Aliens hold the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Now what was the question? My personal favorite explanation of aliens explains it all, if you care to believe it.
Yup. All of this. I absolutely believe that people are seeing "something," but rather than beings from other planets, these are manifestations of the powers and principalities, meant to take our focus off of Father God and set us to pursue other things.
"We may not know the identities of all the mysterious craft that American military personnel and others have been seeing in the skies as of late, but I have seen more than enough to tell you that it is clear that a very terrestrial adversary is toying with us in our own backyard using relatively simple technologies—drones and balloons—and making off with what could be the biggest intelligence haul of a generation. While that may disappoint some who hope the origins of all these events are far more exotic in nature, the strategic implications of these bold operations, which have been happening for years, undeterred, are absolutely massive."[1]
"4) As I looked, I saw a great storm coming from the north, driving before it a huge cloud that flashed with lightning and shone with brilliant light. There was fire inside the cloud, and in the middle of the fire glowed something like gleaming amber. 5) From the center of the cloud came four living beings that looked human, 6) except that each had four faces and four wings. 7) Their legs were straight, and their feet had hooves like those of a calf and shone like burnished bronze. 8) Under each of their four wings I could see human hands. So each of the four beings had four faces and four wings. 9) The wings of each living being touched the wings of the beings beside it. Each one moved straight forward in any direction without turning around."
"10) Each had a human face in the front, the face of a lion on the right side, the face of an ox on the left side, and the face of an eagle at the back. 11) Each had two pairs of outstretched wings—one pair stretched out to touch the wings of the living beings on either side of it, and the other pair covered its body. 12) They went in whatever direction the spirit chose, and they moved straight forward in any direction without turning around."
"13) The living beings looked like bright coals of fire or brilliant torches, and lightning seemed to flash back and forth among them. 14) And the living beings darted to and fro like flashes of lightning."
"15) As I looked at these beings, I saw four wheels touching the ground beside them, one wheel belonging to each. 16) The wheels sparkled as if made of beryl. All four wheels looked alike and were made the same; each wheel had a second wheel turning crosswise within it. 17) The beings could move in any of the four directions they faced, without turning as they moved. 18) The rims of the four wheels were tall and frightening, and they were covered with eyes all around."
"19) When the living beings moved, the wheels moved with them. When they flew upward, the wheels went up, too. 20) The spirit of the living beings was in the wheels. So wherever the spirit went, the wheels and the living beings also went. 21) When the beings moved, the wheels moved. When the beings stopped, the wheels stopped. When the beings flew upward, the wheels rose up, for the spirit of the living beings was in the wheels."[1]
Good point. I rarely reference that scripture, because honesty, who can make sense of it? Perhaps it’s for a time when people will be able to make sense of it and then we will know what Ezekiel is talking about. By the way, Ezekiel was in a very specific place in Syria when he saw that vision. That place exists now, but I wouldn’t go there.
That seems to be the thing about a lot of the scripture. I wonder to what extent it would have been expressed differently had it been recorded when we have a much more developed vocabulary (and accompanying mental constructs) for these kinds of things.
And as much as I'd like to think that we have sufficiently-developed vocabulary today, I suspect that our own descriptions of "flying saucers" and the like will sound as unclear as Ezekiel's when humans a couple thousand years hence are trying to figure out what we were trying to saying now. As someone who has personally witnessed my own light-up sky-based night-time anomaly (one that doesn't fit the traditional UFO schema), I personally struggle conveying clearly what I saw that night in northeastern NM.
Before I get into my story, I have to be upfront in that I was born into UFO culture (I originally hail from Roswell), and was raised for a large part of my formative years by a grandmother who was the biggest advocate of reading, and devoured things like Time Life's "Mysteries of the Unknown" and any number of trashy paperbacks that featured Grey aliens. I myself at various points in my life jumped into reading more of the mythology, including stuff about USAF's Project Blue Book, the Majestic cabal, etc. If anything, I was NOT the biggest fan of shows like the X-Files, if only how their Vancouver shooting locations didn't actually look anything like the places I grew up. I did enjoy (or more accurately was terrified of) Shyamalan's "Signs" (until that STUPID STUPID reveal and twist), because he put on to the screen (for the first 2/3rds of the film) stuff that I spent the better part of two decades noodling around in my head. I throw all this out there to establish whatever bonafides my unique upbringing may impart.
As for my own sighting, I want to first direct folks to this Google Street View of the two-lane highway between Capulin and Folsom NM (where I grew up in my teen years):
On the right (to the southwest), you can see Capulin Mountain[1], an almost perfectly-preserved cinder cone volcano (if you're in the area, you can drive up to the rim and go into the crater - it's a great time), and to the left (south) of it, you can see Sierra Grande, a large shield volcano about 10 miles away, which I'm told is the largest freestanding mountain in the continental United States (which has been contested[3]). I'm diving into the local volcanology, because those were the two most prominent points of elevation in that corner of New Mexico.
As for my own "sighting", we were driving home from Capulin to Folsom one night in the later part of the '90s (most likely '97 or '98) and we were at a part of the road where both Capulin and Sierra Grande were visible to the south of us. It was dark, but there must have been enough moonlight to see Capulin Mountain, and Sierra Grande was always pretty visible with the array of antennas at its peak. A relative was driving and I saw what looked like a LARGE laser beam of light originate from the peak of Sierra Grande, pointed west, behind Capulin, where it did not continue beyond. We thought this might have been a trick of the light, and pulled over and hopped out to verify what we were seeing directly outside of the vehicle. It looked like a straight beam of light across the sky with none of the expected diffusion and the diameter of the beam had to be anywhere from 20 to 100 feet. (It was hard to tell because it was so straight from our view and didn't seem to obey the regular rules of visual perspective.) We got back into the car, continued home until we couldn't see it any more and that was it. No mention of anything like that from anyone else and I've been unable to pull up any additional details other than our own witness of it.
Now, do I think it was extraterrestrial? Not really. Living in NM, we were not that far from any number of military and research institutions. We lived in an area where a**hole F-111 pilots flying from Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis would use our local canyons and area for flight training and were fond of flying low enough to startle the locals (us). It wasn't uncommon to be in school and hear sonic booms from B-1 training flights that rattled our windows. Los Alamos was to the west of us (and I worked there a couple of summers after graduating, which has its own set of fun stories), so if anything what I saw was probably some form of optical experiment that's likely still classified. My own view on extra-terrestrial life (especially *intelligent* ETs) is that should we encounter one, it's extremely unlikely that we'd recognize it for what it was, given the drastically different evolutionary paths our respective races would follow, as well as us not being able to firmly understand the visiting ET any more than a virus recognizes its host as also being alive, given the vast gulf in capabilities between us and them.
That said, I do reserve a small slice of open-mindedness for ET visits, especially in NM. My story above took place between Capulin and Folsom NM, which is about an hour and a half east of Cimarron NM, which had its own spate of weirdness (cattle mutilations) when I was growing up. Furthermore, aliens crashing in Roswell in 1947 seems more likely than them crashing anywhere else, given that two years prior, mankind detonated its first atomic weapon a not that far west of Roswell at White Sands by Alamagordo. If you're an ET looking for an interesting planet / star system to visit, the one that just blipped on your radar with nuclear weapons might be a good candidate for one hosting life that's climbing the Kardashev Scale[4]. (And if you think that faster-than-light travel is impossible, it gives you a roughly 2-light year bubble around us to search to see where ET may have been hanging out when we blew up Trinity Site, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki and they headed our way.) In my own "aliens might be real" head-canon, my explanation for why UFO sightings may have decreased might be related to changes in how we test nuclear weapons. We don't construct artificial towns in the Utah desert and blow them up to see what happens - we moved a lot of testing underground or to computer simulations (hello, Los Alamos!), and those don't blip as brightly on ET's atomic radar.
And one coda to all of this: last year, an American Airlines pilot made the news with a UFO encounter flying west[5]. When I pulled up the flight path and time where the plane was when the encounter happened, it was right over Union County, roughly 10 miles east of where I saw my weirdness. And it also happened to be pretty much right over where my little brother lives these days (he stuck around - I moved to the big city). I only bring it up to mention that this wackiness continues to touch my life up to the present day.
So, that's probably more than you wanted to know, but now you have it. :-)
I'm a firm believer that everything has a natural, explainable cause. We may not now (or ever) be able to fully find the explanation, and yet one unfailingly exists.
Extraterrestrials? Possible. Man-made drones/UAVs? Very plausible.
The universe is huge. And ever expanding. The idea that we are the only intelligent race of beings in all of creation is absurd. That said the only beings who would have the time and reason to search the vastness of space would be artificial in nature. And then the question becomes, What could we possibly offer a race of super machines capable of that kind of tech. We would be insects and beneath their notice. As far as UFO sightings there are countless reasons within known science for seeing these unexplained objects, there is no reason to reach for the fantastic to explain what is ordinary.
Respect your view. It’s closest to Occam’s Razor. But there’s the Fermi Paradox to deal with. If UFOs are ordinary and explainable, then we are effectively alone in the universe (isolated forever) until we hear from other civilizations.
Well I actually think there is a great likelihood that we have already been visited but again any organic race would be put off by the amount of time it would take to travel here and any artificial intelligence would have witnessed cave men or dinosaurs. I think as humanity matures and we start to actively explore within our solar system we may find that evidence that we lack as of right now, but that's all we will ever find.
I tend to agree with Elon Musk. I've spent a lot of time watching radar blips and never saw anything unexpected. But that was technology nearly 60 years old. The accounts of military pilots who what they are seeing on their sophisticated modern displays does give me pause but the skepticism remains.
Yup. All of this. I absolutely believe that people are seeing "something," but rather than beings from other planets, these are manifestations of the powers and principalities, meant to take our focus off of Father God and set us to pursue other things.
This may also be worth a read:
"We may not know the identities of all the mysterious craft that American military personnel and others have been seeing in the skies as of late, but I have seen more than enough to tell you that it is clear that a very terrestrial adversary is toying with us in our own backyard using relatively simple technologies—drones and balloons—and making off with what could be the biggest intelligence haul of a generation. While that may disappoint some who hope the origins of all these events are far more exotic in nature, the strategic implications of these bold operations, which have been happening for years, undeterred, are absolutely massive."[1]
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones-are-spying-on-the-u-s-and-the-pentagon-acts-like-theyre-ufos
I can't believe you skipped over Ezekiel 1:
"4) As I looked, I saw a great storm coming from the north, driving before it a huge cloud that flashed with lightning and shone with brilliant light. There was fire inside the cloud, and in the middle of the fire glowed something like gleaming amber. 5) From the center of the cloud came four living beings that looked human, 6) except that each had four faces and four wings. 7) Their legs were straight, and their feet had hooves like those of a calf and shone like burnished bronze. 8) Under each of their four wings I could see human hands. So each of the four beings had four faces and four wings. 9) The wings of each living being touched the wings of the beings beside it. Each one moved straight forward in any direction without turning around."
"10) Each had a human face in the front, the face of a lion on the right side, the face of an ox on the left side, and the face of an eagle at the back. 11) Each had two pairs of outstretched wings—one pair stretched out to touch the wings of the living beings on either side of it, and the other pair covered its body. 12) They went in whatever direction the spirit chose, and they moved straight forward in any direction without turning around."
"13) The living beings looked like bright coals of fire or brilliant torches, and lightning seemed to flash back and forth among them. 14) And the living beings darted to and fro like flashes of lightning."
"15) As I looked at these beings, I saw four wheels touching the ground beside them, one wheel belonging to each. 16) The wheels sparkled as if made of beryl. All four wheels looked alike and were made the same; each wheel had a second wheel turning crosswise within it. 17) The beings could move in any of the four directions they faced, without turning as they moved. 18) The rims of the four wheels were tall and frightening, and they were covered with eyes all around."
"19) When the living beings moved, the wheels moved with them. When they flew upward, the wheels went up, too. 20) The spirit of the living beings was in the wheels. So wherever the spirit went, the wheels and the living beings also went. 21) When the beings moved, the wheels moved. When the beings stopped, the wheels stopped. When the beings flew upward, the wheels rose up, for the spirit of the living beings was in the wheels."[1]
[1] https://biblia.com/bible/nlt/ezekiel/1/4-21
Good point. I rarely reference that scripture, because honesty, who can make sense of it? Perhaps it’s for a time when people will be able to make sense of it and then we will know what Ezekiel is talking about. By the way, Ezekiel was in a very specific place in Syria when he saw that vision. That place exists now, but I wouldn’t go there.
That seems to be the thing about a lot of the scripture. I wonder to what extent it would have been expressed differently had it been recorded when we have a much more developed vocabulary (and accompanying mental constructs) for these kinds of things.
And as much as I'd like to think that we have sufficiently-developed vocabulary today, I suspect that our own descriptions of "flying saucers" and the like will sound as unclear as Ezekiel's when humans a couple thousand years hence are trying to figure out what we were trying to saying now. As someone who has personally witnessed my own light-up sky-based night-time anomaly (one that doesn't fit the traditional UFO schema), I personally struggle conveying clearly what I saw that night in northeastern NM.
Do share! Tell us what you saw. If love to hear it if it’s not too personal.
Before I get into my story, I have to be upfront in that I was born into UFO culture (I originally hail from Roswell), and was raised for a large part of my formative years by a grandmother who was the biggest advocate of reading, and devoured things like Time Life's "Mysteries of the Unknown" and any number of trashy paperbacks that featured Grey aliens. I myself at various points in my life jumped into reading more of the mythology, including stuff about USAF's Project Blue Book, the Majestic cabal, etc. If anything, I was NOT the biggest fan of shows like the X-Files, if only how their Vancouver shooting locations didn't actually look anything like the places I grew up. I did enjoy (or more accurately was terrified of) Shyamalan's "Signs" (until that STUPID STUPID reveal and twist), because he put on to the screen (for the first 2/3rds of the film) stuff that I spent the better part of two decades noodling around in my head. I throw all this out there to establish whatever bonafides my unique upbringing may impart.
As for my own sighting, I want to first direct folks to this Google Street View of the two-lane highway between Capulin and Folsom NM (where I grew up in my teen years):
https://www.google.com/maps/@36.7952368,-103.9660768,3a,75y,156.03h,83.59t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1spbNCSA1wNSJilzUYLWOdSg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
On the right (to the southwest), you can see Capulin Mountain[1], an almost perfectly-preserved cinder cone volcano (if you're in the area, you can drive up to the rim and go into the crater - it's a great time), and to the left (south) of it, you can see Sierra Grande, a large shield volcano about 10 miles away, which I'm told is the largest freestanding mountain in the continental United States (which has been contested[3]). I'm diving into the local volcanology, because those were the two most prominent points of elevation in that corner of New Mexico.
As for my own "sighting", we were driving home from Capulin to Folsom one night in the later part of the '90s (most likely '97 or '98) and we were at a part of the road where both Capulin and Sierra Grande were visible to the south of us. It was dark, but there must have been enough moonlight to see Capulin Mountain, and Sierra Grande was always pretty visible with the array of antennas at its peak. A relative was driving and I saw what looked like a LARGE laser beam of light originate from the peak of Sierra Grande, pointed west, behind Capulin, where it did not continue beyond. We thought this might have been a trick of the light, and pulled over and hopped out to verify what we were seeing directly outside of the vehicle. It looked like a straight beam of light across the sky with none of the expected diffusion and the diameter of the beam had to be anywhere from 20 to 100 feet. (It was hard to tell because it was so straight from our view and didn't seem to obey the regular rules of visual perspective.) We got back into the car, continued home until we couldn't see it any more and that was it. No mention of anything like that from anyone else and I've been unable to pull up any additional details other than our own witness of it.
Now, do I think it was extraterrestrial? Not really. Living in NM, we were not that far from any number of military and research institutions. We lived in an area where a**hole F-111 pilots flying from Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis would use our local canyons and area for flight training and were fond of flying low enough to startle the locals (us). It wasn't uncommon to be in school and hear sonic booms from B-1 training flights that rattled our windows. Los Alamos was to the west of us (and I worked there a couple of summers after graduating, which has its own set of fun stories), so if anything what I saw was probably some form of optical experiment that's likely still classified. My own view on extra-terrestrial life (especially *intelligent* ETs) is that should we encounter one, it's extremely unlikely that we'd recognize it for what it was, given the drastically different evolutionary paths our respective races would follow, as well as us not being able to firmly understand the visiting ET any more than a virus recognizes its host as also being alive, given the vast gulf in capabilities between us and them.
That said, I do reserve a small slice of open-mindedness for ET visits, especially in NM. My story above took place between Capulin and Folsom NM, which is about an hour and a half east of Cimarron NM, which had its own spate of weirdness (cattle mutilations) when I was growing up. Furthermore, aliens crashing in Roswell in 1947 seems more likely than them crashing anywhere else, given that two years prior, mankind detonated its first atomic weapon a not that far west of Roswell at White Sands by Alamagordo. If you're an ET looking for an interesting planet / star system to visit, the one that just blipped on your radar with nuclear weapons might be a good candidate for one hosting life that's climbing the Kardashev Scale[4]. (And if you think that faster-than-light travel is impossible, it gives you a roughly 2-light year bubble around us to search to see where ET may have been hanging out when we blew up Trinity Site, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki and they headed our way.) In my own "aliens might be real" head-canon, my explanation for why UFO sightings may have decreased might be related to changes in how we test nuclear weapons. We don't construct artificial towns in the Utah desert and blow them up to see what happens - we moved a lot of testing underground or to computer simulations (hello, Los Alamos!), and those don't blip as brightly on ET's atomic radar.
And one coda to all of this: last year, an American Airlines pilot made the news with a UFO encounter flying west[5]. When I pulled up the flight path and time where the plane was when the encounter happened, it was right over Union County, roughly 10 miles east of where I saw my weirdness. And it also happened to be pretty much right over where my little brother lives these days (he stuck around - I moved to the big city). I only bring it up to mention that this wackiness continues to touch my life up to the present day.
So, that's probably more than you wanted to know, but now you have it. :-)
[1] https://www.nps.gov/cavo/index.htm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Grande
[3] https://sites.google.com/site/mountainfables/home/standalone
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R72sAe2VXDE
Good story. Weird stuff in NM, for sure.
Not too personal at all. I'll see what I can share when I have some more time to write something better than a drive-by comment.
I'm a firm believer that everything has a natural, explainable cause. We may not now (or ever) be able to fully find the explanation, and yet one unfailingly exists.
Extraterrestrials? Possible. Man-made drones/UAVs? Very plausible.
The universe is huge. And ever expanding. The idea that we are the only intelligent race of beings in all of creation is absurd. That said the only beings who would have the time and reason to search the vastness of space would be artificial in nature. And then the question becomes, What could we possibly offer a race of super machines capable of that kind of tech. We would be insects and beneath their notice. As far as UFO sightings there are countless reasons within known science for seeing these unexplained objects, there is no reason to reach for the fantastic to explain what is ordinary.
Respect your view. It’s closest to Occam’s Razor. But there’s the Fermi Paradox to deal with. If UFOs are ordinary and explainable, then we are effectively alone in the universe (isolated forever) until we hear from other civilizations.
Well I actually think there is a great likelihood that we have already been visited but again any organic race would be put off by the amount of time it would take to travel here and any artificial intelligence would have witnessed cave men or dinosaurs. I think as humanity matures and we start to actively explore within our solar system we may find that evidence that we lack as of right now, but that's all we will ever find.
I tend to agree with Elon Musk. I've spent a lot of time watching radar blips and never saw anything unexpected. But that was technology nearly 60 years old. The accounts of military pilots who what they are seeing on their sophisticated modern displays does give me pause but the skepticism remains.
"military pilots who know what they are seeing"