simple” because it doesn’t explain all of the anomalous reports in the world (some actually go so far as to suggest that the ETH can’t be correct because it doesn’t explain ghosts and other paranormal phenomena).

This is an inversion of logic, not logic. The conjunction fallacy is very simple: it states that the probability of one factor being true is always higher than the probability of two or more factors being true. For example, among a sample of people, the probability of finding a girl is always higher than the probability of finding a girl with blonde hair.

So objecting to the ETH because it only explains one class of ufo sightings, and doesn’t explain all ufo sightings and ghosts and dog men and reincarnation, is a major logical failure. With each additional class of observations that a hypothesis is asked to explain, the likelihood of that explanation being correct drops logarithmically.

I just wanted to point this out so that one day, hopefully and thankfully, we will stop hearing the fallacious argument that the ETH is less probably true because it doesn’t explain many different types of observations.

It’s a big - apparently infinite, weird, and very ancient universe. We should expect to discover many disparate and confounding phenomena on the long march of expanding human understanding. Anyone who tries to explain all of these anomalous observations with a single postulate should be regarded with suspicion and pity because their logic is fundamentally faulty.
 
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Nice post Thomas R. Morrison,
The late author John Keel classic Mothman story and it's sightings prior disasters and its interactions towards humans encountering from this odd phenomena . The incidents of poltergeist cases and the effects of eyewitness who receive odd phones calls warning folks to keep away from the UFO field from a robotic sounding voice which a number can be tracked. Meeting former fighter pilots and active who seen odd aircraft which changes its formation and morphing into orbs . Submariners sightings of object moving at extreme speeds and odd interference inside the Subs during encounters. Odd interactions with orbs which can increase in size and change different colors. Shooting stars which can move at will and come down change formation and shoot back up into space. Different cloud formations which can move around and change its appearances not the ones you see in the sky either. Intelligent control from X files and able to communicate. Odd encounters with folks asking strange questions able to disappear in seconds. Nuclear specialist being sent down to impacted areas and photographing odd interactions of the phenomena which is collect and sent back to official authorities.
 
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To date, the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) is not only the most scientifically and logically defensible explanation for the class of observations commonly known as “ufo sightings" (and it's a hypothesis that we've seen grow more probable over the decades as we've acquired more and better scientific data), but it’s also the only fully intelligible hypothesis on the table.

The prevailing alternative hypothesis that we’ve heard about frequently, especially on The Paracast, has been coined “the co-creation hypothesis.” But this hasn’t actually risen to the level of a valid hypothesis yet because its basic tenet - that the human mind can somehow produce physical objects that can be tracked on radar - defies every fundamental physical principle and observation in the canon of science. We’ve never detected a single electron being created by the human mind, and in fact the well-proven conservation laws of physics such as the conservation of lepton number and the conservation of energy, prohibit such a thing from ever occurring.
That is very far from the basic tenet of co-creation. You might not be reading the texts or hearing the explanation correctly but no where in any co-creation discussion or writing have i seen any promotion of the idea that radar traces get made with the human mind. That's just silly.

Similarly i have not read anything scientific that has defined the ETH as likely or any more likely, unless you subscribe to what contactees have to say.

One more time i suppose:

 
Nice post Thomas R. Morrison,
The late author John Keel classic Mothman story and it's sightings prior disasters and its interactions towards humans encountering from this odd phenomena . The incidents of poltergeist cases and the effects of eyewitness who receive odd phones calls warning folks to keep away from the UFO field from a robotic sounding voice which a number can be tracked. Meeting former fighter pilots and active who seen odd aircraft which changes its formation and morphing into orbs . Submariners sightings of object moving at extreme speeds and odd interference inside the Subs during encounters. Odd interactions with orbs which can increase in size and change different colors. Shooting stars which can move at will and come down change formation and shoot back up into space. Different cloud formations which can move around and change its appearances not the ones you see in the sky either. Intelligent control from X files and able to communicate. Odd encounters with folks asking strange questions able to disappear in seconds. Nuclear specialist being sent down to impacted areas and photographing odd interactions of the phenomena which is collect and sent back to official authorities.
Thanks blowfish. That was a fun John Keel talk – I laughed out loud when he complained that he would’ve rather been portrayed in The Mothman Prophesies film by Brad Pitt, than by Richard Gere =D I’ve always been intrigued with that story – I’ll have to get around to reading his book.

That is very far from the basic tenet of co-creation. You might not be reading the texts or hearing the explanation correctly but no where in any co-creation discussion or writing have i seen any promotion of the idea that radar traces get made with the human mind. That's just silly.
Yes, it is silly. We do have a number of credible radar-visual cases. So how does the “co-creation hypothesis” explain that, if it doesn’t suppose that our minds somehow interact with something else to produce radar returns?

Similarly i have not read anything scientific that has defined the ETH as likely or any more likely, unless you subscribe to what contactees have to say.
Modern astronomers and astrobiologists have crunched the numbers against the latest exosolar planetary discoveries, and concluded that it’s virtually certain that advanced civilizations share our universe with us:

“By applying the new exoplanet data to the universe's 2 x 10 to the 22nd power stars, Frank and Sullivan find that human civilization is likely to be unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilization developing on a habitable planet are less than about one in 10 billion trillion, or one part in 10 to the 22th power.

‘One in 10 billion trillion is incredibly small,’ says Frank. ‘To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us. Think of it this way. Before our result you'd be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were, say, one in a trillion. But even that guess, one chance in a trillion, implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about a 10 billion other times over cosmic history’”
https://phys.org/news/2016-04-limits-uniqueness.html

“A New Empirical Constraint on the Prevalence of Technological Species in the Universe,” A. Frank & W. T. Sullivan III, Astrobiology, 2016
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1510/1510.08837.pdf

One more time i suppose:



I’m honestly surprised that you weren’t embarrassed to share that painfully banal video that features frickin’ video game footage throughout the entire rotten thing, with some snide twit beating his chest to rhyming couplets like an “Epic Rap Battle” video. Not to mention the weird worship-like fixation on Jacques Vallée, as if he has all the answers (even though he explicitly states that he doesn’t have the answers to the UFO phenomenon).

But this raises an interesting point that I’ve been meaning to address in this thread: namely, the capabilities of technological devices originating from civilizations thousands (and more likely, millions) of years ahead of us.

An Apache helicopter over ancient Athens would’ve made the locals crap their pants in confusion and fear – and that’s just a 3000-year difference, give or take a millennium. Witnesses would’ve been convinced that either Ares or Zeus were furious and had sent some mythical beast to reign terror down on them for some imagined slight (neglecting to sacrifice a calf at their temple on the appropriate day, for example).

Similarly, we literally cannot even imagine the capabilities of a civilization 10-10,000+ millennia ahead of us. We got our first glimpse of a viable interstellar propulsion concept only about 23 years ago, and that covers all of the simple stuff like levitation and inertia-defying performance capabilities. But we can’t even imagine what a PSYOP would be like from a civilization thousands+ years ahead of us. Thought projection/manipulation, unthinkably advanced holographic capabilities, and genetic analysis and alteration capabilities vastly beyond our comprehension, would all be likely, given enough scientific advancement. But just as an ancient Greek couldn’t imagine quantum teleportation, we have no idea what the next million years of technological advancement could yield for an advanced civilization.

But let’s get back to gravitational field propulsion for a moment, because that perfectly fits most of the exotic performance characteristics that are widely reported. By definition, this involves engineering spacetime geometry. Space *and* time. At a minimum, that means that they could control the rate of time with respect to the device, to some extent – perhaps even making it slow to a crawl, or speed by, compared to an observer on the surface of the Earth. And what if they can also move backward in time as well? If they’ve figured out how to do that (and we already have compelling theoretical work that links things like warp drive and wormholes to time travel) – then we’re so far out of our league, it’s mind-boggling to consider. For example, we could occasionally be seeing the same device, separated by thousands of years or more in our time, as it collects data across our entire history, and does whatever weird stuff that a hyperadvanced interstellar civilization gets up to. Such a device could arrive at the Earth and opt to shape our entire history and/or genetic evolution however it wished, and check the results in the future until it got the outcome it wanted, within perhaps a week of its own time on board the craft. This would also allow them to erase all tangible evidence of their existence, of course: if some pivotal sighting accidentally happened that undeniably alerted us to their presence (which they seem to avoid), they could just go back in time and prevent that event from happening, nbd.

And that's just one of the possibilities that we can imagine. We can't even anticipate what another 100,000 years of civilization could yield, scientifically. All we really know is that it would seem like magic to us, and that's not much.

Anyway, I found all of the arguments in this video to be either logically flawed, presumptuous, or simply myopic. So I’ve made a list of rebuttals to each point:

Scientifically rational rebuttals to Jacques Vallee’s five criteria against the ETH:

1.) “3 million landings per 20 years – we’d need only one probe to learn everything about a planet like Earth, so why so many?”

Rebuttal: A.) 3 million landings per each 20 years sounds preposterously large to me – where’s the evidence of this? I’ve only heard a handful of credible landing reports in my lifetime of interest in this subject. B.) The assumption that only one species has visited the Earth is illogical: if one civilization has visited us, then interstellar spaceflight is practical to any life form significantly more advanced than us, so millions of species could be exploring the cosmos with both occupied and artificially intelligent devices – and indeed, we do see a wide variety of craft, so that fits the ETH. C.) The presumption that one of our current probes could learn everything there is to know about our global ecosphere is ludicrous on its face; we’ve sent multiple probes to the barren wasteland of Mars and have only begun to scratch the surface of understanding it and the comparably primitive and evidently lifeless conditions there. The presence of a vibrant Earth-like biosphere would change that equation dramatically – it would take hundreds if not thousands of probes to learn everything that there is to know about; the Earth, the > 8 million species here, and we humans (who still haven’t figured ourselves out yet). D.) The assumption of motive is totally naive: why would an alien species limit its interest in this planet to collecting data? They could be doing all kinds of things that we both can imagine, and can’t imagine. Like running experiments of a biological or a psychological nature.

2. ) UFOs “move through objects,” “pop in and out of existence,” “defy physical logic and quickly change direction like a holographic projection.”

Rebuttal: Let’s take these one at a time:

* “move through objects” – where’s the evidence of this? I’m aware of these objects moving through sea, but so do submarines. I’ve never heard about a case of a UFO moving through a solid object. And if such a thing has been reported, then how can we be sure that it actually happened that way? An extremely fast-moving object could appear on the other side of a solid object (like a mountain) by going around it faster than we could see.

* “pop in and out of existence” – again, many of these devices exhibit lightning fast accelerations from a standstill. Ergo, they could also exhibit equally fast decelerations. An object doing either with sufficient speed would appear to “pop into and out of existence” to the naked eye. Also, we’re already developing and deploying various forms of cloaking & camouflage technology; a civilization that’s, say, a million years ahead of us technologically, would obviously have the ability to cloak and decloak virtually instantaneously.

* “defy physical logic and quickly change direction like a holographic projection” – first off, it’s simply wrong to say that these devices “defy physical logic.” We already have a theoretical concept for gravitational field propulsion (Alcubierre, 1994), that would explain pretty much –all- of the observed performance characteristics quite neatly. And in labs right now, physicists are learning how to engineer the quantum wavefunction of matter to create all kinds of novel effects that have never been achieved before – in time, our very understanding of what properties a “solid object” can exhibit, will change radically, and the capabilities of such devices would be incomprehensible to our current understanding of materials science. Rapid changes of direction are elegantly explained by the principle of gravitational field propulsion, where even extremely high accelerations produce zero g-forces on board the device generating such a field. Also, it’s quite possible that some of the sighting reports –do- involve holograms: holograms generated by extremely advanced interstellar devices (because we’re almost certainly not capable of generating holograms of that nature yet, which appear solid and emit light).

3.) “They usually look like humans and breathe our air etc” – the cases we know of that fit this description, like the Adamski case, usually turn out to be frauds. Those that aren’t frauds, could be psychological/perceptual manipulation of some kind using technology unknown to us. And of course it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that since Earth-like conditions are ubiquitous throughout the universe, some of those planets would yield similar evolutionary patterns that could produce bipedal primates like ourselves. There are evolutionary reasons that we have two forward-facing eyes, and stand upright, and have the size and body mass that we have, for example. Given a large enough sample size, some extraterrestrial life forms will resemble us, and of course, those are likely to take an interest in us because we’d belong to their own class of bipedal humanoid species.

4.) “what are the abductions for? Thousands of cases all over the planet – what kind of experiment requires that much activity?” “And why is their [surgical] technique so primitive?”

Rebuttal: Who says that abductions aren’t entirely psychological in nature? The evidence of abductions is even thinner than the evidence for UFO sightings – perhaps it’s just some kind of sleep paralysis nightmare. But even if they are real, then how the heck can we determine how many abductions would be required, if we don’t know the intention behind them? Consider this: we say that science has “mapped the human genome,” but in reality, every person possesses a unique complete genome, each with different strengths and weaknesses and idiosyncrasies and unique sets of mutations. If a race wanted to 100% understand the potentials and limitations of a species like ours, they’d quite possibly have to study every single man, woman, and child on the planet, because the same genetic profile never occurs twice. As far as their surgical techniques, who knows? Maybe there’s a psychological component to their program to gauge our fear and pain responses. Or maybe it’s easier to stick a needle into somebody to get a deep tissue sample, than any other method available. In any case, recovery seems to be complete in nearly every case, so gauging by “patient outcomes” they seem to be doing far better than our own hospital procedures, which frequently kill people (and sometimes kill them horribly).

5.) “Why does it seem like they’ve always been here, and been described so differently throughout thousands of years of history?”

Rebuttal: The fact that “they” have been visiting the Earth for thousands of years makes absolute sense if the cosmos is teeming with alien civilizations. In that case, most civilizations would be millions or more years ahead of us, so they could’ve been visiting us from the age of the dinosaurs or earlier, perhaps to observe the trajectory of our evolution. And of course we would’ve described them in religious terms before science provided us with the notion of “flying machines” only about 100 years ago. Language evolves: today’s “antigravitational metallic spacecraft” would by necessity be described differently by, say, the ancients Greeks – they’d only have concepts like “a chariot of the gods” to describe a luminous aerial object maneuvering in dramatic ways. Similarly, some uneducated peasant in feudal Europe might witness some glowing object lurching around against the background of stars as a “angel” or a “devil.”

I’ll close by citing a couple of key points that are usually overlooked.

1.) Nobody’s saying that the ETH explains –all- anomalous sightings reports. It’s a big weird universe and we’re only beginning to map the terrain of possibilities for life, consciousness, energy, physics, biology, etc. So lots of freaky things are probably going on all over the place but with sufficient rarity that we haven’t understood them yet.

But the ETH certainly appears to explain some, if not most, of the anomalous reports extremely well. It’s all but certain that –some- sightings are extraterrestrial in origin.

2.) There’s no viable alternative hypothesis, that I’ve seen anyway. It seems to come down to: 1.) the ETH, and/or 2.) an empty and hand-wavy argument that goes a bit like this “something extremely nonspecific about consciousness,” and/or 3.) "they’re extradimensional, whatever that means – and don’t bother me by explaining how extra physical dimensions don’t mean what I think they mean or that we’ve never seen a whisper of physical evidence to suggest that such a thing exists,” and/or 4.) “we have no idea what the heck is going on.”

Note that the ETH is the only concept which actually rises to the status of a hypothesis; none of the other options even achieve the level of a cogent thought.

So the most rational position is this: the ETH explains many sighting reports, and the rest we have no explanation for yet. That works for me.
 
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Thanks blowfish. That was a fun John Keel talk – I laughed out loud when he complained that he would’ve rather been portrayed in The Mothman Prophesies film by Brad Pitt, than by Richard Gere =D I’ve always been intrigued with that story – I’ll have to get around to reading his book.


Yes, it is silly. We do have a number of credible radar-visual cases. So how does the “co-creation hypothesis” explain that, if it doesn’t suppose that our minds somehow interact with something else to produce radar returns?


Modern astronomers and astrobiologists have crunched the numbers against the latest exosolar planetary discoveries, and concluded that it’s virtually certain that advanced civilizations share our universe with us:

“By applying the new exoplanet data to the universe's 2 x 10 to the 22nd power stars, Frank and Sullivan find that human civilization is likely to be unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilization developing on a habitable planet are less than about one in 10 billion trillion, or one part in 10 to the 22th power.

‘One in 10 billion trillion is incredibly small,’ says Frank. ‘To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us. Think of it this way. Before our result you'd be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were, say, one in a trillion. But even that guess, one chance in a trillion, implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about a 10 billion other times over cosmic history’”
https://phys.org/news/2016-04-limits-uniqueness.html

“A New Empirical Constraint on the Prevalence of Technological Species in the Universe,” A. Frank & W. T. Sullivan III, Astrobiology, 2016
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1510/1510.08837.pdf




I’m honestly surprised that you weren’t embarrassed to share that painfully banal video that features frickin’ video game footage throughout the entire rotten thing, with some snide twit beating his chest to rhyming couplets like an “Epic Rap Battle” video. Not to mention the weird worship-like fixation on Jacques Vallée, as if he has all the answers (even though he explicitly states that he doesn’t have the answers to the UFO phenomenon).

But this raises an interesting point that I’ve been meaning to address in this thread: namely, the capabilities of technological devices originating from civilizations thousands (and more likely, millions) of years ahead of us.

An Apache helicopter over ancient Athens would’ve made the locals crap their pants in confusion and fear – and that’s just a 3000-year difference, give or take a millennium. Witnesses would’ve been convinced that either Ares or Zeus were furious and had sent some mythical beast to reign terror down on them for some imagined slight (neglecting to sacrifice a calf at their temple on the appropriate day, for example).

Similarly, we literally cannot even imagine the capabilities of a civilization 10-10,000+ millennia ahead of us. We got our first glimpse of a viable interstellar propulsion concept only about 23 years ago, and that covers all of the simple stuff like levitation and inertia-defying performance capabilities. But we can’t even imagine what a PSYOP would be like from a civilization thousands+ years ahead of us. Thought projection/manipulation, unthinkably advanced holographic capabilities, and genetic analysis and alteration capabilities vastly beyond our comprehension, would all be likely, given enough scientific advancement. But just as an ancient Greek couldn’t imagine quantum teleportation, we have no idea what the next million years of technological advancement could yield for an advanced civilization.

But let’s get back to gravitational field propulsion for a moment, because that perfectly fits most of the exotic performance characteristics that are widely reported. By definition, this involves engineering spacetime geometry. Space *and* time. At a minimum, that means that they could control the rate of time with respect to the device, to some extent – perhaps even making it slow to a crawl, or speed by, compared to an observer on the surface of the Earth. And what if they can also move backward in time as well? If they’ve figured out how to do that (and we already have compelling theoretical work that links things like warp drive and wormholes to time travel) – then we’re so far out of our league, it’s mind-boggling to consider. For example, we could occasionally be seeing the same device, separated by thousands of years or more in our time, as it collects data across our entire history, and does whatever weird stuff that a hyperadvanced interstellar civilization gets up to. Such a device could arrive at the Earth and opt to shape our entire history and/or genetic evolution however it wished, and check the results in the future until it got the outcome it wanted, within perhaps a week of its own time on board the craft. This would also allow them to erase all tangible evidence of their existence, of course: if some pivotal sighting accidentally happened that undeniably alerted us to their presence (which they seem to avoid), they could just go back in time and prevent that event from happening, nbd.

And that's just one of the possibilities that we can imagine. We can't even anticipate what another 100,000 years of civilization could yield, scientifically. All we really know is that it would seem like magic to us, and that's not much.

Anyway, I found all of the arguments in this video to be either logically flawed, presumptuous, or simply myopic. So I’ve made a list of rebuttals to each point:

Scientifically rational rebuttals to Jacques Vallee’s five criteria against the ETH:

1.) “3 million landings per 20 years – we’d need only one probe to learn everything about a planet like Earth, so why so many?”

Rebuttal: A.) 3 million landings per each 20 years sounds preposterously large to me – where’s the evidence of this? I’ve only heard a handful of credible landing reports in my lifetime of interest in this subject. B.) The assumption that only one species has visited the Earth is illogical: if one civilization has visited us, then interstellar spaceflight is practical to any life form significantly more advanced than us, so millions of species could be exploring the cosmos with both occupied and artificially intelligent devices – and indeed, we do see a wide variety of craft, so that fits the ETH. C.) The presumption that one of our current probes could learn everything there is to know about our global ecosphere is ludicrous on its face; we’ve sent multiple probes to the barren wasteland of Mars and have only begun to scratch the surface of understanding it and the comparably primitive and evidently lifeless conditions there. The presence of a vibrant Earth-like biosphere would change that equation dramatically – it would take hundreds if not thousands of probes to learn everything that there is to know about; the Earth, the > 8 million species here, and we humans (who still haven’t figured ourselves out yet). D.) The assumption of motive is totally naive: why would an alien species limit its interest in this planet to collecting data? They could be doing all kinds of things that we both can imagine, and can’t imagine. Like running experiments of a biological or a psychological nature.

2. ) UFOs “move through objects,” “pop in and out of existence,” “defy physical logic and quickly change direction like a holographic projection.”

Rebuttal: Let’s take these one at a time:

* “move through objects” – where’s the evidence of this? I’m aware of these objects moving through sea, but so do submarines. I’ve never heard about a case of a UFO moving through a solid object. And if such a thing has been reported, then how can we be sure that it actually happened that way? An extremely fast-moving object could appear on the other side of a solid object (like a mountain) by going around it faster than we could see.

* “pop in and out of existence” – again, many of these devices exhibit lightning fast accelerations from a standstill. Ergo, they could also exhibit equally fast decelerations. An object doing either with sufficient speed would appear to “pop into and out of existence” to the naked eye. Also, we’re already developing and deploying various forms of cloaking & camouflage technology; a civilization that’s, say, a million years ahead of us technologically, would obviously have the ability to cloak and decloak virtually instantaneously.

* “defy physical logic and quickly change direction like a holographic projection” – first off, it’s simply wrong to say that these devices “defy physical logic.” We already have a theoretical concept for gravitational field propulsion (Alcubierre, 1994), that would explain pretty much –all- of the observed performance characteristics quite neatly. And in labs right now, physicists are learning how to engineer the quantum wavefunction of matter to create all kinds of novel effects that have never been achieved before – in time, our very understanding of what properties a “solid object” can exhibit, will change radically, and the capabilities of such devices would be incomprehensible to our current understanding of materials science. Rapid changes of direction are elegantly explained by the principle of gravitational field propulsion, where even extremely high accelerations produce zero g-forces on board the device generating such a field. Also, it’s quite possible that some of the sighting reports –do- involve holograms: holograms generated by extremely advanced interstellar devices (because we’re almost certainly not capable of generating holograms of that nature yet, which appear solid and emit light).

3.) “They usually look like humans and breathe our air etc” – the cases we know of that fit this description, like the Adamski case, usually turn out to be frauds. Those that aren’t frauds, could be psychological/perceptual manipulation of some kind using technology unknown to us. And of course it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that since Earth-like conditions are ubiquitous throughout the universe, some of those planets would yield similar evolutionary patterns that could produce bipedal primates like ourselves. There are evolutionary reasons that we have two forward-facing eyes, and stand upright, and have the size and body mass that we have, for example. Given a large enough sample size, some extraterrestrial life forms will resemble us, and of course, those are likely to take an interest in us because we’d belong to their own class of bipedal humanoid species.

4.) “what are the abductions for? Thousands of cases all over the planet – what kind of experiment requires that much activity?” “And why is their [surgical] technique so primitive?”

Rebuttal: Who says that abductions aren’t entirely psychological in nature? The evidence of abductions is even thinner than the evidence for UFO sightings – perhaps it’s just some kind of sleep paralysis nightmare. But even if they are real, then how the heck can we determine how many abductions would be required, if we don’t know the intention behind them? Consider this: we say that science has “mapped the human genome,” but in reality, every person possesses a unique complete genome, each with different strengths and weaknesses and idiosyncrasies and unique sets of mutations. If a race wanted to 100% understand the potentials and limitations of a species like ours, they’d quite possibly have to study every single man, woman, and child on the planet, because the same genetic profile never occurs twice. As far as their surgical techniques, who knows? Maybe there’s a psychological component to their program to gauge our fear and pain responses. Or maybe it’s easier to stick a needle into somebody to get a deep tissue sample, than any other method available. In any case, recovery seems to be complete in nearly every case, so gauging by “patient outcomes” they seem to be doing far better than our own hospital procedures, which frequently kill people (and sometimes kill them horribly).

5.) “Why does it seem like they’ve always been here, and been described so differently throughout thousands of years of history?”

Rebuttal: The fact that “they” have been visiting the Earth for thousands of years makes absolute sense if the cosmos is teeming with alien civilizations. In that case, most civilizations would be millions or more years ahead of us, so they could’ve been visiting us from the age of the dinosaurs or earlier, perhaps to observe the trajectory of our evolution. And of course we would’ve described them in religious terms before science provided us with the notion of “flying machines” only about 100 years ago. Language evolves: today’s “antigravitational metallic spacecraft” would by necessity be described differently by, say, the ancients Greeks – they’d only have concepts like “a chariot of the gods” to describe a luminous aerial object maneuvering in dramatic ways. Similarly, some uneducated peasant in feudal Europe might witness some glowing object lurching around against the background of stars as a “angel” or a “devil.”

I’ll close by citing a couple of key points that are usually overlooked.

1.) Nobody’s saying that the ETH explains –all- anomalous sightings reports. It’s a big weird universe and we’re only beginning to map the terrain of possibilities for life, consciousness, energy, physics, biology, etc. So lots of freaky things are probably going on all over the place but with sufficient rarity that we haven’t understood them yet.

But the ETH certainly appears to explain some, if not most, of the anomalous reports extremely well. It’s all but certain that –some- sightings are extraterrestrial in origin.

2.) There’s no viable alternative hypothesis, that I’ve seen anyway. It seems to come down to: 1.) the ETH, and/or 2.) an empty and hand-wavy argument that goes a bit like this “something extremely nonspecific about consciousness,” and/or 3.) "they’re extradimensional, whatever that means – and don’t bother me by explaining how extra physical dimensions don’t mean what I think they mean or that we’ve never seen a whisper of physical evidence to suggest that such a thing exists,” and/or 4.) “we have no idea what the heck is going on.”

Note that the ETH is the only concept which actually rises to the status of a hypothesis; none of the other options even achieve the level of a cogent thought.

So the most rational position is this: the ETH explains many sighting reports, and the rest we have no explanation for yet. That works for me.
Ok....you've got a lot there but I'd like to address some of the points....

Co-creation has no truck with the idea of a true event anomaly (using Jerome Clark's division and classifications of the phenomenon that we've heard about on various episodes of The Paracast and most recently on the August 13 episode) where physical evidence is evident of an actual physical object being confirmed by multiple hard sources I. E. Radar along with multiple witnesses, physical trace evidence etc. These are things in our tangible reality and what they are and where they come from we know not. These are rare and few in the history of the phenomenon, occupying a very small percentage of what is called UFO sightings. The vast majority of the phenomenon Clark calls experience anomalies which are are alive only in the perception and memory of the witness.

These are also described as High Strange because while not a hallucination or a dream they are unique experiences for the witness. And it is inside these anomalies that we find all the many paranormal associations with what was seen, including surreal descriptions of craft, craft behaving like ghosts as they disappear and yes float through objects or are accompanied by other strange experiences for said witness. These are Fortean phenomenon that have a large rich history and belong to a paranormal categorization. Co-creation is interested in how these work as they appear to be a collaboration of a perceiving witness and possibly some unknown external source that may or may not be conscious.

The August 13th 2017 episode featuring many long term luminaries in the field, along with the After the Paracast episode, highlights how all of these hardcore and well regarded researchers moved away from the ETH and towards a much more evolved and nuanced approach to trying to understand what experience anomalies are. Co-creation is another way to define this manner of thinking about what the majority of ufo sighings are built out of.

I show you the video game piece to understand how the ETH is thin up against the greatest thinkers in the field.

The ETH belongs to the Greer's and DeLonge's of Ufology who are basically cult leaders promoting a religion or a belief system. The big thinkers in the field say the exact same thing. While hardcore event anomalies speak to a nuts and bolts craft the fact remains we have no idea what they are or where they come from. Just because life is likely to be everywhere in the universe it doesn't mean it's visiting us. We see ufos near the planet and they seem to belong to this habitat and we have no reason to confirm they come from outer space. This type of thinking about the phenomenon appears to be the dominant strain of critical thinking from both past and current thinkers in the field. It's worth listening to how these major researchers started as ETH promoters as Vallée was, and how the all switched away from ideology towards being much more open minded about what's going on. This does not mean the ETH is false, just unproven and not very likely given what the vast majority of sightings tell us, along with the people who basically have been defining the field for the last 40 odd years.
 
Co-creation has no truck with the idea of a true event anomaly (using Jerome Clark's division and classifications of the phenomenon that we've heard about on various episodes of The Paracast and most recently on the August 13 episode) where physical evidence is evident of an actual physical object being confirmed by multiple hard sources I. E. Radar along with multiple witnesses, physical trace evidence etc. These are things in our tangible reality and what they are and where they come from we know not. These are rare and few in the history of the phenomenon, occupying a very small percentage of what is called UFO sightings. The vast majority of the phenomenon Clark calls experience anomalies which are are alive only in the perception and memory of the witness.
Okay, and I appreciate the clarification, but I have a valid objection to this classification system right off the bat, namely: apparently it presumes that all sightings that don’t provide physical traces (radar, sonar, landings impressions, etc.) aren’t true event anomalies.

But a child could see the flaw in that reasoning – most witnesses clearly either don’t have access to radar evidence/etc., or they simply don’t look for that kind of evidence. It doesn’t mean that such evidence doesn’t/didn’t/couldn’t exist at the time of the sighting. Chances are, most true event anomalies wouldn’t be classified as such for any number of reasons; because nobody bothered to talk to the local radar station to get radar confirmation, or because the radar station denied the existence of the evidence, or because the physical object employed a stealth technology that foiled the radar in the first place (we already have the technology to achieve this, certainly any device created by a civilization with spacetime engineering capability would likely have far superior stealth technology).

To properly model the ratio of confirmed true event anomalies to the number of real but unconfirmed true event anomalies, one would have to perform a very challenging statistical analysis that factored in such considerations. Because obviously the number of confirmed true event anomalies would only be a tiny percentage of the total number of true event anomalies, due to the difficulties involved in acquiring independent physical confirmation like radar traces and landing impressions.

These are also described as High Strange because while not a hallucination or a dream they are unique experiences for the witness. And it is inside these anomalies that we find all the many paranormal associations with what was seen, including surreal descriptions of craft, craft behaving like ghosts as they disappear and yes float through objects or are accompanied by other strange experiences for said witness. These are Fortean phenomenon that have a large rich history and belong to a paranormal categorization. Co-creation is interested in how these work as they appear to be a collaboration of a perceiving witness and possibly some unknown external source that may or may not be conscious.
I’m the first to admit that the ETH doesn’t necessarily explain –all- sighting reports; I’m pretty confident that there must be more going on than extraterrestrial vehicles visiting our planet from time to time. Given the age and complexity of the cosmos, we should expect to encounter some truly confounding/incomprehensible phenomena from time to time – things vastly more perplexing than alien technology zipping through our skies.

But as I described in my last post, it’s a mistake to assume that all single witness events are High Strange. For one thing, the technological capabilities of an interstellar civilization would very likely be so beguiling as to appear “supernatural” at times. And it would be logically indefensible to assume that, if a second/third/etc witness were present, they wouldn’t have seen the same thing – and in fact the vast majority of multiple witness sightings are described in essentially the exact same way by each observer present.

It would be more sensible to only classify those rare events where multiple witnesses describe the experience very differently – Joe sees a UFO, but his wife sees a flying pig, and their neighbor sees a helicopter – as High Strange. But honestly I can’t think of a single case like that. And if they do actually happen, I think it’s more likely to involve a technology that surpasses our present scientific comprehension, than some undefined paranormal force.

I show you the video game piece to understand how the ETH is thin up against the greatest thinkers in the field.
Well, that backfired then, because I’ve clearly demonstrated many fundamental weaknesses in those points. With a little applied analytical reasoning, the ETH makes those objections look silly, not the other way around.

Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy btw. Our culture is rife with examples of very intelligent and accomplished specialists in one field (computer programming, for example), failing utterly to arrive at the correct solution to a problem in an unrelated field (physics and astrobiology, for example).

The ETH belongs to the Greer's and DeLonge's of Ufology who are basically cult leaders promoting a religion or a belief system. The big thinkers in the field say the exact same thing. While hardcore event anomalies speak to a nuts and bolts craft the fact remains we have no idea what they are or where they come from. Just because life is likely to be everywhere in the universe it doesn't mean it's visiting us. We see ufos near the planet and they seem to belong to this habitat and we have no reason to confirm they come from outer space. This type of thinking about the phenomenon appears to be the dominant strain of critical thinking from both past and current thinkers in the field. It's worth listening to how these major researchers started as ETH promoters as Vallée was, and how the all switched away from ideology towards being much more open minded about what's going on. This does not mean the ETH is false, just unproven and not very likely given what the vast majority of sightings tell us, along with the people who basically have been defining the field for the last 40 odd years.
No – the ETH does not “belong” to people like Greer and DeLonge. That’s also a logical fallacy: that’s like saying that the theory of evolution is wrong because some of the people who believe in it are idiots and/or charlatans.

This whole paragraph is fraught with errors, frankly. And they’re mostly unrelated, so I guess I’ll have to address them one at a time:

The big thinkers in the field say the exact same thing.
First of all, no they don’t. And second, you’re appealing to authority again. Most medieval priests thought that the Sun orbited the Earth – they were considered to be the authorities because they could read. “The big thinkers” are often wrong, and when they are, it’s usually all at the same time (which is how bad ideas persist for so long).

While hardcore event anomalies speak to a nuts and bolts craft the fact remains we have no idea what they are or where they come from.
The ETH is clearly the strongest explanatory candidate for such cases – multiple independent lines of data and logic converge in support of it. So while we can’t say for sure that the ETH is the correct explanation, it’s a strong argument. Which is better than no argument, which is what the anti-ETH camp seems to be offering.

Just because life is likely to be everywhere in the universe it doesn't mean it's visiting us.
If you get a burning bite while you’re out camping, and you know that the area is infested with fire ants, then it’s not a big leap to assume that you got bitten by a fire ant. And we only need to look at ourselves, to understand that sentient beings like to explore as far outward as their technology will permit. Since we’re the only sentient being that we know about for certain, we’re the only example we have to go by – so we should do that.

We see ufos near the planet and they seem to belong to this habitat and we have no reason to confirm they come from outer space.
You seriously assert “they seem to belong to this habitat?" In what way? The reason people get so excited when they see these things, is that they’re very obviously –not- “from this habitat.” And from a physics POV, a solid technological device that can defy gravity and perform virtually instantaneous accelerations from a dead stop to many thousands of miles per hour, is almost certainly a gravitational field propulsion device. And we already know that this is the *ideal* technique for rapid (superluminal) interstellar travel, and the only theoretically known method of side-stepping special relativistic time dilation effects. So if we witness a device that’s vastly superior to any human technology, and it clearly possesses the capability of rapid interstellar spaceflight, then it’s natural and rational to conclude that it probably isn’t from Earth. Especially since we now know that 22% of the stars in the universe are orbited by a warm Earth-like planet – and a great many of those are significantly older than our own planet, so they’ve had plenty of time to evolve an intelligent species like our own and to surpass our own level of technological development. It’s a simple, even elementary, argument – I can’t fathom why so many people struggle with it.

This type of thinking about the phenomenon appears to be the dominant strain of critical thinking from both past and current thinkers in the field.
Another (false) appeal to authority. In reality, only at The Paracast do we find a hotbed of anti-ETH thinking. But just because a few people got bored with the ETH, doesn’t undermine its solid (and continually growing) basis in fact and logic.

It's worth listening to how these major researchers started as ETH promoters as Vallée was, and how the all switched away from ideology towards being much more open minded about what's going on.
I’m all for having an open mind: show me a superior alternative hypothesis and I’ll get into it. Oh right, there isn’t one yet.

This does not mean the ETH is false, just unproven and not very likely given what the vast majority of sightings tell us
You’re really going with a “vast majority of sightings” argument here? The vast majority of sightings appear to be physical devices that emit light and appear the same way to all witnesses. And when we can get access to radar evidence, it frequently confirms the events as reported by eyewitnesses. Ergo, the vast majority of sightings are best explained by the ETH.

along with the people who basically have been defining the field for the last 40 odd years.
That’s yet another appeal to authority (how many is that now – four, five?). And it’s still a logical fallacy. I also think that if we were to conduct a survey among “the top ufologists” (whoever that is), greater than 90% would favor an explanation involving extraterrestrial civilizations visiting our planet. Why? Because it’s the only clear hypothesis on the table, and all of the existing data and logic supports it.

Sure, some things we see in the sky on rare occasion could be something else – perhaps unknown atmospheric plasma effects, or perhaps elves, fairies or ghosts (if such things actually exist).

But for the vast bulk of truly anomalous ufo sightings, the ETH is clearly still the only real explanatory contender. So rather than attacking it, we should do what a scientist would do: employ it as a working hypothesis and continue to develop it, to see if it holds up and strengthens for yet another half century, or if new evidence emerges that challenges its basic assumptions.

Like I said in my question to Jan Harzan yesterday, it strikes me that the situation will shift fairly dramatically once we figure out how to build a gravitational field propulsion system. Because once we know how do it, the frail human ego will finally be ready to accept that “if we can do it, then ‘they’ can do it too – and they probably already have.”
 
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The ETH belongs to the Greer's and DeLonge's of Ufology

While they have certainly hitched their wagons to it, its doesn't belong to them.
But i think a version of the ETH is the most likely answer.

It comes down to a simple question:

Are we all alone in this vast universe or not.

Is our planet , one in a model that with variations is still basically the same the universe wide the only place life took hold ?

Objections such as distance and speed are irrelevant imo.

10 years ago a mission to Mars using the technology of the day would have taken 8 months, today we are talking 40 days......

New Rocket Engine Could Reach Mars in 40 Days

The reactor needed is a challenge, but the Polywell may solve that

Polywell - Wikipedia

So imo distance and speed factors are only limited by technology and that's always evolving.

So the ETH conundrum can be resolved with the question. Are we likely to be the only life in the universe or not.

My money is on not.

There Are Probably Way More Earth-Like Exoplanets Than We Imagined | Science | Smithsonian

A group of scientists from UC Berkeley and the University of Hawaii published a calculation suggesting that we’ve overlooked evidence of a vast number of Earth-sized exoplanets in the habitable zone of their stars, simply because these planets are harder to detect with current methods. They believe that, on average, 22% of Sun-like stars (that is, stars with a size and temperature similar to the Sun) harbor a planet that’s roughly Earth-sized in their habitable zones.


And that doesn't even include the post biological aspect who would not need earth like planets, and for whom distance and timescale is also not a factor.

ABSTRACT


The pace of technological advance on Earth is such that post-humans – whether organic, cyborg or entirely inorganic – could emerge within a few centuries (or indeed within a single century). In the billions of years lying ahead, such entities, continuing to evolve not through natural selection but on the (far faster) timescale of technological evolution could spread through the cosmos (in a manner whose details we manifestly cannot even conceive) . If advanced life had emerged on other planets, and followed a similar evolutionary track to what has happened on Earth, then the era of ‘organic’ intelligence will be a thin sliver of time compared to the far longer post-human era dominated by ‘machines’. This suggests that, if SETI succeeded, the most likely source of any artificial emissions would be unlikely to come from anything resembling the ‘organic’ civilization that prevails on Earth.


Extraterrestrial life and intelligence have always been fascinating topics on the speculative fringe of science. But in the last decade or two, serious advances on several fronts have generated wider interest in these subjects – indeed, they have become almost ‘mainstream’. One can highlight four areas where there’s a gratifying crescendo of interest and understanding:


(i) The discovery and study of exoplanets began only 20 years ago. It is now one of the most vibrant frontiers of science. Data are accumulating at an accelerating rate; we can confidently assert that there are billions of Earth-like planets in our Galaxy; it is not premature to seek evidence that some have biospheres


(ii) There has been substantial recent progress in understanding the origin of life. It’s been clear for decades that the transition from complex chemistry to the first entities that could be described as ‘living’ poses one of the crucial problems in the whole of science. But until recently, people shied away from it, regarding it as neither timely nor tractable. In contrast, numerous distinguished scientists are now committed to this challenge.


(iii) Advances in computational power and robotics have led to growing interest in the possibility that ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) could in the coming decades achieve (and exceed) human capabilities over a wider range of conceptual and physical tasks. This has stimulated discussions of the nature of consciousness (is it an ‘emergent’ property or something more special?), and further speculation by ethicists and philosophers on what forms of inorganic intelligence might be created by us – or might already exist in the cosmos – and how humans might relate to them.


(iv) In the coming years there will be expanded and better-resourced efforts to search for ET; these will focus wider interest on the subject and thereby generate new ideas.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Post-Biological Intelligence | SETI Institute
 
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It comes down to a simple question:

Are we all alone in this vast universe or not.
Good post mike.

I’d like to make a couple of points that are germane to this discussion.

I’ve been noticing that the people who speak out against the ETH tend to share these two factors in common:

1.) They don’t seem to be aware of the long-term successes of the ETH, so they’re not seeing the “big picture” aka historical perspective here. And

2.) Critics of the ETH don’t seem to be aware of recent scientific findings which unanimously favor the ETH.

Since its inception over 70 years ago, the ETH has racked up a number of successful scientific predictions. In my estimation, these successes justify the elevation of the ETH to a true scientific theory. Let’s be specific:

* The ETH suggests that habitable worlds are not rare in the universe. This was unknown at the time of its inception, but in the intervening 70 years we’ve discovered that a whopping 22% of all stars are orbited by at least one Earth-like planet within the habitable zone (and note that life may also exist on habitable moons outside of the stellar habitable zone, and perhaps in unexpected conditions as well via silicon chemistry rather than carbon chemistry, and perhaps even more exotic conditions).

* The ETH predicted that a form of field propulsion would be discovered which averts the shortcomings imposed by the special theory of relativity, thereby making interstellar space travel practicable. And indeed, in 1994 Alcubierre formally demonstrated a novel form of gravitational field propulsion that’s consistent with the general theory of relativity, and work in this direction continues to this day. And on a technical note, we’ve learned in the last 20 years that the key factor required for a gravitational field propulsion system – a negative curvature of spacetime – in fact exists in nature, as indicated by both the discovery of the “dark energy” phenomenon and the inflation mechanism of the early universe. In other words, once we understand –how- those naturally occurring physical mechanisms work, we’ll know how to design a human-made interstellar spacecraft with all the key performance characteristics of a ufo.

* The ETH predicted that the occurrence of life is not an extremely rare phenomenon. This too predated a series of breakthrough discoveries ranging from the discovery of H20 throughout the cosmos, to the discovery of amino acids and other complex organic molecules in space, to the development of exoplanetary science which has recently revealed that Earth-like compositions and even planetary magnetic fields are likely to be very common throughout the universe – all of which favor a model of a universe teeming with life. Similarly, recent findings indicate that life arose here on Earth as soon as the planet cooled enough to form oceans and a surface crust, which also suggests that life arises very quickly wherever Earth-like conditions occur:

“Here we describe putative fossilized microorganisms that are at least 3,770 million and possibly 4,280 million years old in ferruginous sedimentary rocks, interpreted as seafloor-hydrothermal vent-related precipitates, from the Nuvvuagittuq belt in Quebec, Canada.”
Evidence for early life in Earth’s oldest hydrothermal vent precipitates - White Rose Research Online

“Life first emerged in ‘warm little ponds’ almost as old as the Earth itself”
Life first emerged in ‘warm little ponds’ almost as old as the Earth itself
Paper: “Origin of the RNA world: The fate of nucleobases in warm little ponds”
Origin of the RNA world: The fate of nucleobases in warm little ponds

"If life arose relatively quickly on Earth, then it could be common in the universe."
- Stephen Blair Hedges, geneticist
Hints suggest life arose much earlier than thought

Honestly it appears that critics of the ETH have no leg left to stand on. The growth of various unrelated fields of science not only favors the ETH, but as our data sets continue to grow, the ETH has grown ever more likely. This is the pattern one sees with all successful hypotheses in science.

The only objections left appear to be purely emotional/religious/psychological in nature. Astronomy and astrobiology currently favor a view of a cosmos rife with life, and they now estimate a lower bound on the number of technologically advanced civilizations in the observable universe at a staggering 10 billion[1] – that’s mainstream academic peer-reviewed work today. Physics has demonstrated that superluminal spaceflight is a feature of the theory of general relativity – that’s also mainstream peer-reviewed scientific work[2]. And the original objection to Alcubierre’s work – that negative spacetime curvature is inherently unphysical, was quickly rebuked by the discovery of “dark energy,” and the inflationary theory of the early universe which is now a central pillar of modern cosmology.

So what rational objection to the ETH remains? None. The only objections that I can see are either A.) based solely on ignorance (not being aware of current scientific knowledge and/or its significance, and/or misinterpretations of the data - as we saw with the list of faulty objections from Jacques Vallée), or B.) purely psychological/religious/emotional in nature "humans are the most advanced species in the universe, because otherwise it would be a major blow to my worldview/religious beliefs/ego."

If anyone can provide a legitimate scientific objection to the ETH, I’d like to hear it, because I can’t identify a single one.


[1] “To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us. Think of it this way. Before our result you'd be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were, say, one in a trillion. But even that guess, one chance in a trillion, implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about a 10 billion other times over cosmic history”
https://phys.org/news/2016-04-limits-uniqueness.html

“A New Empirical Constraint on the Prevalence of Technological Species in the Universe,” A. Frank & W. T. Sullivan III, Astrobiology, 2016
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1510/1510.08837.pdf

[2] “The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity,” Alcubierre, 1994
https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0009013
 
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Also the ongoing discussion by scientist who appear on mainstream radio opening up to fact intelligent life forms are strong possibility and finding exoplanets over 2900. Not ignoring the latest discoveries of odd object outside our solar system? The fly over Washington in 1950s and the South American events. Agree SETI is just one group searching for life outside our planet and don't be naive not to think other nations are doing similar experiments funded. China has invested millions into its searching for intelligence life forms and robotics . Regarding Gandalf type snake oil sales folks who keep preaching their agenda we just ignore them. Thomas is on the money and other discoveries as other who keeps an open mind without preaching.
 
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Thomas R. Morrison, you're the greatest poster on this board. :) I think the reason the ETH has incurred so much resistance is the phenomenon wants it that way. It deliberately deceives us. Although it appears ET on the whole--no doubt because it can't help it, as that's what it is-- it doesn't want us to be sure of what we're dealing with. It confuses us with all kinds of bizarre appearances and behaviors. The idea, I think, is to keep us going around in circles arguing what it is. As long as there's no consensus on what it is, there's not likely to be action, so it can proceed with its agenda unhindered....
 
SOME HISTORY


Speculations on ‘the plurality of inhabited worlds’ date back to antiquity. From the 17th to the 19th century, it was widely suspected that the other planets of our Solar System were inhabited. The arguments were often more theological than scientific. Eminent 19th century thinkers like Whewell and Brewster argued that life must pervade the cosmos, because otherwise such vast domains of space would seem such a waste of the Creator’s efforts. An interesting and amusing critique of such ideas is given in books by Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-developer of natural selection theory. Wallace is specially scathing about the physicist David Brewster (remembered for the ‘Brewster angle’ in optics) who conjectured on such grounds that even the Moon must be inhabited [1]. Brewster argued that had the Moon “been destined to be merely a lamp to our Earth, there was no occasion to variegate its surface with lofty mountains and extinct volcanoes, and cover it with large patches of matter that reflect different quantities of light and give its surface the appearance of continents and seas. It would have been a better lamp had it been a smooth piece of lime or of chalk.”


By the end of the nineteenth century, so convinced were many astronomers that life existed on other planets in our Solar System that a prize of 100,000 francs was offered to the first person to make contact with them. And the prize specifically excluded contact with Martians – that was considered far too easy! The erroneous claim that Mars was crisscrossed by canals had been taken as proof positive of intelligent life on the Red Planet.

The ETH is actually a very old hypothesis, and its changed over the years as our science has shed light on the nature of the cosmos.
 
Thomas R. Morrison, you're the greatest poster on this board. :) I think the reason the ETH has incurred so much resistance is the phenomenon wants it that way. It deliberately deceives us. Although it appears ET on the whole--no doubt because it can't help it, as that's what it is-- it doesn't want us to be sure of what we're dealing with. It confuses us with all kinds of bizarre appearances and behaviors. The idea, I think, is to keep us going around in circles arguing what it is. As long as there's no consensus on what it is, there's not likely to be action, so it can proceed with its agenda unhindered....
That was really heartening to read, thank you Trajanus.

And you’ve made an excellent point that’s rarely touched on. It’s a little more speculative than the ETH itself, but it also demonstrates the kind of ancillary thinking that fortifies the ETH overall.

A central feature of the phenomenon is evasive behavior. Whoever or whatever they are, “they” clearly make an effort to minimize detection/observation. This is evident in the reports of dramatic evasive maneuvers and the brevity of most sightings. So we can make a strong argument for these devices operating in a deliberately covert manner.

That’s a small step from psychological operations, disinformation, and diversionary tactics – which our own military and governments engage in constantly. It would be silly to presume that a species more advanced than our own wouldn’t engage in these kinds of behaviors as well. In fact, it would be logical to assume that they do, and that they’re much more sophisticated about it. This is what I was getting at when I mentioned “alien PSYOPs” above.

Modern human psychological operations are quite effective – imagine how much more effective they’d be if we had the technological capabilities of a species that routinely employs interstellar spaceflight. Holograms, technologically induced thought projection and mind reading, invisibility cloaks, advanced camouflage, perhaps even time travel – and these are just some of the possibilities that we *can* imagine: we should expect that many of their technological capabilities would be beyond our capacity to imagine. It’s perfectly possible that the mysterious “Men and Women in Black” are features of an on-going alien psychological/disinformation operation. Alien abductions could fall into the same category.

My working assumption is that we’re being visited by a wide variety of civilizations far more advanced than we are today – most sightings probably involve a one-time “drive by” from various unique civilizations, but it does appear that at least one or two alien species have taken a more active interest. So here’s the part that troubles me: all of them exhibit covert behavior. Not a single one has made any effort to make formal public contact with us.

Frankly that makes me wonder if we’re on some kind of galactic “terrorist species” list, which prohibits open diplomatic relations with our kind. This would be easy to justify: our primary hobby seems to be mass murdering each other. No sooner than we had a working nuclear bomb, we used it to murder and horribly maim hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. And if that’s how we treat –each other- then how could we possibly be expected to treat an alien species any better?

If I were an intelligent spacefaring alien being, I’d probably take a morbid fascination with humanity, and study it like some lethal virus: very carefully and not too intimately. I certainly wouldn’t land on the White House lawn and extend a hand of friendship to the war criminals running our government.

Or perhaps we’re on some kind of “cosmic death watch.” Given our rapacious addiction to mass murder, and the logarithmic growth of our technological capability to do that ever more effectively, it does seem all but inevitable that we’ll soon succumb to the mass extinction event that we’ve precipitated upon this planet. Perhaps in a few decades we’ll be used as an alien cautionary tale: “don’t be like these savage humans that wiped themselves out in a blaze of fury; be kind to your neighbors and embrace peace if you want to flourish and endure.”
 
Okay, and I appreciate the clarification, but I have a valid objection to this classification system right off the bat, namely: apparently it presumes that all sightings that don’t provide physical traces (radar, sonar, landings impressions, etc.) aren’t true event anomalies.

But a child could see the flaw in that reasoning – most witnesses clearly either don’t have access to radar evidence/etc., or they simply don’t look for that kind of evidence. It doesn’t mean that such evidence doesn’t/didn’t/couldn’t exist at the time of the sighting. Chances are, most true event anomalies wouldn’t be classified as such for any number of reasons; because nobody bothered to talk to the local radar station to get radar confirmation, or because the radar station denied the existence of the evidence, or because the physical object employed a stealth technology that foiled the radar in the first place (we already have the technology to achieve this, certainly any device created by a civilization with spacetime engineering capability would likely have far superior stealth technology).

To properly model the ratio of confirmed true event anomalies to the number of real but unconfirmed true event anomalies, one would have to perform a very challenging statistical analysis that factored in such considerations. Because obviously the number of confirmed true event anomalies would only be a tiny percentage of the total number of true event anomalies, due to the difficulties involved in acquiring independent physical confirmation like radar traces and landing impressions.


I’m the first to admit that the ETH doesn’t necessarily explain –all- sighting reports; I’m pretty confident that there must be more going on than extraterrestrial vehicles visiting our planet from time to time. Given the age and complexity of the cosmos, we should expect to encounter some truly confounding/incomprehensible phenomena from time to time – things vastly more perplexing than alien technology zipping through our skies.

But as I described in my last post, it’s a mistake to assume that all single witness events are High Strange. For one thing, the technological capabilities of an interstellar civilization would very likely be so beguiling as to appear “supernatural” at times. And it would be logically indefensible to assume that, if a second/third/etc witness were present, they wouldn’t have seen the same thing – and in fact the vast majority of multiple witness sightings are described in essentially the exact same way by each observer present.

It would be more sensible to only classify those rare events where multiple witnesses describe the experience very differently – Joe sees a UFO, but his wife sees a flying pig, and their neighbor sees a helicopter – as High Strange. But honestly I can’t think of a single case like that. And if they do actually happen, I think it’s more likely to involve a technology that surpasses our present scientific comprehension, than some undefined paranormal force.


Well, that backfired then, because I’ve clearly demonstrated many fundamental weaknesses in those points. With a little applied analytical reasoning, the ETH makes those objections look silly, not the other way around.

Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy btw. Our culture is rife with examples of very intelligent and accomplished specialists in one field (computer programming, for example), failing utterly to arrive at the correct solution to a problem in an unrelated field (physics and astrobiology, for example).


No – the ETH does not “belong” to people like Greer and DeLonge. That’s also a logical fallacy: that’s like saying that the theory of evolution is wrong because some of the people who believe in it are idiots and/or charlatans.

This whole paragraph is fraught with errors, frankly. And they’re mostly unrelated, so I guess I’ll have to address them one at a time:


First of all, no they don’t. And second, you’re appealing to authority again. Most medieval priests thought that the Sun orbited the Earth – they were considered to be the authorities because they could read. “The big thinkers” are often wrong, and when they are, it’s usually all at the same time (which is how bad ideas persist for so long).


The ETH is clearly the strongest explanatory candidate for such cases – multiple independent lines of data and logic converge in support of it. So while we can’t say for sure that the ETH is the correct explanation, it’s a strong argument. Which is better than no argument, which is what the anti-ETH camp seems to be offering.


If you get a burning bite while you’re out camping, and you know that the area is infested with fire ants, then it’s not a big leap to assume that you got bitten by a fire ant. And we only need to look at ourselves, to understand that sentient beings like to explore as far outward as their technology will permit. Since we’re the only sentient being that we know about for certain, we’re the only example we have to go by – so we should do that.


You seriously assert “they seem to belong to this habitat?" In what way? The reason people get so excited when they see these things, is that they’re very obviously –not- “from this habitat.” And from a physics POV, a solid technological device that can defy gravity and perform virtually instantaneous accelerations from a dead stop to many thousands of miles per hour, is almost certainly a gravitational field propulsion device. And we already know that this is the *ideal* technique for rapid (superluminal) interstellar travel, and the only theoretically known method of side-stepping special relativistic time dilation effects. So if we witness a device that’s vastly superior to any human technology, and it clearly possesses the capability of rapid interstellar spaceflight, then it’s natural and rational to conclude that it probably isn’t from Earth. Especially since we now know that 22% of the stars in the universe are orbited by a warm Earth-like planet – and a great many of those are significantly older than our own planet, so they’ve had plenty of time to evolve an intelligent species like our own and to surpass our own level of technological development. It’s a simple, even elementary, argument – I can’t fathom why so many people struggle with it.


Another (false) appeal to authority. In reality, only at The Paracast do we find a hotbed of anti-ETH thinking. But just because a few people got bored with the ETH, doesn’t undermine its solid (and continually growing) basis in fact and logic.


I’m all for having an open mind: show me a superior alternative hypothesis and I’ll get into it. Oh right, there isn’t one yet.


You’re really going with a “vast majority of sightings” argument here? The vast majority of sightings appear to be physical devices that emit light and appear the same way to all witnesses. And when we can get access to radar evidence, it frequently confirms the events as reported by eyewitnesses. Ergo, the vast majority of sightings are best explained by the ETH.


That’s yet another appeal to authority (how many is that now – four, five?). And it’s still a logical fallacy. I also think that if we were to conduct a survey among “the top ufologists” (whoever that is), greater than 90% would favor an explanation involving extraterrestrial civilizations visiting our planet. Why? Because it’s the only clear hypothesis on the table, and all of the existing data and logic supports it.

Sure, some things we see in the sky on rare occasion could be something else – perhaps unknown atmospheric plasma effects, or perhaps elves, fairies or ghosts (if such things actually exist).

But for the vast bulk of truly anomalous ufo sightings, the ETH is clearly still the only real explanatory contender. So rather than attacking it, we should do what a scientist would do: employ it as a working hypothesis and continue to develop it, to see if it holds up and strengthens for yet another half century, or if new evidence emerges that challenges its basic assumptions.

Like I said in my question to Jan Harzan yesterday, it strikes me that the situation will shift fairly dramatically once we figure out how to build a gravitational field propulsion system. Because once we know how do it, the frail human ego will finally be ready to accept that “if we can do it, then ‘they’ can do it too – and they probably already have.”

Sorry but if Jerome Clark's assessment of the history of sightings is childlike, and Vallee should not be heeded, nor any of the larger ufologists in the field then we should probably stop talking as it sounds like you've got a belief there on your hands and not a hypothesis. That also was the closing warning from that After the Paracast episode, that "belief" should only be attached to religions and not ufology. If your premise is starting from a belief that ufo's come from outer space and that the people who have defined the field don't know what they're on about then our divisions are large. If you're going to argue that "witness testimony only" sightings could easily be about actual event phenomenon, when there is zero evidence for that, then this discussion is dead in the water. We need a methodology to talk about the evidence of sightings and not start giving them credibility or confirmation of ET because we want it to be that way.

If you want to check a leap in logic you moved from the vast majority of sightings, which are basically lights in the sky, to physical devices that emit light. Even Greenfield admitted that many UFO reports are about Venus, or mundane explanations, and not a device from Sirius 3. Sounds to me like you've got a firm belief about UFO's already that i'm not going to change and neither are the leading thinkers in the field who've done the actual research and categorization and analysis of sightings. So when Vallee identifies just how many millions of "craft" have visited the earth based on tabulating sightings he's not making shit up. If you want to talk about the evidence and the analysis from within whatever thin scientific context "ufology" has provided so far i'm good to do that, but i ain't gonna play in the ETH sandbox which places ideology before evidence and stringently holds to such a dead end hypothesis no matter what. Why do you think the major researchers have one by one abandoned it over the years? Who is still holding on and why? That's a better discussion for ufology to explore - and consider clearly, who has been most involved in establishing that ufo's come from outer space - it sure ain't researchers. The sponsorship of the ETH belief system, while mocked and concluded with the air force saving the day in our many cultural representations of it come from our "informers" the infamous leaks, the MJ12 crap and of course the PTB that would love for us to hold onto simplistic ways of thinking, because the phenomenon is obviously much more complex than that.

I am often amazed at how everyone knows the term "high strange" but does not deconstruct the implications of that terminology and how much of what we call UFO sightings are truly paranormal experiences and not actual event anomalies. The event anomalies have real evidence and are worthy of great investigation - but even Clark, whom you are identifying as childlike in his thinking, who wrote the goddamn UFO encyclopedia, that ultra academic historian, identifies that the smallest percentage of cases are actual events.
 
While they have certainly hitched their wagons to it, its doesn't belong to them.
But i think a version of the ETH is the most likely answer.

It comes down to a simple question:

Are we all alone in this vast universe or not.

Is our planet , one in a model that with variations is still basically the same the universe wide the only place life took hold ?

Objections such as distance and speed are irrelevant imo.

10 years ago a mission to Mars using the technology of the day would have taken 8 months, today we are talking 40 days......

New Rocket Engine Could Reach Mars in 40 Days

The reactor needed is a challenge, but the Polywell may solve that

Polywell - Wikipedia

So imo distance and speed factors are only limited by technology and that's always evolving.

So the ETH conundrum can be resolved with the question. Are we likely to be the only life in the universe or not.

My money is on not.

There Are Probably Way More Earth-Like Exoplanets Than We Imagined | Science | Smithsonian

A group of scientists from UC Berkeley and the University of Hawaii published a calculation suggesting that we’ve overlooked evidence of a vast number of Earth-sized exoplanets in the habitable zone of their stars, simply because these planets are harder to detect with current methods. They believe that, on average, 22% of Sun-like stars (that is, stars with a size and temperature similar to the Sun) harbor a planet that’s roughly Earth-sized in their habitable zones.


And that doesn't even include the post biological aspect who would not need earth like planets, and for whom distance and timescale is also not a factor.

ABSTRACT


The pace of technological advance on Earth is such that post-humans – whether organic, cyborg or entirely inorganic – could emerge within a few centuries (or indeed within a single century). In the billions of years lying ahead, such entities, continuing to evolve not through natural selection but on the (far faster) timescale of technological evolution could spread through the cosmos (in a manner whose details we manifestly cannot even conceive) . If advanced life had emerged on other planets, and followed a similar evolutionary track to what has happened on Earth, then the era of ‘organic’ intelligence will be a thin sliver of time compared to the far longer post-human era dominated by ‘machines’. This suggests that, if SETI succeeded, the most likely source of any artificial emissions would be unlikely to come from anything resembling the ‘organic’ civilization that prevails on Earth.


Extraterrestrial life and intelligence have always been fascinating topics on the speculative fringe of science. But in the last decade or two, serious advances on several fronts have generated wider interest in these subjects – indeed, they have become almost ‘mainstream’. One can highlight four areas where there’s a gratifying crescendo of interest and understanding:


(i) The discovery and study of exoplanets began only 20 years ago. It is now one of the most vibrant frontiers of science. Data are accumulating at an accelerating rate; we can confidently assert that there are billions of Earth-like planets in our Galaxy; it is not premature to seek evidence that some have biospheres


(ii) There has been substantial recent progress in understanding the origin of life. It’s been clear for decades that the transition from complex chemistry to the first entities that could be described as ‘living’ poses one of the crucial problems in the whole of science. But until recently, people shied away from it, regarding it as neither timely nor tractable. In contrast, numerous distinguished scientists are now committed to this challenge.


(iii) Advances in computational power and robotics have led to growing interest in the possibility that ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) could in the coming decades achieve (and exceed) human capabilities over a wider range of conceptual and physical tasks. This has stimulated discussions of the nature of consciousness (is it an ‘emergent’ property or something more special?), and further speculation by ethicists and philosophers on what forms of inorganic intelligence might be created by us – or might already exist in the cosmos – and how humans might relate to them.


(iv) In the coming years there will be expanded and better-resourced efforts to search for ET; these will focus wider interest on the subject and thereby generate new ideas.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Post-Biological Intelligence | SETI Institute
But why make the leap from we are not alone to we must be being visited from ET? Just because we are not alone doesn't connect to what we call ufo sightings around our planet. That's a rather large leap with nothing inbetween it except empty space.
 
Thomas R. Morrison, you're the greatest poster on this board. :)

I completely agree with your estimation of the value of Thomas's broad knowledge base concerning the ETH and his highly competent representation of its development on the basis of both 1) extensive human experience and 2) human reasoning based in hard data that can be confirmed.

I have to disagree, however, with your claims concerning "the phenomenon" --

I think the reason the ETH has incurred so much resistance is the phenomenon wants it that way. It deliberately deceives us. Although it appears ET on the whole--no doubt because it can't help it, as that's what it is-- it doesn't want us to be sure of what we're dealing with.

As I see it, "the phenomenon" is a notional term that lacks substance, content, description, specificity, and resulting coherent meaning. No comprehensive definition of this term has been provided in this forum (at least so far as I have seen). Rather, an incoherent variety of human experiences are referred to/tossed into this imaginal category as if we possess/have achieved developed grounds on which to do so.

You go on to say "the phenomenon wants it that way. It deliberately deceives us . . . because it can't help it, as that's what it is -- it doesn't want us to be sure of what we're dealing with."

My question is how we can know what this 'it' wants if we don't yet know what 'it' is? These claims are acts of faith in an imagined entity that we cannot yet define or determine to be a coherent source of various states of apprehension and confusion within which we exist, out of which we hope -- and must struggle -- to 'make sense'. Assuming and claiming that there is -- or must be -- such a thing as "the phenomenon" does not make sense. Projecting upon this unknown entity notions concerning what it must want {i.e., to deceive and confuse us} makes even less sense.

What would make sense? To thoroughly study various forms of anomalous experience manifested and described over the recorded history of human experience and to further develop our recognition of the levels of consciousness that we discover in these investigations. There may be [indeed it appears that there are] various levels of 'reality' beyond what we know as 'local reality' that are apprehended in paranormal experiences available to humans in different situations. We will never begin to appreciate what those levels might be unless we distinguish between or among the types of anomalous experience and anomalous capabilities we ourselves manifest.




 
I really should know better because the core signs of belief are often evident when people start talking about knowledge of their propulsion systems. The other great trope is the overpopulated universe concept that likes to prop up the ETH....we haven't any proof at all of life elsewhere - we speculate about it, whereas fire ants we can actually see. But we can't see anyone else in the universe so far but apparently they must be here. That's the illogical part.

What's fascinating about ETH belief is that it can only be ETH and such rigid patterns of thought have got this field no where to date - no knowledge still of what they are, where they come from, how they work, or why they're here. And all the guess work done to support the ETH and the dismissal of the only real academy that Ufology has ever had are all classic hallmarks of the religious belief system of Ufoology. I don't mean to be dismissive or inciting here but when you actually do look at the history of the thinking of the field and are happy to throw it all into the trash then it's not a wonder that this field has yet to get off the ground. If you're going to be ultra selective of how you want to make evidence and the history of sightings conform to your outlook then you'll never get anywhere. If you read reports and read the research - yes many people see absolutely and utterly surreal and paranormal things and that's a central plank in UFO history and should never be abandoned,,,but if you're good to fudge the evidence and dismiss the people who have pushed thinking about UFO's the farthest to date then you might want to start writing your own books as no one else will obviously do. That's for all the ETH believers. It's called a hypothesis for a reason and it's boring and got us no where so far except a whole pile of rationalizations without any evidence at all. What's one actual piece of evidence that proves an off planet craft has ever been here?

And you want to know the answer, Vallee and Rutkowski, are the only pep i know so far that actually have some pretty interesting laboratory tested materials that prove something anomalous, and in Vallee's case while what he had tested could be manufactured here it would cost millions of dollars and makes no sense that it may have come from this planet - oh but wait, he's a really weak thinker apparently and we should not heed what he has to say. Sheesh...no wonder this field has gotten no where slowly.
 
But why make the leap from we are not alone to we must be being visited from ET? Just because we are not alone doesn't connect to what we call ufo sightings around our planet. That's a rather large leap with nothing in between it except empty space.

Making leaps is a fact of life, it happens every day in the courts system.
The magistrate wasn't there, didn't see the crime, All he can go on is the data on the table and the balance of probability.

So we have the Fermi paradox.

The Fermi paradox is a conflict between arguments of scale and probability that seem to favor intelligent life being common in the universe.

The balance of probability says life should be common. And we are back to my original premise. Either ET life exists, or we are all alone in the vast universe, a fluke in a model that remains consistent across solar systems and galaxy's. If our planetary model isn't unique but rather is common. The balance of probability says we are not alone.

The fermi paradox explores myriad reasons why we dont have any proof of ET visitation

Fermi paradox - Wikipedia

Some like the Zoo hypothesis - Wikipedia

And

They are too alien


Another possibility is that human theoreticians have underestimated how much alien life might differ from that on Earth. Aliens may be psychologically unwilling to attempt to communicate with human beings. Perhaps human mathematics is parochial to Earth and not shared by other life,[98] though others argue this can only apply to abstract math since the math associated with physics must be similar (in results, if not in methods).[99]

Physiology might also cause a communication barrier. Carl Sagan speculated that an alien species might have a thought process orders of magnitude slower (or faster) than ours.[citation needed] A message broadcast by that species might well seem like random background noise to us, and therefore go undetected.

Another thought is that technological civilizations invariably experience a technological singularity and attain a post-biological character. Hypothetical civilizations of this sort may have advanced drastically enough to render communication impossible.[100][101]

Seem like reasonable explanations for the lack of evidence.

we haven't any proof at all of life elsewhere

Is the argument from ignorance fallacy

Argument from ignorance (from Latin: argumentum ad ignorantiam), also known as appeal to ignorance (in which ignorance represents "a lack of contrary evidence"), is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false or a proposition is false because it has not yet been proven true. This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is that there may have been an insufficient investigation, and therefore there is insufficient information to prove the proposition be either true or false. Nor does it allow the admission that the choices may in fact not be two (true or false), but may be as many as four,

  1. true
  2. false
  3. unknown between true or false
  4. being unknowable (among the first three).[1]

The absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

All we have is a leap, Like a magistrate we must draw a conclusion based on the balance of probability.

I cant see any compelling reason to conclude we are not being visited, i can see many that we might be.

If the choices are we might be, or we might not. I favor might be on the reality that scale and probability seem to favor intelligent life being common in the universe.
 
One major research program investigating the likelihood of life on other planets has been underway at Harvard over the last ten years. Here is a link into its website:

Origins Council | Origins of Life Initiative

Dimitar Sasselov, the director of this program, outlined its interdisciplinary directions in a famous Edge symposium held in 2007, described at the following link, which provides a link to a pdf publication of the symposium's proceedings as a whole. I call your attention in particular to the presentation by Sasselov, which you will find directly at the second link below.

Life: What A Concept! | Edge.org

Dimitar Sasselov—LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT! | Edge.org
 
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