20 UFO's Fly over Britain
You should go read this story about 20 UFO's buzzing over Britain. It shows a photo of what was seen.
Stunned families watched as the lights in the sky lined up in a flying formation before disappearing upwards into space.
The close-encounter snap was taken by quick-thinking engineer Paul Slight on his mobile phone at about 10.30pm on Sunday.
He was coming home from a day out cycling with friends in Lincoln when they spotted the lights in the sky.
The eerie extra-terrestrial crafts were hovering in the night sky over the town moving in different directions before eventually shooting straight up into the atmosphere.
"There were 26 of them at first, dodging and darting in between each other like they were playing a game.
"After that, seven more arrived from the right hand side and weaved through the crowd of lights like strange kinds of aircraft.
"After five minutes of moving around, the flickering yellow objects hung in the air for a second then shot off into the sky and disappeared.
"I have no idea what they were - I'm not usually a believer but what I saw was really weird.
"I have flown planes and helicopters before and I know these were not them, helicopters couldn't line up like that or move that fast."
In case you didn't know it, I'm a huge believer in the theory that we're not the only intelligent species in the universe.
I always use to say that I watched science fiction movies so that I could be 'prepared' in the event I would ever come face to face with an alien being. Of course, if they ever did appear on my doorstep, I'd probably crap my pants.
I love this stuff Coonsey, I am sucker for it.
Thank you.
June 4, 2009 12:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Me too. Let's pray they come in PEACE! LOL
June 4, 2009 12:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why don't they just come down for a visit? I really wish we could get some wise counsel - they have to be wise in some way to get this far. Wonder where they're from?
June 4, 2009 1:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Coonsey, after seeing this picture, I'm convinced we're the only species in the universe that isn't intelligent.
June 4, 2009 1:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I know how much a chiche this is: But the photo looks like weather balloons. And in the jetstream, balloons move real fast... or so I'm told.
I know I want to believe this stuff. I want to believe there are civilizations on the other side of the universe technologically evolved to the point they can buzz Earth's desert scrublands and rolling English countryside. Even the bad boys - poking us with needles and carving up cattle.
But my desire that be true - the "Art Bell side" of me - tends to make me credulous and gullible. Skepticism is my filter, it's the cap that keeps my hopefully open mind from spilling out my primitive brains.
June 4, 2009 1:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
But if they come and torture us with anal probes, who will prosecute them?
Ha! Just kidding...I saw the article and photo yesterday, and it's a pretty amazing image. You could easily copy-n-paste it into the body of your post.
June 4, 2009 1:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
About that probe issue. I have never understood the proposition on the following basis.
Why would an alien race develop and employ the technology to cross huge distances to abduct and inspect the inside of a crazy person from an anal perspective?
June 4, 2009 11:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
There's a drug/brain chemical known as DMT, that in low doses causes a feeling of surreal significance (as in weddings or other significant events) and in high doses causes severe hallucinationsm the most common of which are meeting benevolent elves who seem to reveal the mysteries of the universe (which of course you can't explain after the episode) and being raped by alligators or other assorted beasts. This explains most abduction stories as well as the instability of those who report them (spontaneous secretion of DMT on a regular basis has gotta be weird). wiki that shit.
Schizophrenics who hear voices sometimes attribute them to aliens. Hence the wierdo "contactees".
The insanity of adbuctee/contactee/UFO cultists has nothing to do with the fact that people have sighted UFOs, including noted loon Dennis Kucinich. Most people who've seen UFOs just don't like to report it for fear of being lumped in with the crazies.
June 5, 2009 12:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nothing wrong with DMT. There are many things that fall into the class of unidentified, and some of them fly - I doubt however that the purpose is to fly there.
June 5, 2009 12:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Several things about that image don't seem right. It's giving me the impression of a photoshop job. I wish they'd published the entire series.
June 4, 2009 1:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, one sure giveaway is the "ufo" in front in the branch on the right hand side of the picture. In the art biz we like to call that perspective - objects in the foreground appear larger than those objects in the background even if the objects are the same size.
June 4, 2009 1:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let me add that the other sure giveaway is that the picture was published by The Sun.
June 4, 2009 1:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, now that the Weekly World News is out of business, SOMEBODY has to inherit the mantle as the paper of record. Might as well be The Sun.
June 5, 2009 8:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
I find that O'Hare airport sighting -by multiple airline employees no less- particularly intriguing. Here's a link to an NPR report on that sighting.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6707250
June 4, 2009 1:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I often wonder why witnesses who are airline employees are considered reliable witnesses in ufo sightings. Have you flown lately?
June 4, 2009 1:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
I suppose it's because they are used to seeing conventional aircraft and are more likely than the average person to correctly recognize an aircraft that's, uh, non-conventional.
June 4, 2009 2:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Any average person can tell the difference between conventional and non-conventional aircraft. Airline employees have a hard time telling the difference between a black bag going to Cincinnati and a brown bag going to Nashville and they're barcoded. Why they're considered more reliable than anyone else is beyond me.
June 4, 2009 2:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, the most fun you can have while delayed in an airport is going over to the lost baggage claims desk and listening to the tirades - LOL.
June 4, 2009 4:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is fun Newton
Thanks
June 4, 2009 3:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
How to Serve Man
June 4, 2009 2:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's a Cook Book!!! Ahhhhh.... LOL
June 4, 2009 8:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
The photo is protected.
June 4, 2009 2:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
You can copy it here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5434040/UFOs-spotted-in-Cambridgeshire.html
June 4, 2009 4:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
What would impress me is if there were nuemrous unrelated accounts coming at the same time from differing vantage points. All these "aircraft" and how many people saw them? It seems there would be more. Everyone has a cell phone these days, there should be several independent photos.
June 4, 2009 2:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is only one explanation for repeated sightings but no formal "Take me to your leader": poachers violating quarantine. Therefore the Roswell incident was the bad guys running afoul of the game wardens.
But given no confidence in faster-than-light travel, it's hard to find a reason for such coy behavior of the UFOs. Also note that we only have these stories after fictional presentations, in books or movies. They are essentially absent from historical record, although we have plenty of records of astronomical oddities.
And it's not unreasonable to conclude that we could be the first intelligent life hereabouts. It took a few billion years for the earlier stars to generate the heavier elements, and recycle them through another generation of supernovae, which then would be exploded back into space. Add another few billion years for evolution, and we have the age of the Milky Way, roughly, or at least our neighborhood.
Another issue is the unhealthy environment of areas nearer the galactic center due to supernovae, gamma-ray bursts from collapsing stars, and unreliable orbits because of passing stars. The outer reaches are safer, but with less start-forming activity. We inhabit a sweet zone of planetary orbit, but also one of solar system location.
So the places where a race of spacefaring (assuming it's feasible) creatures could evolve are fewer than is obvious. And the time needed might be very long. We might be the wise Progenitors that will contact other races. Of course that could be tricky, see Stanislaw Lem's "Fiasco" or "Eden".
June 4, 2009 7:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
tom, is it reasonable to conclude that if the origin of everything was one singular and wicked unstable atom, and it exploded (big bang), spewing star stuff endlessly and infinitely outward, creating what we observe as an ever expanding universe, or multiverse, with planets, quasars, supernovas, black holes, brown dwarfs, the whole nine yards, that it would be really naive for us to think that we are the first intelligent life "hereabouts"?
Especially if we believe that 95% of the makeup of everything that started from that one singular and wicked unstable atom that exploded outward, including is unknown or what we call dark matter and dark energy, and only 5% is the known visible universe?
And we know so little about dimensions--from what we can tell, there's length, width, height, and what we call space-time--( quantum physics theorize about what, 10 dimensions? Well, these are just concepts used to simplify human mathematical descriptions of the physical world.
All things considered, to define "hereabouts" with any degree of certainty is kind of self-centered on the part of humans, is it not?
All I'm prepared to say about things we don't yet understand is, anything's possible.
June 4, 2009 10:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
By "hereabouts" I mean the stellar neighborhood, the Local Bubble of a hundred light years or so. Our radio signal hasn't made it much past there, so we are not likely to have attracted attention from farther away than that.
We are very confident of the history of the observable universe from the point of galaxy formation onwards. We know a lot about genesis of the elements past lithium, of which carbon and some others need to be made in stars.
The wicked unstable atom is rather more conjectural, and isn't quite that, anyway. The Big Bang model is more like space coming into existence along with energy, all of it from a point.
June 4, 2009 11:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Given that we only are familiar with 5% of things, we can't say we know 100% of the 5%. The 95% of what we don't know isn't just physically elsewhere, far off spatially. 95% of what we don't know is inside our own local bubble as well. And that's where I have difficulty defining "hereabouts" with any degree of certainty. Science is a perceptual enterprise, and we are limited by our human senses and what we are able to observe and measure and assign mathematical constructs to.
What we consider "hereabouts" today, within the 100 or so light year bubble, may change dramatically if we discover forces or dimensions inside our bubble that change our entire construct of space.
Would you agree?
June 5, 2009 1:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
Not quite. The 95% is itself conjectural. Starting with dark matter, it's called that because it doesn't do anything. The evidence for its existence is solely its apparent presence to alter distribution of velocities in the outer reaches of galaxies, and in the relative velocities of galaxies in clusters. It is strong evidence, since the alternative to its existence is major revision of Einstein.
That's part of it, and the dark energy is a bit more of a conjecture, although also pretty strong, lacking alternatives. It is deduced from the apparent flatness of the universe and smoothness of the microwave background which implies there should be more stuff than we can account for via lit-up matter and dark matter.
But not knowing the mechanism of the universe's shape and construction doesn't mean we aren't pretty familiar with chemistry, which is why I can say we have some understanding of life's origins and likelihood. At this point we can't rule out rocky planets with oxygen atmospheres in the area, but within about twenty years we will know if any exist.
The assumption that a civilization will achieve interstellar space travel at the same time we are approaching it is unsupportable. The odds would have any civilization in our region of the galaxy either not yet past bacteria or way past worrying about some mammals with radio and nukes.
But, more in sympathy with you, if we consider the rest of our galaxy and uncountable galaxies in the wider universe, there are functionally infinite opportunities for intelligent life. Here's the "but": We won't be noticed by those at galactic distances for a few million years at the earliest.
June 5, 2009 10:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ah, okay, I think I understand it better. Thanks Tom. It takes me a while to get a handle of these concepts--all I can do is ask questions--and hope that someone patient like you can help better explain things.
June 5, 2009 10:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
Dude, if you watch that much Sci-Fi, you should know a couple good reasons for there being no "formal contact"
1. The star trek prime directive. Of course, these aliens would have been much less careful than the federation, perhaps correctly assuming we'd dismiss sightings. Maybe cloaking is trickier than Rodenberry thought. This is what I think is most likely to be closest to true.
2. The Babylon 5 Vorlon manipulators, aka "Angels" and "prophets" intervening and guiding human history.
June 5, 2009 12:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
I hate to be a naysayer, but The Sun is not really a newspaper - it's one step up from the Enquirer.
You can see the photo is a fake by looking at it, but even if it wasn't obvious, a good rule of thumb is 'if it's in the Sun, it's not true.'
June 5, 2009 8:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
Those look like chinese lanterns to me. See:
http://www.fiestaskylanterns.com/
June 5, 2009 10:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
The POINT is.....there ARE other beings out there, why on earth just bother with human beings? I'm betting we're ALL being TESTED and the ones who best suits the creator gets to STAY.
June 5, 2009 12:55 PM | Reply | Permalink