With regard to the recent proposals that E.T. may be on the net, I offer http://www.sightings.com/ufo5/seti.htm, an article from a UFO site asking why SETI supporters are so dogmatically resisting the evidence that UFOs are real and are extraterrestrial craft. Rather than surfing the net, we should keep watching the skies, by this view:
A full house turned out Tuesday night in Cocoa to catch the SETI show at Brevard Community College's Fine Arts Auditorium. Leading the sermon was Dr. Seth Shostak, a brilliant wit at the privately funded SETI Institute of Mountain View, Calif.... Audience members were told how they, too, could assist the radio hunt by downloading and crunching signals with the so-called SETI@Home program.
The doors slammed when several listeners advanced the UFO heresies,
wondering if maybe those alien life forms hadn't already arrived. One
woman rattled off a list of related Web sites, prompting Shostak to
charge, "None of those sources you've mentioned are credible."
[...]
Pressed further by another listener who asked why UFO researchers
and SETI guys couldn't reason through this thing, Shostak replied,
"Scientists don't object to a dialogue; it just doesn't go anywhere."
Speaking for all scientists, naturally. But not a nine-member Stanford University panel led by physicist Peter Sturrock who, after examining the available evidence in 1998, advocated a rigorous public investigation. Good luck.
This is the problem with fringe science. You can always find someone who has some modest credibility who will support the topic, at least with the idea of investigating it further (which would involve funding the researcher, of course). Once you open up the possibility that ETs may be here on earth, monitoring us, of course you have to deal with UFOs. Furthermore, because it is overwhelmingly likely that they would have been here for millions of years, you have to look at all the ancient artifacts, the "chariots of the gods", the possibility of meddling in the human genome, the stories of the Bible, all as possible confirmation of ET activity on earth.
Maybe religion is true: maybe we are the creation of god-like beings.
If ETs have been here throughout our evolutionary development, isn't
it a significant probablity? Maybe Jesus was an extraterrestrial.
He could have been, couldn't he? Water into wine and raising the
(recently) dead shouldn't be too difficult for nanotech equipped aliens.
I don't see how you avoid this slippery slope once you assent to the view that ETs are among us. Is there anyone here who denies the truth of biblical miracles yet maintains that there is a real probability that extraterrestrial intelligences are monitoring us right here and now? How can you reconcile these views?
Hal