Starman said:
No offence intended and I would ad that the use of profanity is beneath you.
True enough. Perhaps it was the late hour and the second snifter of brandy. My years in the military gave me some bad habits. That phrase probably seemed more offensive than it really was intended.
Starman said:
I thought we covered this before, A UFO is a Un-identified Flying Object. My remark had nothing to do with implying that UFO's are ETI, ETL or ETV's or the origin's of reported UFO's.
Sure it did. That's the problem with the UFO community. They like to talk about UFOlogy, ufologists, the "UFO Enigma," and the "UFO phenomenon." When the average person hears "UFO," the connection to ET is immediate. To demonstrate, why would someone need to "believe" in a mundane phenomenon. It would be akin to saying that people believe in unidentified insects and those that aren't are "mental midgets." Of course there are insects that cannot be identified. We see them flying and hear them in the brush. We wash their exploded remains from windshields, but often we cannot identify them. We just know they are insects.
With UFO's, we know that things fly and physical manifestations of weather are airborne. But as soon as the general public cannot identify a bird as a bird, a plane as a plane, or a cloud as a cloud, it gets classed as a "UFO." It then becomes
elevated from the mundane to the extraordinary. But the fact remains that the only thing extraordinary about it is that the observer has no experience with this particular object or phenomenon in this specific perspective. Perhaps the cloud is small and high and the ice crystals inside reflect for a moment giving a metalic quality for the observer to interpret.
No further explanation need apply. The object is now a "UFO." And popular culture associates UFO to aliens. Show me one website that proposes to "investigate UFOs" that doesn't discuss aliens.
Starman said:
As for ETI, ETL and ETV's that is a whole different story.
Not hardly. Its the same story. It is always
implied by the fundamentalist ufoist that UFO means alien spacecraft.
Starman said:
I would have to say SkinWalker you may be UFOfobic and this might account for the anger in your response.
My anger was the implication that those that don't believe in UFOs (meaning that those who don't believe UFOs are anything but ordinary phenomena that have ordinary explanations that the observer is too ignorant to discern or arrive at) are mental midgets.
I don't believe UFOs are extraordinary phenomena. Indeed, I think that the hyperbole that surrounds them is part of the dumbing down of American society. So if you are suggesting that I'm afraid that the pseudoscientific nature of ufoology is contributing to the decline in scientific thinking among contemporary students in school, then you're right. If, however, you are suggesting that I have a
pathological fear, akin to that of agliophobia, agoraphobia, melissophobia, or coimetrophobia (fears of pain, crowds, bees, or cemetaries, respectively), then you are mistaken. If that were the case, would I not be constantly looking out of windows, inclined to avoid being out of buildings or vehicles, particularly at night, or cring each time an airplane passed?
But what I do "cring" at, is the constant flip-flop that fundamentalist ufoists present when discussing ufos. They have no problem discussing crashed disks, alien contacts, the probabilities of extraterrestrial intelligence, the signs of past alien contacts in ancient texts and art (all the while refusing to educate themselves on the original cultural contexts), or alien abductions. But they rise to the occasion to exploit the "true" meaning of UFO in the literal sense as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
Lets call a spade a spade, shall we.
For the purposes of discussion in the sciforums
Pseudoscience sub-forum, and unless specified differently from the outset, the term UFO refers to craft operated by extraterrestrial intelligence. That has always been the case in this forum.
UFO defined by WordNet 2.0:
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn?stage=1&word=ufo
The
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989): UFO - An unidentified flying object; a ‘flying saucer’.