A Follow-Up to “Greetings….Ass!”
9 August 2006 by Eve
Back in May, Sean’s post about ufologist McKinnon under the hilarious headline of “Greetings! I’ve travelled a thousand light-years to peer up your ass!” (well worth repeating over and over again) triggered a vague memory for me of something I’d read in a skeptical magazine about the traditional “gray” alien described by abductees. Catherine suggested that it might be a Skeptical Inquirer article I was remembering.
It turned out to be Skeptic magazine, and here’s the story I had skimmed and couldn’t quite recall in its entirety. Frederick V. Malmstrom asks, “Close Encounters of the Facial Kind: Are UFO Alien Faces an Inborn Facial Recognition Template?”
I’m reproducing the article here in its entirety, since it’s a little hard to read on the magazine’s homepage (whose bright idea was it to put dark lettering on a dark background?):
The Descriptions of alien faces historically reported by UFO abductees are almost boringly uniform. Long before “close encounters” became a catchword in the ufologist’s vocabulary, self-proclaimed UFO abductees described their abductors as bulbous-headed humanoids equipped with oversized, wraparound eyes, vertical double-slit nostrils and gray skin. Is there another explanation for this uniformity of features besides the most obvious — that it is a description of an actual alien race?
Reports of Aliens
The archetypical alien face most commonly reported by abductees is usually recalled while the victim is in a hypnagogic half-dream state, or else under hypnotic regression. Figure 1 below shows a typical face drawn by a self-claimed UFO abductee who was interviewed by psychologist Robert A. Baker in 1993. Figure 2 shows another typical alien face drawn by one of my abductee clients. In 1979, my colleague Richard Coffman and I published a study of the bodily dimensions of reported aliens.1 Our random sample of 30 reported aliens revealed that 100% were humanoid in shape and stood at a median height of 155 cm (60 inches )— a height close to that of the average woman. In addition, 80% of our sample had the typical UFO face: prominent, somewhat diagonally oriented eyes, double-slit nostrils, and little or no evidence of a mouth.
Figure 1:a typical face drawn by a self-claimed UFO abductee.
Our most telling finding was that most of our alien encounters were reported by subjects who admitted to either being in a hypnagogic state (that nether region between sleep and wakefulness) at the time, or else they were experiencing hypnotic regression. For instance, the world-famous abduction of a New Hampshire couple, Betty and Barney Hill (Betty was once a neighbor of mine) was not reported by them immediately after it happened. They recalled the abduction several weeks later, and then only when prompted to do so under the influence of hypnotic regression.2
FIGURE 2: another typical alien face drawn by one of Malmstrom’s abductee clients.
The Inborn Visual Recognition Template
Many newborn animals are equipped with inborn visual recognition templates. It has been well over a half century since ethololgist Niko Tinbergen found that newly hatched chicks would automatically cower from shadow patterns that resembled predators (such as hawks). These same chicks ignored shadow patterns that matched nonpredators (such as geese).3
Human facial recognition is a highly specialized ability, and it seems to be pre-wired before birth in specific visual processing areas of the brain. However, the human newborn ability to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar faces does not develop in infants until about two months of age.4 Up to that time, an infant will respond favorably to nearly any face, familiar or unfamiliar, normal or bizarre, mother or Halloween mask. Of course, all these human-type faces seem to share two quite generalized and nonspecific features, namely a pair of eyes and a nose.
FIGURE 3:Dual “pupil” schematic which receives the most attention from newborn infants (after Hess, 1975).
The singular feature that seems to grab the baby’s attention is the presence of two large horizontally arranged spots or “eyes.” Infants seem to ignore one or three spots. Furthermore, the pioneer pupillometry researcher Eckhard Hess reported that infants paid especially close attention to the size of the “pupils” within these eyes. Larger pupils attracted more infant attention than smaller ones.5 The visual presentation that gathered most infants’ attention was the dual large-pupil schematic shown in Figure 3.
FIGURE 4:A female “Protoface” (after Nelson, 1994).
The Prototype Female Face
Rather than using spots or schematic pupils, I.W.R. Bushnell utilized a “prototype” young female face, one for which the hair and ear outline of the face was covered with white cloth, such as that shown in Figure 4.6 Newborn infants seemed not to discriminate between these prototype faces, although they afterwards quickly learned to discriminate between faces with the added cue of a hair outline. However, the ability to recognize this prototype hairless and earless face is reportedly located in the hippocampus, a noncortical area of the brain.7 An infant’s inborn ability to recognize a generalized face is apparently evolutionarily quite primitive. According to this research, the infant begins with the prototype female “protoface” pre-wired visually into the midbrain, and then later utilizes the cortical areas to add additional visual recognition cues, such as the hairline and ear.
Newborns Have Quite Limited Visual Capabilities
Within the literature of neonatal vision there is considerable disagreement over whether the neonate is born severely myopic (nearsighted) or hypermetropic (farsighted). Regardless of the conflicting claims, it is generally reported that a neonate will pay attention to objects only 7–25 cm (3–10 in) in front of their eyes, and they will generally ignore any activity outside this range. However, the infant’s range of attention increases rapidly and will expand to perhaps a range of 1 meter or greater in as little as 1–2 days after birth.8 The newborn infant’s vision is also reported as being substantially clouded, as if he or she is peering through fog.
Regarding infant color perception, neonates (as measured by the time they focus attention) are also unable to discriminate between colors within the same display. Their vision seems to tend toward discrimination between shades of gray. To the newborn, says Atkinson, “color discriminations are either weak or absent.”9
Finally, Atkinson reports that newborn astigmatism is “very common.”10 Adults are quite aware that astigmatism is most annoying and gives the impression of visual “smearing” of an image. However, newborn astigmatism seems to be a perceived smearing only in the periphery of all images outside the central cylinder of focus.
Seeing Faces That Are or Are Not There
Prosopagnosia, an inability to recognize faces, is both a well-documented and fascinating medical condition. It is frequently preceded by bilateral brain damage or insult to the areas surrounding the calcarine fissure, an area that overlaps both the parietal and visual cortex. Anatomically, the cortical fusiform gryi and the midbrain structures are also most certainly involved.11 Prosopagnosia involves not only the inability to see or recognize faces, but sometimes, and just as importantly, as neurologist Oliver Sacks illustrates in his charming book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, often involves the perception of faces that aren’t there.12
Human facial recognition occurs at a surprisingly coarse level of visual processing, a crude contrast sensitivity range of around 3 cycles/ degrees spatial frequency, precisely the region where the human visual system also has its highest contrast sensitivity. Harmon and Julesz, both of Bell Labs, reported that faces are remarkably recognizable under these so-called degraded or otherwise blurry, limited environments. Moderate blurring acts as a low-pass filter and often actually improves facial recognition.13
FIGURE 5:Unprocessed young female face.
What is the First Thing a Newborn Baby Sees?
Obviously, one of the first and most frequent things a baby sees and commits to memory is its mother’s face. In Figure 6 of this article I have transformed the young female face of Figure 5 into the kind of face that may be presumed to be seen by the newborn. The transformed face is shown at the intimately close distance that we might expect an infant to see. The reader is invited to compare the “neonatally” perceived face to a “typical” alien face as shown in Figures 1 and 2. I believe this demonstrates that there is an innate template face that approximates the typically reported face of a UFO alien.
FIGURE 6:A mother’s face as it might be seen by a newborn (processed to represent a contrast sensitivity of 3 cycles degrees when viewed at a visual angle of 50°, with simulated radial astigmatism and an extremely shallow (1 cm) depth of focus.
Transforming a Mother’s Face into a UFO Alien Face
I enlisted the assistance of a young healthy Caucasian female about age 30, a representative age for a mother of a newborn. She was photographed with direct frontal lighting to reduce shadowing and also to minimize her hairline. Her digital photo was then transformed in gray scales to a coarseness of about 150 pixels across a field of 50° of visual angle. This operation simulated a 2-dimensional Fourier transform of about 3 cycles/degrees of visual angle, the same region where the human visual system has its highest contrast sensitivity. Extremely shallow depth of focus and astigmatism were also simulated by smearing the periphery. Finally, her face was then clouded and further smoothed by blurring to eliminate the high contrast edges introduced by the coarse pixilation process of step one. The resulting face approximates the face a newborn baby might perceive immediately after birth (Figure 7).
The facial transformation from mother to alien proceeds in these steps. The first processing (Figure 6) seems to yield a face in which the eyes and associated pupils become the most prominent feature. The smearing of the periphery and the simulation of an extremely shallow depth of focus yields a rather startling effect. The eyes seem to slant diagonally upwards and assume prominence. Second, the nostrils begin to lose their roundness and tend to be seen as vertical slits. Third, the mouth becomes less distinguishable.
FIGURE 7:The mother’s face immediately after birth. Cloudiness was added to Figure 6 and the image was coincidentally smoothed to remove the residual high spatial frequencies. Squinting at the picture enhances the “UFO alien” effect even more.
The final process (Figure 7) was accomplished by inserting a smoothing function that serves as an additional second low-pass spatial frequency filter, passing only the 3 cycles/degrees visual information. This transformation makes the mouth features still more indistinguishable but paradoxically often improves facial recognition. In fact, the transformation to an alien face becomes even more extreme if the observer squints at the picture. The blurring caused by squinting acts as an additional low-pass filter.
A Little Green Woman?
Similar results can be produced by transforming the prototype female faces published by both Nelson and Atkinson.14 In fact, these transformation results could be used to support the claim that ubiquitous UFO alien faces are those of Little Green Women rather than Little Green Men.
The power of visual imagery is often confused for visual reality. This confusion is understandable, as visual imagery frequently occupies and competes for the same regions of the visual cortex and subcortical regions as visual perception itself. The competition between visual and mental images seems to be at its greatest during hypnagogic and dream states, precisely the awareness regions where these two processes merge.15 Hence, it would be expected that the alien face perceived in hypnagogic dreamlike states is also produced from the same primitive facial recognition template. Further investigation is warranted. Like the predator-recognition system of the newly-hatched chick reported by Tinbergen,16 it would be no surprise if a template of a female UFO-type face is also preprogrammed into our human brains. The infant’s immediate recognition of a prototype female face, and especially that of its mother, is arguably an important survival advantage.
References & Notes
1. Malmstrom, F. and R. Coffman. 1979. “Humanoids Reported In UFOs, Religion, and Folktales: Human Bias Towards Human Life Forms?” In: Haines, R. (ed). UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist. Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, 60–88.
2. Fuller, J.G. 1965. The Interrupted Journey. New York: Dial Press.
3. Tinbergen, N. 1951. The Study of Instinct. London: Oxford University Press.
4. Atkinson, J. 2000. The Developing Visual Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5. Hess, E. H. 1975. The Tell-tale Eye. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
6. Bushnell, I.W.R. 1982. “Discrimination of Faces By Young Infants.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 33, 298–308.
7. Nelson, C.A. (1994). “Neural Correlates of Recognition Memory During the First Potential Year of Life”. In: Dawson G., and K. Fisher (eds) Human Behaviour and the Developing Brain, New York: Guilford Press, 269–313.
8. McCarthy, G. 2000. “Physiological Studies of Face Processing In Humans.” In: Gazzaniga, M. S. (ed.-in-chief). The New Cognitive Neuroscience, 2nd edition. Boston: The MIT Press.
9. Atkinson, 2000.
10. Atkinson, 2000.
11. McCarthy, 2000.
12. Sacks, O. 1998. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and Other Clinical Tales. New York: Touchstone Books.
13. Harmon, L. and B. Julesz. 1973. “Masking In Visual Recognition: Effects Of Two-dimensional Filtered Noise.” Science, 180, 1194–1197.
14. Atkinson, 2000. Nelson, 1994.
15. Baker, R. A. 1996. Hidden Memories: Voices and Visions From Within. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.
16. Tinbergen, 1951.
9 August 2006, on 7:45 pm
It’s neat that we can apply all the same skepticism about gods to alien abductions. I also like seeing this site take on some other forms of imbecilic nonsense from time to time. Excellent post!
9 August 2006, on 8:14 pm
Yeah, but how does that explain Bill O’Reilly?
9 August 2006, on 8:17 pm
Thanks, ATM! In this day of New Agers I often meet people who turn up their noses at organized religion, only to fall head over heels for other types of whackadoolery.
9 August 2006, on 8:19 pm
I happen to think there is life out there, but with the immense space between our world and others, the possiblity of finding an intact, advanced civilization is small.
However, that first picture, labelled Figure 1, looks like something Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th would wear.
9 August 2006, on 8:33 pm
Good question, Raindog; perhaps there are no extraterrestrials, only intra and ultraterrestrials.
9 August 2006, on 8:58 pm
I’ve never heard of ultraterrestrials, but if they exist it would go a long way to explaining the phenomena of ghosts.
9 August 2006, on 9:25 pm
I personally think that most ghosts are natural phenomena like infrasound, for starters.
9 August 2006, on 9:55 pm
At James Randi’s “The Amaz!ng Meeting” (http://www.randi.org/amazingmeeting/tam4/index.html) last January, Frederick Malmstrom, the author of the above work, gave a short presentation on it. If you think it’s impressive on this blog, you should have been in the audience! There was an audible gasp when he showed the distorted images. I made a noise, too: it was really incredible to see the faces change into those sinister greys.
This work isn’t definitive, of course, but man! It was very impressive.
Incidentally, when people ask me about aliens coming here to take samples, I always say the same thing: why should they travel trillions of miles to repeatedly excoriate cow anuses when they can do it once and clone all the cow anuses they need at home?
9 August 2006, on 10:47 pm
So I guess the anal probes are remembrances of having rectal thermometers stuck up our butts?
9 August 2006, on 10:54 pm
I happen to have some insight into alien abductions since I have a known condition called hypnogoncic hallucinations. They are also sometimes called “night terrors”. Happening several times a year at best, several times a week at worst since I was a teenager it is fascinating and terrifying at the same time.
It’s very realistic and can leave me disturbed for hours before I can get back to sleep. Since, I guess, I was born with an innate skeptical mind I have never attributed these dreams to supernatural entities even though it was not until college that I learned about the condition. It’s a real hallucination where things are strange, but you can’t tell the difference between it and reality.
I have spoken to many people and they are quick to attribute these “episodes” to aliens, demons, gods, or “the mad gasser” despite the fact that a completely rational explanation exists. Far too many people want to feel special, want to believe that these things do take place, or want to participate in this larger community ( sound anything like a cult/religion? ).
Try to explain this condition to someone who has already attributed it to something else and it’s like trying to steal their soul. They can’t mentally allow themselves to have the rug yanked out from under them, they must build up this false belief and protect it.
9 August 2006, on 11:49 pm
I too have suffered from the occasional hypnogogic hallucination but by brother had it much worse, he had full out paralysis and thought he saw a silhouetted figure over him. He managed to snap himself fully awake and repel the mental illusion.
As for why aliens would master the nontrivial task of interstellar space flight just to chop up some cows and kidnap some guy from a trailer park is beyond me. If we ever meet them the conversation will probably go like this:
HUMAN: So, uh, what was with all those rectal probes and stuff?
ALIEN: What!!? Oh man, we thought those were your faces and we were putting lipstick on ‘em! Jeez, what am I gonna tell the guys…?
9 August 2006, on 11:50 pm
Cool! The Bad Astronomer is here! How awesome is this!? Gotta love the BA Blog!
10 August 2006, on 12:04 am
For my part, I remain a pretty staunch [whatever that is...more like paunch?] skeptic with regards to all the claims of UFOs and abductions. We, after all is said and done, know so little about almost everything…i.e…we’ve just started scratching the surface with our rather destructive and juvenile technologies etc.
In my atheist opinion, the only ‘thing’ I know any appreciable amount about, with ‘first hand’ experience, is my own consciousness. Even then, there’s a lot of somewhat vague ‘mystery’ there! Yeah,…Yikes!
I do have a kind of sarcastic, joking thought about the human race’s appearance on this planet; as opposed to, strictly speaking, the other apes and animals…
which is: Maybe we’re all previously warring aliens from different planets; who simply fucked each other onto this one…and can’t escape each other…say what!…’til we stop warring abusing each other, give up our stupid madeup mythologies, and start cooperating with each other…trying to make Earth a sane place to exist!
Is it, however, just a case of “Ain’t gonna happen?”
Like I say,…it’s only a sarcastic, joking thought!
Right now, I’d rather head for the “Castle Antrax” for…um…a spanking (?), and/or maybe some oral sex. [Thanks Jimmer, for that earlier Python link; and the "Killer Klowns..." too...what a little cult film classic that is! I love the hand shadow scene in that flick! Lot's of poking at stupid humans!]
See?…I can’t quit that kidding addiction!
Oh!…did anyone else catch today’s Wolf Blitzer interview with Pat Rubbersuit…er…Robber’s-son…er…Robertson?
For me, it’s another example of CNN’s “Whoring with Nutcases” theme!
“Hey Wolfie,…go get laid!”
“…and there they go, Wolf and Pat…off behind the bombed out Jewish temple; where Pat will probably demonstrate his leg press!”
10 August 2006, on 12:13 am
Great post, Eve! And another thing: how come so many more aliens that look exactly like this started abducting people after “Close Encounters” came out? Gee. Hmm.
BTW: Sorry, folks, if I have been lax on posting and responding to email this week. Have been sick, and so has a beloved family member.
10 August 2006, on 12:21 am
That broght back memories of scrooged with bill murry.
“Cross: All day long I listen to people give me excuses why they can’t work. My legs hurt. My back aches. I’m only four. The sooner he learns life isn’t handed to him on a silver platter, the better.”
10 August 2006, on 12:44 am
Thanks, Eric, for the somewhat backhanded well-wishes.
10 August 2006, on 1:50 am
Eve
Good post.All of those symptoms are explainable.
RDZ
O’Reilly? Thst is explained best by ” Rectal Probing”. Repeatedly
10 August 2006, on 3:06 am
Like I have always suspected: Delusional people are devoid of intuitive psychology.
They don’t know the “why” of what’s going on in their head; exactly like religiontards.
10 August 2006, on 6:30 am
Whitley Schreiber’s ‘Communion’ is the ground zero of ‘grey’ sightings. Up until its publication, aliens came in all shapes, from six foot angelic beings to hairy dwarves. Then Schreiber’s book came out with the now familiar picture of a ‘grey’ on the cover. Since then, aliens have been uniformly ‘grey’, and all the other varieties have vanished forever.
10 August 2006, on 12:36 pm
Possibly slightly off-topic, but this excellent article brought to mind a brief personal experience. My son (now 11) was breast-fed until he was 13 months old (received wisdom at the time was that breast-feeding for a full year helped prevent asthma developing), and was an extraordinarily hungry baby for the first few months, wanting to be fed every half an hour or so night and day. (Yes, it was tiring. But I managed: he slept in a cot at my side of the bed so I could just lift him in and out without having to actually get up, and I left a very dim light on all night so I could see what I was doing.) Early one morning, when he was about 2 months old, I’d lifted him into bed and settled him to feed, half-asleep and lying on my side, looking down at him as always, when it suddenly struck me that his face looked exactly like one of the aliens in these illustrations, big slanted eyes, tiny nose, minute mouth and triangular shaped head (due to foreshortening). Very strange feeling – especially since we’d joked about me being invaded by an alien life-form while I was carrying him!
It’s probably too fanciful to suggest that this has any bearing on the subject as a whole, but I can’t possibly be the only mum who’s had such an experience.
10 August 2006, on 2:43 pm
Deacon Barry, that’s exactly what the Junior Skeptic section of the current issue of Skeptic magazine points out; they also mention temporal lobe epilepsy as a possible cause for the “phenomena” he claims to have experienced.
Joules, your comment (not OT at all) reminds me of a view Anne Rice put forward in her Mayfair Witches series, that the similarity of “grays” to human fetuses in popular culture, especially movies, showed America’s obsession with sex, fertility, abortion, and the birth process in general. Both of you might be on to something…
10 August 2006, on 8:06 pm
On this topic, you guys should check out a very entertaining and skeptical book called Captured By Aliens. It is one of the most enjoyable non-fiction books I’ve ever read, and it really addresses the deep desire of some to believe, no matter how non-existent the evidence.
10 August 2006, on 8:07 pm
Joules: That’s it! Aliens are just babies from space.
10 August 2006, on 8:12 pm
Martian (how appropriate a name): Thanks for the book tip! Must check it out.
Look, here’s what I have to say about all this in a clamshell:
I want there to be aliens. I know there most likely are. The universe is insanely vast, beyond all human comprehension.
But… Shit, let’s face it. Physics says we are somewhat stuck where we are without having to somehow literally travel for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s a damn shame, and one of the great ironies. If we could make contact, we’d shut up a lot of god-botherers but quick.
Oh, who am I kidding? They’d just twist it around and make up a new fantasy to replace the old one.
10 August 2006, on 8:23 pm
Sean: Heh. Yeah, the name is from Oliver Sacks’ An Anthropologist On Mars, and it’s the name of my blog.
But seriously, everyone, I’m very glad to have found this blog. It’s great to be able to converse with thinking people.
10 August 2006, on 8:47 pm
I read “Communion” many moons ago. Scared the shit out of me!
Saw many an alien face as a stoner in the 80’s, I found that if I concentrated long enough on anyone, his or her face would shift around like crazy.
I’ve experienced that sleep “paralysis” where I’ve actually felt hands all over me moving my skin and pushing on me. (what a relief to finally hear there was an explanation for it!)
There’s a logical explanation for everything.
But, I sure do think that somewhere in the endless universe there are other life forms. It’s just too big for there not to be.
10 August 2006, on 9:18 pm
Yeah Sean, it would be cool if extraterrestrials were able to provide documented proof that humans have existed on this planet for over 6,000 years (they had been studying us and making National Geographic type documentaries about us the whole time) and then saying to the Creationists “debunk this ya dummies!”
10 August 2006, on 9:44 pm
Island57, glad to hear the diagnosis of sleep paralysis helped you; from everything I’ve read and heard, it’s damn scary even when you know what’s going on. I know of a lot of people who insist on sticking to the supernatural explanation despite the medical evidence, probably to make themselves feel and seem “special” in some wacky way.
10 August 2006, on 10:15 pm
the similarity of “grays” to human fetuses in popular culture, especially movies, showed America’s obsession with sex, fertility, abortion, and the birth process in general.
Eve – I’ve not read much Anne Rice (I’m afraid I don’t like her writing very much), but from what I’ve been reading in news/blogs/journals I wouldn’t be surprised if there was something in that suggestion. It’s very sad that something so basic has been twisted and distorted out of all recognition in certain sections of the US. (I’m in the UK and I think – though I couldn’t swear to it – that we still have a rather more pragmatic and sensible view of the whole process. Possibly because we have far fewer fundies than you do. Though I understand that may be changing.)
That’s it! Aliens are just babies from space.
[grin] Sean, my parents decided I was an alien when I hit my teens, and I’m just about ready for my son to exhibit the same symptoms I did, and a few new ones, in the next few years. If the young ‘uns didn’t start pushing those boundaries I’d be bloody worried…
10 August 2006, on 11:47 pm
Even with this very compelling and logical explanation people will undoubtedly cling to their evidence-less beliefs in UFOs and alien abductions. Skeptic Magazine had an issue a few years back that dealt with false memory syndrome. This could also play a role in the fantastical stories told by “abductees”. People continue to insist that aliens have visited the planet and created crop circles even though circle makers have confessed to their night-time ventures.
11 August 2006, on 12:29 am
I firmly believe- well, as firmly as a belief can be held that has no evidence to back it up- in aliens. I think they’re out there, I think there’s a very good chance they’ve been here but I do not believe for one minute is that a lifeform capable of interstellar travel wouldn’t be intellectually capable of eluding the inbred, so-called “abductees” and appealing to a more evolved specimen.
11 August 2006, on 2:26 am
Raindogzilla Says:
I firmly believe- well, as firmly as a belief can be held that has no evidence to back it up- in aliens. I think they’re out there, I think there’s a very good chance they’ve been here
RDZ: As much as I admire your brilliance, I am gonna have to call you on that one, man.
There is no reason at all to believe they have been here. In fact, the sheer physical reality of the very concept of interstellar travel says that they most probably have not.
Even if you could develop some generational starship, or some kind of warp/wormhole travel that got around the limitation of the speed of light, why would you visit this dust speck of a planet in a remote spiral arm of an insignificant galaxy? We haven’t even done anything to attract attention, having had radio capabilities for only an infinitesimally small period of this planet’s existence.
I’m not saying they aren’t out there. The Drake Equation seems to say it is quite likely. I’m just saying that Carl Sagan had it right. Watch the skies.
11 August 2006, on 9:43 am
Sean, that’s why I qualified that belief as unqualified. I like to imagine things like, oh, the celestial alignment of such earth locales as Stonehenge, The Great Pyramids, The Pyramid of the Sun, etc. crossed with the sheer implausibility of mankind’s collective knowledge at the time being sufficient to both engineer and orient these works. Of course, I can’t prove it and, in a court of law, I don’t know if I could swear that I really believe it or not. However, just because our limited intelligence cannot imagine a method of interstellar travel or a suitable reason for a visit, doesn’t mean there isn’t both. Besides, it’s fun and I’m not trying to govern anyone by my unfounded beliefs.
11 August 2006, on 1:17 pm
When I was in my pre-teens, I was fascinated with the idea of extraterrestrials visiting the Earth. I think it was spurred by seeing “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” when I was 7 or 8 years old.
But today I do not believe that any intelligent life from other planets has ever visited us. Like Sean wrote above, the sheer distances involved make it very implausible. I would also imagine that if some intelligent race of beings from another planet had the technology to visit us on a regular basis, I don’t see why they would be skulking around and trying not to be noticed. There is nothing to stop them from making themselves openly known to us and our own government would be powerless to cover it up. On a less optimistic note, I should think that if aliens had the technology to visit our world, they likely would have conquered us all by now. I imagine it would be something like Cortez with the Aztecs of Pizzaro with Incas.
20 August 2006, on 9:25 am
[...] Is it just me or does anyone else see the striking similiarities between newly accused JonBenet Ramsey murderer John Mark Karr, currently winging his way out of Bangkok back to the U.S. to face charges of first-degree murder, kidnapping and child sexual assault … and Whitley Strieber’s “Gray” Aliens?? [...]
15 October 2006, on 6:45 pm
BTW, in reference to Phil Plait’s Aug 9th comment and my UFO alien Skeptic magazine article, I appearing shortly in the 2006 TAM4 Proceedings an expanded version. I did the same transformation on both an Asian-American and and an African-American female. The results are similar — race doesn’t seem to matter.