What are the arguments against the ETH?

[Anonymous]

"I'm not "inventing new traits" at all. Isn't this what rationalisation is about? Using the known and the familiar to offer a potential explaination for the unknown and the unfamiliar?"

To me, you appear to be inventing a shapechanging ability in the aliens, along with an ability (and desire) to anticipate and respond to human expectations.

I wouldn't say I was "inventing", I'm extending what we,
as humans, do; traits we are already familiar with and recognise. As for shape shifting, I've never proposed anything quite that literal. "Shape-shifting" aliens is hardly a new idea anyway, the Vallee-flavoured weltschau is rife with it.

Also, as far as response to human expectations, again, I'm not inventing this either, merely working within the existing frameworks of others: MIBs etc.

Also, apologies, I didn't see your post on the first page so I'll pick it up here.

Point taken, but the different aliens don't vary by just skin tone, and they claim to have come from all over the place...and the grays are supposed to have been around for thousands of years.

Yes, it's possible that aliens follow national boundaries so you get different types on North and South America, it's possible that they all happened to evolve to be capable of dealing with our gravity, temperature and atmosphere, it's possible that they all speak the various languages of Earth where they happen to be, and it's possible that the huge surge gray sightings in places where they were popularised by the media...and it's equally possible that alien sightings are just a trick played by the flying pink elephants.

I was just making the point about how even humans from the same planet differ and would likely to come in waves. Secondly, if grays (or any aliens for that matter) have been around for thousands of years then it's quite possible that considering most of the world has been, until recently, very sparsely populated, they could have come and gone very easily without being noticed.

 

[Anonymous]

Y'all are talking past each other.

Evidence is the eyewitness accounts and physical remains. These can be interpreted with a number of logical possibilities.

Anti-ETH people regard it as important that there is no evidence giving more weight to the ETH hypothesis than to any other, and that the ETH has to get pretty complicated in order to cover that evidence. They are concerned with not theorizing too far ahead of the data, picking the most parsimonious and testable (scientific) theory, and provisionally believing that.

Pro-ETH people are having fun figuring out ways in which the ETH can cover the evidence, and correctly reason that the most testable theory is not necessarily the one that will be proved right in the long run. They prefer an interesting theory to a scientific one. (Personally I find the ETH as normally presented, dull - but that's personal preference, not science.)

Nobody can prove anything at this point.

I wouldn't say we're all talking past each other! In fact I think your last point, "Nobody can prove anything at this point", echoes my post on the first page of this thread:

I think a scientific equivalent of agnosticism makes more sense.

 

[PeniG]

Agnosticism always makes the most sense; but most people dislike using it.

The point is that people who want to work things out scientifically and people who want to play with logical possibilities aren't talking toward the same goal or standing on the same ground; yet each is trying to get the other to concede or recognize some point which, while essential to one side, is irrelevant to the other.

Just like the conflict among creationism, natural selection, and Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, in fact.

 

[dreeness]

The universe is big, maybe even infinite, nobody knows. There might be aliens in it somewhere, possibly.

http://www.ufoskeptic.org/contact.html

 

[barfing_pumpkin]

Ok, try telling an ETH'er that most/all UFOs are actually the result of various divine/demonic incursions. Lights in the sky, for example, are angels - greys and reptoids are demons etc. Said ETH'er would probably guffaw indulgently, and patronisingly inform you that such things are so very unlikely, dear boy.

Yet, in raw scientific terms, there is just as much/little evidence for 'alien' UFOs as there is for theologocial ones.

It's all down to personal preference - a matter of faith, really.

For the record, I don't subscribe to either of these theories.

 

[Graylien]

But surely flesh-and-blood aliens are theoretically possible (scientifically speaking) in a way that angels aren't? After all, we're certain that life exists - we're surrounded by it. So there's always the possibility that it exists elsewhere. But we aren't certain that angels exist. All we know is that people have visionary experiences which they interpret as having been caused by angels (just as other people have visionary experiences which they interpret as having been caused by aliens).

We don't have to radically alter our scientific view of the universe to accept the possibility of extraterrestrials. We do have to radically alter our scientific worldview to accomodate angels or ultraterrestrials.

The ETH is a perfectly rational and plausable theory. But it has to be stretched to breaking point to explain the wild diversity and high-strangeness of the UFO/alien phenomenon, and there is absolutely no physical evidence to support it.

 

[Timble2]

Actually fairies would be a better alternative than angels, there's lots of parallels between the UFO phenomenon and fairy-lore, abductions and lost-time events, for example, and traditional fairies are living, solid beings not generally invisible and intangible entities like angels.

They seem to inhabit a universe slightly tangential to our own, and interdimensional travel is no more or less improbable than FTL travel: it's just a matter of knowing how to do it.

As the item in FT a month or so ago in Iceland showed there's still plenty of people who claim to actually have encountered and interacted with them.

BTW: I don't think believe that the aliens are fairies or vice-versa, though I supect they're different cultural interpretations of the same phenomenon.

 

[Anonymous]

BTW: I don't think believe that the aliens are fairies or vice-versa, though I supect they're different cultural interpretations of the same phenomenon.

I'm open-minded enough to subscribe to the fairies and aliens being a related inter-dimensional phenomenon: the Oz-factor etc., etc.. In fact, it's my personal UFO preference and it doesn't necessarily rule out the need for nuts and bolts craft either.

However, maybe it's as much a projection on their part rather as an interpretation on our part.

 

[wembley8]

" Secondly, if grays (or any aliens for that matter) have been around for thousands of years then it's quite possible that considering most of the world has been, until recently, very sparsely populated, they could have come and gone very easily without being noticed."

But why do they seem to predominate quite so much now? The problem is that whichever version you pick you have to dump 90%+ of reports.

The social theory of aliens (ie as a cultural phenomenon) would predict that sightings follow the culture, and that portraying a particular type of alien would make them more likely to be seen in that particular way. The ETH theory struggles with this, and has to come up with new features - variable appearance, a fitting-in with human expectation. Angels or fairies have this sort of plasticity built and work better as a theory.

I suppose that's the basic problem with the ETH theory: it simply has nothing going for it. But people like it anyway, which is why it persists, in the same way as the pleisiosaur (sp) theory of Loch Ness was so appealing.

 

[AMPHIARAUS]

Perhaps extraterrestrial life does exist in fermi / drake numbers, but instead of travelling they use some form of communication more akin to telepathy at huge distances to communicate.
To get over the huge cultural and language problems perhaps they use images and concepts latent in our memories. Hence when they try to show us they are 'alien' they pick what the individual thinks of as alien - which in recent years would be most likely a grey. The medical procedures are them letting us know we are being interrogated and the hybrid children are an attempt to convey a melding of ideas and concepts. The aliens could explore the galaxy from their armchairs that way.

Its no worse an explanation than many others and covers the both the sincerity of abductees and the lack of physical evidence.

 

[rynner2]

To get over the huge cultural and language problems perhaps they use images and concepts latent in our memories. Hence when they try to show us they are 'alien' they pick what the individual thinks of as alien - which in recent years would be most likely a grey. The medical procedures are them letting us know we are being interrogated and the hybrid children are an attempt to convey a melding of ideas and concepts. The aliens could explore the galaxy from their armchairs that way.

I like that!

(I'd use it for my next sig, except it is a bit large!)

In fact, it chimes perfectly with a philosophy I'm slowly developing as I get older, which is that...

Everything is true, in the right context.

(I haven't developed the language yet to fully explain it, perhaps because it is somewhat beyond mere words.)

 

[Anonymous]

Perhaps extraterrestrial life does exist in fermi / drake numbers, but instead of travelling they use some form of communication more akin to telepathy at huge distances to communicate.
To get over the huge cultural and language problems perhaps they use images and concepts latent in our memories. Hence when they try to show us they are 'alien' they pick what the individual thinks of as alien - which in recent years would be most likely a grey. The medical procedures are them letting us know we are being interrogated and the hybrid children are an attempt to convey a melding of ideas and concepts. The aliens could explore the galaxy from their armchairs that way.

Its no worse an explanation than many others and covers the both the sincerity of abductees and the lack of physical evidence.

This ties in with what I said above:

However, maybe it's as much a projection on their part rather as an interpretation on our part.

 

[kevinjwoods]

Wow I fully expected to be told to stop trolling as ETH cannot be true but am gratified to find that it is still a remote possibility and have some thoughts of my own.
THe prepondernce of Grays is almost certainly due to cultural factors like more believable in this form than Nordics, and the fact that there were some grays seen before they became popular shows that they were part of the phenomenon early, also it should be noticed that the Nordic alien was commonly seen when this type was popularised.
Is thereany evidence that video cameras are being affected by the same thing that causes cars to stop working, or perhaps there is the simple fact that most people don't have such things with them all the time, and aliens would go out of their way to avoid being seen on such things.
Another fact is that many of the "Airship" sightings often quoted as being evidence of the changing technology was simply lights in the sky and noises at night which was interpreted as being an Airship because airships were being seen at the time.

 

[Graylien]

Another fact is that many of the "Airship" sightings often quoted as being evidence of the changing technology was simply lights in the sky and noises at night which was interpreted as being an Airship because airships were being seen at the time.

Quite true, but the same might be said of many reports of flying saucers or of black triangles. There are actually a handful of reports from people who saw the phantom airships at close hand - eithier flying low or on the ground. But even those reports are inconsistent with each other, and at this late date it is virtually impossible to sift the hoaxes from the genuine sightings.

Although there are a few cases of circular objects/lightforms in the sky prior to 1947, people really only started seeing flying saucers after Kenneth Arnold's infamous close encounter, which was widely reported at the time. Unfortunately, Arnold didn't actually see a flying saucer. He actually reported seeing a rather complicated looking boomerang-shaped craft. He simply remarked that it moved with a bobbing motion "as if you had skipped a saucer across water". Somewhere along the line, a journalist got hold of the wrong end of the stick and coined the phrase "flying saucer" (which then had a brief struggle for supremacy with the term "flying disc"), and suddenly everyone was seeing saucers and discs at the drop of a hat. Even Kenneth Arnold's own book - published in the early 1950s - featured a picture of a flotilla of giant flying saucers on the cover hovering menacingly over his tiny plane, rather than portraying the incident as he actually described it.

A proper sociological study of the evolution of saucer beliefs from, say, 1947 to 1953 (when George Adamski published his first book) is long overdue.

 

[Twin_Star]

Although there are a few cases of circular objects/lightforms in the sky prior to 1947, people really only started seeing flying saucers after Kenneth Arnold's infamous close encounter...

Historical Evidence of UFOs
Ancient UFO reports
Don't make the mistake of thinking that the UFO phenomenon began with Kenneth Arnold in 1947, or with the "foo fighters" of World War II, or even with the airship sightings of 1897. Unidentified flying objects have been with us much longer than that, they just weren't called UFOs.

Many possible sightings are recorded in the Bible and other ancient writings, and during the Middle Ages, many strange things seen in the skies were recorded:

776 AD - As the Saxons were laying seige to Charlemagne's castle at Sigiburg, flying shields appeared and rained down fire on the attacking army
840 AD - Agobard, Archbishop of Lyon's, France, mentioned that the people believed in a place in the sky called "Magonia", and that people traveled through the skies in cloud ships. He wrote that he prevented a crowd from stoning to death three men and a women who supposedly came from one of these ships.
1034 AD - a book called "Liber Chronicarum" from 1493 records that in 1034 a spherical object with fire shooting from both ends was seen over Europe.
1200 AD - William of Newburgh wrote of a slivery, disc-shaped object that appeared near an abbey in England.
1290 AD - The monks at Byland Abbey in Yorkshire, England saw a similar disk.
1461 AD - An object like an iron rod with fire shooting from it was seen over Arras, France.

These are just a few examples. There are many more of these sightings listed in "Passport to Magonia" by Jacques Vallee and "The Greatest Deception" by Patrick Cooke. Remember, during ancient times and the Middle Ages, most people were illiterate, so the recorded sightings may be only a miniscule part of the actual number of sightings.

Strange objects in the sky have also been a recurring theme in medieval art. What were the artists who put these objects in their paintings trying to depict? Are they religious images or something else?

What were flying "shields?" What were these objects that people were seeing in the skies during a time when there were no aircraft in the sky, and certainly no weather balloons?? Comets had been seen before and were known as such. Meteorites would hardly be described as these objects are described.

Taken from here

I know it's hardly the most scientific of websites, maybe even one step from Rense, but it does suggest that aerial phenomena, whether mis-identification of natural occurences or something else, has been going on for centuries, if not millenia. It certainly makes me think, anyway...

 

[Anonymous]

" Secondly, if grays (or any aliens for that matter) have been around for thousands of years then it's quite possible that considering most of the world has been, until recently, very sparsely populated, they could have come and gone very easily without being noticed."

But why do they seem to predominate quite so much now? The problem is that whichever version you pick you have to dump 90%+ of reports.

The social theory of aliens (ie as a cultural phenomenon) would predict that sightings follow the culture, and that portraying a particular type of alien would make them more likely to be seen in that particular way. The ETH theory struggles with this, and has to come up with new features - variable appearance, a fitting-in with human expectation. Angels or fairies have this sort of plasticity built and work better as a theory.

I suppose that's the basic problem with the ETH theory: it simply has nothing going for it. But people like it anyway, which is why it persists, in the same way as the pleisiosaur (sp) theory of Loch Ness was so appealing.

Sorry for the tardy reply, it was hard spot your own reply as you didn't use the quote function.

Why grays now? I mentioned earlier in the thread that we went to the moon in a 'wave'. First tentative loops around the moon, then a flurry of landings, then we buggered off. Who's to say that it isn't the same for alien races too? A little bit of fly-by followed by a few years of landings and noseying around then a drop off in activity?

 

[Anonymous]

Remember, during ancient times and the Middle Ages, most people were illiterate, so the recorded sightings may be only a miniscule part of the actual number of sightings.

I wonder how many sightings would have gone unrecorded for fear of investigation by the Church?

 

[rynner2]

More possible old UFO sightings:

http://www.ufoartwork.com/

 

[Anonymous]

More possible old UFO sightings:

http://www.ufoartwork.com/

Nice link - some intriguing stuff there. On page 13 of the B.C. Ufo artwork, there's some great images of Iraqi statuettes of Reptilians. Which is made weirder by the fact I was pondering on starting a thread enquiring about middle-Eastern fortean phenomena.

 

[Timble2]

....1200 AD - William of Newburgh wrote of a slivery, disc-shaped object that appeared near an abbey in England.
1290 AD - The monks at Byland Abbey in Yorkshire, England saw a similar disk. ....

IIRC one of these, was a deliberate hoax, it got wide currency because a lot of people who write UFO books take their stories from other UFO books without checking the sources.

I've started working through William of Newburgh, even if the UFO stuff isn't there (it's a long document) there's still some weird stuff in there;

....a little before the solemnities of the Lord's Ascension, as the king drew near, and urged on the work (for he came frequently to point out and hurry its completion, and took great pleasure in beholding its advancement), suddenly a shower of rain mixed with blood fell, to the astonishment of all the bystanders who were present with the king, as they observed drops of real blood upon their garments, and feared that so unusual an occurrence might portend evil....

Still no silvery disk, but there's this which could be an attempt at describing something indescribable to the people of the time

Of a certain prodigy which at that time was seen in the air

Nor ought I to pass over in silence a most amazing and fearful prodigy, which about this time was seen in England by many, who to this day are witnesses of it to those who did not see it. There is upon the public road which goes to London a town, by no means insignificant, called Dunstaple. There, as certain persons happened to be looking up at the sky in the afternoon, they saw in the clear atmosphere the form of the banner of the Lord, conspicuous by its milky whiteness, and joined to it the figure of a man crucified, such as is painted in the church in remembrance of the passion of the Lord, and for the devotion of the faithful. As they stood thus in astonishment, gazing with their eyes fixed on this marvelous object, many persons going on the public road wondered at their amazement, with faces upturned to the sky, and also looked up and began to be equally astonished when they saw the novelty of this appearance. When this fearful sight had thus been visible for some time, and the countenances and minds of those who were curiously watching it were kept in suspense, the form of the cross was seen to recede from the person who seemed affixed to it, so that an intermediate space of air could be observed between them; and soon afterwards this marvelous vision disappeared; but the effect remained, after the cause of this prodigy was removed....

Book One Chapter 27 is the story of the Green Children, Chapter 28 has frogs and dogs in rocks, later on there's the living dead and demons. Still not found that UFO.

 

[Graylien]

I believe we're doing past generations a disservice by attempting to shoehorn their visionary experiences into the ETH. If William of Newburgh says that people saw the figure of Jesus in the sky, then (assuming for a moment that it's not just a piece of Medieval Christian propaganda) I'm willing to accept that that's what they actually saw - not that they really saw an alien spaceship but were too ignorant to describe it accurately. People may not have known what aircraft looked like, but they were familiar enough with ships and carriages and chariots; any one of which could have been used as an analogy to describe a structured craft.

 

[Jerry_B]

IIRC one of these, was a deliberate hoax, it got wide currency because a lot of people who write UFO books take their stories from other UFO books without checking the sources.

Ditto for the tale about Magonia - oft-repeated tales within UFO literature just make such tales taller, not more convincing (in the case of Magonia, it has more to do with Fench folklore and weatherlore anything UFO-related). Often as not, such stories are retellings of retellings, sometimes as the result of poor or non-existent research. It would be unwise to consider apparent reports of UFOs from history as any sort of raw data. Even drawings that apear to depict such should also not be considered as depicting anything in a real sense. Such images were more often used for illustrative purposes rather than descriptive ones.

The same sort of mistaken inference is often repeated with the 'Devil mowing a crop circle' pamphlet illustration, whereby artistic license has been taken as proof of crop circles - whereas the text of the pamphlet makes no mention of any circles at all.

http://www.forteantimes.com/gallery/mowingdevil.shtml

 

[barfing_pumpkin]

We don't have to radically alter our scientific view of the universe to accept the possibility of extraterrestrials.

Perhaps not. But we would have to radically alter our scientific view of the universe if said extraterrestrials had actually found a way to cross such vast distances of space in a relatively short amount of time.

There might be plenty of anecdotal evidence for the ETH, but as for physical evidence, there is none. Exactly the same applies when you swap 'the ETH' for 'angelic visitations'.

 

[Anonymous]

I believe we're doing past generations a disservice by attempting to shoehorn their visionary experiences into the ETH. If William of Newburgh says that people saw the figure of Jesus in the sky, then (assuming for a moment that it's not just a piece of Medieval Christian propaganda) I'm willing to accept that that's what they actually saw - not that they really saw an alien spaceship but were too ignorant to describe it accurately. People may not have known what aircraft looked like, but they were familiar enough with ships and carriages and chariots; any one of which could have been used as an analogy to describe a structured craft.

Initially I agreed with this completely. It's a less patronising attitude towards those that have gone before. However, I'm curious as to how far you extend this attitude. If I said I saw Jesus in Manchester, this afternoon, would you accept that I had actually seen Jesus or would you favour the more plausible explanation that I believed I had?

 

[Graylien]

I'd accept that you believed you had seen Jesus. I'd consider that eithier you'd suffered a misperception (i.e. you saw someone who happened to look like Jesus, or was pretending to be him) or that you'd had an internally generated visionary experience.

I believe we can learn a lot by looking not at unsolved cases, but at cases where UFO and alien encounters have been proven beyond reasonable doubt to have a mundane explanation.

As an example: one evening during the French UFO flap of 1954, a farmer, Monsieur Faisan, saw an alien carrying out repairs to its flying saucer and opened fire on it. Luckily he missed - as the "alien" turned out to be his neighbour Monsieur Ruent, busy repairing his car.

"I believed, when seeing a silhouette evolving in the light of the headlights, to be in the presence of a Martian repairing his flying saucer. I went to get my rifle and I shot," the hapless M. Faisan told police. (source)

Now, compare the scene that M Faisan was looking at (his neighbour bent over his car) with the scene he was actually seeing (a Martian repairing a flying saucer). It seems unbelievable that anyone could mistake the one for the other, but nevertheless, it happened. Stories of "Martians" haunting rural France had been filling the newspapers for several months before M Faisan's 'sighting', and had obviously predisposed him to interpret anything he didn't immediately recognise as being 'alien'.

In a similar incident the following month, a vine grower beat up a man who he had mistaken for a Martian in the darkness (source)

Unfortunately, UFO literature is (understandably) dominated by 'unsolved' cases. Once a case has been proven to have mundane causes, the researcher loses all interest in it, and may not even bother writing it up. As a result, we are ignoring a mountain of potentially invaluable data which could show to just what extent our personal beliefs, fears, and expectations can radically distort our perception of reality.

 

[Anonymous]

I'd accept that you believed you had seen Jesus. I'd consider that eithier you'd suffered a misperception (i.e. you saw someone who happened to look like Jesus, or was pretending to be him) or that you'd had an internally generated visionary experience.

That's the point I'm trying to make.

Previously you made the point that you'd take the sighting of Jesus in the sky as exactly that, rather than reattribute it as a UFO because you believe that the people concerned were capable of describing it accurately and because they were au fait with various other frames of reference (chariots, ships etc., etc.) to accurately describe a UFO, if that was indeed what they saw.

However, even though they may have had a more applicable paradigm set of references to align their perception to, it doesn't necessarily mean they were seeing what they actually believed they were seeing. You could have a myriad of reference points to accurately describe something, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to see things as they actually are. If your perception doesn't match the reality, then no matter how accurately you can describe something is immaterial, you're still describing the wrong thing only just describing it very well.