Posted on 02/24/2005 3:55:40 PM PST by traumer
Almost 50 percent of Americans, according to recent polls, and millions of people elsewhere in the world believe that UFOs are real. For many it is a deeply held belief.
For decades there have been sightings of UFOs by millions and millions of people. It is a mystery that only science can solve, and yet the phenomenon remains largely unexamined. Most of the reporting on this subject by the mainstream media holds those who claim to have seen UFOs up to ridicule.
On Feb. 24, "Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs — Seeing Is Believing" takes a fresh look at the UFO phenomenon. "As a journalist," says Jennings, "I began this project with a healthy dose of skepticism and as open a mind as possible. After almost 150 interviews with scientists, investigators and with many of those who claim to have witnessed unidentified flying objects, there are important questions that have not been completely answered — and a great deal not fully explained."
"Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs — Seeing Is Believing" airs Thursday, Feb. 24 from 8-10 p.m. ET on ABC. The program will be broadcast in High Definition.
This two-hour primetime special reports on the entire scope of the UFO experience — from the first famous sighting by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 to the present day. The program draws on interviews with police officers, pilots, military personnel, scientists and ordinary citizens who give extraordinary accounts of encounters with the unexplained. Also included are the voices of professional skeptics about UFOs, including scientists who are leading the search for life forms beyond Earth elsewhere in the universe.
The program explores the facts behind the enduring mystery of the incident at Roswell, N.M., and looks into the strange stories of alien abductions. Among the UFO cases presented:
Minot Air Force Base, N.D., October 1968 — Sixteen airmen on the ground and the crew of an airborne B-52 witness a massive unidentified object hovering near the base.
Phoenix, March 1997 — Hundreds witness a huge triangular craft moving slowly over the city.
St. Clair County, Ill., January 2000 — Police officers in five adjoining towns all independently report witnessing a giant craft with multiple bright lights moving silently across the sky at a very low altitude.
Today if you report a UFO to the U.S. government you will be informed that the Air Force conducted a 22-year investigation that ended in 1969 and concluded that UFOs are not a threat to national security and are of no scientific interest. But as one of the world's leading theoretical physicists says in the program, "You simply cannot dismiss the possibility that some of these UFO sightings are actually sightings from some object created by … a civilization perhaps millions of years ahead of us in technology."
"Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs — Seeing Is Believing" is produced by PJ Productions and Springs Media for ABC News. Mark Obenhaus and Tom Yellin are the executive producers.
Isidora is right. If there's truth out there, we can take it, in fact, we would welcome it.
I have a lot of confidence in the majority of collective Americans in handling touch situations.
However, watching so many vote for SKERRY the last time . . . I'm not sure they can handle much beyond 1 + 1 =2.
"I think a good chunk of your assumptions are inordinately askew from the reality"
Ok Art Bell, give me more than that inane one short sentence response. You must have one huge chunk of provable reality to lay on me. My statement by the way wasn't an "assumption"
No. I really don't have a lot to lay on you.
I only hoped you might think about the assumptions behind your statements. It seems that you may not be that aware of them.
They were flares, pure and simple. you can watch them burn out in sequence. A very good optical illusion viewed in a large urban area.
It's an assumption that those flares were all that was involved in all the sightings. Those living in Phoenix who are 100% certain they saw huge solid object ships are not at all moved by such assumptions related to flares; ultra-lights; Cessnas information or any other such.
"I only hoped you might think about the assumptions behind your statements"
There were NO assumptions in my statement. There was a question in my post, but no assumtions
Flying in the middle of nowhere is also a signature of secret military projects.
There may be an assumption in that--that flying in the middle of nowhere is ONLY a signature of secret military projects and of NO OTHER possible kind of project.
If it were extra terrestrial in origin, why would they not be checking out places like New York, Chicago, LA and other areas of bustling activity?
There may be at least an assumption or two in that one. 1) that they don't check out places like New York, etc. Actually, they evidently do from a number of vantage points, perspectives--up close and personal as well as with close and long range sensor type instruments. 2) That they would have similar goals and priorities to check things out which you might imagine for yourself.
If NASA had evidence of a city on Mars, would we instead send a probe to a sea of sand?
You seem to assume in that question that NASA's purposes in sending a probe to Mars would be similar to those you might construe for yourself sending a probe to Mars.
You seem to assume that it's impossible for NASA to both have evidence of a city on Mars AND have a reason to send a probe to a sea of sand.
You seem to assume that NASA could not possibly already KNOW anything about a city on Mars AND wish to deflect from such an issue by sending a probe to a sea of sand.
You seem to assume that NASA could not possibly already be operating a human/ET base on Mars and therefore want to insure that any probe stayed well away from such activity.
You seem to assume that all the leadership involved with NASA HAS to think and value and prioritize as you do.
I just don't find those assumptions all THAT likely to have a lot of currency in a number of very possible, and perhaps some probable contexts and constructions on reality.
I concur. There are quite a few people here in my area that have seen things that they couldn't explain. Usually it is a light that is hovering close to the ground, that suddenly takes off at blinding speed, or a light, or even several different lights that are whizzing around close to the ground. One old guy would grab his gun and go outside, and he said they would just suddenly "go out". Not large objects either. Their stories are pretty consistent with each other for the most part.
The sightings were definitly real and not made up or imagined. These were solid folks who were honest and weren't trying to push a book or something. Probably some phenomena of nature, possibly even something of the militaries doing since we live close to a very large base, but I'd lean towards the former.
I had a bizarre experience almost seven years ago.
I was in the middle of a dream, and felt an urgent need to wake up. I lurched out of sleep, looked over to the door of my bedroom, and saw a small, almost human-like person in the doorway. I pushed at my husband, who also started to sit up, and said, "It's here."
I don't recall anything afterwards, except returning to sleep.
In the morning, my husband told me he had a crazy dream. He swore he saw someone standing in the doorway of our bedroom, and thought I did, too. He described exactly what I saw, and I confirmed it to him.
For typically gregarious individuals, we did not comment further. For some unnameable reason, we did not want to explore it further. I asked him about it last year, and he had no longer had any memory of it.
Given my right brain nature and my propensity for talking in my sleep, I now believe that I must have been talking about what I thought I was seeing in a dream. When I roused my husband, he heard enough to incorporated it into his own dream.
I must admit that until this rational explanation came to me, I slept lightly and uncomfortably for several nights. And for the record, we are clean living, college educated people who do not give credence to frivilous things.
50% including I believe in UFOs. But all UFOs are is unidentified flying objects.
I figure UFOs are military craft and that kind of stuff, not illegal aliens from Mars.
Perhaps so.
I'm certainly no fan of gullibility.
However, there's something sad about the fierceness and the depth, breadth, comprehensiveness of your skepticism.
Life requires lots of estimates; guesstimates; projections; accepting significant chunks on faith, even.
We wisely learn to make them as effectively and safely as we can.
Rigid, brittle, narrow skpeticism just doesn't produce the accurate hits such stances are chalked up to produce. Too much is missed for too long.
I think it's akin to perfectionism in general. Do you rate high on that? I have too much, in my life.
Research shows clearly now that perfectionistic people don't succeed as well as those who aren't. . . . and certainly not as well as they would were they markedly less perfectionistic. They waste too much time on inconsequential last 2-7% of the problem or situation or issue. Or they spend 80% of their time on the least important 20%.
Somehow, it seems to me, that's what your skepticism does. It seems like you end up straining at gnats and swallowing camels. And that's very sad to me.
I don't like seeing people setting themselves up for unnecessary falls of that heavy-duty sort. WE all set ourselves up for enough falls as it is, imho.
Anyway--have a blessed weekend.
BTW, the backgrounds, motivations, job positions, training etc. of 100's, probably 1,000's of quality observers/experiencers
HAVE BEEN VETTED rigorously by solid investigative types in quite a lot of cases. . . even by people very tenaciously given to investigating by the book to the nth degree with perhaps even more skepticism than you--because they have to wade through a lot of hokey stuff to vet the quality stuff and get more weary of the hokey stuff than you do because they've had to muck about more with it than you have.
That is some story. I think your explanation is probably true, that your husband was in the same dream state and incorporated yours into his, you know how spouses sort of groove on the same track. Sometimes I think of something and call my husband and he is calliing me at the very same time with the very same thought.
I think I would have the same response, just not mention it ever. And odd thing happened like that to me concerning a strange dream involving my grandchildren and the very next day the details of the dream happened in real life. It still gives me chills and while everyone in the family knows about it, we don't talk much about it. But when I call my daughter with a dream I had, she yells to her husband "mom had a dream" and it is like one of those commercials where everyone stops to listen! They think I dream the future!!
And you know this because....?
God probably DOES engineer you dreaming about a future event, on occasion. How often is another question.
A dream journal could help answer that question.
i THINK that Barney did die much earlier than his wife.
I wonder.
I dreamed that my two grandsons were in a sandbox and suddenly there were black widows all over them. Now I live in an urban area and don't think about black widows.
The next day we went for lunch on my sister's farm. It was a beautiful day. I had fortunately told my daughter about the dream. We were all talking and my daughter told my sister about the dream. My sister paled, looked around and there were all the little kids way off on her property in a big pile of sand. She jumped up and ran to them. When we got there, she was screaming,,there were little spiders, baby black widows and a couple of big ones all over the kids. No one got bitten.
It is nice to think God gave me this dream. I cannot think of an explanation because, believe me, this was not in my mind at all, it came in a dream.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.