in the Project Blue Book era, UFO sightings were debunked by the US government. This may have been due to the same reasons that NASA wrote Stephen Spielberg a 20 page letter imploring him not to make Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Concerns over the possibilities of mass hysteria Spielberg had already proven capable of with Jaws. Only UFO hysteria could undermine pretty much any and all of society's institutions: religious authority, governmental authority, military authority, etc - once people began to realize that there could possibly be other models and technological paradigms to be known in the universe.
Or it could have just been cold war paranoia.
Well if you watch almost any UFO show, you see people being interviewed whose credibility lies somewhere between "mastery of the fryalator" and "mastery of some English language". Of course, you get the upper end of the spectrum too, with no shortage of astronauts and military-industrial VIPs weighing in with some VERY plausible experiences of their own.
And then there are the regular joes, people like cops and pilots, just doing their jobs and leaving weird-ass UFO paper trails a mile long following mass sightings of Very Unusual Things.
So my question right now is this: is society in general, do you think, opening up to the question of alien intelligence? And able to start pondering the implications of other life in the universe? Some things have changed - for example, we're now able to confirm that yes, there are other solar systems and planets out there, and that certainly helps us to generalize "billions and billions" of worlds across the cosmos.
And then there's science fiction in popular culture, gaining traction as everyday life begins to bewilder us with abilities and questions only society's most brilliant authors could conceive in the pre/industrial age.
And if there still is a stigma - is it worth defying, and committing career suicide in order to ask the questions that clearly, need to be asked by a species calling itself intelligent?
I think it might be worth it. How about you? Are we becoming more open to the questions?
Here's one question:
What if there were a whole other arm of our own military that operated with its own funds and its own arena, and without oversight or within lawful parameters (that are demarcated by mere continental borders, really)? What if our own species had super technologies that could make mince meat of conventional materiel? What if most people came to realize this? Would it change societies? How?
Well, add your UFO 2 cents here whatever it is.
Or it could have just been cold war paranoia.
Well if you watch almost any UFO show, you see people being interviewed whose credibility lies somewhere between "mastery of the fryalator" and "mastery of some English language". Of course, you get the upper end of the spectrum too, with no shortage of astronauts and military-industrial VIPs weighing in with some VERY plausible experiences of their own.
And then there are the regular joes, people like cops and pilots, just doing their jobs and leaving weird-ass UFO paper trails a mile long following mass sightings of Very Unusual Things.
So my question right now is this: is society in general, do you think, opening up to the question of alien intelligence? And able to start pondering the implications of other life in the universe? Some things have changed - for example, we're now able to confirm that yes, there are other solar systems and planets out there, and that certainly helps us to generalize "billions and billions" of worlds across the cosmos.
And then there's science fiction in popular culture, gaining traction as everyday life begins to bewilder us with abilities and questions only society's most brilliant authors could conceive in the pre/industrial age.
And if there still is a stigma - is it worth defying, and committing career suicide in order to ask the questions that clearly, need to be asked by a species calling itself intelligent?
I think it might be worth it. How about you? Are we becoming more open to the questions?
Here's one question:
What if there were a whole other arm of our own military that operated with its own funds and its own arena, and without oversight or within lawful parameters (that are demarcated by mere continental borders, really)? What if our own species had super technologies that could make mince meat of conventional materiel? What if most people came to realize this? Would it change societies? How?
Well, add your UFO 2 cents here whatever it is.
