UFOs are real to the extent that people are seeing things in the sky that they cannot explain.

To say that this means that they are "aliens" or any other such phenomenon is a leap of faith every bit as much as believing in God.

There is no solid, incontrovertible, non-controversial evidence to suggest that UFOs represent any kind of spacecraft or non-human intelligent life. Even if they were, they would have to be either from around here or some kind of travellers who have no concern about when they get home.

Why? Relativity, which is an experimentally tested and verified hypothesis, says that travelling faster than light is impossible (not on practical level like the speed of sound used to be, but on a fundamental one in that FTL travel = travelling backwards in time creating paradoxes right and left) so that even a short interstellar journey (e.g. from the planet around Alpha Centauri, though that planet is not currently regarded as habitable) takes years.

And this is coming from someone who did, in fact, take UFOs fairly seriously in his childhood/youth.

To be clear, I am open to the possibility that there are visitors from beyond. The discovery of earth-like planets around a growing number of stars in our galaxy leads me to suspect that it is quite probable that life exists outside our solar system, it's just that there are massive barriers to anyone from another solar system actually showing up here and there is no evidence that they have. Rather like I am with God, I am presently an agnostic on UFOs being alien visitors.

Mendalla

PAUL HELLYER?

I have known Paul--6 years senior to me--for many years.

For those who think that he is nuts, take a look at what top physicists are now saying about how mysterious the universe is and so full of possibilities:

http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25449

http://www.edge.org

More on this, later.

Hi Linds

Great article and website. Wow....I'm so proud of you and your fine inquisitive mind, how you keep on keeping on...may it be so for many years to come .

Off topic a bit but here's Chris Hadfield talking on CBC last night about the wide possibility of other life in the universe and on  Mars.  He's so humble, what a great guy! He says he's still as  confused  as ever about the mystery of the universe  and he's afraid of heights. Isn't that something? He's hired to be on the Nat. News CBC staff, commentaries  or such.

I love it that physicists can still be baffled.

We get to set all the parameters in this endeavor to apprehend the big U don't we? This monolithic Infinity.

I don't think the universe is necessarily cognizant of our parameters... 

Still, the Manderbrot Set can begin the conceptual ride

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_spiral

"Bubble Multiverse"  as described in the essay sounds closer to the concept of "universe" to me. 

Stardust,

Hellyah is the bomb!

UFOs are so mainstream its silly :3

It's like that story "The day after the day the martians came" by Frederik Pohl...we're surrounded by so much marvelousness, amazements, wonder that, because they are around us all the time, we consider them ordinary, prosaic...

I also loved how the US congress recently did a symposium on UFOs...