Amentep

Good and Entertaining are both subjective terms, so they're going to mean different things to different people, and why one can be entertained by things that aren't particularly good or to think things good when they aren't entertained by it personally. Ergo, arguments about such things will need to determine what is Good and Entertaining for the sake of the argument, or risk having people talk at cross purposes.

Really, so you have an equal 'belief' in unicorns and Xenu too, do you? I find it odd to gather how you get I can get that I have some sort of "belief" in unicorns or Xenu from professing to neither believe nor disbelieve in ghosts. My general feeling is that if someone says ghosts exist, they should try to the best of the ability to prove that they do exist. If someone wants to claim they don't exist than IMO they need to prove such impossibility. Otherwise, my general feeling is to accept that some people feel like they have seen a ghost, while others will try to rationalise that it had to be something else. I have never experienced anything ghostly, so have no personal experience I could say fuels a belief in ghosts. While I tend to think the possibilty of extraterestrial life - whether it visits us or not - is strong, I think that ghosts are more interesting to theorize about. Should an extraterestrial visit us, I think that understanding the why of it without some form of interaction to be near impossible. More interesting instead to look into ghosts because then it means that either there is an intangible spirit connected with humans or some sort natural "distortion" of time/space/whatever which in turn would be worth probing or it indicates something about the psychology of human beings and/or physiological perception problems. Its easy to reject human perception and just assume that the cause was due to some physiological or psychological issue or even just the human ability to create patterns where none exist, but I just tend to favor not leaping to conclusions.

Saw Quantum of Solace. Really liked it and felt it was completely in keeping with the previous film. It also involves Bond actually doing some vaguely spy like things rather than just flinging around sci-fi gadgets.

Nah, it was mostly just skeptics replying to skeptics playing devil's advocate. Ze substance was lacking. Err, unless somebody in this thread actually believes in ghosts and feels robbed of legitimate intellectual discussion? I feel robbed of a slightly more interesting discussion than "OMG! Ghosts don't existorz LOLZ" I neither believe nor disbelieve in ghosts; I do think the idea of finding a scientific approach to putting the matter to rest (rather than assuming that absence of evidence is evidence of absence) intriguing.

Wow and the thread was going so well...

"ghosts"* require an afterlife populated by... souls. i am an atheist, you know. alien life doesn't really require any stretch in imagination (or faith) other than the simple concept that we may not be alone, and the other life out there could easily be significantly more advanced than we are. other than that, less evidence that remains unexplained in spite of gobs more "sightings" throughout history. even hell kitty's link is, well, a joke (creepy, yes). first of all, how does something "feel evil and malevolent." the thing hung out and observed them all freaking night, even allowing them to throw things at it, yet did nothing. not very evil if you ask me. also, the room got colder but the thermometer didn't show it? sounds like something imaginary to me. you can tell by the beginning of the story that they went in to the place with the implicit assumption that something was there (heck, the guy had "psychic training" ). it is not a stretch to think their own minds perpetrated the hoax. overall, the ghost phenomenon is a bit easier to falsify scientifically. so far, i haven't seen anything that passes the smell test. taks * the term ghost should not be used when a readily available, albeit odd, phenomenon exists by which it could be explained. there are things that may seem supernatural, but they really don't have any actual link to prior human existence of any sort. Are souls (and thus incarnations of souls) really supernatural if they are a part of the natural world (ie, what distinguishes a soul's existence in this realm rather than the afterlife not an explicable phenomenon *if* souls exist)? Also a ghost created because of something like a time distortion or psychic imprinting would technically link to a prior human existence without actually necessitating a soul. Alternatively, I could be missing the point.

Or maybe the noise was too low/high for human ear ranges?

That's a very good point and very interesting approach to it. Almost makes me want to try and set something up! On the plus side they are uber-creepy. Or maybe its because whenever the play them they keep repeating them over and over.

But that's my point, the claimer claims to have got it FROM the UFO. The person hearing the claim only see a weird metal; the claimer's experience though is something that can't be passed on, which is the problem with proving most of the unusual phenomena claimed to exist in the world.

To me this is where paranormal investigtaion needs to start. FIrst you need to begin to test if there are actual correlations between paranormal phenomena and reported "hauntedness" or is it all just anecdotal. DO non-haunted locations display the same phenomena as non-haunted locations. Yes? No? Absolutely the test environements need to be controlled and experiments have to be repeated over and over again, adjusting hypotheses and methodolgy as you go along. I can imagine it would be a relatively tedious and unrewarding task, which is probably why most paranomormal groups don't even bother. MUch more fun to just wave your gear around in the dark and make things up. Well that raises an immediate question to my mind; since we go from testing for the ghost to testing the house, how similar should the experiment/control houses be? Since ghostly phenomena tend to factor into older building based on the anecdotal evidence, if you're investigating the ghost in a 1920s mansion, do you have to find another 1920s mansion with the exact same square footage (I'll assume that we can leave off having to have similar floor plans, or else we'll have to wait 100 years or so for the haunting of the prefab houses to know for sure). Should location matter? If one is in the NE, could the other be in the SW and it'd be okay?

The way I see it, no single piece of evidence, no matter how convincing, isn't going to prove anything. What's going to prove something is when a procedure is estblished that anyone can follow and duplicate the same results. Even if you bring in a bigfoot body, if you only let one person see it and test it, and only one person can say OMG Bigfoot DNA!!!, then nothing has been proved. If you've got a bigfoot body you need to let everyone test it. If everyone tests it and ends up with the same results then you've got proof. Proof of something is never a one-off event. I agree in terms of Bigfoot. But lets say you have a piece of metal that you claim is part of an alien craft. You can give it to as many scientists as you want and even if its an unusual or new alloy using rare metals, it doesn't prove its of extraterrestrial origins as opposed to a prototype Earth vehicle. Short of being able to bring a ghost, alien or bigfoot to people, I don't think there is going to be proof that will satisfy everyone.

I did a 360 flip and landed on my face at 3.6 meters.

Inherent problem with that is that we don't know the motivation for ghosts to appear in the first place (if they exit) which makes it difficult to determine how to repeat the phenomena. I suppose a ghost hunting crew could try and work on finding a way to make a ghost appear as opposed to trying to find some proof the ghost exists, but you'd need know a ghost is really there to know you could find a way to make it appear. Egads, I think my brain just broke. Also there is the fact that you're trying to do science experiments in the wild as opposed to a controlled situation anyhow, so until there's a haunted multi-million dollar science laboratory...

Well there are groups that have tried. The problem is kind of two fold, one is that until we know more about the phenomena (if it exists) its nearly impossible to determine how to test it and if what we have to test is really testing what we think its testing, or if its testing something that happens to be coincidental to the phenomena (the "do ghosts make cold spots, or do ghosts tend to be associated with old drafty houses that naturally have cold spots" problem). Then the other is that there a large number of skeptics who don't believe the scientific principle works with Fortean phenomena, insisting instead that fantastic claims require fantastic proof (the "I don't care if you have a rare piece of metal alloy unheard of on Earth as of yet and photos of a UFO, you need to bring me an alien to talk to before I believe you were abducted" problem) I've seen a fair number of skeptical scientists shoot down attempts at following scientific procedures because they feel that they're using equipment in ways it wasn't originally intended - which is typically true, but until you can quantify what you're looking for its a bit hard to come up with specialist equipment.

Fallout 1 [ 22 ] ** [39.29%] Fallout 2 [ 21 ] ** [37.50%] Fallout 3 [ 13 ] ** [23.21%] Looks like the fights not over yet.

That's true. But my point was more that the public awareness of UFO's didn't really take off until the 40's and 50's. If someone in the 20's was interested in making some sort of hoax photo, they most likely would have choosen a medium with ectoplasm coming from her nose as the photo subject not a flying saucer. Seances and the paranormal were very much a part of the public consciousness even then, UFOs were not. Anyway, I'm not saying that age makes them any more real than a contemporary photo, only that I find it interesting that photos of UFOs go back that far. Yeah, I understand what you're saying about faking it, but that doesn't mean that an unfaked picture couldn't have an object in it that is only seen as being a UFO in retrospective viewings of the photo, but at the time wasn't considered to be anything more than...oh, dust on the lens or something. Documenting UFOs goes back far into history (Chinese documents indicate appearances of what is believed to be Halley's Comet in 240 BC; Shen Kuo a scholar and official wrote of testimony from people in the 11th century who saw a fast moving, glowing pearl shaped object); there are a number of sightings in the late 1800s and early 1900s that all predate the 1940s & 1950s UFO craze.

Its those nuclear power cells, I'd suspect.

Besides which, even if the photo dates to 1920, the identification of a weird flying object may not have come until later. Until then people might have just thought it was some weird bit on the photo. Need some history of the photo to know for sure.

Well the problem is that it assumes that all UFOs have a common origin. Even if assume a significant amount of UFOs aren't earthly in origin, that still leads a vast potential for multiple different extraterrestrials visiting the earth for a multitude of reasons. So a consistent plan in terms of motivation can't really be created without making a large number of assumptions. As far as we know, the greys come to investigate the dero in the hollow earth and then some other aliens come afterwords to try and figure out why the greys were poking around... It was your ability in Maths that tipped us off.

Also known as "Our Secret Atlantean Masters"

I don't think its impossible for there to be UFOs that are of extraterrestrial origin, but I think there are far to many people who see something that on the surface is inexplicable and leap to the conclusion that it IS extraterrestrial (and just as many who insist quickly there is no way it could be extraterrestrial). Which is sort of my take on most of the "paranormal" studies.

I got caught in between two cars exploding during a firefight at a drive-in. It killed me, tossed me in the air and blew off my arms and legs (it did the same for the raiders I was trying to kill and we all landed legless and armless corpses in a little pile!) Also exploring is fun until you explore to far and find yourself running away while getting hit in the back with lasers and trying to outrun missles.

It depends on the listeners. Some may assumed as taks pointed out that the listeners may have assumed an expertise that wasn't there. But there are a number of people who will believe any unusual phenomenon even in the face of scientific evidence (for example the proliferation of ghost hunters having "ghost orb" photos taken with a digital camera which is usually, in fact, backscatter or near-camera reflection due to decreasing size in cameras - particularly digital ones).

Well there has been a long string of American actors who played Robin Hood, but with Robert Frazer from Massachusetts, Douglas Fairbanks from Colorado, George Segal from New York, Richard Guatier & Kevin Costner from California, it seems no one has hit on the awesome mid-westerness yet

Wayne lobbied for the part based on the script; as a huge box-office star he was a reasonable choice once he made his interest known (although director **** Powell stated before he died that he tried to talk Wayne out of it). The writer wanted Marlon Brando for the part.