Aliens

what are the origins of the now iconic generic alien look as seen here:

http://www.egr.msu.edu/~fergus52/alien.gif

(i think the ubiquity of communion in airport bookshops took that model global and caused it to be handily agreed on, generally, sine so many people had seen it clearly)

(ie there was much cultural range in re the shape aliens take prior to [something]: in brazil the most famous abductee said they were women w.giant breats and bright red hair)

(ie it only generally coalesced into that specific iconic figure relatively recently)

Where did the 'green' thing originally come from, then?

http://www.xdream.freeserve.co.uk/Communionalien.jpg

http://home.pacific.net.au/~drjon/schwa/schwa_logo.gif

the middle one is the original cover to communion

oh and the middle pic annoys me - it's head shape does not look sufficient proportionately to house an average human-sized brain which i would've thought would be the bare minimum for a species capable of intergalactic travel and an interest in anal probes (couldn't they just read a medical textbook?). there's a wry grin on it's face too, probably used it for space travelcard or something.

now that's better - silver jumpsuits are due a revival

Steve - you can't even see its body to judge the proportions, you mentalist! And since when do aliens have brains like ours, or even brains? Maybe intelligence is distributed through their body?

xpost

and nick i'm talking about the space above it's eyes. if it's brain is not in it's head then why is everything else relatively in the right place - why the need for two eyes etc. - it never struck me as very logical. it's the wry smile as well. the face is so blank and featureless, as if designed to not communicate emotion thru facial movements (the nose and mouth are usually absurdly small compared to the eyes). in short, they suck - and i'm glad it turns out they probably don't exist after all (except in your mind, man)

For a laugh, one of the scientists decided to run it *forwards* rather than backwards, and - the eyes and forehead expanding while the jaw and brow grew less pronounced - the result a couple of million years into the future looked just like the "traditional" space alien!

Perhaps future, more advanced being = even more neotenous.

But it is more likely that this is a psychological thing. I once read of a survey of ppl who claimed to be alien abductees where all those who had claimed to had left the spacecraft through a tunnel had natural childbirth and all those who spoke of doors were born by Casesarian section.

The article I read did note the similarity between the "evolutionary future human" and a foetus.

If you are in a film, and you meet someone with an English accent, be very afraid. This is the rule. Like, all Nazis speak perfect English with cartoon German accents.

also: how does either neoteny theory lead to most of freud? his deal was surely (right or wrong in any other way) the ousting of biology-as-destiny?

(bah i wish i had a schwa T-shirt w.THAT on it)

Haeckel drew pictures of embryonic/foetal development at various stages to show how a mammal looks like a fish in the eraly stages of devlopment in the womb, then later like a reptile, just like the evolutionary stages. Except that it doesn't. He saw what he wanted to see.

(bah i wish i had a schwa T-shirt w.THAT on it)

I miss the Schwa Corporation stuff...

NO ONE DID SEE :(

It's more likely than not that there have been millions of civilizations somewhere among the hundreds of billions of stars within a hundred thousand light years of Earth, i.e., in this galaxy alone. It isn't more likely than not that any of them have found their way to this insignificant little world, even though it was more than 60 years ago that the democrats nuked Japan, thereby sending an electromagnetic pulse into space announcing that we have some technologically brilliant scientists and some sociopaths here. If we humans had evidence of such shenanigans on another planet, we'd be hard at work trying to find a way to go out there and have a look, working around the fact that our present knowledge says that it can't be done in anyone's lifetime.

As for believing in alien visitation...there are millions of people right now in this country who believe that a grandiloquent, done-nothing mediocre senator whose only notable accomplishment has been emphasizing a few of the myriad reasons why Bill Clinton's wife shouldn't be president, and who listened to two decades of anti-America vitriol from his "spiritual guide" without lifting a finger in his country's defense, ought to be Commander in Chief. Such people shouldn't have any trouble believing in extraterrestrians or anything else. If Barack Hussein Obama, a gifted orator (a complete description), tells them the aliens are teen-aged space-Mormon "elders" sent here to preach the joys of polygamy, they'll believe it.

i am totally copping that line of argument sometime

Isn't someone going to show a "real" living Ailien on video somewhere today? Denver or something?

Where did I read this? Don't remember

Denver Man Makes Alien Claim

Call me a doubter, but I'm a little skeptic.

http://simianfarmer.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/lackoffaith.jpg

Call me a doubter, but I'm a little skeptic.

http://www.criticalgamers.com/archives/pictures/LittleGerman.7.19.06.jpg

Alien will be mans dog in wearing a hat.

(a complete description)

ah wikipedia

Also, he has claimed that the red rain in Kerala is a biological entity, which is huge if true.[6]

Lol The microbiologist they are quoting has been dead for a decade!

there's a lot if that on ilx recently, cf rolling obit thread.

maybe ilx is purgatory and anyone we mention can reliably be presumed deceased by now

CONTROVERSIAL LIST REDACTED

directed panspermia as a potential origin of life on earth is interesting

it's also compelling, to me, to you bake in the notion that there are alien communication signals out there that we've yet to develop the capacity to collect--as if the seeds were planted with a tape recorder, and barring a downward shift in technological development we plants might any day now figure out how to press play

Modern views of abiogenesis (esp recent ones focused on deep sea alkaline hydrothermal vents) are adequate to account for an independent arising of microbes on Earth some 3.8-4.3 billion years ago, and there's no extant evidence of latter arrivals. All life uses essentially the same energy apparatus and genetic code, though there are enough differences between Eubacteria (on one side) and Archaea / Eukaryotes to suggest DNA replication and membrane synthesis either diverged extremely early or had two independent origins.

That's not to say that it had to be on Earth. Earth gets peppered with bolide ejecta from Mars on a regular basis, and some microbes seem to survive long passages through the radiation and vacumn of space. It's plausible that life first originated on Mars, and supplanted feeble early attempts on Earth; or vice versa. Moreover, the solar system regularly passes through regions of higher stellar density, where life conceivably could be exchanged between systems. Enough generations of this, with sufficiently durable microbes, and in time every remotely habitable planet in the galaxy could be exposed to life from a single origin. Not directed panspermia, just the numbers game of nonnillion microbes on Earth, trillions ejected into space, handfuls still viable upon landing elsewhere. That may be the fate of our galaxy. More terrifyingly, its plausible that another, fundamentally more efficient form of microbial life could be making the rounds, and just hasn't landed here, yet.

As for the Fermi paradox, it appears complex life (eukaryotes) evolved only once on Earth. The universe may be teeming with microbes, but the transition to complex life is far more fraught. Intelligence doesn't seem much of a bulwark against environmental/civilizational collapse, indeed any evolved dominant species may follow have resource demand/social status perogatives incompatible with preserving its own cradle. And given any species that can dominate a planet is likely rapacious, those few that manage to adopt sustainable behavior, suitable to finite planets or colonization ships, may find preemptively exterminating others an imperative. The smarter species, recognizing this, would lay low, and not broadcast their presence.

i’m with terence mckenna, mushrooms are extraterrestrial in origin

*sees through time, dies*

Astronomers have spotted a second repeating fast radio burst, and it looks a lot like the first. The existence of a second repeating burst suggests there could be many more of the mysterious signals in the cosmos.

The burst, called FRB 180814.J0422+73, is one of 13 newly discovered fast radio bursts, or FRBs — brief, bright signals of radio energy that come from distant galaxies. The FRBs were detected over a few weeks last year by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, in British Columbia. Astronomers reported the discoveries at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on January 7 and in the Jan. 9 Nature.

Most such bursts erupt once, last for a few milliseconds, and are never seen again. So astronomers have puzzled over what causes them for years.

“If you have something that flashes for a millisecond in the sky, and there’s nothing that happens for many years, it’s really hard to study,” says astronomer Shriharsh Tendulkar of McGill University in Montreal, a member of the CHIME team....

Astronomers’ theories for what causes FRBs are almost as numerous as known FRBs themselves. At one point, astronomers even considered the idea that FRBs could be signals from intelligent aliens. But it’s unclear if the repeating bursts and single bursts both come from the same kinds of sources, or even if one-offs might also repeat if watched for long enough.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/second-repeating-fast-radio-burst-tracked-distant-galaxy

"Calculations show that the new repeater is about 1.6 billion light-years away. The CHIME team also saw an odd similarity between the two known repeating bursts. Most FRBs are just a sharp blip, akin to a single note being played on a trumpet. But some of the individual bursts in both repeaters were made up of multiple sub-bursts that descended in frequency, like the “wah wah wah wah” of a sad trombone."

I think someone is bouncing our old sitcom soundtracks back to us

hey guys
https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/ufos-the-central-intelligence-agency-cia-collection/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/16/pentagon-ufos-leaked-photos-uap

As I posted on the other thread earlier today, this is being handled by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, which is a real missed opportunity for Space Force.

Hey man, they have a whole lotta space to enforce without worrying about the unidentified objects flying through that space.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/us/politics/ufos-sighting-alien-spacecraft-pentagon.html

starting to think this is mostly just some radar spoofing tech

Why, aren't there a lot of visual reports too?

This guy is a pretty obsessive debunker, iirc, almost to a fault, but this was a pretty easy demonstration of one sighting's possible cause:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r2oaQWmqkk

the most compelling are the GIMBAL and GOFAST videos and that's all just instrument footage

Btw this was a good overview article (covers Mick West, Leslie Kean, etc):
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/how-the-pentagon-started-taking-ufos-seriously

yeah, I liked that article, but like a lot of reporting it felt pretty incomplete, because it has to be incomplete, because unidentified aerial phenomena etc.

the officially sanctioned 'disclosure' with elizondo et al is now alluding to remote viewing, skinwalkers, and all kinds of batshit stuff. it's been hugely entertaining to casually pay attention but i still don't understand the 'why'. concealing tech would have been one thing but now i think they're trying to drive people insane/divert from qanon? they're basically restarting the ufo cults

i mean, look at this shit. it has a harry reid quote on the cover!

https://www.amazon.com/Skinwalkers-Pentagon-Insiders-Account-Government/dp/B09HR54GQF

also i’ve bought some jacque vallee books. man is fascinating

Jacques Vallée is a seriously cool dude

I quite enjoy the pic in that first post Guardian article

it’s slightly lonely being a left wing UFO guy since it's the purview of so many art bell adjacent cranks, but can someone here please explain to me why the government tried to pass a bill saying they would seize technology of nonhuman origin from military contractors and then why did the contractors use their influence to scuttle the important parts of the bill if there is nothing there and it’s all a distraction or whatever. facts and logic me please. this has been deeply fascinating and weird to follow the last few years and the topic and it’s ‘lore’ has never gotten to the level of actual legislation before

https://i.imgur.com/yHaYFOC.png
https://i.imgur.com/mnDTjL5.png
https://i.imgur.com/6d67dbl.png
https://i.imgur.com/lkN0EGl.png

yes i want to believe etc etc but what is going on here

'mirage men' the book goes into the extensive history of intel services using UFO shit as a smokescreen for advanced projects but to my knowledge the civilian branches have never bitten to this extent

government passing a bill is easy - if there's something there they want to know, if not then no harm. plus as mirage men shows, gullible & venal senators are happy to sign up to anything that sees money coming their way. don't know about the contractors - healthy and sensible scepticism? don't know the ins & outs of what you're referring to though.

"non-human intelligence"?