UFOs, Religion, and Skepticism

I notice that a while back someone posted that Roswell was a government coverup. Not sure what they meant but I personally have met and know some of the people involved in debunking the claim the Roswell Incident had anything to do with little gray aliens from outer space.I have also noticed that some religions seem very comfortable with the idea of space aliens visiting Earth, most directly, but not exclusively, Scientology and Raelianism. There is even a webpage outlining some kind of relationship between alien visitations and Ron Wyatt (thanks for the humor Arachnophilia).My question is, does anyone here subscribe to the idea that UFOs are spaceships and/or we have been, or are now, being visited by aliens from another planet, and if so, does it have anything to do with your religious beliefs?Obviously Coffeehouse for maximum participation.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

I'm an agnostic on both issues on evidentiary grounds.I am amused by the supposed extraterrestial catch-and-release policy...but hell, I'd go.The fundamental link between religion and UFO sightings and alien abduction reports, I think, is the greater presence of scientific possibility in human minds. Since religion is no longer the final arbiter of reality for many, extraordinary experiences are more likely now to be interpreted as strange events in this naturalistic world rather than visitations from a another, supernatural world.Paul would probably have his orifices probed by willowy aliens if he had his roadside seizure today.

We could have been visited but you would think a suitably advanced race would be able to manage it without leaving a trace if they wished it.If they wanted to contact us I'm sure it would not be some poor sod from hicksville USA. You would imagine they would pick on a government of some kind.I would be very suprised if this supposed advanced culture had anything to say to credulouse religious types. Surely the advanced culture used science to cross space not belief in the divine.

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We could have been visited but you would think a suitably advanced race would be able to manage it without leaving a trace if they wished it.

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But one would wonder why they would care enough to avoid traces.

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"These monkeys are at once the ugliest and the most beautiful creatures on the planet./ And the monkeys don't want to be monkeys; they want to be something else./ But they're not."
-- Ernie Cline

I would hazard that:1: They do care about secrecy. They do not want to adversly effect our world by making them selves known (bit of a prime directive here I admit). This would make it a good idea not to set down in Shitkick, USA.2: They do not care at all what Earth thinks. In this case we should see pretty clear evidence in many places.3: They are not here.P.S.I would say however that if they were bent on conquest they could do a lot worse than pretending to be the second coming and bagging a whole load of eager beaver followers.

I beleive purely based on chance (we orbit ONE of billions of stars in ONE of countless galaxies) that somewhere out there aliens do exist.
But if you had the ability to travel the universe, go anywhere you want, would you really come to this war struck, polluted dump of a planet and meet the primitive, aggressive freaks that are destroying it?

I think you believe purely based on faith. We do not even know if life arose here in order to begin to suppose chances of it arising anywhere else. There is a difference in that which is necessary to sustain life and that which might cause it to arise It ain't all bad. The environment on any planet we know of strikes me as even less hospitable than the one here.

I dunno, we sent BBC news teams to war torn regions, our press covers ecological disasters and such like.I reckon if space travel was as challenging for them as international travel is for us we should be seeing them all the time.Point is we don't.I concur that the universe is a big place and that it would be very likely that there are other planets with life on them but the problem is not really the chance of aliens existing.The larger problem is them existing near us in spacetime. If they exist 2 billion light years away they would have very little chance of knowing we are here (even with FTL engines).If they are 2 billion years away from us we are even more unlikely to come into contact with them.

Yes we do. It did.

Two good points LarniJust like to add; as i said before my belief in the exsistance of alien life is down purely to numbers there are infinate chances that life exists or may come into existance at any given point in spacetime.
To believe in a god relies on trusting what you have been toldEdited by Jonson-Needs_proof, : Quick addition

If life came from something that is not of here then it did not arise here. Unless life being created here can be stated to have arisen here.

Sigh. Well of course that is true, but it arose somewhere in the universe.Life arose from energetic chemical interactions. Either on Earth or in Space.The fact that we don't yet know exactly how it occured is no reason to invoke a god and creation.

anglagard I doubt the likelihood is very great that intelligent aliens have visited Earth as a matter of expeditionI do think the challenges presented by space travel are insurmountable from the multiple levels necessary for such an undertaking.For instance the enormous resources necessary for leaving a planet to travel the stars are quite unlikely to be available for use by such race.Then the distances involved present unique problems.Where the heck do you go would be a very difficult decision since, unless the race enjoys the endless travel through space, it can be safely assumed that there would need be a game plan.In view of the distances involved there are problems with traversing light=years at even the speed of light.Before you attain that velocity you are going to run into the difficulty of of how to shield yourself from the cosmic rays that would be the result of high velocity travel. The reason is that at the sub-light velocity of 60,000 miles per second hydrogen gas atoms floating throughout space now are the equivalent of cosmic rays.For every solution there are costs incurred that must be taken into account which leads to another problem. Who builds the thing that will take you away from the planet to travel in space? Each person who is working on the project must be compensated and have the incentive necessary to send people on basically a one way trip, since even at the speed of light the effects of relativity will mean that the time dilation they experience will likely mean they never return to the planet they left in any reasonable time frame.I can list many other problems and the solutions that tend to raise even greater problems. Anyone care to comment?Edited by sidelined, : No reason given.

Everywhere you go, there you are... Your surprise me, iano: Do you not believe that God created life on this planet? It seems fair to say that life arose here, whether it was called forth by God, emerged from the burgeoning chemical complexity, or hatched from alien pods.Did you have a theory about life being divinely created somewhere off-planet and then delivered?