I once had a conversation with someone who claimed to have seen the proverbial little green men. They allegedly came from Mars. He was determined to return the visit, and intended to build his own space ship to do so. When asked how he would make it, he said he would use wood. When I pointed out that it would burn up, he replied that he would cover it in cooking foil. And he was in earnest. Draw your own conclusions on that one.
That's sad. More humorous is this from a British Government briefing to the House of Lords:
"Let me assure this House that Her Majesty's government has never been approached by people from outer space"
But on a more serious note -
There's an interesting forum thread elsewhere in which TheFallibleFiend includes this question:
"Do we have to see something to accept it with reasonable certainty as a fact - at least tentatively?"
The consensus so far is that in general we find ourselves tentatively accepting most trivial information as fact, although we all know of instances in which the answer is 'yes'. The case of UFOs is not in that 'general' category, and neither is it firmly in the 'yes' category. It raises the point that identifying what we see is not always straightforward (as any lawyer would agree). UFOs are often thought to be alien spacecraft, but an individual's assessment of the probabilities is largely dependent upon their level of knowledge in related fields. It's not surprising, then, to read comments such as this:
"I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the result of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence rather than the unknown rational efforts of extraterrestrial intelligence." - Dr. Richard Feynman.
