I want to believe, and part of me does think that there is something out there but I can't help but thinking that most sightings are something and nothing.

That said I remember when we were on a camping holiday years ago seeing lights with no obvious source in the sky - but as much as I want to believe that was something I struggle to!

No I do.....on my ankle. If I ever meet you, I will gladly show you 'the sign'.

i once saw a flying saucer when i lived in garforth it was as clear as day it hovered for a while then vanished twas amazing. and i had no alcohol inside me!!

Why have there only been sightings since the 50's??

The drugs weren't as good before the 50s.

I only hope for mankind's sake that they come in peace, seeing as we've not made it past our own moon thus far.

You mean stargate isnt real???

They have been spotted and recorded since well before then.

Quote ="Hollywood Harrigan"Yeah, there are people out there who want o believe in it so much that they will fabricate stories but I think people should have an open mind about it. I mean what if the species was created millions of years before us? They could easilly have the capability to travel far distances. I mean we went from Not being able to fly to Space travel in half a century. Heres the vid btw over LS10. Its no copyright so should be OK to post: www.youtube.com/watch?v=idWFiGR3tT4 I dont mind sceptics or believers either. Everyone has thier right to an opinion.'" I believe that there are two thoughts. One of them has us alone in the universe the other one doesn't. I remember many, many years ago a series presented by James Burke on the BBC. He went through the calculations based on estimating number of possible planets, number proportion of those capable of having life supporting conditions and thus the potential number of civilisations and their rate of development etc. It's called the Drake equation and is explained here by Carl Sagan. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB_v99FSTYc So Sagan here is also being very optamistic - at the time they hadn't found one solid planet in the universe (only gas giants incapable of supporting life). Far more likely than being visited by spaceships we should have detected radio emmissions (the joke about our TV transmissions being picked up by other civilisations is not really a joke). I'm not a sceptic, just a scientist.

Quote ="Hollywood Harrigan"Yeah, there are people out there who want o believe in it so much that they will fabricate stories but I think people should have an open mind about it. I mean what if the species was created millions of years before us? They could easilly have the capability to travel far distances. I mean we went from Not being able to fly to Space travel in half a century. Heres the vid btw over LS10. Its no copyright so should be OK to post: www.youtube.com/watch?v=idWFiGR3tT4 I dont mind sceptics or believers either. Everyone has thier right to an opinion.'" I believe that there are two thoughts. One of them has us alone in the universe the other one doesn't. I remember many, many years ago a series presented by James Burke on the BBC. He went through the calculations based on estimating number of possible planets, number proportion of those capable of having life supporting conditions and thus the potential number of civilisations and their rate of development etc. It's called the Drake equation and is explained here by Carl Sagan. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB_v99FSTYc So Sagan here is also being very optamistic - at the time they hadn't found one solid planet in the universe (only gas giants incapable of supporting life). Far more likely than being visited by spaceships we should have detected radio emmissions (the joke about our TV transmissions being picked up by other civilisations is not really a joke). I'm not a sceptic, just a scientist.

I saw a UFO once, lovely sunny saturday afternoon it was, [url=http://jerrychicken.wordpress.com/2008/09/09/the-day-i-saw-a-ufo/wrote about it here in fact[/url

It was an object, it was flying, and I couldn't identify it with anything I'd seen before, so it was a UFO, nothing more, nothing less.

Quote ="Hollywood Harrigan"Do you believe? I saw something last Monday in the sky at around 9pm that looked odd and just wondered what people thought. It was a bright white object moving at tremendous speeds across the Leeds sky maybe a mile up. There was a plane at maybe twice the height coming into land and that was crawling compared to this object. After looking on the internet for something about about it I found the following article and similar was spotted the evening before. www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/R ... 5042899.jp'" Check Out My Clip: [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as1ifHAQznk...[/url

Quote ="Hollywood Harrigan"Do you believe? I saw something last Monday in the sky at around 9pm that looked odd and just wondered what people thought. It was a bright white object moving at tremendous speeds across the Leeds sky maybe a mile up. There was a plane at maybe twice the height coming into land and that was crawling compared to this object. After looking on the internet for something about about it I found the following article and similar was spotted the evening before. www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/R ... 5042899.jp'" Check Out My Clip: [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as1ifHAQznk...[/url

I see UFO's all the time



In all seriousness I do believe that there's other life out there.Pehaps it's not human,animal or plant from but something completely different that we can't even imagine. However I don't believe these 'sightings' are cosher. As with ghosts I'd have to see it myself before I believe there true. Ghosts I have seen so thats one down.

Shhhh ! You'll give me away ....

To take this a stage further and given that there are a number of satellite launches in recent weeks, it is perhaps a good time to mention it here.

It is not-so-long-ago that science would have you believe that the Terran System was the only planetary system in our Galaxy, we are unique and basically there's a load of other stars, dust, matter and that's about it.

Current science now shows that planetary formation is common-place and there are around 300 'exoplanets' now in exisitance. Sadly, most of them are so far away and so small, they are actually mesured by the minute 'wobble' the create against the gravitational pull of the star they orbit. Additionally, most of them observed fall outside the 'Goldilocks Zone' (not too hot / not too cold) where water would be in a liquid form and there is the potential for life 'as we know it' to be present.

There have been other advances too .... Around the Deep Sea Vents at the bottom of the oceans, science would have told you not-so-long-ago that nothing could survive the pressure and the chemical soup, not to to mention the heat ... However, when we finally got down there to take a look for ourselves, it was teeming with life and for the first time, we came across creatures where the primary driver on the foodchain was not light from the Sun, but actually the chemicals that surrounded them.

You also need to take in to account the relative short time that life as a whole has been present on this planet ... Some of you will have seen QI not too long ago that put the presence of any forms of life against the scale of a 12 month calendar (actually it was first perfected by Carl Sagan) and in the grand scheme of things, where 1st Jan = The Big Bang, life on Earth of any form did not develop until early October in the same scale.

It is also worth considering that us mere humans are actually here by accident. A quirk of fate / nature .... Remember the inital dominant life form on this planet was not human, but lizard based and save for the mass extinction event 65 million years ago, primate life on Earth might not have got a look in .... Thus, consider those planets where the mass extinction event didn't take place and you could be having a serious re-write of the concept of life 'as we know it' ....

Still, there is a lot more to discover out there. What's to say that they're not already here and maybe influencing popular culture by the number of bug-eyed warty things we see in mass entertainment on the off-chance of preparing the human race for meeting something not disimilar in reality some time in the future ? And we still haven't solved the question of what is generating the large quantities of methane on Mars. The 'dead' planet producing a great deal of a typically organic gas (Ok, Ok, I know it can be produced by geological processes too, but ...). If we did discover life of any sort on Mars, even microbial, it would have a massive effect on how we thought about the universe around us. If it can 'live' there, then where else could it be that we have previously dismissed as inhospitable ?

Mate, NOBODY believes you're from this planet!

I think to rule out any life on other planet is stupid, and naive

Not to mention scientifically impossible. Any "rule out" approach would require vastly more information than we have to do it with even modest confidence.

I would rate the probability of being visited by other life as vanishingly small, based on the available information, which may/will be subject to change. I could not begin to rate the probability of life exisiting elsewhere, and nor could anybody else. Whatever equation you use, we don't have enough reliable values to plug in to it to make it meaningful.

One thing I think most scientists would agree on is that life is dependent on one factor more than any other - liquid water. Even on this planet the temperature scale at which life can exist is fairly narrow. There are some tricks bacteria can use to avoid freezing at low temperatures, and they have some unique enzymes that can work and survive temperatures near boiling point (crucial for the development of PCR and producing recombinant proteins in labs) - but all life here needs liquid water. In the universe and our solar system that narrows habitats down a bit. -200 degrees C is not survivable in.
There are a number of alternative metabolic pathways that can allow to exist in an oxygen free state (oxygen is the final requirement for respiration in most life - without it the whole pathway jams up and you can't generate biological energy, but there are substitutes). And there are many sources of external energy - ie volcanic springs at the sea bed. However, once again there are scant few signs of volcanic activity outside the Earth in the solar system.
Europa is an intersting one as it's thought the huge gravitational force it endures creates enough movement in it's ice to generate friction - and thus heat. If there is liquid water there is the possibility of life there of some kind.
But in reality most discovered planets are gas giants, any solid planets would have to fit in an orbit suitable for liquid water to exist - and that narows things down a bit.

I would say that the above is very sound logic, but we do not know of what life is like outside our own experiences. On earth life is based on water, and mostly oxygen, but there is nothing to say that in other galaxies around other stars that other rules apply.

The answer to the question about the ufo last week is simple Brent Webb is back

Like it!

I agree. There is nothing in our biology or chemistry research to suggest that other rules apply elsewhere in the universe.

true, but why would we research the possibility of life based on consuming platinum only for example? As a race I think we have an inability to think beyopnd what we see / witness.

Loved 'Contact' one of my fave films.