UFO's  and Aliens

Quoted from grimsby pete

When Governments and high ranking people speak I listen

Quoted from Maringer

Have you seen some of the fruitcakes we've got running the country? A good chance that Trump will be the most powerful man in the world before to long as well!  

Quoted from Caesar

I don't say they are not real because it is so unlikely for us even to contact other alien species, I simply say I am sceptical of claims because of how unlikely it is.  It is so unlikely I follow Carl Sagan's paraphrase:

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

What we have with regards to aliens is very limited evidence that would easily be dismissed in a court of law if they were making far less extraordinary claims.  

To take the ex Canadian defence minister,  Paul Hellyer I believe you are referring to.  He first announced he believed in September 2005.  Taking my information from wikipedia in 1967 he opened the first UFO pad as part of an official centenary celebration, suggesting he already was primed into being open about the existence of UFO's.  He claims him and his wife saw a UFO, dismissed it.  Then years later watched a program about UFO's and that brought the memory back and he became convinced of UFO's.  I am not sure of the time gap between the 2 but it seems to be a quite significant gap, plenty of time for memories to get confused and embellished, memory is easily manipulated and confused.  The further you are from an event the more sceptical you should be as I am sure we can all think of examples in our own lives when our memories have got things wrong.  Seeing a program about UFO's will certainly remind you of a time you saw something strange, but memory does not work like a video playback.  Your mind makes various key points to remember and fills in the gaps, seeing similar images can implant themselves in your memory easily enough and you can become convinced that what you are now picturing in your mind is exactly what you saw.  If you want evidence just google 'implanting false memories'.  There are numerous psychology articles that go in depth explaining exactly how this happens, how it can be manipulated, either intentionally or unintentionally.  

His claims are therefore immediately susceptible to possible false memory.  But if we take them at completely face value we can still question them easily.  So he goes onto suggest that America is trying to put a space base on the moon.  This despite the fact NASA doesn't even send space shuttles into low orbit anymore and only sends unmanned probes that show us pictures of space.  If we are to believe this we need to also believe therefore that the American government, possibly with numerous other governments, are hiding what they are doing and the alien technology we have.  This is the same government that cannot protect its secrets from being exposed by Edward Snowden.  If you ever decide to look into a list of blunders by governments the list is as long as you can be bothered to stay awake.  Governments are made up of too many people to be able to keep secrets, the worlds most powerful man in the 90's wasn't even able to keep secret he had an affair with a white house staffer (Clinton and Lewinski).  It is a stretch to try and imagine a government can keep a secret as big is that, it is simply too inefficient

The only 'alien' photos I can find of him (please feel free to point me in their direction) are slightly odd shaped lights in the night sky.  While I do not profess to say what they are, you can see many similar images from Hubble telescope photos or even from earth looking at the norther lights for example.  Quite simply space is full of weird crap, gasses meteors and other natural phenomena before we even get to the numerous satellites we have put up there.

From what I can see the only evidence therefore for his claims are his own personal testimony which is contradicted by the many more defence ministers all over the world and in various other time periods.  As far as I know no other Canadian defence ministers are convinced of alien technology having been on earth.  So either he is mistaken, or there is a mass conspiracy involving everybody else.  This combined with the extraordinary unlikeliness of what he says being the case, I am going to presume it is the former.  Until I get extraordinary evidence I am going to remain sceptical.

I do agree it is an interesting question though as my rather ridiculously long post suggests, and I do enjoy thinking about it.  Sorry if I have bored you btw!

Quoted from grimsby pete

Its a bit like religion some people just believe they do not need prove, they just know,