Friday, December 25, 2009

Merry Christmas & Happy New Aliens!


Wherever you are - white Christmas in the snowed-in north or Christmas by the pool in the sunny south - all the best for a great day. But will there be aliens celebrating with us?


Have the aliens already arrived? Or have they been and gone at various times in the past?

Periodically I have gone over UFO accounts on the web, and at one point looked obsessively at those British UFO archives that were released a few years ago. Its fascinating stuff. Undoubtedly lots of people have seen lots of things that cannot be explained.

Take the recent sighting of the UFO over the Kremlin (see inset photo - from Courier Mail). I kind of blinked when I saw this blurry image, which looks exactly like one of the smaller Stargate Goa’uld spaceships, the Tel’tak scout-ship. In fact the whole triangular (pyramid-like) shape was just a little two weird a co-incidence. Especially having something like a Goa’uld spaceship (say commandeered by SG1) hovering over the Kremlin is something I could have expected straight from a Stargate series script. Maybe April Fool’s Day is in December in Russia.

Lots of famous people have publicly stated they have seen UFOs – air force pilots, astronauts. The fact that various governments took the investigation so seriously for so long means that something was going on.

Given the massive distances and energy cost of likely space travel, it does make sense that arrivals would be smaller, likely even automated. Perhaps designed to gather data, but not capable of engaging into any sort of dialogue with species they encounter (unmanned & any AI’s not ‘authorised’ for contact). Perhaps civilizations within 50-100 lightyears – amused enough by Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin and similar early EM transmissions – have sent automated scout craft as a first response. If so – then maybe the first of these scout craft have already returned for download. That means the ‘manned’ response could come within the next few decades.

I personally hope we have been observed for thousands of years. Can you imagine getting your hands on the alien database with actual photos of Caesar going up against Vercingetorix at Alesia? Or satellite footage of the building of the pyramids at Giza?

So what's your take? Have they been here? Is it all just atmospheric phenomena and deflated weather balloons? Or better yet – have you seen one?




14 comments:

Anonymous said...

:: Grin :: One of my husband's first jobs was collecting passive ground noise for a geothermal company. This mean they needed quiet, remote spots. Very few vehicles. In other words, Tom has driven down every remote desert road in the western US, at night. And parked. And fallen asleep. He's always said that if the Aliens were abducting people who drove down dark deserted desert roads, they'd have taken him. Over and over.

Myself, I just think they thought he was trolling for Aliens and demonstrated that they have more intelligence than the average fish.

I have no idea, or rather too many to make sense of, about unknown phenomenon. I love Crop Circles. Beautiful designs. Explainable, but wouldn't they make a great way for Aliens to try and communicate with us?

I tend to be very cynical, having had several internet encounters with that brand of true believers. "They want to take our water" "Well, if they need water, having used up one of the more common molecules in the Universe, why don't they just grab a couple of comet cores and haul them away?" "But our water is probably better. More hydrogenated."

Entertaining, but they must be taken in small doses to preserve one's belief that humans are an intelligent species.

C Kelsey said...

There are two places that I'm familiar with that see UFOs and "aliens" almost every night. Oddly enough, they also seem to be the pot smoking mecca's of the western United States too. ;)

I've seen a few unexplained flying objects as a pilot. Mostly they're the "what is that idiot doing here when he should be *there*
type of UFO. One was clearly military. All were obviously man made.

I really wish they were here. That would give me hope for some serious FTL travel. But I've not seen evidence of their presence yet.

John Lambshead said...

The Moscow pics are clearly faked. All alien battlecruisers entering the solar system set course for London not Moscow. It's a well known fact. Watch any episode of dr Who.
John

Chris McMahon said...

Hi, matapam. Maybe the crop circles are formed by the consciousness of Gaia as the Earth tries to spell out 'HELP!' to passing alien spacecraft:)

Chris McMahon said...

Hi, Chris. The fact that aliens aren't here makes me wonder if we are just missing something really fundamental. Like SETI is banging sticks together while the aliens are surfing the internet - a huge gulf in commuincation mode.

Even worse would be if they know but couldn't be bothered. Its like being ignored at a party.

I was reading recently about an idea to use dark matter as a space drive. The theory goes that the stuff actually eliminates itself, so much like the Bussard ramjet, the ship would cruise through space scooping up dark matter as fuel. The only hitch is that the greatest concentrations of the stuff are nowhere near our neighbourhood - which might explain ETs absence. We are living thousands of miles from the nearest gas station!

Chris McMahon said...

Hi, John. Good point! Plus, if it had headed to Moscow, we would have also seen a little tell-tale blue police box there trying to fix the problem.

Speaking of spaceships hovering over capital cities - have you seen District 9? Where the alien ship hovers over Johannesburg? I loved that film.

Anonymous said...

I prefer to think of Crop Circles as a natural phenomenon. Maybe they're where the little wormholes touch down. If we can just figure out how to catch one we could figure out how to get to the stars. But if they are wandering around, and not sitting still, we'll never come out in the same place twice. Could make those colonizing flights on way trips, with no way to check on the viability of what's on the other side.

Loved the CGI in District 9. The mother ship and the Prawns were excellent. The surface communication with no deeper understanding at all was interesting. The icky bits, fingernails and cat food, were well done. Just enough to invoke the emotions and ruin the appetite, without loosing the audience. Another UFO that came and went, and we didn't understand why or what came next.

They say SF sees the future. Will the inability to communicate be spot on, or completely off the mark? Only the arrival of some Aliens will settle the question.

Kate Paulk said...

As John said, clearly a fake. Everyone knows UFOs come to London or New York first, depending on whose radio signals they've been listening to, just like monsters head straight for Tokyo.

Precisely why they'd drop in is another question - and that's without going near the Freudian implications of the alien anal probe obsession (Maybe they're all xenobiologists out taking samples to get digestive information from as many species as possible? That would make for interesting dinner conversation. "Oh yes, I'm a pre-coprolithic xenobiologist. Want to see my specimens?" Er. Moving right along there...). These days the idea that Earth could have any mineral material they'd want that they couldn't get more easily elsewhere is sort of silly, especially if they've got viable cheap fusion or replication/fabrication technology.

They could be alien grad students, doing research projects on a range of topics (this might explain the anal probe fascination and the crop circles. Grad students having a bit of fun with the primitives). Or maybe there's a big market for cultural artefacts and anyone that's got a source keeps it well hidden.

Okay. Now the giant crabs that raid planets so they can sell cultural artefacts from extinct civilizations (which weren't extinct when the crabs showed up, but that's a whole different beastie) are wanting their story. They can shut up. The queue's too long.

Anonymous said...

Immanently extinct civilizations bring this to mind. From the part of California I grew up in:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjfrJzdx7DA

Kate Paulk said...

Matapam,

That is wicked! Of course, it IS The Onion, but it's still a classic.

I feel the need to quote Dirk Blackpool from Wizards and Warriors "A clever servant. Very rare. Soon to be extinct."

Chris McMahon said...

Hi, matapam. I loved district 9. The whole idea of these aliens that have advanced tech, but most of them are totally clueless, like worker ants Vs the soldier, except in this case the worker Vs the scientists. The whole thing was very well done, although I was glad the 'doco' style camera work settled down as the movie progressed.

Chris McMahon said...

Hi, Kate. Its fun to speculate on the possible motives of the maybe alien visitors. Crab aliens? Led by the evil Claw? Ahhh. OK. Bad pun.

KylieQ said...

Hi Chris, I don't know about aliens but I certainly believe in spirits or ghosts or whatever you want to call them. I saw something unexplainable once. I was somewhere I shouldn't have been (maybe you could call it trespassing; I call it being a curious teenager) and whatever it was wasn't happy about me being there. It gave off some very bad vibes and it still - more than 15 years later - gives me goose bumps to think about it. There is definitely something out there beyond what we see everyday.

Chris McMahon said...

Hi, Kylie. That sounds like an interesting experience. I have had a few weird ones as well. Life would be a little boring if there weren't a few mysteries still out there.