Why doesn't the scientific community take UFOs seriously...

Why doesn't the scientific community take UFOs seriously? I got interested after watching a programme and investigated it for a year, I used to think it was bullshit stories but I found that it's very distinct other paranormal things that it usually gets lumped in with.

I now think UFOs are real but obtuse people then pipe up "anything unidentified is a UFO of course!" So I will clarify; I think it is some real unknown phenomenon and not all just simple misidentification of known things

Aliens. I want to believe but I found zero proof of that. I gave up on the ET hypothesis after rumours that the Zamorra case was hoaxed. Maybe they flew past Earth once in a Neumann probe or something and one UFO case out there was really ayys but the claims thousands of them spent years joyriding on Earth in shiny flashing saucers make no fucking sense.

So I now think ball lightning makes a likely candidate. Makes sense, bright light in the sky, weird motion. The British Ministry of Defense report on UFOs came to the same conclusion that the 5% unexplainable sightings could be an unknown atmospheric plasma

So in conclusion, I took my time to investigate something that everyone else dismissed as bullshit and I found that it could actually be a little researched atmospheric phenomenon. I know it's a tinfoil meme but you really should keep an open mind.

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Self-censorship is worse than you realize.

A tactic used by deep state government to supress a story is by encouraging sci-fi writers/directors to make films over a subject.
The public who used to think that a topic was controversial or mysterious, now associates the subject matter with entertainment.

Yes government aren't hiding aliens of course but they do really supress UFOs for the obvious reason that it could cause mass panic over nothing.

lol i used to drive by that place all the time

>Why doesn't the scientific community take UFOs seriously?

where would you start? there's absolutely no money in it, and at the end of the day, you have to make a living. who's going to pay you to spend 70 hours a week reading through abduction reports from mostly somewhat crazy US citizens?

Hearsay and low-quality footage is below scientific standards. If something interesting crops up, scientists will take it seriously. That hasn't happened yet.

>Why doesn't the scientific community take UFOs seriously?
Maybe because 9/10th of the evidence is eventually proven to be fake or pareidolia and the remaining tenth is unconfirmed but highly suspected as such. Just read about the Roswell slides for a bit and you'll see how stupid, or (((opportunistic))), UFOlogists are.

Fuck abduction reports, just investigate the glowing lights as possible ball lightning. Abduction is complete BS
So is Roswell.
Griefswald lights, Levelland UFO. AF said it was probably ball lightning, nobody ever bothered investigating the phenomenon further.

it's not that i don't take UFOs seriously - it's the interpretations that I don't take seriously. certainly there's charlatans in the UFO community (steven greer comes to mind), but i can buy that most people who see things they don't understand are making accurate reports of their experience.

that doesn't mean they understand what they're seeing. the number of ways that our visual systems can be tricked is very long, and that's not even getting into the faults of memory creation and recall

>Why doesn't the scientific community take UFOs seriously?
>pic related

Gee I wonder?

>certainly there's charlatans in the UFO community (steven greer comes to mind)

Wait, what? Since when is Steven Greer considered a charlatan? What did he do? It's been a long while since I last read about him, but he seemed like the most reputable UFOlogist.

Pretty much every word out of his mouth is a lie. The "dinner briefing" was an enormous exaggeration on his part, he took someone politely listening to a dinner guest and spun it out into a covert, official debriefing. His UFO hunting parties are bullshit but he puts everyone who goes under harsh NDAs (for a long time he claimed an overexposed picture of a moth taken on one was an alien/angel/whatever). He's been hawking over-unity devices for decades with no apparent energy output. He's stolen other peoples' work and misrepresents it as his own.

>abduction reports from mostly somewhat crazy US citizens?

Russia is also a hotbed of UFO reporting and interest.

>I now think UFOs are real but obtuse people then pipe up "anything unidentified is a UFO of course!" So I will clarify; I think it is some real unknown phenomenon and not all just simple misidentification of known things


I think it is a mistake to assume that there is A ufo phenomenon. The range of what is reported is simply too great. Ball lightning, for example, is a possible explanation for lights in the sky, but not for daylight disks. Sleep paralysis could account for many contactee reports, but seems unlikely to have much to do with anomalous radar contacts.

Somehow, all sorts of reported observed phenomena got lumped into the category of "UFO," with an assumption that those that are not frauds or mistakes must all have some common underlying cause.

When you ditch all the obvious hoaxes and misidentification of common things you might see in the sky, and then break down the remaining cases into appropriate categories, you pretty quickly get to the point where you understand that, while no single underlying cause exists for all reports, few if any reports are left as unidentifiable with currently know phenomena.

Something that's always important to remember with any paranormal phenomenon like this is that people have bad memory. Like, really, really bad. Nobody remembers what they see. They remember what they thought they saw at the time. Your memory isn't like a camera that captures everything and reproduces it exactly so that later you can reexamine the picture and realize you saw something else. Your memory of an event is more like a collage your brain makes by combining clipart of the objects that you thought were in the scene.

So when some hillbilly sees a bear walk past his yard on his hind legs at night, if he thinks in that instant that he is seeing a Bigfoot, then later on when he remembers it to recount the details his mind will fill in all the details of what a bigfoot looks like, and he will describe in detail the big hairless feet and monkey face he saw. And he's not lying; that is what he thinks he saw. That's how bad human memory is.

It's very likely that our only means of recording them and proving their existence is technology and if they've managed to make it to this planet from another then it's pretty likely that they have much more sophisticated computers that are aware of the presence of phones, cameras and sound recording equipment.

All it really takes is for them to avoid being recorded, to be able to manipulate video footage of them if they happened to make a mistake or to have some kind of shield or cloaking device.

This, ayy lmaos would only get caught if they wanted to be.

The only genuine UFOlogist is Jacques Valee. The rest are just trying to sell books.

Because the CIA allotted $80 BILLION towards covering them up. Documentary: unacknowledged.

If you really want to see UFOs and are friendly then all you need to do is go out to a dark place and shine a light, even a lighter will do, towards the sky and perhaps wait.

Make sure it's a fairly isolated area, think visibility, if they can see your light, they probably will investigate.

i've seen the black knight sattelite up close man, i'm telling you, they are real and they seem to be capable of traversing through dimensions entirely.

again, black budget coverups. ex CIA and military have gone on record to say how they would set up hoax debunk videos, with ballons for example, to debunk any credible evidence leaked to the public.

ex military have gone on record to state that all cow mutilations were fabricated by man as a false flag towards aliens, i have heard this from two seperate sources, one being an internet forum, the other being a recent documentary.

how about Carl Sagan, apparantly he was quite the proponent for UFOlogy, then all of a sudden, he was apparently commited to debunking the phenomenon. Source: unacknowledged

man those things are real and i've seen em do some real sci fi stuff. one even flew so close to a flat it barely clipped the roof. definitely illegal flight behaviour for human craft. i've seen silver aeroplanes with wings curved to a point, like a real crescent shape, elongated past the tail, definitely not human craft. would think there was a chance it would be project blue beam hologram but i saw the black knight sattelite, that's something else entirely.

Yes 95% of cases are people seeing things hallucinating but some are genuine unknowns. In my investigations I discounted single witnesses or multiple witnesses who knew each other and all the reports had to be near simultaneous so it couldn't just be people seeing things after hearing it on the radio. If all these criteria are fulfilled then the only explanation is that the object really did exist

But that doesn't mean it's aliens oh no. Like with your bear example all the sightings could be genuine but it still just be a mass misidentification. So I discount any case where it could feasibly be something known.

Now with the Levelland case, multiple unconnected people reported the same thing at around the same time, that ticks box 1, wasn't a hallucination or someone making shit up or joined the bandwagon after hearing the story on the radio. This mean something must have really been flying around that night. The reports all said that it was a huge glowing ball that hovered silently a few yards from their cars and disabled them. Could it be birds or a plane? If we take the report as true it's far too close, even if we say they misjudged the distance, nothing man-made even today hovers silently and certainly nothing disables your car. So we come to the logical conclusion that it a) existed b) wasn't man-made. This is why the Air Force and I say that ball lightning was a likely explanation. It's round, it glows, it floats, and maybe it's electrical field can disable equipment.

Now skeptics just dismiss the whole thing as fantasy stories but if you actually read about it as I did you see that it wasn't aliens but something interesting really was happening.

Because a lot of the people who claim to have been abducted are definitely just mental patients even if the idea itself of extraterrestrials with space travel who manage to reach us is relatively reasonable. It's a case of the people known to be associated with this topic giving it a bad reputation, much like how you can come across as a scientologist nutjob if you criticize psychiatry even though psychiatry deserves a lot of criticism (scientology for whatever reason at some point in its early history became mortal enemies with psychiatrists).

Tinfoil get out, the government isn't hiding aliens. People like you are why I get riduculed for talking about UFOs

A lot of people actually do have really good memory, visual memory is not uncommon, either. Photographic memory, is an occurence, too.

If our memory was as bad as you make it out to be, we wouldn't be able to remember words such as 'exquisite' for example. Memory is stored and recalled, don't underestimate it, although, don't overestimate it, either. I can see where you're coming from, as conscious memory is limited to what is being thought of in the now, whereas subconscious is more reliant on spatial, awareness so to say.

but there are some memories that leave imprints in peoples minds, they are memories that aren't just forgotten. The only way i know about the black knight sattelite, for example, is by having googled it, first coming across a video of the sts-88 mission, sending chills down my spine, as then was the instant i recognized it to be what i saw. and i was googling it because i had seen the craft. but whatever, i can't remember my name cause my memory is so foggy, maybe it was a flying black cat that looked like a bumblebee hypercube moving through multiple dimensions, yeah, that's something i'd forget ..

I've come to the conclusion that abductions are bullshit. Never seen a single convincing case and as ever it doesn't make sense, why would you fly across the galaxy just to anally rape the local fawna?

that's what they said in the documentary that i bet you didn't watch. it's not even that hard to deduce, desu. Waste of $80 billion dollars i say.

It's less that memory is "bad" and more that most of what we think is "memory" is actually our brains just completely bullshitting up with manufactured narratives about what "must have happened." This is the mechanism behind the very reliably occurring phenomenon of delusional behavior in people with the right kinds of brain trauma. If you damage the hemisphere opposite your rationalizing / bullshit hemisphere, it'll go into overdrive and make you start making all sorts of blatantly false claims like denying your arm is paralyzed when everyone in the hospital room can clearly see it limping there motionless and when pressed on why you aren't moving it you claim the arm they're looking at actually belongs to the patient in the bed next to yours.

Using human memory as your data is not scientific. If that satellite was real any amateur could observe it much less NASA and the Russians and the Chinese who are in LEO all the time. Do you really think they are all working together to cover it up?

lmfao

oh i'm sorry, i forgot to mention in this thread that i can summon them, too. for quite some time now, didn't know what to do with it until i showed a friend and now the whole neighbourhood wants to check it out (i'm exaggerating, for now, we're a small group)

Also we shouldn't forget that all of us become 100% delusional basically every single night when we dream. What person in their right mind would accept the typical dream narrative as a logical / real series of events? Yet we very rarely recognize the inanity of these scenarios while dreaming and just go along with it, precisely because what we're compelled to believe often has relatively little to do with objective reality and a tremendous amount to do with that narrative generating process that "makes sense" of it all for us with the added convenience of making us believe the stories we're fed by it "really happened."

Actually both halves of the brain apparently have different personalities entirely, like two people living inside the same body. It is this nature that makes it no surprise that the left brain (i guess) would deny the right brains condition as it is unknown to it when damaged or something like that. There's more to it than memory in the scenario you're hypothesizing, i think.

I mean that's not a memory issue that's a brain damage issue, a peripheral malfunction. We are talking about people with generally efficient brains, while the conscious memory does have its limits, the subconscious does not, and is thoroughly supported through triggers as matter/physical reality. You read 'once upon a time', perhaps that triggers your memory of snow white or another fairy tale. it is triggered by reality itself, which is where many of our subconsious memories are stored, making a fairly efficient data recollection system, you have the universe acting as a hard drive, and the conscious mind as a RAM bus.

yeah because most of us don't become lucid once the dream becomes too surreal for logic >__>

when that happens i usually do a backflip and start to fly because then i know it's a dream.

for the rest i would agree, people who are sleeping aren't in the most practical state of mind, however, dreams serve as a buffer for either cpu processes/standby processes or memory compartmentilization or something similar to it.

it has a function is what i am saying. although it perhaps makes little sense to you, it makes sense in the system.

>If our memory was as bad as you make it out to be, we wouldn't be able to remember words such as 'exquisite' for example
False equivalence. Something you see once is not nearly as well retained as a word you see repeatedly, over how many years you've lived your life, and has triple reinforcement from also being spoken and heard many times over that period.

>visual memory is not uncommon, either. Photographic memory, is an occurence, too.
kek, do people still believe this?

how much of that $80 billion ended up in your pocket, huh?

as for your own point, the sattelite has been observed by nasa and the iss live feed. What's LEO got to do with anything? I don't even know what that is, all i'm saying is that this sattelite flew, hovered up close, emitted a halo, while transforming its form similar to a hypercube in movement, and then flew straight up into space.

as for what is scientific well science can kiss my ass because science can't even prove it exists. Until science can prove that other consciousness exists then science is pretty much moot as a doctrine. However, anecdotal evidence should be considered scientific, as empirical evidence is that which pertains to the senses, anecdotes included.

Fag

funny thing how scientists demand objectivity yet can never deliver on the whole, proving objectivity exists kinda thing.

your visual experience, in reality, consists of a narrow cone of high fidelity vision (maybe 10-15 degrees) surrounded by 90+ degrees in any direction of nearly useless blur. the only reason you perceive uniformly clear vision is because your brain is filling in the gaps and making guesses about what's there based on your memory and assumptions about typical shapes of things. this happens every second of every day.

visual perception is terrifying and shit

You're right. Scientific standards is when an archaeologist takes bones found hundreds of yards apart to construct a skeleton, or takes a single tooth to infer the remainder of the skeleton.

Most of what we know about healthy brains we learn from damaged brains. It's when the system breaks down that you get the best insights into how it works when it's not broken. I know people tend to have that reaction to disease or trauma based evidence, but that's really the richest source of data we have on how our bodies operate.
>yeah because most of us don't become lucid once the dream becomes too surreal for logic >__>
Most of us don't. Lucid dreaming isn't very common at all, whereas illogical plots are standard for the dreams we have every single night. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but for most people it's an extremely rare occurrence (like once in a few years). It's not even uncommon for people to report never having a single lucid dream in their entire life, which is why experimental work had to be done just to prove that the phenomenon existed.

I mean fair enough, not all sciences are created equal and some fields have stupidly low standards. There is still a difference between weak as shit data and actual here-say and eye witness testimony.

Does anyone actually have any arguments against UFOs being ball lightning beyond "the witness was probably high"?

that is definitely science that nobody could ever see fault in, why anybody would doubt science, is unclear to me? /sarcasm (thanks buddy)

it is no surprise that you would then doubt the memory of others, i myself, find my memory to be highly accurate and detailed. There are certainly gaps, but my mind leaves them as literal gaps. There is always a degree of visualization towards my memories, too, it is like photographic memory, but the images are stored in the back of the mind and not in the peripheral vision, except perhaps when dreaming or even meditating, although meditation leads to random images for me.

i just assume everybody has quite a strong memory recollection. not expecting the details to be accurate all the time, but i am expecting people to be able to recall, particularly, interesting events.

especially in this day and age. The internet is practically a stimuli for memory of all sorts. what did george bush look like? (and the twin towers, for that matter..)

just need to google it and boom it's there. What does trump look like? i can see him below. Our memories are being triggered constantly.

i say memories are fallable when forgotten, yes, but when a person holds on to certain memories, i trust them to be a accurate to a certain degree. it is difficult to generalise and discuss broadly, it is mostly dependant on the situation

>Does anyone actually have any arguments against UFOs being ball lightning

Many UFOs do not fit even vaguely into and description of ball lightning. "Daylight disks" do not resemble ball lightning, for example.

UFOs do not appear to be one consistent phenomenon.

That said, reports of hovering glowing balls that drift around before suddenly vanishing, yeah those may well be ball lightning.

But even there, memories are recollections of what we thought we were perceiving, shaded and molded by later events (in your example, using the Internet to lookup what somebody looks like.)

All of that MAY have some resemblance to what actually went on, or may not.

If you've ever been on a jury, hearing a case with multiple witnesses, you will likely have gotten some sense of just how fallible memory is. Police and intelligence services can even use fallibility of memory as a rough-and-ready test of honesty -- two witnesses who recall an event in exactly the same way have likely been coached, and are likely lying.

UFOs will never be taken seriously.

Any video is automatically dismissed as a CGI fake nowadays.

Even if you saw a UFO land right in front of you, it could have easily been a hallucination.

If a large crowd of people saw a UFO land right in front of them, it would just be dismissed as a case of mass hallucination and/or mass hysteria.

>Why doesn't the scientific community take UFOs seriously?

They do but their answers aren't taken seriously by anyone who believes in aliens.

>i myself, find my memory to be highly accurate and detailed
Do you realize how retarded it is to self-assess your own aptitude for reliable memory? Of course you *believe* your memory is fine, so does most everyone else including alzheimer patients.

>i trust them to be a accurate to a certain degree
your statement doesn't fit the evidence we have, though

Ok, using your example, say a crime was commited and somebody was shot, the witnesses called that were at the scene are all likely to say that a shot was fired.

Less witnesses will be able to describe the time, the suspect, the colour of the car down in the street, the problem you are describing is not a problem with memory recollection, the problem is with perception, or rather, the focus of attention.

I don't need to show you a video to remind you of what happened 9/11. I am not going to expect you to recall the exact number of windows on the twin towers or even the colour of the alledged plane because that is not what we shift our focus towards.

Like those 'memory games' where you have to memorise a whole room of objects, it is a percentage of how fast you can store short term memory but also a large percent of where your attention is diverted towards, as you can only focus on one or two things at a time in general.

5% of our vision is sharp the rest is more or less out of focus so remembering details is not so much a memory issue as it is a perception one.

If we are talking about details that are engrained into our inner root, such as, say, our own name, or the shape and form of our flag *cough* mandela effect *cough*, then we are not talking about perception anymore but pure memory storage and recollection, perhaps processing too.

i mean with the mandela effect things in reality change like i'm from the UK and the UK flag has changed since 15 december 2016 to what it is now, from having st Patricks saltire being unaltered in the union jack, but hey, you'll get people like you saying how weak peoples memories are so yeah...

no arguing with that because who know maybe my memory'll be so weak that my real name ain't even what i think it is >__>

funny thing, the mandela effect has been known to change peoples names, too. That's not proof of parallel dimensions no that's just people forgetting how their names are spelled because memory.

i'm out

With such an attitude i should disregard your existence, as there is no means to prove it, right?

One cannot assess the existence of another consciousness, so i think you're the retard here.

it's called logical positivism or something like that. We assume it to be self evident, idiot.

'of course reality seems like it's real'
that's because it is real, moron.

by aptitude i am talking about being able to recollect a broad span of memories ranging from a very young age to adolescence. I cannot perceive others memories, so i can't really compare, but when i recall memories, i can visualize them in detail, you're saying you can't remember your mothers' face without instruments? if so, then i have pity for your poor memory :(

also, you should gtfo my friend. i don't like your attitude. You sound like a sorry fellow indeed. Why are you so angry?

so you have evidence against the accuracy of my own memories? So you would be able to confirm the colour of my teddy bear as a child, or the colour of my dead cats' eyes?

fuck you, cunt. go eat some shit i know you like that.

>there is no means to prove it
There's a difference between relying on your own feels vs. using findings that were cross-validated across multiple parties in controlled settings.
>you're saying you can't remember your mothers' face without instruments?
I'm saying being your own judge of how well you can remember things is like putting your hand on top of your head and saying "I'm this tall!" There is no good reason to place a lot of stock in how reliable you feel like your memories are because almost everyone feels like their memories are reliable. And almost every psychology experiment on this topic has come to the same basic conclusion that they aren't reliable at all. How would you like it if you were convicted of a crime you didn't commit because everyone trusted some idiot like yourself who is certain you killed a man because he knows for sure he has a great memory? This is why we don't self-assess shit like that.
>so you have evidence against the accuracy of my own memories?
We have evidence against the accuracy of human memory. Nobody needs to know about you personally, it's the nature of how these processes fundamentally work to be spotty and much more based in unconsciously formed stories of "how it must have been" than in accurate recall of the exact sensory stimuli as it happened.

what part of >to a certain degree
don't you understand? I merely stated that i trust my memories. You're the one making this way too hard on yourself.

as in, i know what i have been through in life, i know my past, but if you're the one willing to doubt that, then i'd like to see your evidence. You're basically implying that memories can never be trusted at all, because we cannot subjectively verify them, if we were to go by that logic, we'd all be solipsists by nature, the most retarded religion in the world.

>You're basically implying that memories can never be trusted at all
They shouldn't ever be "trusted." This is exactly why we have the scientific method instead of going off of personal anecdotes, and why we have a legal process that expects independently verifiable evidence instead of relying on just one person's claims.
>because we cannot subjectively verify them
You mean "objectively?" You can objectively verify claims. It's not a subjective opinion that the sum of the squared lengths of a right triangle's legs is equal to the squared length of its hypotenuse. That's a claim which has been checked by more than just one person's feelings, hence objectivity.
>if we were to go by that logic, we'd all be solipsists
No, you wouldn't be a solipsist. Being a solipsist is the ultimate form of overrating your own subjective reliability like you've been doing in this thread. You would do the opposite and look at cross-validated, non-anecdotal evidence.

>You mean "objectively?"
indeed i did, I was thinking ahead of my typing speed, i was thinking, as we experience everything subjectively.

If you're gonna go by objective verification then you can never prove anything other than solipsism, you can't even work yourself out of the problem of other minds, you see, even scientists need faith or trust or a belief in reality itself to even study it, they cannot prove (other) consciousness exists, but they must beleive it, because it is the truth, even though it cannot be proven.

It's called logical positivism and also extends in religion to pantheism. Things are what they are.

> Being a solipsist is the ultimate form of overrating your own subjective reliability like you've been doing in this thread.

what if I told you i score good on memory tests?
also, i think you're over exaggerating and taking what i said out of proportion. see >to a certain degree
collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/to-some-a-certain-degree-etc
>You would do the opposite and look at cross-validated, non-anecdotal evidence.

For a subjective memory one cannot obtain non anecdotal evidence neither is it required in the above example

>you can never prove anything other than solipsism
You can't prove solipsism.
>inb4 "I think therefore I am"

Hah, touche. Let's rephrase that, science cannot prove consciousness exists. Is I think therefore i am a valid rebuttal? (to this... >that

Aliens are just the latest version of the same old night terrors.

Look up willow-wisps and old timey accounts of people getting taken by the faries. Or waking up in the middle of the night paralyzed by some demon. Its all the same ingredients as modern alien abduction stories, we just blame them on something else now.

Human nature doesn't change, just the words we use to describe it.

>kek, do people still believe this?
This. If you believe in visual memory, go on to /ic/. If you're not consumed by the groupthink you'll realize that "visual memory" is is some kind of complex skill that involves sensual memory and muscle memory very quickly.

willow wisps are actually interesting af.
aliens aren't so terrible, if you compare them to humanity, they've done us little to no harm. we've been raping the planet and all other life (even our own) on it. If i were to die today, i would rather die in the knowledge that aliens took over the planet and cared for it than the state the planet is in now :/

also ufos are real

you don't dream? no? you never smoked dmt i'm willing to bet, either. For any computational process you need memory, even dreams. I would say that dream are certainly a visual aspect of memory. I've even had dreams of the future which have come true, like, to the last detail on a cracked phone. but that's something else entirely. We can visualize past events in our dreams, too, that certainly qualifies as visual memory. Also, meditation certainly triggers visualization with closed eyes, fyi. I am willing to bet one can train ones meditation to such a point where one can visualize his own memory, as that would also be an efficient way to store data and recall it more efficiently than through symbolic thought,

My memory is actually 50% visual i will tell you that now, ((approx.))

as long as area 51 stays a no go area I won't accept aliens.

You need to look up all the shit that happens with attempts at hypnotic regression for remembering buried childhood experiences. Just the act of trying to remember something can create a false memory so convincing you're absolutely sure it happened to you. Being personally sure an event happened to you is really not a guarantee that it really did.

Some UFOs like Earthquake lights are aliens.
Check this video.
twitter.com/plumasatomicas/status/906023803309875200
Whenever there is chaos, (((they))) jump on the opportunity to come and blend among us.

If you really believe that you know what your teddy bear looks like, try drawing him. Then dig him out of wherever he's hiding and draw him from life. It will become pretty apparent that your brain is just tricking you into thinking that you know what your bear looks like by replicating key details.

Because there's no reason for a civilization that's advanced enough to travel between stars quickly to visit us regularly. Maybe once every couple of thousand years to get a DNA sample. There's no other reason to fly around earth. UFOs are fun, but if an advanced alien race wanted to be undetected they probably would be.

Wow, that's apples and pears to say the least, your experiment is based on a false premise and set up to fail. One cannot draw as well as one can visualize, I myself, am terrible at drawing, let's rephrase your experiment for a second.

>If you really believe that you know what your teddy bear looks like,[taking a photograph of your teddy bear, and then] try drawing him. Then dig him out of wherever he's hiding and draw him from life. It will become pretty apparent that your brain is just tricking you into thinking that you know what your bear looks like by replicating key details.

We have now established that i cannot draw any realistic depiction of any real life object, because i am not an artist. You have set this up on the premise that one can draw equally as good as one can remember.

Also, please just stop arguing, i had said 'fairly accurate to a certain degree', the statement you are debating isn't a statement that you are even disagreeing to, as i had already implied that this degree of accuracy varies widely. The word 'fairly accurate' doesn't mean, always accurate >__>

I am not saying that memory fills in gaps on varying occassion, but a wise man knows that he doesn't know what he doesn't know, so in my memory gaps are usually literal gaps, visually speaking. I don't have the teddy bear anymore, but hey, i can't trust my memory to be fairly accurate so perhaps i do have the teddy bear still but my brain is filling in key details to trick me into thinking i remember having thrown it away (regrettably).

If memory was so faulty as you imply then we wouldn't even be able to hold proper conversation as abstract ideas would be foreign concepts to us or we would have great difficulty with abstract conversation. If i say the word ball, you're recalling a round object to fit the definition of a ball. Just because you think of a baseball instead of a basketball doesn't mean your memory is failing you, as it still fits the criteria of a ball.

not saying that memory doesn't *
or for that matter that (my) memory is infallible (which is implied by the statement 'to a certain degree'), you can watch a tv program, smoke a weed, and as the commercial hits you forget what you were watching. Those are low attention memories, a tv show is being watched passively. a teddy bear from a loved one is stored actively in the synapses. I believe we lose all memory upon death, and compare conscious memory to RAM. so your argument is really just one with yourself, your own degree of nitpicking.

In a fully deterministic universe, does it actually matter?

I'm sure aliens exist since there are billions of galaxies and billions of stars in those galaxies. Way to many odds for there not to be a planet with water or temps similiar to earth. I dont believe any are within reach though. The voyager mission (with the golden records) has now left our galaxy and with go 40,000 years before it gets near another body. Keep in mind in space terms 40,000 years is close by. So I see no way possible that even with other life existing that we can find it outside of our galaxy.