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Church of the SubGenius

Founded in 1979 with the publication of SubGenius Pamphlet #1 by Ivan Stang and Philo Drummond, the Church of the SubGenius has been known as a “parody religion” due to its extensive use of comedy and parody. In spite of this, the organization claims over 10,000 followers worldwide who have paid $30 to become “ordained SubGenius ministers”, and it has been embraced by many skeptic and atheist groups. With the publication of The Book of the SubGenius in 1983, the Church of the SubGenius prophesied that its founder, J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, was in contact with an exterrestrial race called the Xists (“X-ists”), and these Xists were scheduled to launch a worldwide invasion of Earth on July 5, 1998. (See also: X-Day (Church of the SubGenius)) The day of the scheduled invasion came and went without an appearance by the Xists, but church members remain unconvinced. The church now holds annual “X-Day” celebrations on July 5 of every year. The church also claims that its members are not entirely human, having descended from the Yeti.

Knightly_News
Master_Valek wrote:
reflectivist wrote:
trysts wrote:
pdela wrote:

alien explanation doesn't seem simple enough to be considereded between the first options for explaining the optical aberrations and reflections some people sees in the sky

Why don't you go to an even simpler explanation, pdela, and say that everyone is lying? That way you can get back to concentrating on your favorite topic: yourself

Even my mom, who was an atheist and very skeptical of every kind of thing like UFO's, psychic stuff, religion, etc... Told me she saw a UFO doing all kinds of weird inexplicable things in the sky at night when she was driving, near the hills of Calabasas California many many years ago.

And she was nobody's fool.  She knew the difference between jets, airliners, prop planes, cars, hot air baloons, etc...  This really threw her for a loop. She was observant, and would be the last one anyone would expect to even be open to the possibility of UFOs and would have been set on figuring out a way to discount the experience if she could.

What made me realize there was more to this, was that when I 14, three bright focused, and rather unusual lights circled above our house then flew away at amazing speeds. Several years later, our town had a mass sighting of lights travelling to the south. It was evaluated the best explanation it was chinese lanterns. A day later, the same lights appeared in my fathers town, around an hour away from here... doing strange stuff. Chinese lanterns burn up to an hour and I doubt by coincidence sake, these lights where unrelated as such a phenomenon is quite rare to be observered. There is a real phenomenon and a lot of the public are yet to be awoken to this. 

Chinese lanterns are a lousy explanation for highly animated objects. I used to build those as a kid with the thin plastic bags from dry cleaners, drinking straws, aluminum foil, tape and sterno, and by the time they got high enough to get caught in a thermal (thermals spin) the thing would melt itself and fall straight down.  You couldn't get much motion with one.

royalbishop

Man i suspect the number of Area 54 agents that have joined this site have doubled in the last hour. Better believe they are checking your profiles out. One of you guys may be the alien that eluded them.

Knightly_News
royalbishop wrote:

Man i suspect the number of Area 54 agents that have joined this site have doubled in the last hour. Better believe they are checking your profiles out. One of you guys may be the alien that eluded them.

That's freaking scary because it means that Area 51 has grown so large, there are new areas and even more agents!

TheGrobe

Wait -- you're invoking Occams Razor to support UFO claims?

Can't explain it?  Must be aliens.

trysts
Irontiger wrote:
trysts wrote:
Irontiger wrote:

Incredibly, those aliens decided to take interest in a country that various  secret agencies watched carefully in those times (the Guardians of the Islamic revolution take the power during the year 1979).

Another mysterious coincidence, another proof that nothing was left at random : this happened when Jupiter was at a maximum intensity in the sky. Probably those flying aircrafts run on Jupiter's rays.

 

Two plausible stories that explain the observations without aliens... Well, that's enough for me.

In 1976, Iran was governed by the American-backed Shah of Iran. 

Jupiter sure does some strange things in your world, Irontiger

Neither story explains the event to me, but maybe I'm more skeptical than you are?

Another edit: Maybe I'm misreading you, Irontiger? Maybe you were being sarcastic?

Half-sarcastic.

1- the shah regime was collapsing at the time (first riots one year after the aliens brainwawed the population - source here).

It wouldn't seem unbelievable to me that the CIA (or anyone else) would want to spy on Teheran or somewhere near where they suspected something, but without asking via the official channels. The real problem in that explanation is that the technology for spy satellites etc. was much less developed at the time than it is now.

 

2-Neither of my explanations is fully convincing, not even for me.

But the alien theory is even less convincing. I mean, admitting all the reports are true, those aliens have an aircraft that can go as fast as the ones that were sent to him, yet stay stationary when he wants to, that can jam the controls and weaponry at a ~30 miles distance, and vanish after falling in the lake. Oh, and it has shiny lights of different colors on it, so that we can see it from afar. And it can be detected by the radar, sometimes, sometimes not.

...come on.

 

I do not know what happened. (and frankly, I don't care much.)

The point is, there is no easy explanation at hand, but that does not make the alien theory more plausible than it is, and that's still far behind the conspiracy theory (spying aircraft) or the blunder theory (the pilots mismaneuvered somehow, blinded by the light of natural source, and blamed the UFO to avoid punishment, for instance).

 

To take a (purposely) trivial parallel : I do not know what exactly causes the sudden change in the properties of water when the temperature goes from slightly more than 0°C to slightly less. This change is completely different of what happens at 1°C or -1°C. Does that make the claim that there is a devil, guardian of the 0°C threshold, who appears in the water at that threshold and modifies its properties, a valid/plausible theory ?

Demonstrations did not start until one year after the incident, so I don't believe one can say the Shah was collapsing at the time, if this explanation could possibly account for the event as described by the participants. 

But staying on the event described, it certainly isn't plausible to think that Jupiter, secret military aircraft, or ignorance could be the explanation, since Jupiter can not be picked up on radar and do the things attributed to the object(s) in the report. Secret aircraft are ruled out by military experts witnessing the event. Ignorance doesn't explain the event as described by the participants, either. And of course the idea that a pilot would infer an alien experience over confessing an ill-advised manuever doesn't make sense, since delusion and error can both reflect upon a pilot's trustworthiness. The participants clearly state that whatever it was leads them to believe that they had an encounter with an object which was not made by humans. 

It is very important to explain all the details of such a report, and not as so often happens, just explain that you believe they saw something, but you disregard all the things associated with the experience as mere delusion. 

The alien-hypothesis is based upon the details involving people's experiences. It does not just come from the movies.

Irontiger
Master_Valek wrote:

Have you ever heard of Occams razor? It is actually the principle of least imagination. (...)

Well, precisely, let's apply it. For instance for the Teheran thing :

-on one side, the CIA or anyone else had spying aircrafts with uncommon properties (but they also had this kind of toy at the time) and used it for whatever reason ;

-on the other side, Jupiter blinded the pilots, scared the crowds, the pilot panicked, blamed an alien for their panic crisis to avoid to be punished ;

-on the third side, an alien came all the way from nowhere to spy on our planet, with technology to jam communication, maneuverability and weaponry, in an aircraft that can become invisible on a radar screen when it wants too, and who can disappear in lakes.

 

You seriously think the last one is the least imaginative solution ?

TheGrobe

Well, sure, because.... aliens.

Knightly_News

The "Grobe" wrote:

   Wait -- you're invoking Occams Razor to support UFO claims?

   Can't explain it?  Must be aliens.


Grobe - there is no question at all that there are UFOs.  We have been being visited by aliens from other planets since at least the 1950's.  End of story.  There's so much graphic documentation and testimony, it's not even a question:

 

pdela

i don't know why this still holds in general chess discussions and my threads doesn't hold a minute in any category before being moved off-topic, and with this I return to my favourite topic...

TheGrobe

Simply posing it as a declarative statement doesn't make it true.  Some actual proof would be nice....

Knightly_News
TheGrobe wrote:

Well, sure, because.... aliens.

But seriously, you'd rather be a prick than know the truth. But still you and the topic are funny.  Science is way ahead of you.  Astrophycisists are not in so much of a rush to discount the possibilities as you are, and they have a lot more data and training, information, and probably (sorry to say) intelligence than you do.

Knightly_News
TheGrobe wrote:

Simply posing it as a declarative statement doesn't make it true.  Some actual proof would be nice....

And simply refuting everything out of hand and going off on tangents with ad hominem attacks, hyperbole and misrepresentations as you do is anything but truth or science, it's much more about your immaturity and psychological malfunctioning.

TheGrobe

I'll say again, the burden of proof is on the claimant.  I stand by my skepticism.

royalbishop
reflectivist wrote:
royalbishop wrote:

Man i suspect the number of Area 54 agents that have joined this site have doubled in the last hour. Better believe they are checking your profiles out. One of you guys may be the alien that eluded them.

That's freaking scary because it means that Area 51 has grown so large, there are new areas and even more agents!

Secret,  Club 54 was really Area 54 as they were testing on celebrities back in the 6o's and 70s. How else do you explain how they would dress. And think about the endless alien movies then. Even Godzilla, Ultraman and etc. They started testing again with next generation this time unknown. Canada? and William Shatner playing Captain Kirk making love to all those alien woman. That was another attempt to take over the Earth and make us love them when they did reveal themselves.

Knightly_News

Proof that skeptics are credible - they tend to think the existance of fictions like this proves there are no aliens or UFOs:

Knightly_News
TheGrobe wrote:

I'll say again, the burden of proof is on the claimant.  I stand by my skepticism.

If that's all you said you'd be credible, and people might think you honest and objective.  But you didn't leave it at that, did you?  You went on to show that your skepticism is rooted in your own bias, ego, hostility, immaturity and dysfunction.

royalbishop

Scotty Pippen is half human and half alien.

Did you see him on Celebrity Apprentice the final week.

TheGrobe
reflectivist wrote:
TheGrobe wrote:

I'll say again, the burden of proof is on the claimant.  I stand by my skepticism.

If that's all you said you'd be credible, and people might think you honest and objective.  But you didn't leave it at that, did you?  You went on to show that your skepticism is rooted in your own bias, ego, hostility, immaturity and dysfunction.

Example?

trysts
pdela wrote:
trysts wrote:
pdela wrote:

alien explanation doesn't seem simple enough to be considereded between the first options for explaining the optical aberrations and reflections some people sees in the sky

Why don't you go to an even simpler explanation, pdela, and say that everyone is lying? That way you can get back to concentrating on your favorite topic: yourself

I don't understand quite well why you say there are things that are hard to explain and there are many cases of experts alleging & reporting there is no way to explain it, then, if this case concerns an UFO you claim for the existence of a supreme intelligent being called alien, but if that concerns to someone who had recover the vision (miracle!) you deny the existence of any supreme being which have a reminiscence to a god. Your aliens have many reminiscences of what other people would call deities

Where are the reports of gods and angels being investigated by governments around the world? Radar data? Radiation detected at sites where an angel has been witnessed to walk upon? People reporting UFOs are not necessarily reporting to know that they are alien craft, it's one of a few explanations for what they have encountered. 

For me, religion is politics for the government and the masses, and hopefulness for the individual. It is not comparable to the material existence of craft-like objects confusing the perspective of individuals who never hoped for their encounters. 

The alien-hypothesis is a possible explanation for these sightings and experiences which shouldn't be ruled out, in my view. I'm not looking to replace a mystical, supreme being with an alien one. There are no mystical supreme beings, angels, and demons, in my view, pdela.