The other side gives all the variables that add up to that number, including the average rate of star formation, the number of planets around those stars that have developed intelligent life and the ability to send radio signals.
Frank Drake speaks at a conference exploring the possibility of life on other planets at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on October 7, Astrophysicist Frank Drake, who formulated the equation way back in , said it's really a way of showing "all the things you needed to know to predict how hard it's going to be to detect extraterrestrial life.
Mack put it more directly: "The point of the equation is really to show how little we know. Read More. If it's hard for professional scientists to run the numbers, it's harder still for us mere-mortal Earthlings to do the work.
That's where the imagination comes in. So for generations we've been putting our creative minds to work in guessing if extraterrestrials exist, what they might look like and how we've going to greet them and they us, whether with a sign of peace or a ray gun. UFOs: Have we been visited? This image from video provided by the Department of Defense, labeled Gimbal, shows an unexplained object at the center. When zeppelins were invented, the aliens flew in dirigibles.
After World War II, they came in flying saucers, the latest and greatest technology we could imagine. The anthropomorphism — putting things that are not human in human form — is a constant. So, too, is the belief in alien life forms to begin with. Strong beliefs in alien visitations. According to a Chapman University study , There are understandable reasons for such beliefs, Impey noted. For decades, some people have been convinced that the US government has been harboring secrets about visitors from afar ever since , when they believe an alien spacecraft supposedly crashed near Roswell, New Mexico.
It's just that people connect the dots way too quickly. Both scientists and many civilians hold to the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. As a recent CNN story revealed , for years government and military officials alike ignored sightings of UFOs reported by both military and civilian pilots — just the sort of extraordinary evidence that might substantiate the reality of ETs.
The panel was headed by H. The Robertson Panel met for three days in and interviewed military officers and the head of Project Blue Book. They also reviewed films and photographs of UFOs. Their conclusions were that 1 90 percent of the sightings could be easily attributed to astronomical and meteorological phenomena e.
A second committee was set up in at the request of the Air Force to review the most interesting material gathered by Project Blue Book. Condon, the physicist who headed the investigation. A total of 37 scientists wrote chapters or parts of chapters for the report, which covered investigations of the 59 UFO sightings in detail.
Like the Robertson Panel, the committee concluded that there was no evidence of anything other than commonplace phenomena in the reports and that UFOs did not warrant further investigation. This, together with a decline in sighting activity, led to the dismantling of Project Blue Book in These mysterious planes helped fuel rumors that Area 51 was used to conduct experiments on extraterrestrial life and their spacecraft.
Despite the failure of the ETH to make headway with the expert committees, a few scientists and engineers, most notably J. The Canadian records comprised about sightings. UFO sightings in China have been similarly provoked by military activity that is unknown to the public. UFO reports have varied widely in reliability, as judged by the number of witnesses, whether the witnesses were independent of each other, the observing conditions e. Typically, witnesses who take the trouble to report a sighting consider the object to be of extraterrestrial origin or possibly a military craft but certainly under intelligent control.
This inference is usually based on what is perceived as formation flying by sets of objects, unnatural—often sudden—motions, the lack of sound, changes in brightness or color, and strange shapes. That the unaided eye plays tricks is well known. A bright light, such as the planet Venus, often appears to move. Visual impressions of distance and speed of UFOs are also highly unreliable because they are based on an assumed size and are often made against a blank sky with no background object clouds, mountains, etc.
Reflections from windows and eyeglasses produce superimposed views, and complex optical systems, such as camera lenses, can turn point sources of light into apparently saucer-shaped phenomena. Such optical illusions and the psychological desire to interpret images are known to account for many visual UFO reports, and at least some sightings are known to be hoaxes. Radar sightings, while in certain respects more reliable, fail to discriminate between artificial objects and meteor trails, ionized gas, rain, or thermal discontinuities in the atmosphere.
Within weeks the U. Air Force decided to look into the reports. It was a worldwide phenomenon within months. Two things happened in parallel: First were government-sponsored investigations in the U. Starting in the Air Force set in motion a number of different projects all basically interested in one question: Do UFOs represent a national security threat? On the other hand, from to you had a lot of the general public who were just utterly fascinated with the mystery of flying saucers.
What are they? Are they real? Most people — if they thought the sightings were real — believed they were either secret weapons of the U. So out of this fascination developed what you could call the equivalent of fan groups — flying saucer clubs.
Those became the seeds of growth in the s and s for UFO organizations first at the local, then the national and then the international level. A lot of what the Air Force did was behind closed doors and supposed to be clandestine. The government has released files over many years that show that a considerable number of UFO sightings were people seeing secret airplanes like the U2. But that strict control is one of the many things that fed conspiracy theories over the years.
But when the Cold War ended, interest fell off. From the late s into the early s media coverage was nominal. That all changed with the revelations about the secret UFO project in the Pentagon.
This spurred on a resurgence of interest in UFOs. The way the media were talking about UFOs had lot of the same elements from before: Are these things alien?
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