TheOtherSide1945, on 26 January 2013 - 09:12 AM, said:
heres one from a convert. lets please get something other than rocks as evidence...please I want to believe...again....
Just stay away form these nubag enthusiasts that think a cut rock is proof of ET. I mean for goodness sakes, if that is the case, then surely Coke a Cola is an ambrosia than can only have been concocted in the heavens!
The phenomena is very fascinating, and some cases do stump even the most ardent skeptic. Big names like Roswell tend to go no place because too many people have already "solved" them. Some amazing cases do indeed remain out there then even I, a cynical skeptic whom believers far and wide love to hate have to admit some cases are just too bizarre to be explained in conventional means, like Portage County, my personal conundrum. Some just take some hard thinking to work out, but some just defy conventional explanation.
As a skeptic, I say do not be disillusioned too soon. Because there are so many people in the field that will take advantage of it, it will have a lot of garbage to sort through, but personally I like to take the WOW! signal as in indication that it is not all in vain, and one day, we will get that gratification. I am just not so sure this has happened yet, maybe, but the evidence is slim to nothing, and a lot of people want you to believe so they can feel personal validation - comfort in numbers and all that. Nobody likes to feel like a crackpot, unless everyone is a crackpot. But that does not mean it is not a genuine and interesting pursuit. If people like Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, Brian Greene, Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking can consider this a worthwhile pursuit of knowledge, then I think we can consider that at least one aspect of this pursuit is most certainly valid. We need more people like this, and less like Friedman, Greer and Lazar. Then we might actually start making some real progress.
There is much to keep us interested, just like I tell the believers, the goods ones anyways, just make sure your gunpowder is dry before you go to pull that trigger, or all we will get is a fizzer

That is what we all have to do.
Unfortunately what you are seeing here is the bottom of the barrel. The worst that UFOlogy has to offer. Silly questions based on lies and ignorance. It is embarrassing I grant. But it is all part and parcel Good and bad. These people will exist no matter how much information is given, we could use a time machine to go back and film it, and stil these people would remain stubborn. Yet still, somehow Zechariah Stichin and Daniken will continue to live on in people like Giorgio Tsoukalos. He will lie and make things up to sell his television show, and keep enough people interested enough to get the producers to pay for another season. What does confound me is when his mysteries are resolved, why some refuse to accept a real world answer, and pretend the mystery remains.
Once the ETH is separated into the kooks and the real world, that is the Daniken's VS the Sagan's we see the phenomena for that it really is, and half of it is pretty interesting. But half of it is so dismally silly that their tin fil hat syndrome tends to overcome, Mostly because the worst that UFOLogy has to offer tends to make it into mainstream entertainment, where the highest exposure is managed. That gives people the impression that tin foil hats and UFOLogy go hand in hand, when really, what we have is a science apartheid.
Do not worry mate. there is plenty to keep you scratching your head. Despite what believers tell you, skeptics do not care if believers are wrong right, or never existed at all. All skeptics care about is the genuine 1%, and dismiss the 99% woo woo. I guess a skeptics believe but in a concentrated from. Not everything that he hears, but what is plasuble. That is the real difference between skeptics and believers and why most tend to favour natural phenomena. Most believers treat this like a religion. It is not. It is simply information. Like anything else. An easy way to spot a believer is to look for the amount of emotion put into an explanation vs actual information.
Edited by psyche101, 28 January 2013 - 05:31 AM.