I would like to know what people think about flying saucers. Are they real? If so, who makes them?

If by "flying saucers" you mean Unidentified Flying Objects of Saucer-like Appearance, then until we identify them as "Flying Saucer Shaped Objects" I'm really not that concerned.

However, is it possible that beings from somewhere other than Earth have visited, and maybe are visiting, us?

Yep.

And they probably leave because they haven't found any intelligent life-forms here.

Not really sure the difference between flying saucers and "flying saucer shaped objects". For that matter I'm not sure the difference between either of those and "Unidentified Flying Objects of Saucer-like Appearance". It all sounds the same to me.

Ah, I understand your confusion with my cryptic words.

I should have kept it simple - if it is an "unidentified" anything, then by definition we really don't know what it is.

Once it is identified, and it is identified as "not from this world", then I'll be concerned.

I suppose the shape of the object is somewhat irrelevant other than being somewhat intriguing.


I do suspect that ETs may have visited us, however, as I said.

JohnWho - I strongly suspect we have been visited and the last Telemarketer I had to calm down was an end product of one such visit....


post edited to close BB Code tags by Iodine

Unidentified Flying Object: A bird you do not recognise? Flying Saucer: Something the wife might greet you with after a night with the boys.

Just how intelligent would our little green men be that take the trouble to travel a billion billion miles to get here and then hide? If they are not hiding, where are they? We have scientists listening 24/7 and we have been pumping out radiowaves at the speed of light for 100 years and more.

Taking the vast epochs of time into consideration and civilizations ability in destroying themselves swiftly, the chances of two civilisations appearing within reachable proximity of each other at the same time is so negligible as to be nigh on impossible. Undoubtedly civilizations have probably appeared and will appear again within the universe, however, the chances of a meeting of two will never occur.

Well, my opinion is that flying saucers are real, but I don't think they are extraterrestrial. I read a book that said they were designed by Nikola Tesla, but the US government didn't take him seriously. Then Werner Von Braun brought the design to the Nazis, who developed it. These were the "Foo Fighters" that WWII pilots reported. After WWII, the US got Nazi technology and scientists. So we have the Roswell incident occuring shortly after, in which the military pulls the ultimate in reverse psychology: they say its a UFO from space, then retract that statement shortly after. So of course people begin to believe it was from space, and that the government is covering it up.
Is this true? We can't know for sure with government secrecy the way it is, but it is certainly more plausible than "aliens", and so many people have sighted and photographed the same thing, I think that is probably very close to the truth.

My nephew and I saw a ufo the other night, it had a couple flashing lights and made no noise we could hear , my guess is it was something like a high flying LearJet or Gulfstream, but have no real way of knowing for sure , Seriously though, I find it fascinating that most photos look similar to what flies thru the air after someone yells Pull. The Air Force Black Projects section have been doing weird test since at least the 40's, I'm fairly sure the first set of Flying Wings caused some commotion to the average citizen , untill they became better known. Lots of links to Black Aircraft (it's not a ufo site) here (button on left mid-way says "Black Projects"). Now then , that being said, who knows ? I do find it implausible that "they" could travel astronomical (pun intended) distances and not be able to hover without looking like a child's top thats about to fall over. The History or Discovery Channel had a good program(me) on Alien Technology. I like what Stanton Friedman has to say about us trying to reverse engineer alien tech, as if you could take a nuclear submarine back to Columbus's day and give it to him and tell him you want him to make 3 more If they do exist (I'd need to see one first, MINUS the "anal probing" ) then they are well beyond anything we can do (obviously) and if they wanted to "smoke" us they would have done so by now.
I have always liked this poster...

[
[/quote]
I think the poster just about sums it up for most of us - there IS something exciting about the thought that a greater, benign, more intelligent, protective, kinder life form could be watching over us, just waiting for the right moment (??) to contact us and cure all our ills, ............. but I really think that the various U.F.O's of whatever shape, size or location are man-made, earth-sourced or natural in origin.

E.T. and that lovely feel-good sci-fi film where friendly "Caspar" type e.t. 's were hatching in huge eggs (can't recall the name) have given us warm, fuzzy feelings for the idea of lovable creatures from outer space joining with us. But we really must look at the facts unemotionally - IF such entities were "out there" and looking at us helpfully/citically/pityingly/hungrily whatever, I think that mankind has demonstrated enough stupidity world-wide for them to intervene long before now! Don't you??????

Yes, quite. It seems believers in aliens have borrowed a purely Star Trek paradigm: the prime directive. For the uninitiate, I will explain that term. In Star Trek, the highest law(Prime Directive) is to not interfere with "developing" cultures. It would seem that since we haven't produced a world government and a warp drive yet, the aliens can only watch us.

When I stop and think of the infinity of space I don't see how our little biology project could be the only one to evolve.

NoOne - Did you steal that from Mulder? I'm telling!

I really don't think there are aliens(from other planets) allthough I am a SciFi addict. But if there are - I want to meet them as long as they don't want to eat me, implant their young in me, or take over the world.

Second thought -- they may do a better job.

Yes agreed, but that does not mean any civilizations are likely to meet. As I have stated above/below, the immense scale of time, the self-destruction of civilization within very short periods of time and the infinity of space render the chances of such an encounter as extremely remote, to say the least.

Good luck with that, I've had this stupid X taped to my window for years and haven't heard from him yet ..

That would probably be true if hampered by "our" technology, while they may not break what we think are the rules of physics , I'm sure they would have found a way to bend the heck out of them

This a tiny bit extraneous but interesting nonetheless. I have put forth the notion that Nazis were the original developers of flying saucers. This is not the same thing but it is kind of similiar, and just mind blowing. Nazi AT-ATs!

I just looked at the AT-AT link.

Was it written on April 1st ?

Or are you being ironic First of Nov.?

Am I being gullible, not seeing the irony? Help!

Hey Colonel - take it easy on Apr 1 - My birthday, honestly. No laughing!

And to think you've only had twenty so far!

Hi colonel
If you scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the link ,it appears that it is some sort of dungeons and dragon's thing.

Yes, just done that. Thanks.

By the way, good luck against Marseilles, is it next week? Out of the big four, I (and probably most neutrals), root for Liverpool.

Your welcome.
Yes marseille next week in the champion's league then man ure in the premier league then chelski in the carling cup quarter's.
Pretty hectic schedule

Yes, the AT-AT was a joke - on me! A friend e-mailed me that together with a lot of real information. He told me a bunch of BS over the phone and I only lightly perused the page. Sorry

No prob Dude, I find it incredibly entertaining..!! I just got two of my buddies on it..!!

Hi,

I bet that your probably thinking that it will be at least 300 to a 1000 years before we begin to even understand what this UFO phenomena is all about, right?

Well, if not you I certainly thought that way until reading the October 1999 Popular Mechanics article "Taming Gravity".

Then guess what I found out?

What would you say to finding out that we, our world is currently about where - Galileo was with his message of whom is going around whom - with brake through science and technology that will very soon get us to Interplanetary and Interstellar travel stuff.

Not only that but once you read these articles you'll realize that if we are getting to this now in our world then most likely it's all ready out there and has been there for a long time.

You know, once you know how something works you end up saying "DAH"!

Dr. Ning Li wants to take advantage of what's called the "Bose-Einstein Condensate phenomena" which get this has been around sense the 1920's (that's like the LASER only with gravity from spinning atoms (read the article)). Her application of it is called AC/Gravity.

The accomplishment of her aspiration will be nothing less than making us a part of an Interplanetary - Interstellar Community.

Again, you'll say "DAH"! once you read the article!

The Popular Mechanics article is for sure a decisive description of the actual Bose-Einstein Condensate phenomena making the principle readily understandable.

But I want to include a re-post - copy of another article published in the Discover magazine on the same phenomena. This Discover article emphasizes some of the none conservative far out applications of this surprising phenomena that the more conservative Popular Mechanics magazine tends to leave out.

I find it kind of hard to miss the obvious "In my face" kind of straight forward surprisingly far out applications of this phenomena my self. To do so would be to have to call Einstein stupid, which everything so far indicates is not in our best interest to do.

Discover mentions that: "Li hopes to pave the way (to this "New Face" of technology) by designing an antigravity car--and thinks she can do it in a decade."

So, here is the Discover's article, I hope that you read it and please do post your comments:

Zero Gravity - antigravity devices

Discover, May, 1999 by Corey S. Powell

New schemes to float free aren't just science fiction

In her laboratory at the University of Alabama, Ning Li tinkers time and again with a device she believes will transform the world. Tanks of liquid nitrogen and a clumsy array of plumbing surround a chamber in which the temperature has been reduced to 390 degrees below zero. Inside, a disk of an exotic ceramic material that's about the size of a phonograph record spins rapidly. Levitated by powerful magnets, the disk floats in midair. The contraption may not look like much, but Li insists that the data she is gathering could rid mankind of the shackles that bind us to the planet. "It could change everything," she says. "Current industry will vanish from the face of the Earth!" A practical antigravity device could allow rockets without propellant or power plants that run without fuel. Li hopes to pave the way by designing an antigravity car--and thinks she can do it in a decade.

Ever since an apple conked Sir Isaac Newton on the head, sober thinkers have tended to sneer at anyone who proposed to defeat gravity. Li herself jokes, "I am not a normal scientist." Nor is she a crackpot. NASA funds some of her research on the gravity-altering properties of superconducting materials--a phenomenon first reported nearly a decade ago by a Finnish researcher--and three years ago the agency set up an antigravity program of its own at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Research on gravity modification (the preferred term in scientific circles) has been gaining credibility, and physicists now speak increasingly of how little we know about what gravity can and cannot do. "The number of anomalies is growing," says Michael Martin Nieto of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Japanese researchers were the first to claim some success--however slight--at breaking gravity's hold in the laboratory. A decade ago, Hideo Hayasaka and Sakae Takeuchi of Tohoku University noticed intriguing signs of lift off while studying the behavior of high-speed gyroscopes with metal flywheels spinning several thousand times per minute. When the gyros rotated clockwise, their weight seemed to drop by about one part in 100,000. Hayasaka and Takeuchi suspected an antigravity effect at work. Most of their peers soon chalked it up to experimental error, however.

Eugene Podkletnov, then a grad student at Tampere University in Finland, inadvertently became a poster child for the antigravity movement in the early 1990s while studying superconducting materials that lose all resistance to electricity when chilled with liquid nitrogen. Podkletnov was hoping to learn more about the behavior of these superconductors when he placed ceramic disks a few inches wide in a cold chamber, passed a magnetic field through them, and then spun them rapidly. What he observed completely took him aback. Objects placed above the disks seemed to lose as much as 2 percent of their weight.
Seeing a little antigravity is like being a little pregnant: either something is there or it isn't. If the effect is real, people could presumably figure out how to magnify it and exploit it. So tales of Podkletnov's discovery were soon circulating around the globe. But mainstream scientists remained skeptical. The laboratory conditions needed to create a spinning superconducting disk give rise to many misleading effects that could change the apparent weight of a test mass.

Nevertheless, Ning Li, who had published theoretical papers on antigravity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, promptly rose to the challenge. In collaboration with a NASA team, she constructed superconducting flywheels as much as a foot in diameter--a messy and technically demanding project--and tried to reproduce the results of Podkletnov's experiments.

Li and the NASA group have since undergone an amicable split. NASA is focusing on validating the basic experiments, while Li is concentrating more on applications. She has stopped publishing papers and no longer speaks of her techniques or experimental results, saying she fears any delays will give foreign researchers the lead.
NASA's separate and much more public Delta G Experiment (Delta G is a term used to indicate a change in the pull of gravity) is led by project scientist David Noever of the Marshall Space Flight Center. His goal is to eliminate every possible source of error and quantify the exact nature of the gravity modification phenomenon--if it exists. Podkletnov conferred with the NASA researchers last year to share his expertise. "We're convinced it's worth exploring," says Noever, who says Podkletnov turns out to be "a very genuine scientist." Rumors flashed across the Internet that NASA has already constructed a top-secret antigravity lab, but the truth turns out to be less spectacular. "We haven't reached the point where there's stuff floating around the room," says Noever with a laugh. "This is very much a work in progress."

Meanwhile, physicists are beginning to explore the chances that there may be more than one way to beat gravity. Nieto wonders whether antimatter, which has the opposite properties of ordinary matter, might not fall down when dropped. Anti-matter and matter destroy each other when they meet, so nobody would want to drive an antimatter car. Still, any sign of antigravity would have great theoretical interest. To investigate, Nieto is participating in a project called ATHENA. Sometime early in the next century, physicists will use two powerful particle accelerators to create antiprotons and antielectrons, trap them, and bring them together to form antihydrogen atoms. The researchers will then cool the atoms of antihydrogen and watch to see whether they plummet under the force of gravity.

If the answer isn't in the atoms, perhaps it lies in the depths of space. James Woodward of California State University at Fullerton has been studying the connection between gravity and inertia, the tendency of objects to resist changes in acceleration. (Imagine trying to push a car with the transmission in neutral. Although the car rolls freely, it takes a lot of effort to get it going.) According to Einstein, inertia is related to the gravitational field of the whole universe. Giving an object a sudden kick should cause minuscule, temporary fluctuations in its mass. Between his other studies, Woodward says, he "fiddles around" with twisting pendulums and electrical capacitors, searching for these momentary variations. He has found provocative indications that he can modify the mass of an object, although he is daunted by the many possible sources of error. "The likelihood for success is not large, but the practical payoffs are potentially staggering," he says. For instance, he thinks it should be possible to "steal" a little extra push from the distant parts of the universe, and do it repeatedly. This process might form the basis of a fantastic new kind of propulsion. NASA is listening here too. Two years ago the agency established a Breakthrough Propulsion program to investigate mass modification and other speculative schemes for space travel.

The best-documented antigravity effect comes not from laboratory experiments but from studies of exploding stars, or supernovas, in distant galaxies. Two teams of astronomers are studying the brilliant flashes of light from supernovas to see how quickly the cumulative pull of the matter in the universe is slowing the Big Bang. Early results have produced an unexpected result: rather than slowing down, the universe appears to be speeding up. Many scientists take this finding as evidence of a "cosmological constant," a latent energy hidden within the fabric of space that counteracts the tug of gravity. In their wilder speculations, scientists like Hal Puthoff of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas, speculate that the energy that gives rise to the cosmological constant is also responsible for the phenomenon of inertia, linking the universal antigravity back to potential gravity-fighting techniques here at home. Although the theory is only still only half-formed, "it's a very fruitful area of study," Noever says.

If the experiments hold up, explanations can come later. After all, Thomas Edison didn't need a quantum model of radiation to make a lightbulb.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Discover
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

Bibliography for "Zero Gravity - antigravity devices"
Corey S. Powell "Zero Gravity - antigravity devices". Discover. May 1999. FindArticles.com. 18 Nov. 2007. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m151..._54432952"


I guess that means that we'll now be able to take this conversation out of "Unexplained Phenonena" and put it into the physics, science and technology topics. Isn't that nice!

John

My Sources:
Popular Mechanics October 1999 Issue
Discover My 1999 Issue
Wikipedia.org
My Yahoo! 360* blog

Hi John - what fascinating stuff!!! My knowledge an understanding of physics and related field is not just miniscule, but a minus factor!

However, as a kid I was intrigued and somehow excited to see the top one of two bar magnets I had placed in a restraining box, one above the other with parallel poles, floating and resisting my attempts to push it down to the other one. In later years, being a great sci-fi fan, I pondered the thought that somewhere in this phenomenon lies the secret of anti gravity space flight - perhaps this is where we are heading.... Of course, not being gifted with understanding of these things I find it hard to extrapolate thoughts along these lines, so rely on the brilliance of others who do!I look forward to more info and posts about this subject, hopefully in very much layman's terms!! A belated welcome to thoughtvent!

Hi QuiteMike,

Here is a long over due response to your comment. I tried to paraphrase the articles. I hope that it makes sense to you.


Trying to understand how this "artificial" gravity is made should be as simple as understanding how LASER light is made the only difference is that instead of a LASER light beam you get a gravity directional "beam".

Here lets look at it. You know how LASER is made right?

With LASER individual "micro" - photons combine with each other coherently and synchronously to make a "Macro" wave function that we perceive as a LASER light beam, right.

Now with the "Bose-Einstein Condensate" we do the same thing only with "atoms" instead of "photons".

The difference is that with atoms you need to get them to spin coherently and synchronously very fast so that their individual gravities will combine coherently and synchronously so that we will make a resultant gravity directional - "Beam" that will be as strong as an entire planets gravity. Like LASER only with "atom's" gravity instead of individual photons.

Dr. Ning Li is presently doing this by trying to get embedded atoms in a graphite disk to spin very fast. In doing this the individual atoms gravities will significantly increase but of course this still is hardly enough of a gravity to affect planetary gravity like the earth's. To affect a planets gravity with this disk what needs to happen is that the individual atom's gravities need to combine coherently and synchronously like photons do to make LASER then the magnification will be significant enough to affect a planets gravity.

A 1" thick by 12" wide graphite disk with the atoms in it's lattice structure spinning their little hearts out coherently and synchronously could make a gravity (directional) field as strong as a planets like earths.

It's called "A/C Gravity" because the disk's gravity would be directed away from the disk on one side of the disk and drawn to the disk on the other side of the disk. And depending on where you point the disk you could either cancel the planet's gravity or increase it.

If you're following so far you are getting it.

In any case you'll need to get what I've just said to get the implications of such a device.

The obvious implications are craft that can cancel out the planet's gravity and even increase the Gravity of the disk to "Fall" off the planet that you're on.

Sounds like a UFO, no?

Anyhow, this is why I am saying that it seems like it may be if not very close to start taking this subject out of the twilight zone and start to put it into the mean stream of "Obvious" Science and Technology.

Don't you think?

John

PS Sorry for the duplication but I am still learning how to use this stuff.

I saw a documentary a couple of years ago about Us and Soviet attempts to make aircraft in the shape of saucers. They did actually get them to fly. I think people must have spotted them and thought they were aliens. The saucer shape, however, turned out to be too aerodynamically unsound.