Riddle me this. I watch a lot of the various UFO and unexplained Mystery shows and the thing that puzzles me the most is the repeated statements of people that see odd things flying in the sky and that it scares them and makes them afraid. ????? What is it that they are afraid of? Maybe if I saw something definitely now made in America land and some just butt ugly aliens came walking off I might be afraid of them…probably not. I have met some awfully ugly people before and most of them have been pretty nice folks. How though can you be scared to death of just a bright light high in the sky? There are a lot of lights in the night sky. If one moves, I assume that it is some sort of aircraft. Even when I thought that it was probably alien I don’t remember any fear. ????
Maybe the government is right. If people are afraid of just seeing a moving light in the sky, pandemonium might break out if it were revealed that we had visitors NOT from around here. Personally, I hope that we are not the highest lifeform there is. If so, I have to wonder if the universe might be better off without intelligent life. Sadly, at least when you are looking at our branch of intelligence, we mostly have used it to better perfect our ability to kill each other. Only a human will travel thousands of miles overseas and mountains to find and kill people that they don’t know and that have never done anything to them.
If an alien species can travel interstellar distances in a reasonable time it makes them so far ahead of us that you might as well say, “Resistance is futile!” We had better hope that they didn’t spend a lifetime getting here and plan to look us over and then go home. The kind of power and technology that they will have would make them like modern-day Marines landing in England in 2000BC.
Fortunately if all the UFOs that people spot are real the aliens are a lot more advanced and civilized than we re or will be for a LOOOONG time to come. I actually suspect that we just don’t have anything that they want or need and are just looking us over sort of like we do looking at monkeys in a zoo. Any massively advanced and ancient species has most likely abandoned living on planets. For one thing, they are dangerous and always killing people. The resources on a planet are hard to get to and the heavier more valuable ones are often so deep as to be mostly unreachable. Once we get off this ball and into space mining will be totally done in places like the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and the Kuiper belt between Neptune and Pluto.
This is one of the biggest conundrums of our race. We seek for life on other planets to answer the age-old question of are we alone in the universe? We find evidence that we may not be and then panic.
The 'flight or fight', as mentioned by Debi, is one of the strongest primaeval instincts that we have as part of our 'survivalist' skillsets. I believe, though, that this can only account for some people's behaviour; most of the 'panic' is produced through our fear of the unknown and taking in too much media! As an intelligent race, we are not very bright. If we come across something we cannot explain or comprehend, we panic and go off stomping the streets with 'End of the World' banners and placards in hand............
The media also feeds our frenzies. In my lifetime, the world has 'ended' on three occasions, the most prominent being the 'Year 2K Bug'. The media has a lot of influence on our perception by the stories they feed to us, and in 1999 this was so horrific in some reports of potential planes falling out of the sky at midnight, nuclear missiles being launched by automated systems, utilities shutting down and other events, that many people actually took their own lives. One of the most infamous events of the 20th Century that is a great example of this media-infused frenzy, was the 1938 CBS airing of 'War of the Worlds'. Many people fled to the hills to escape the 'alien onslaught', whilst others took a more horrific approach and ended their lives, although not to the extreme as, once again, the media made out the event to be in their 'Radio Broadcast Terrifies The US' headlines.
And, as if we did not learn something from that event, a Spanish version was produced in February 1949 for Radio Quito in Quito, Ecuador, which set off panic in the city. Police and fire services rushed out of town to engage the supposed alien invasion force. After it was revealed that the broadcast was just fiction, the panic transformed into a riot. Hundreds attacked Radio Quito and El Comercio, a local newspaper that had participated in the hoax by publishing false reports of unidentified objects in the skies above Ecuador in the days preceding the broadcast. The riot resulted in at least seven deaths.
And then there is Religion. For the majority, the belief systems that, in each of their own way tells of how the Universe, Earth and 'man' were created by a supreme being and, how he sent down his only son and allowed him to die to 'save' the people. Now, imagine what the discovery of an ancient alien society could
potentially do to religion and the simple truth of the matter is, this scares some people with deep religious beliefs.
In a way, I agree with any government covering up any knowledge of alien life and civilizations. As a race, we just can not handle this information at this time and in true human tradition, there potentially would be mass panic. It is just who we are and what we do. However, on the other hand, I am like many others who are curious if we are alone in this vast Universe. I wonder about the technology we could gain from a friendly encounter with another species. I also wonder what would happen under an alien encounter with an 'invasive' force intent on taking our planet for themselves. I have questions and I have fears.
Because I am human...........