What got you interested in UFOs and aliens?

M

Moondog

New Member
I think I have made a few of errors trying to post a new thread. If this is in the wrong section, please move to an appropriate one.
I wanted to ask what got members here interested in UFO's and aliens etc…?
For me, it was when I watched the TV series Sightings hosted by Tim White when it first aired in the early 90's.
Of course, the internet was in its infancy, and there was no Metabunk.
If I remember correctly, Roswell was covered, and they interviewed someone who says he saw the bodies of aliens outside the "crashed saucer"
There was also a segment on PVP, which at the time I found quite interesting.
Has anyone else watched the series? If so, what are your thoughts.
The episodes are available on YouTube, I did try to post a link, but I don't think I can yet.
 
I read a great deal of sci-fi when I was younger. The more I got into hard science and military technology, the more I realized that most UFO reports contained one or more errors in peoples' perception or understanding of either the Laws of Physics, available American military technology, or both. People on my old military history forum in the early 2000's kept bringing up the topic and we began an on-again, off-again discussion.

Ancient Aliens cemented my disappointment with the believer community and I've been debunking ever since.
 
Moondog said:
I did try to post a link, but I don't think I can yet.
Click to expand...
you can post links. under "info" at top of page is the "Link Policy".
your first three posts need to be manually approved to weed out bots, whether you have a link in your post or not.
 
Gary C said:
The more I got into hard science and military technology, the more I realized that most UFO reports contained one or more errors in peoples' perception or understanding of either the Laws of Physics, available American military technology, or both.
Click to expand...
This is interesting.
Watching the Sightings series, when they discussed things like animal mutilation, Roswell, alien abduction etc.. they nearly always interviewed a rancher for the mutilation story, the man who says he saw the aliens outside the "saucer" and a person who claimed that they had been abducted.
They came across as sincere, and I thought about why they would make things like that up.
I also remember watching the Giza Pyramid-Orion theory, it was backed up by a convincing display, that may well also be on YouTube, but I can't remember what the programme was actually called.
For the animal mutilation segment, I actually felt sorry for the rancher, as it was his livelihood, I remember Tim White saying the high heat used in the mutilation in the 60's was not possible with the technology of the time.
Has that been discussed anywhere?
Also, I think I read something about the man who says he saw the aliens bodies at Roswell, it might have been on Skeptical Science, I'll have to have another look.
 
Experiencing all the sightings during the booms of the early '60's - back then ufos were all over the tv news (all THREE channels) and papers because the space race was super hot. I wrote Hynek in '66 and he sent me a book on astronomy and a letter (I wish it hadn't gotten lost when we moved) stating that ufos were nonsense.
 
Well, for me, I grew up reading science fiction, heavily influenced by the classics, and I just believed there had been aliens visiting Earth in our past and possibly all the way to today.
As I slowly became educated in actual science, I realized the impossible distances involved in space travel, the incredible technological developments required as tech base, and the implausibility of biological aliens flying around in tic tacs.

Then I found Mick West' podcast with Rogan years ago and I realized there was absolutely zero evidence of UFOs flying around.
 
Moondog said:
I think I have made a few of errors trying to post a new thread. If this is in the wrong section, please move to an appropriate one.
I wanted to ask what got members here interested in UFO's and aliens etc…?
For me, it was when I watched the TV series Sightings hosted by Tim White when it first aired in the early 90's.
Of course, the internet was in its infancy, and there was no Metabunk.
If I remember correctly, Roswell was covered, and they interviewed someone who says he saw the bodies of aliens outside the "crashed saucer"
There was also a segment on PVP, which at the time I found quite interesting.
Has anyone else watched the series? If so, what are your thoughts.
The episodes are available on YouTube, I did try to post a link, but I don't think I can yet.
Click to expand...
That was a long time ago! But to the best of fallible human memory...

But I was always something of a sci-fi fan, and flying saucers and big-headed aliens were a staple of (especially low budget cheesy) sci-fi at that time. In middle school (I think it was)I read "Incident at Exeter" (dealing with a rash of sightings in New Hampshire which led me to "The Interrupted Journey" about the Betty and Barney Hill case. Which was all fascinating stuff!

I must have had SOME interest in the topic before that -- some friends and I had taken a fake "thing on a string" UFO picture when I was a pretty young kid (tune fish can lid on a string, the cover story for why it hung in all different directions in the pics was that it was tumbling along rather than flying like a Frisbee...) But I don;t recall spending much time thinking about the topidc until finding those books.

In High School I was a pretty strong believer in ET UFOs (more than my share of money wound up in Mr. Spielberg's bank account when Close Encounters came out,I still think the original release of the movie was a brilliant portrait of what happens when obsession crashes through people's lives, cutting the heart of that while adding more shiny SFX for the special edition was a big disappointment to me)... and since we lived in the VA suburbs of DC, I went up to the National Archives when the Blue Book files were available to thread them through a microfilm reader and learn how irritating trying to read highly redacted material is!

But I also ran across "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved" which was a very thorough deconstruction of the Triangle myth and demonstrated that at least some of this sort of stuff is just nonsense. I also read Baldridge's book about analyzing the Navy shark attack files, which introduced me to ideas like control data and correlations that may not be causation after all.

So I remain fascinated by UFO stories, but the interest now is "what REALLY triggered the experience" and the psychology of flaps and such. There may well be some aliens put there, and we may maybe someday discover this -- but I'm not assuming they'll be landing their saucers in the gravel pit and start taking over the minds of a young protagonist's parents, nor descend on a dramatic backlit mountain to a John Williams score!
 
For me it started with movies — especially Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That film had a way of making the unknown feel both mysterious and almost believable. It wasn't about monsters or invasions, it was about curiosity and contact. That sense of wonder stuck with me, even after learning how much of the UFO lore it inspired was built on shaky ground.
 
My interest started as a kid watching VHS recordings of the Leonard Nimoy hosted In Search of... television series, which covered all kinds of fringe topics including UFOs and aliens.

Then I was really impacted when I watched a recording of the 1979 The Bermuda Triangle documentary, co-written by Charles Berlitz. It was more of a series of dramatic reenactments of alleged events than a proper documentary (it opens with a scene of Christopher Columbus and crew seeing UFOs that effected their compass). It also depicted the alleged Philadelphia Experiment where Navy ships were teleported to different dimensions and back. I must have watched that movie two dozen times as a kid.

I had no idea until much later and looking back into it more critically, that Berlitz basically invented/popularized several of the common tropes in forteana and ufology with his books (the latter two being co-authored with Bill Moore), including the alleged Roswell incident.

The Bermuda triangle (1974)
The Philadelphia experiment: Project Invisibility (1979)
The Roswell Incident (1980)

I found a copy of the documentary on youtube (incorrectly labeled as 1978, but imdb agrees it was 1979):


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4033TFmCMwA
 
I was never really interested in UFOs themselves, but miscellaneous Fortean phenomena intrigued my pre-teen self. I attribute that to the credulous stories in the Reader's Digest, one of the few publications my father subscribed to.

Later I read every sci-fi book I could find in the local library, in the era of Asimov and Bradbury, but purely for the enjoyment of the stories, not as a "believer".

OT: I do not remember the name of the movie, but one of them concerned some mysterious thing going on, supposedly at White Sands Missile Range. I was watching the movie at the base theater at White Sands, and the entire audience erupted into laughter.
 
Last edited:
MonkeeSage said:
The Bermuda triangle (1974)
Click to expand...
From miscellaneous sources, I get the following statistics.

Shipwrecks in the Bermuda Triangle: a thousand, in half a million square miles (approximately one per 500 square miles).

Shipwrecks in Lake Erie: two thousand, in ten thousand square miles (approximately one per five square miles, if I've got the math right).

Those numbers alone put the Bermuda triangle stuff into the category of "ridiculous".
 
I started watching Star Trek TNG and DS9 in elementary school, and then later on any sci-fi I could get my hands on here in non-English-speaking space. Then at some point I started seeing articles about people who claimed to have seen aliens for real.
My mother had some Von Däniken and Berlitz books that I devoured as a teen, and at that point of course was not very critical of.

Then as a late teen / uni student, my critical thinking sense evolved and I started researching all that stuff.
Still think the world would be an even more interesting place if some of it was true, but I want scientific proof first, please ;)
 
Mendel said:
They lack context, e.g. the total number of ship movements, miles travelled, and typical seaworthiness of the vessels.
Click to expand...
I'd add: prevalence of dangerous storms. I do not know about great Lakes weather, much of the "Triangle" (depending on how it is defined, their are variations) is prime ocean for hurricanes...

delme.jpg

(https://www.historicalclimatology.com/features/lessons-from-the-storm-that-wasnt)

But it is also fair to note that Berlitz's claims about the Triangle lack key items of context, such as ships that did not in fact exist, or did not in fact vanish, or "vanished mysteriously" during one of those hurricanes, or were nowhere near the Triangle when they were lost. (This based on reading the well-documented The Bermuda Triangle Mystery – Solved by Lawrence David Kusche. I do not currently have a copy in the house, so cannot cite page references, but I will post a bit from a review, spoilered as this is going a bit off topic, to save scrolling time for those who are here for the ufos and aliens discussion!
External Quote:
So what did Kusche find? Basically that a lot of authors are a) lazy or b) dishonest. Some cases (two or three) seems to be entirely imaginary – simply made up. None of them are very interesting or significant though. A few of the vessels listed as missing in much Bermuda Triangle lore were actually found, safe and well, with crews intact – they were just delayed, out of radio contact, or rather prematurely reported missing in one case by a slightly over anxious son.


Where the vessels or planes are missing, time and time again there is little mystery. In a surprising number of cases some debris was found, though in many none. In a LOT of cases there was terrible weather at the time of the loss – not mentioned in most accounts now. What is very common is for the Triangle authors to make things sound more mysterious than they actually were. Planes were within sight of the airfield and just vanished. Weather conditions were perfect when ships vanish half way through a message. In short the writers have allowed truth to give way to dramatic flourishes, and they sometimes actually get "improved" by further invented details by subsequent authors, though not always. These details always serve the purpose of making the story weirder, more interestingly mysterious.


The newspaper accounts throw up all manner of little errors that have crept in to the stories. Kusche opens each chapter with "The Legend" – a composite account of how the story is told in books on the supernatural – and then gives the facts. A few cases took place nowhere near what we would consider the Bermuda Triangle – one occurred in the Pacific Ocean off Mexico, several a lot closer in the Gulf of Mexico but others all over the North Atlantic, right up to within a few hundred miles of Ireland. I was surprised at the inclusion of Donald Crowhurst and the Teignmouth Electron – according to Kusche one author depicts this as a mysterious disappearance, rather than the clear case of suicide it was!


At the end of the book Kusche summarises his findings, and points out the only clear conclusuon. Prioperly examined on a case by case basis, there is no need to postulate a "Bermuda Triangle effect".

https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2015...ngle-mystery-solved-by-lawrence-david-kusche/
 
I have had recurring dreams my whole life about UFOs/UAP... for as long as I can remember, anyway. I don't know if the topic (a show or movie or something) started the recurring dreams when I was very young (likely) or if I became interested in the topic because of the dreams or what, but I've always been fascinated by it regardless. I've even personally witnessed some things that were very strange.

Anyway, I've read probably every "first contact" science-fiction book under the sun; it's my favorite type of sci-fi. I even love the cheesy movies and TV series that have been made about it. I've seen them all. I don't believe that "ET" or "NHI" are here poking around but I'd love to be wrong.
 
For me, growing up in the 70's and 80's in the UK, apart from the obvious films (Close Encounters etc) it was the magazine The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time, published by Orbis in the UK from around 1980.
Managed to collect a decent video collection and then went to a talk by Timothy Good which was superb.
ATS was the next step.
Also have an interest in the paranormal and ghosts etc after having a bizarre experience once.
 
Fascinating responses so far.
With regards to watching Spielberg films, I 'm sure I read about an interview with him once where he said he knows a little bit more about aliens etc.. but I can't remember if he expanded on it or where the interview is.
Back in the 90's, a friend had a book about alien abduction, in the book, some abductees said they saw animals etc.. before the abduction, another fiend of his who didn't know about the book, was discussing alien abduction, and said he thinks he was abducted by aliens and experienced the animals and bright lights in the room.
 
Probably /Arthur C. Clark's Mysterious World/. Even though it shied away from actual UFO sightings stuff, it softened me towards the weird and the woo. Sci-fi never had that effect on me, I knew it was fiction (showing two episodes back-to-back, and have the start of the latter one not match the end of the prior one kinda destroys any such illusion, and once you're in that mindset, it applies to all the movies as well), but ACCMW was presented factually and that made the difference.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke's_Mysterious_World if you don't know it.)
 
I've always been a big sci-fi fan. Aliens come with the territory. I grew up with all the usual sci-fi media and it inspired my interest in science that would grow into my interest in skepticism and conspiracy.

Frankly my interests mostly followed the big trending conspiracies back then. First it was flat earth and geocentrism, later the Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracies, and then the lab leak conspiracy. UFOs and aliens would occasionally come up via Sam Harris and Ezra Klein, but the topic didn't really grab me until July 2023.

My brother brought up UFOs and the then-recent David Grusch article during a roadtrip. I hadn't looked into the UFO topic nor had I heard of Grusch before. Given my lack of knowledge I was unprepared to accept or rebut what my brother was telling me, which he found frustrating, but I assured him I would look into it more.

After we got home I went back and listened to a few recent podcast episodes that I had skipped. Ezra Klein's episode with Leslie Kean, frankly, discredited Grusch in my eyes her answers were so bad. And the two Decoding the Gurus episodes with Mick West led me to rediscover Metabunk and really piqued my skeptical interest in UFOs and aliens.
 
I'm not very interested in UFOs, and I don't think we're being visited. That said, I got into a little bit of a UFO fever when I was a kid, and I borrowed that movie Roswell (1994) from the video store. I remember the description on the box read that it was based on real events, and I thought, "Ha! How could this be real?" And then I watched it, and I was a little bit hooked because I had never heard that conspiracy talk before and didn't know how to defend myself from it. And then "The X-Files" arrived on TV. But now that movie looks ridiculous, and I feel sorry for people who take it seriously.
 
Moondog said:
I wanted to ask what got members here interested in UFO's and aliens etc…?
For me, it was when I watched the TV series Sightings hosted by Tim White when it first aired in the early 90's.
Click to expand...

I'd imagine that like a lot of folks here, life has different stages. I can remember as a pre-teen being fascinated by both science and things like the TV movie Chariots of the Gods? By the time of high-school ('79) I was both a regular watcher of In Search Of and heavily involved in Evangelical Christianity. These sometimes clashed with my love of science, but it turned out I didn't have the math chops to ever be a scientist.

As we went through college (mid '80s), my then girlfriend/now wife and I moved away from the church for various reasons. Learning how things like The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish pre-dated and influenced the Bible was enlightening. However it was thumbing through an anthropology book on human evolution that detailed dozens of hominid fossils, that I realized the Bible just doesn't work for me.

It was a bit later in life (mid to late '90s) that I read one or two of Graham Hancock's early works and realized it was full of "perhaps", "what if", "possibly" type arguments while also discovering formal skepticism in the form of The Skeptical Inquire magazine.

I only realized later that I had gone from Evangelical Christian to a materialist. Bigfoot, ghosts, ESP and UFOs all need to fit into a materialist world for me. IF it's a material thing or entity, there is material evidence for it.

For me now, UFOs are a part of Metabunk and I find Metabunk a place to think and learn. It's a place I can at least attempt being cerebral in a mostly physical work existence. I'm a retired small-time contractor, we live on a few acres and try to work a garden and some grape vines. It's mostly hands-on outside, so UFOs are an intellectual pursuit.

The current UFO media machine provides plenty of opportunity to study UFOs, which in the end, is fun.
 
Moondog said:
I think I have made a few of errors trying to post a new thread. If this is in the wrong section, please move to an appropriate one.
I wanted to ask what got members here interested in UFO's and aliens etc…?
For me, it was when I watched the TV series Sightings hosted by Tim White when it first aired in the early 90's.
Of course, the internet was in its infancy, and there was no Metabunk.
If I remember correctly, Roswell was covered, and they interviewed someone who says he saw the bodies of aliens outside the "crashed saucer"
There was also a segment on PVP, which at the time I found quite interesting.
Has anyone else watched the series? If so, what are your thoughts.
The episodes are available on YouTube, I did try to post a link, but I don't think I can yet.
Click to expand...
I was raised in a fundamentalist evangelical high control group. But my mom has always loved sci-fi, her favorite movie is Blade Runner! So we watch lots of sci-fi channel shows together. Alien stuff was always my favorite. It was totally an escape to imagine adventures with extraterrestrials, intelligent or "not.".

Even though my church and parents strongly emphasized that aliens were imaginary because they were not in the Bible, it just made more sense to me that there were probably life forms elsewhere in the universe. I actually went through a period where I was terrified of alien invaders.

Since I have always been a science nerd, I have learned about the universe and spend my free time with hard sci-fi. The science supports that there are aliens. It's actually super annoying that so many people make stuff up because it's interesting and exciting. I do hope I am alive for first contact!
 
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