Don't know if anyone is familiar with this topic, i just watched a program on Discovery channel that covered it, and made me annoyed by its simple minded view of it.

Basically there were a number of UFO sightings over a number of nights of lights in the sky over Phoenix Arizona. The special thing was that they were in a formation of either a v shape or an arc.

I have seen the string formation of the same phenomena over Poole Harbour, in Dorset England.

This programme did the whole alien and consiracy theory thing which was really very very poorly done. I am certain that it is a natural phenomenom and not extra terrestrial. It just seemed so natural to watch, and did not show any signs of being controlled by an intelligence.

I had this experience, among company, in August last year, on a night of heavy meteor activity, in fact that is why i was out watching the skies.

What i would like to hear from you is what you think it was/is?

It's apparent that the same thing happens world wide, and that it is probably ball lightning or similar and related to the incurrsions into the atmosphere, but what do you think?

I have had a hard time finding any information on it, either on the web or in libraries.

Here's my artists impression of what i saw, just to clarify what i'm talking about:

http://www.closertogod.net/main/images/UFOPoole.jpg

it could be ball lightning, Laz, or airplanes (from the nearby airport).  I've been to Tucson, AZ (not sure how close that is to Pheonix), but never saw anything unusual in the sky.  

Dan's an expert on lightning and its triggering. Perhaps he can shed some light on this possible natural phenomenon.

I doubt it's ball lightning, and it certainly doesn't look like ordinary lightning. Maybe it's a queue of aircraft, military or civilian. Or maybe it's little green men.

Suppose a meteor, as it's flying through the air, is heated and the outer portion explodes leaving ionization to form ball lightning. Then it heats again and repeats. As it slows due to air drag it starts to arc lower in the sky. That hypothesis will account for the observation as represented by the photograph.

I doubt ball lightning, if it is possible all, can persist for very long. I wonder, how long were these lights reported to persist?

Sorry guys i didn't see that you were posting on this topic.

Well it happend at about 2230 as we were diving home from the beach. Ali spotted some guy staring at the sky out of our window and then saw the lights, at which point she shoutted Stop. He'd been standing there for at least a minute.

We parked and got out of the car, walked to the waters edge and stood there for about 5 minutes watching these lights moving slowly across the sky before i suggested we go home to get a camera, we got back in the car and I started to drive but after another minute or so Ali shouted from the open window to stop again as the first light had disappeared.

We stopped again and i stood out of the door to see and the lights one by one down the line started to fizzle out. We had seen them for about 7 minutes and i guess the guy who first caught alis Attention had been standing there for a minute or so. So maybe 10 minutes in all.

if you go here you can find a map of the area and the arrow points to where we stopped to look:
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=40...p=newsearch.srf

Don't know if the areas geology or geography has anything to do with it? Oh and the lights were coming towards us from over brownsea island.

Closest answer i've been offered is that it was kids letting off a succession of trash bag hot air balloons!

maybe it was a queue of commercial aircraft, waiting for a turn to land?

I understand how that could be seen from the description, but they were too low, too slow, and we have a crappy little airport!

I think Dan i'm going to have to chalk it up to being unkown :0)

Perhaps parachute flares, dispensed in a line by a military aircraft.

Or from military boats... What a fine idea!
It would explain the orange light, the slow movement, and the fading out after a short time. The SBS are based in Poole and could well have been on exercise that night.

Thank you Rick, I think we have a winner :0) My unknown is known, I'll have to retract what i said about them in the other topic...

Glad to be of service.

A quick check of Phoenix Arizona reveals Luke Air Force base, which is a training facility for F16 pilots. Very coincidental don't you think?

Flares has got to be it.

http://www.yorkepeninsula.com/magsboating/images/rocket1.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights

Thanks Dan, that pretty much wraps it up for me :0)

Actually this really throws into doubt any ufo story i have read. The wikipedia entry for the phoenix lights has the most ludicrous claims as to what the lights were, and having seen the same thing i have to conclude that these people who report them as giant spaceships are absolute nuts.

I think the reason those mysteries never get solved is that everyone seems to think the explanation cannot be original. Be it airplanes, baloons, even UFOs, the explanations offered are always the same. But the problem with those explanations, even the UFO ones (especially the UFO ones!) is that they only go so far. Something always remains unexplained.

I personally think those things happen because of phenomena we cannot ordinarily conceive. It should be obvious that there is a lot of stuff going on in the atmosphere, perhaps even in outer space, just as there is a lot of stuff going on at the bottom of the sea. We can't study those things long enough to understand them, but that doesn't mean they have to be similar to the things we are already familiar with. The bottom of the sea for one is a very strange place!

It makes sense to me to think the space above our heads is not empty and devoid of life. I have no idea what is there - beings made of plasma, holographic phenomena, distortions in spacetime, whatever - but it sure looks like a very interesting place.

My preferred hypothesis is that outer space is completely lifeless. A single counterexample will serve to disprove my idea.

Their is no reason why the universe should have life, nor one that it shouldnt. However if water falls when poured from a glass in China, why should it be any diffrent here?

The conventional wisdom holds that since the origination of life requires merely the right conditions and lots of coincidences, then given a very large number of stars and planets, it must also exist elsewhere. This is logical. However, the observation does not support the logic. Fermi's paradox asks "if life is ubiquitous, why aren't they here?" UFO sightings do not hold up as credible evidence.

Given the lack of evidence of life in the stars, and the strong evidence against it on the Moon, Mars, and Venus, the unlikely hypothesis becomes more attractive: the universe is sterile, except here.

There is also the irrefutable fact that life in the universe had to start first somewhere. Why not here?

Lastly there is the philosophical argument that inclines me to my hypothesis: what we do here is of ultimate importance if this is all that there is. So until evidence suggests otherwise, we are alone with ourselves and must make the most of it.

Hmm, I do not support the UFO sighting either, they rely on poor images and discredible eye witness'. Although I do agree life has to start somewhere Rick, we may be tiny ants, to ants we could be giant mountains, to the next larger species we could be foolish imbicils who worry about how they look rather than what life will be like in the next while. The hypnothisis does indeed become more attractive, but not nessecarily more plausible, people have a hard enough time defining what life is, for all we know we could be a science project for some kid.. The problem is not that their may or may not be other life in this universe but what about beyond the universe? beyond our conscious? what lies beyond what we cannot yet see?

That's like saying rocks don't exist on the moon because I can't see them with my eyeballs. There may well be billions of life-infested planets, but they are too far away to observe adequately and/or travel to/from.

god's out there and waiting too see if we reverse on abortion rights here in the US. That's his queu to bring hell on earth.

There might be blue meatballs on the moon too, but because we can't see that they're not there from the earth, does that mean that we should hypothesize their existence?

Perhaps I wasn't sufficiently clear. Allow me to rephrase the assertion. There is no question that life is not only possible in the stars, but probable. However, observations run counter to theoretical probability (Fermi's paradox). Therefore, until evidence suggests otherwise, my working hypothesis is that we are alone.

The next logical question is that if one's working hypothesis is likely to stir up so much protestation of lack of "visionary" acumen, then why bother?

The answer, that I alluded to above, is that it matters ethically. In my attempt to answer the question "what is a life well lived (for me or maybe others)?", I have concluded that life is good, that human life in particular is rather cool, and that continuation of such might be a good thing to promote. What needs doing in the very long run is affected by potential relationships with other life (exobiology), intelligent or otherwise. If there are hundreds of civilizations among the roughly 2,000 local stars non-prosthetically visible on a clear night, then in the grand scheme of things if we destroy this particular planet, it will mean somewhat less than if this place has the only life that will ever start from scratch. As an experienced engineer, I know the value of using worst case assumptions in project planning.

Why would we hypothesize blue meatballs on the moon? Surely you aren't suggesting that all hypotheses are equally viable.

How do you figure? Maybe the probability of intelligent life landing on earth or sending a probe here isn't as great as Fermi assumed, or maybe (insert reason here). Here's an interesting rundown of arguments on this issue

That Wikipedia entry just about covers it. I'm not saying that we need to settle the argument now. I'm just saying that for the practical purposes of decision making today we need to assume we are alone in the universe, and if later new evidence contradicts that assumption, that we then revise our policy.

During my PhD I was coached to imagine everything and not assume anything, and that was the stimulus for directed work. If we don't imagine that there is life out there, then why would we bother to look for it? Just like why would we bother to study the brain if we assume that we would never understand it; rather we imagine that we might understand it, and get on with it! From a personal viewpoint, if we are alone, then I feel depressed (why? - you might conjecture), although if there is no other life now, it does not mean that it will not pop up at some future time. The fact is, that we have evidence that life can appear within the resources of the universe - here. So why not imagine it has occurred elsewhere? I look for shooting stars every cloudless night (very relaxing) and whilst I'm doing it I imagine that someone out there is looking towards here. It's my way of trying to use both sides of the brain. I have to try something - you've seen my poetry!

Just break down the word assume:
When you assume you make an ass of u and me

A human being who can't make reasonable assumptions can't effectively operate in the real world. If you examine human mental processing closely, you will see that making rapid accurate assumptions is the norm in daily life. The key to effective planning is making good assumptions.

Here's an example. Suppose I travel from California to England. In making my hotel reservations, I assume the plane will arrive on time. It might not be the case that the flight is not delayed, but it is the best assumption under the circumstances. If the flight is delayed, I modify my travel plans accordingly.

One of the hallmarks of a good planner is making assumptions explicit and then revising plans as new information comes in contradicting assumptions. Engineers are trained to do this. Scientists are also trained to make simplifying assumptions, to list them, and to evaluate the sensitivity of their results to any assumptions that might not be true.

So therefore, that old saw about making an "ass out of you and me" is fully debunked. Assumptions, explicitly stated and subject to modification, are essential to human life.

So, I am supposed to assume what you said to be true just because...

I had assumed that what I was writing was an appeal to reason, but maybe I was wrong.

hmm assumptions are funny things, I agree with buttons that making assumptions is not good practice and when in search of information I like to take the meta model approach. However it is with these assumptions that we function, having to validate everything leads to very very long periods of time do a simple task. It should be noted that assumptions are used very well in so many diffrent forms, you assume that because a company says something will happen it will, if they dont it should be false advertising however proper and careful wording allows for a consumer to assume something to be true without the company having to state it. eg, our product has the highest concentration of natural ingredients, in the study done about natural ingredients it showed that all companys surveyed had the same amount. Assumptions is how people are tricked, scammed and fooled everyday, although it may be next to nearly impossible to live without making any assumptions, you can always make less of them and be more prepared.

Rick you know what I mean, I'm sure. Assumptions are fine and alongside imaginations lead to the well rounded usage of an intelligent brain.

A good example of a good assumption.

Some assumptions are trivial because they have a high probability of being correct. We need to focus more on the non-trivial assumptions.

For example, when one gets up in the night to go to the bathroom, he might not turn on the light because he assumes nobody has moved a chair into the path from the bed. That's a trivially good assumption. It illustrates that we habitually and constantly make assumptions, and that if we didn't, if we had to be indecisive at every turn, we would be functionally paralyzed.

In formal situations, such as early iterations in engineering design, it is good practice to write out all assumptions so that all team members and customer representatives understand the consequences of wrong assumptions, and how information can be obtained to reduce the number of assumptions being taken, thus reducing risk.

In the current thread, the topic of unexplained sky phenomena, the "we are alone in the universe" assumption is a good one because it doesn't bias an investigation toward extra terrestrial explanations, which have been shown to be enormous time wasters in the past. However, if there should some day appear hard evidence of ET life, then that formerly good assumption will need to be erased.

Not only do I not believe this assumption is necessary for practical policy, I believe it is unreasonable. It is basically an extremist skeptical posture, saying "until I see it, it isn't there". Perhaps this position feels comfortable to you, but to me it appears as extremist scientific conservatism which doesn't feel very enlightening.

You were not wrong. Your assumption was right this time.

Yes, I know, it flies in the face of the conventional wisdom. Your reaction is conventional, according to my experience. Every scientist I have ever read or conversed with also agrees with you and is against my position. Sometimes I just have to defy the conventional wisdom. It seems right to me.

One credible counterexample will totally destroy my position, of course. It's entirely falsifiable.

So if everyone "feels" that they're really out there (in spite of the fact that SETI (of which I am a certificated participant) has been demonstrating in the negative for 20 years), why do I disagree? Because, as I said above, assuming there are multiple civilizations in the stars makes our actions on Earth seem less imporant than they really might be.

It's what I call the "magnitude of the crime" argument (MCA), not that it's really necessary. It may be only an intellectual curiosity. The argument goes like this:

If the galaxy is teeming with civilizations, and we destroy life on this planet, we have done a relatively small harm in the grand scheme of things. If this planet has the only life in the universe, then the crime would be infinitely more enormous.

Unnecessary harm is always evil, of course, so having ETs flying around unseen does not excuse the corporatists in power these days. Therefore, the MCA is not strictly necessary, but it does head off the "so what, other life will still exist" argument (which I have actually heard from more than one person).

the problem I'm having with your argument is the implication that we must either assume a "teeming with life/x-files" position or a "it ain't there till I see it" position. I in no way assume the universe is 'teeming with life'. In fact, at a given moment, there may be less (or far less) than one planet per galaxy with life intelligent enough to bury its own poo. I simply assume that life is a function of the proper physical conditions and that, given the number of stars in the observable universe (10^22) vs. the conditions necessary for life, it seems unreasonable to assume that earth is the only lucky winner.

I'm tending to side with Rick on this subject. The idea of assuming and of guessing is really a control mechanism that's been forced upon you. It's actually far more enlightened to say that unless i experience something directly it is none of my concern.

Taking responsibilty for your environment and what happens in it is not an ego trip, where as dreaming about what might be; certainly is. Polysolipsism

This isn't Rick's position. He admits to making many assumptions, as described a few posts prior to this one. The assumption of his that I am contesting is that the position "there may be extra-terrestrial life" has strong negative consequences on society and therefore is best countered by holding the position "there isn't any extra-terrestrial life". I am saying that a reasonable position concerning the possibility of extra-terrestrial life is both scientifically credible and need not be damaging to society. Unreasonable x-files-type positions may be damaging, but I am not advocating such positions. I am trying to determine whether Rick's "ain't no aliens until they land in my back yard" position is what he really believes or is an attempt at promoting what he sees as 'socially helpful' propaganda.

Ah, you want to know my True Belief!

If I were a betting man (and sometimes I am), and I had to bet right now, and there was some reasonable assurance that we could find out for sure, then I would bet that the only life in the universe currently in existence is right here on Earth.

How about this bet: there will be no generally accepted proof of life elsewhere within the next ten years. If I am right Dan pays me a dollar. If I am wrong I pay Dan ten dollars.

Bizarrely enough i've just seen a advert on Discovery channel for the Phoenix lights program again! As it's such rubbish i'd like a piece of this action and put an English pound on there being no life anywhere else in the universe. Life that is brought from earth and manages to survive on another panet doesn't count ;0)

The bacteria we brought to the moon are long dead, dead, dead, shot throuth and through with hard radiation.

Discovery channel also keeps showing those debunked crop circles programs!

Therefore, you believe that there is no life but that on Earth at the moment. This is a weaker form of the earth-centric hypothesis, but still quite strong.


It is an interesting bet, but I am not convinced that we will find such proof in 10 or even 100 years so I would not want to misrepresent my position by acquiescing

Life is abundant, for the time being, right here on Earth. Certainly, if life is developing independently elsewhere, that lends a measure of redundancy in the quest for survival. However, that assurance, as you mention, is probably unavailable in the forseeable future. Therefore, space colonization is necessary if we are to have assurance of survival in the long run. Getting all the eggs out of the single basket, so to speak, is necessary.

I understand your "position" with regard to the liklihood of hypothetical verity (based on the large sample sapce). The odds are on your side, but irony also seems to be a recurring attribute of existence (e.g. Murphy's law).

Let's not forget, that life here started small. I assume, with my little imagination, that there will be lots of life out there of the bacterial kind. They won't be landing here just yet! Who knows how much survival and evolution might have occurred to generate advanced life forms, even in the 10 billion years before life started here? But it's interesting to imagine it, and its interesting to think about other ways of trying to find it. If Anton van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke hadn't had an interest in seeing if there were little critters in the world, they wouldn't have invented the microscope. When they had the microscope, they could see the little critters. We need to imagine that life exists out there, and then get on with devising methods to detect it. Otherwise we might never see what there might be. But that's science, eh?

The upcoming Mars Sample Return Mission will let us look at the rocks under a microscope. I'll bet they're sterile. The next likely place to look is the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, but the radiation there is intense due to those moons orbiting within the magnetic radiation belts of those planets. It's also pretty cold for the kinds of chemical reactions necessary for originating life. After that we need to go to Alpha Centauri, which will take a few hundred thousand years with current technology.

Would you bet (and how much) on the existence of primordial soups in the Universe?

Yes, if there were some way to verify it. Superluminal space travel isn't going to happen any time soon. By the Drake equation, some frequency of occurrence of earth-like planets can be calculated, and of course, they will have liquid water with disolved salts and gasses, etc., with lightning creating amides and ureas, so all the basic molecules will be present. As these chemical experiments have been run in vitro with no life spontaneously appearing in the laboratory, the level of unliklihood for life arising is unknown.

Bottom line: I bet the soups exist (ten million Euros, at least) in this and other galaxies but there is no way to prove (or disprove) it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4790126.stm

Saturn moon 'may have an ocean'

This false-colour image shows the extent of the active region (Image: Nasa/JPL/SSI)
Saturn's moon Enceladus could harbour a liquid water ocean beneath its icy crust, according to data sent back by the Cassini spacecraft.
Until Cassini reached Saturn, the tiny moon had received little attention.

But Enceladus is now the focus of intensive study following the discovery that it is geologically active.

Enceladus may possess reservoirs of near-surface liquid water that erupt to form geysers - and where there's water, there may be life, scientists argue.

These jets have been observed erupting from a "hot spot" in the moon's south polar region.

Scientists on the mission have likened them to the kinds of geysers found in Yellowstone National Park in the US.


Click here to see how activity may be generated on Enceladus
"We realise that this is a radical conclusion - that we may have evidence for liquid water within a body so small and so cold," said Dr Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, US.

"However, if we are right, we have significantly broadened the diversity of Solar System environments where we might possibly have conditions suitable for living organisms. It doesn't get any more exciting than this."

Dr Jeffrey Kargel, from the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, US, believes that shifting, glacier-like tectonic plates and tidal forces could generate and trap heat to produce the activity seen on Enceladus.

His modelling also allows for a deep liquid water ocean saturated with gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2). This CO2 may either be locked up in the icy crust or may exist as an icy clathrate seafloor below the hypothesised ocean.

Other researchers on the Cassini mission say the plume at the south pole may be erupting from near-surface pockets of liquid water above 0C (32 F), like cold versions of the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone Park.

"There are other moons in the Solar System that have liquid water oceans covered by kilometres of icy crust," said Dr Andrew Ingersoll from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena.

"What's different here is that pockets of liquid water may be no more than 10 metres below the surface."

Jupiter's icy moon Europa is also thought to host a briny ocean beneath its crust of ice. Neptune's moon Triton has an icy volcanic surface from which break forth plumes of nitrogen.

But they haven't been run for a billion years as happened on early Earth before life appeared. And do we really know exactly what the ingredients should be? For example, how much electrical input and for how long?