Lindy, as much as I like your contributions on here, I simply cannot get on board with assertions such as these for exactly the same reasons I fight so hard against the black and white thinkers in the political arena.

The problem in my opinion comes down as always to my experience and knowledge of basic human behavior. Our minds are absolutely capable of incredible rationalization if we have enough motivation behind our theories.

Where some claim like this falls down is that once again, we're relying on images that show something blurred, small, and without noticeable detail. I don't know if you've been watching tv in recent years but the proliferation of high quality, detailed, zoomed in, random shots of events captured by the millions of camcorders are showing us occurances that we could only rely upon our imaginations to fill in the details in the past. We now see daily shootouts, car chases, explosions, tornados, animal attacks, plane crashes, volcanic explosions, and other things that were an extreme rarity to ever actually witness.

These are often high definition shots in good lighting taken with equipment that used to belong only to professionals. Today's average citizen now has video equipment that will take images in extremely low light, adjust for camera shake, and there's no doubt the shot is framed right, in focus, or zoomed in properly when the user can see the details immediately on their LED screen. There's no film to load or process. Huge advances have been made in auto-focus and exposure.

All in all, it's simply easier today to capture the moment than any other time in our history and yet, please think about this carefully, the shots we've seen of UFO's in the past decade are still the blurred, grainy crap we got in the decades prior. If we do get a decent shot of a "craft", there's nothing to reference it to such as buildings or crowds of people which to me gives the feel of a setup.

Even without that however, I'm just not convinced that lifeforms can travel the vast distances of space to go play tourist on Earth. It just seems reasonable to me that the technology required to overcome those huge distances and the perils long spaceflights bring upon life as we know it, would also mean that any creature that mastered that technology would be capable of ensuring they could go undetected if they so desired. Why would they need to hover around and fly in our atmosphere at all? They could in all likelihood simply transport themselves anywhere they so desired.

But see Lindy, just that little imagination I allowed of myself there in defining possibilities was subject to my own prejudices of what to expect. I want like everyone else does for there to be aliens flying our skies or hovering in orbit above us because it tells me that our civilization will someday attain that. I can feel that desire work on my logic when I see some blurry picture to truly believe it's true. So in my atheistic mind, wanting to believe is the ultimate red flag that I try to constantly expose when in critical thought. For the topic of UFO's, I'm afraid none of it makes any sense once the element of wishful thinking is removed.

Of all the thousands of people I've met and respected in life, not a one of them has ever had a "close encounter of the third kind". They've seen things they couldn't explain but their own logic filters generally waved those off as just the oddities that occur naturally or just an instance where insufficient information existed to truly rule the phenomenon as other-worldly.

Now, don't get me wrong. I firmly believe other intelligent life exists out there somewhere. It's just unbelievable to me they give a rats ass about us.

Art