11:29:00 pm
Unknown
I am very confused that we are smart enough to land an automobile size payload on another planet, but still live in a culture where a significant percentage of people want to believe in implausible if not impossible things. DO YOU know why INTELLIGENT DOES NOT BELEIVE WEIRD THINGS.
A recent National Geographic Society poll reported that 36 percent of Americans -- about 80 million people -- believe UFOs exist, only 17 percent do not, and the rest of the people are undecided.
The survey did not specifically equate UFOs with flying saucers or little green men, however.
It's pretty unlikely a ghost will make a grand appearance on CNN, or we'll see an exorcism release the devil. But the discovery of aliens via a SETI signal might conceivably happen someday.
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| EGG SHAPED UFO |
Fortunately, we'll be prepared because the NGS survey shows that 77 percent of Americans believe there are signs that aliens have already visited Earth. No doubt this is anchored in mystical themes that benevolent aliens came by and helped out early civilization on huge public works projects, such as the building of the Egyptian pyramids.
Only 13 percent of 1,114 respondents said they would be afraid of aliens harming them. Apparently sci-fi films such as "Independence Day" and "Signs" haven't made much of an impact. Nor has astrophysicist Stephen Hawking's warnings of ray-gun wielding aliens.
A public relations challenge for NASA and the U.S. military is that 80 percent in the NGS survey feel that the government is hiding information about UFOs. This percentage of government distrust is consistent with a 2009 CBS News poll that found that 77 percent of the population believes that the government covered-up the truth behind the 1963 John F. Kennedy assassination. On the flip side, belief that the Apollo moon landings were a government hoax dropped from 11 percent to 6 percent over the past decade.
#PHOTOS: Mars Curiosity 'Litter Bug' Spied from Orbit#
I'd say that UFO beliefs are fueled by a "secular theology" where people look for greater meaning to the universe and our relationship with it. The theme is that the aliens flying the UFOs pay attention to us, worry about our misdeeds (as evident in alleged sighting of UFOs hanging around nuclear power plants) and want to help raise us to a higher level of existence. This is simply a post-age version of ages old stores of visitation by angels, demons, and other imaginary spirits.
A UNFULLFILLED HYPOTHESIS
A few of my colleagues dismiss the SETI searches as an unscientific experiment that border on theology. We imagine aliens that are intellectually made in our image: they are as curious as we are, they build lasers or radio telescopes like we do, and they are similarly motivated to devote time and resources simply to letting us know that they exist among the stars. This is hypothesis on top of hypothesis.
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| ILLINOIS at 16-01-2012 |
Also, people simply love to believe in weird things just because it's fun. (As an example, simply listen to the audio track of the UFO sighting posted on the YouTube video shown above.) The staid, rational world described in physics, astronomy or biology 101 classes is a bore to most undergraduates.
SECTOR 15
This is exacerbated by the fact that students traditionally are taught what to think but not how to think, concludes Richard Walker and colleagues in a 2001 survey of 211 college students. One of the true/false questions was, "The government is hiding evidence of alien visitors at Area 51." Walker's conclusion: science knowledge is not an inoculation against accepting pseudoscientific gobbledygook.
What's more, fun ideas sell. Simply go to you neighborhood bookstore. Pseudoscience topics from astrology to parapsychology fill a lot more shelves than hard-core science books.
This Article is written with the help of reference UFO sciences and Discovery Article. by SARAVANA
