[Skybird]

Science is not omnipotent. In it'S claim to be able to explain and to deal with all and everything, it tends to see earth as the centre of the universe, and all cosmos can only be constructed in a way so that human mind can master it. - We are still as egocentirc as we were during the medieval, we just hide it in a most subtle self-betraying.
But the opposite position to this critcism is attractive, but nevertheless a trap, too: while I dislike the self-understanding of science as to be fit with all tools to explain all and everything, which I severly doubt, some people now go and tell us that ignoring science and fall for the most phantastic follies is a virtue, and that it is true if only you would believe in it.

Skybird'S most-hated poster ever: Fox Mulder's office, a flying saucer and above that the headline: "I WANT TO BELIEVE" Aaaargh!

What I like in science - as i understand it - is set at it's base. In it's best understanding it is a very sceptical mindset. It is, in my understanding, so sceptiacl, that it even is sceptical about itself, it's means and tools and potentials. Science, as I understand it, rules nothing out from the beginning, it is open for all perspectives, whicht hen get examined in a systematical manner, by use of reason of logic (at least often).

but today science is a busi9ness, and an opportunity for careers. To be succesfuly, you need to adopt to the paradims of your time, you need to make compromises. creativity suffers from that, and honesty. With the ongoing selling of scientific institutes all over the world to the econom,ical big players, knowledge and insights is loosijng in value, the demand is shifting to science' responsebility of delivering the tools that the industry is in need for to be successful in it's fields of profits. Science is more and more suffering from opportunistic tunnelview.

On the other side of the masses of people being interested in UFOs and the like, are the bekievers. These people DO WANT to believe, soemtimes as a religion in itself, sometimes in service of their orthodox religion. The symptoms this audience is producing often are rediculous.

The way we talk aboutUFOS already may be hindering our understanding of it. Most people think they are classical, mechanical means of spoaceships, that fly from A to B and land on poor mother Earth to haunt the natives. then science comes and say that it cannot travel at such speeds from A to B, so it is impossible that someone else maybe can, and so UFOs cannot exist. Or other ways of argueing like this.

I personally believe that a phenomenon that a wide public names as "UFOs" or "Aliens" does exist, however, I do not think thewre is a flying saucer under every cup of coffee. I doubt most sigthings, and I do not follow most theories. I observe the talking, or btter: the babbling both camps are producing in their heated debate about pro and contra the existence of foreign intelligence. A foreign intelligence not beeing so kind to stay where it is until mankind reaches out and discovers it to man's conditions, no, we are talking about an intelligence that is able to shake our imagined feeling of being safe from being discovered on our little earth by being so rude to come to us and contact earth to it's own conditions, instead of ours. A scandal, isn't it! How could "they"?

Well, do they? I am not interested in those 98 % of sightings that are explained by weather and air traffic ophenomenons. I am talking about those less than 2% of sightings from professional personnel that was able to rule out disfunctioning technical equipment, that made precise descriptions of a flight behavior that impossibly can be done by man-made aircraft, and that also could not be explained by atmospherical phenomenons, or testflights of new, secret airplanes, wetaher ballons or such. Some of the attempts in the past decades to shake the UFO hypothesis had been so idiotic claims and stupid arguments, that one even could feel offended by how stupid they thought all people of the public audience must be.

Do I believe in UFOS, grey little men and adbuctions? Neither yes, nor no. I keep my mind open, but have stopped to actively being busy with this. I know that there are interesting links between abduction exprriences, and old mythology, and near death experiences (the latter has been a special interest of mine as a psychologist). I know that there is a small handful of books of scietifically skilled researchers that cannot be wiped off the table so easily. They came to some research results and conclusions that may not reach as far as the UFO believers would want them to go, but they are able to defend their conclusions by clear logical argument, and sometimes evidence. Nevertheless, the UFO-sceptics and governments are officially thinking they are already going to far. Usucally, neither believers nor sceptics like these persons, and they often are isolated by both.

I said I beloieve the pohenomenon exists, and there is a hard core in it, that has nothing to do with natural sciences, technics, and military stuff. I never believed in the thewory of aliens flying from Sirius to Earth to save us, to conquer us, or to study us (not to mention to eat our babies or rape our women). I think that the usualy clear separation between the field of the material world and the psychological world maybe needs to be perceived as being transcended here. I could imagine that what we recognize as being aliens and strange,m maybe is part of ourselve, our world, our life, our mind - who knows. I even think our own mind could be causing these vistiors from outer space, not as a hallucination, but a material reality that could transition between both level of existence as it like, for whatever the reason may be. I think that we need to re-discopver a btter knowledge and understanding of old mytholgies from various tribes and people here. What I believe very strongly is that if there are visitors, they must not necessarily come from very far away, nor from our level of existence, or dimension - understanding dimension as only one of a many different reflections of one and the same cósmos, that appears to be a very different thing with every reflection, nevertheless always is one and the same.

To end with Fox Mulder again: maybe it is not like that "the truth is out there", somewhere, but inside of us. Maybe the outer space and the inner space have more in common than our materialistic perception allows us to see. And maybe the humand person, it'S life and existence, it'S mind and the answer to the question why it is there, is so much more than both sceptical scientists and euphoric believers even could imagine.


It's not only that our vision is not deep enough. Maybe it also is not wide enough.

Visitors from far away worlds? Hardly. Manifestations of intelligence that our scientific or believing mind cannot perceive as such? Possibly. The need to better understand our own mind, and another level of existence concluded by that? Definetly.

"The truth, as always, will be far stranger". (Arthur C. Clarke ["2001"] )