--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Rick Archer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > On Behalf Of TurquoiseB > Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 1:05 AM > To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com > Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: New Cropcircles > > > > That's always been my problem with the belief in > UFOs, period. Spaceships are just so *low-tech*, > man. Since it is (as reported by numerous seers > over the ages, at least) theoretically possible > to "see" anywhere in the universe instantaneously > with no nagging have-to-travel-1000-years-to-get- > there problems, *why bother to do it mechanically*? > It seems to me that any species limited to travel- > ing via low-tech spaceships couldn't possibly be > terribly evolved in the first place. > > Maybe that's why Maharishi dismissed them as "truck drivers of the > universe."
(I heard it as "vacuum cleaners of the universe.") Sometimes people forget that "UFO" stands for "Unidentified Flying Object," not "spaceship from a distant planet." So it isn't a question of "believing in UFOs," as if there were some question as to whether they really exist. The issue is what one believes they would be if they could be identified. And as with crop circles, anyone who has seriously looked into what we know and don't know about UFOs realizes that no explanation for what they are and how they got here fits what we know about them. Every explanation fits *some* pieces of evidence but not others. Most people don't want to investigate that far; it's too unsettling. Even some folks who go on about how strange and wonderful the universe is and who mock people who like to have all the answers may find it too uncomfortable to look at the phenomena closely enough to see how strange they really are. Even some folks who claim they get off on the mystery of How Things Work may look just far enough to enable them to come up with reasons to comfortably dismiss the phenomena as a function of overactive imagination or of "self-importance." > These crop circles are the things that we'd see kids > doodling in their notebooks in class instead of pay- > ing attention to the teachers. > > Pretty talented kids: > http://images.google.com/images? hl=en&q=crop+circles&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2 But Barry's right, basically. The thing is, that's part of what is so unsettling, because it makes no sense. It's a lot more comfortable to assume it's talented human hoaxers making the circles and decline to expose oneself to the evidence that they can't all be explained that way--or any other way, for that matter. The UFOs and crop circles that can't be explained away are, to paraphrase Haldane, not just queerer than we suppose, they're queerer than we *can* suppose.
