UFOs

Con: The traditional approach towards answering the question "Are we being visited by aliens?" runs like this. First, we confine the discussion to our galaxy, as it seems extremely unlikely that aliens would travel the distance between galaxies. Then, the number of stars in the galaxy is approximated (it's something like "billions and billions"). The number of stars having planets is then estimated as a fraction of this. The number of planets able to sustain "life as we know it" is estimated as a fraction of this. The planets which have developed intelligent life is estimated as a fraction of that, and the number that haven't blown themselves up as a fraction of that. Then, those who developed interstellar travel are derived as a fraction of this. Scientists more educated in this field that I can still only make educated guesses on what each of these fractions should be, but the end result may be that there is only one intelligent species, or perhaps as many as a thousand.

Let's be generous and say there are a thousand intelligent species. Of these, how many have developed interstellar travel? Being generous here and saying one hundred, the odds are that they would be so spread out, they'd be unlikely to ever meet each other.

Still, it is argued that aliens are visiting us now, even abducting humans and doing all sorts of strange things to them. As far as I am aware, most abduction accounts are derived from hypnosis sessions. It may take the hypnotist many months to get at the "truth". I find this method of gathering information highly suspect. If the hypnotist looks for repressed memories of abuse, he will find them. If he looks for satanic ritual abuse or past lives, he will find them. I believe in reincarnation myself, and children are abused, and there may even be "satanic ritual abuse", but this method of gathering info is highly dubious.

Then there are numerous accounts of people seeing things in the sky, which cannot be easily explained. Exactly what these things are, I can't say, though I have no reason to believe they are extraterrestrial in nature. I believe there are non-material beings which are capable of appearing to us, and this may account for it.

It's somewhat difficult to account for the "fact" that the aliens in these accounts have the same basic appearance, such that they've been nicknamed "grays". Of course today we "know" what the grays look like, but back in the 50's, the stereotype wasn't as clearly defined. So at this point, I'll turn it over to the

Pro: side. We don't really know how those fractions above work out, and it just takes one other nearby species to blow the first section of the previous argument. We don't know how advanced the aliens are, so they may be able to communicate and travel faster than the speed of light. Since they are so advanced, we can't understand the strange things they do to us, and to try to figure them out from a human perspective is somewhat erroneous.