Cryptozoology

[moonchip]

Following on from the interesting thread about persons of faith, or otherwise, I wondered what other peoples views were on topics such as Bigfoot, the Yeti and UFO's

Do you believe ?

If not, how do you explain the many thousands of sightings often by very credible witnesses including experienced airline & air force pilots for UFO's, distinguished Nepalese sherpa's for the Yeti, and suchlike

 

[Robbity]

I don't believe we can possibly know everything about the world and universe we live in, so I try to keep an open mind with regard to such weird and wonderful things.

Robbity

 

[Mike d]

Bigfoot and Yeti .... nope.

UFOs ...... There are 70 thousand million million million stars in the universe (7 sextillion) and without doubt billions of planets, many of which could sustain life but perhaps not as we know it. Do aliens exist? IMO, yep, they do.

Have we genuinely seen them? Don't know. But consider the distances ....... our nearest star (Proxima Centauri) is 4.7 light years away from us and that's travelling at 186,000 miles per second every minute and every hour and every day. Exoplanets are (around) 50 light years away.

Assuming an alien craft can match the speed of light, I don't see how it's possible they would take the journey unless they have life spans far longer than ours. It would take us (with our technology) thousands (many thousands) of years to get to an exoplanet.



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[moonchip]

Bigfoot and Yeti .... nope.

UFOs ...... There are 70 thousand million million million stars in the universe (7 sextillion) and without doubt billions of planets, many of which could sustain life but perhaps not as we know it. Do aliens exist? IMO, yep, they do.

Have we genuinely seen them? Don't know. But consider the distances ....... our nearest star (Proxima Centauri) is 4.7 light years away from us and that's travelling at 186,000 miles per second every minute and every hour and every day. Exoplanets are (around) 50 light years away.

Assuming an alien craft can match the speed of light, I don't see how it's possible they would take the journey unless they have life spans far longer than ours. It would take us (with our technology) thousands (many thousands) of years to get to an exoplanet.



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Maybe the speed of light isn't the fastest form of travel ....... both Hawking & Einstein have proposed how both space & time may be 'warped' and massive distances covered almost instantaneously. On the face of it this sounds unbelievable but no more so than telling a neanderthal man sitting on a log floating on a stream that man would one day be capable of travelling at six times the speed of sound (sr71 spy plane)

For Bigfoot & Yeti, et al, these are usually seen in tight geographic areas ....... now bear with me on this

Now, lets say that where we live, here & now, our 'reality' is the 'ground floor' of a tower block. Other realities are stacked above us. The reality where the Bigfoot live, one where the yeti live, much like a tower block with thousands of inhabitants.

You can't see all the inhabitants at the same time

You can (and do) see one or two, briefly, when the lift doors open. Some may board the lift with you and travel a few floors, then they leave again, or you get out at your desired floor, leaving them.

I believe that the places where 'mythical' beings are seen are places where our realities converge, if only for a brief moment, such as where our individual human lives, usually strangers', converge for a brief few moments whilst they travel in the lift - they don't always exist just as one can board & travel an empty lift without seeing a soul

Perhaps the reason we haven't learned much about these other creatures is because everyone travelling in a lift rarely talks to anyone else

 

[Mike d]

Maybe the speed of light isn't the fastest form of travel ....... both Hawking & Einstein have proposed how both space & time may be 'warped' and massive distances covered almost instantaneously.

Perhaps. Wormholes? Maybe. It's all theory. I won't dismiss it and I won't accept it @moonchip

What I will finish on is that I am convinced we are not alone

 

[jay hay-char]

We don't know everything yet, and perhaps we never will, so who knows?

However, in general I think stuff like this is mostly down to (a) Drugs (b) Self-delusion (i.e. seeing what you want to see rather than what is really there) and (c) Natural phenomena, either viewed from an odd angle or misinterpreted by our brains.

For example, the "Beast of Bodmin", allegedly a wild black panther or similar, turned out to be a large feral cat viewed in dodgy light or from a strange perspective, by people who were expecting to see something exotic.

In spite of all this, I do keep an open mind - and "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (Arthur C Clarke)

 

[Arab Horse]

I have an open mind but there are things that we can't explain.

A very good friend of mine who is definitely a "non believer" is now a believer. Her younger half brother died of a hereditary genetic condition in his mid 20s. Her mother wanted to go to a "fortune teller", not sure what they call themselves when they contact the dead, to see if they could contact him and eventually my friend agreed to go with her as no one else would (after telling her many times that she was wasting her money, it was a load of rubbish etc.).

She didn't mention it to me and eventually I asked if she had gone and she said she had but it was the scariest thing she had ever done and would never go again. The man had contacted her brother and said he was fine and things were good (yeah, right!) but then went on to tell them things such as "Do you remember the barbecue when the dog (can't remember it's name but he used the name) ate the sausages and how we all laughed" and several other things that they had forgotten but remembered when they were told, things he could not have made up as they were too specific.

Her mother was really happy and wanted to go again but my friend refused and still never mentions it; it really freaked her out. I can't explain things like that but I know she would not have made it up. She was even more sceptical than me before then but it badly frightened her.

 

[jay hay-char]

I am very sceptical about mediums, or anyone else who claims to be able to contact the dead. This is for several reasons: (1) The people they are "talking " to are dead, and incapable of any communication; (2) mediums are very adept at picking up cues and information from the (alive) people they are talking to, and eliciting information from them that they may not even realise they have given away; (3) most mediums are complete charlatans making money (quite a lot of it, sometimes) from people's grief - the likes of Doris Stokes have had their reputations fairly comprehensively trashed, albeit sometimes after they have died; and (4) Without sounding too much like Mr Spock, logic dictates that the whole is impossible.

Having said which, the wife of a friend of mine earns a living by claiming to make contact with people who have died. She is a respectable, intelligent woman (a JP, no less) and doesn't strike me as a con artist. The only explanation I can think of is that she is deluding herself - she's from an island in the Caribbean (not Haiti, btw) where there is a strong tradition of witchcraft and talking to the spirits, and I suspect she has, unknowingly, convinced herself that she has "a gift".

In short, I think it's all superstitious rubbish. Sorry if that offends anyone - a couple of members of my immediate family died before their time, and I would love to think that I could contact them, but in my opinion, the dead are dead, and that's that.

 

[tim2000s]

Perhaps. Wormholes? Maybe. It's all theory. I won't dismiss it and I won't accept it @moonchip

What I will finish on is that I am convinced we are not alone

Not so much wormholes as "bending spacetime" to create a singularity, much as you can do with folding a map to jump from London to New York instantaneously. However, this is (very) theoretical physics. That's not to say that something somewhere hasn't done it. Just that we can't right now.