SASQUATCH

 

 

Aliens, the New Jersey Devil, Big Foot, Angels, Satin, Nessie, Gods, Ghost, Monsters, Shape Shifters…

 

A Scottish Prayer

From goulies and ghosties

And long leggedy beasties

And things that go bump in the night

Good Lord deliver us

 

Human beings are not rational animals.  We are capable of rational thought, applying logic, and accepting beliefs based on facts, but it is much easier to believe that truth is what we wish it to be.

 

The credulity of our nature makes us receptive to accepting beliefs without questioning glaring inconsistencies.    Sometimes we believe implausible premises because we have been indoctrinated by our parents or our community, and sometimes we accept a popular belief simply because the idea appeals to us.

Often the more outlandish the premise of our belief, the more fundamentalist we can become and dogmatically defend the indefensible.

 

In other cases, it is just fun to buy into long leggedy beasties – a wish to believe that there are things beyond our discernable norm.

I have to admit, for years I wanted to believe in sasquatch, the skunk ape, or bigfoot – all the same creature but existing in different areas of North America.  I had no proof of Big Foot, but I wanted to believe that a mystery existed, and my justification was eyewitness accounts of sightings or encounters.

 

In the scientific world, human eyewitness accounts are considered unreliable (I swear I saw a ninety-foot-necked alien woman step out of a UFO that landed in my backyard – and my buddy saw it too!).

The Big Foot craze began in 1958. 

 

 In 1952 the SciFi movie The Abominable Snow Man was released to theaters.  This was followed in 1954 by the movie The Snow Creature.   These sparked an interest in the reported Yeti sightings in the Himalayas.

 

In 1958  Andrew Genzoli, a reporter at The Humbolt Times in Eureka, California printed a story about loggers finding a large footprint.   Genzoli joked that maybe we have a relative of the Abominable Snow Man of the Himalayas

 

That set the seed.

 

There is a minuscule possibility that a large, undiscovered, humanoid animal could exist in remote forested areas, but there is no proof.

 

My skepticism is that in 66 years no creature has been found.  No Big Foot has ever been hit by a car.  No corpse has ever been discovered as the result of natural or accidental death, by hunters or hikers.   No Big Foot has been captured.   We have some fuzzy photographs, some dubious plaster cast of footprints, and hundreds of – Me and my buddy saw Big Foot.

 

I will readily accept the existence of Big Foot: when you show me the body.

the Ol’Buzzard

 

 

ARE THERE ALIENS AMONG US?

 

 

Yes, so says QAnon; but over two hundred of them hung around Dallas, Texas for two months waiting for President Kennedy to come back to life to run as Donald Trump’s Vice President.

Reptilian aliens disguised as humans running the deep state… 

Enough of the Q-crazy section of the MAGA crowd.

 

Life surely exists elsewhere in the universe.   Our Milky Way galaxy is estimated to contain over one hundred billion stars (100,000,000,000).

 

  The latest estimate of the number of galaxies in our observable universe exceeds two trillion (2,000,000,000,000).

 

Our Milky Way galaxy is dwarfed by some of the megagalaxies.   But just to establish a number possible to work with, to estimate the number of stars in our observable universe,  let us presume all galaxies as relative to the Milky Way containing one hundred billion stars (100,000,000,000 stars).

 

Using these numbers as a reference, the number of stars in our observable universe would be at least two sextillion stars – that is two with twenty-one zeroes: 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

 

Not all stars have planets, and only a small percentage are within the Goldilocks zone where temperatures are not too hot, not too cold, and are just right to sustain life as we know it. But when we consider a number as large as two sextillion, the number of stars containing planets that could develop life is enormous.

 

One of the problems when we talk about alien life is our egocentric view that we as humans are the standard reference.  We invent gods in our image and we do the same with aliens: arms, legs, heads, eyes, and the ability to communicate at our level of understanding.

  

If we were to back up and rerun evolution on Earth to the very beginning, it is unlikely that we would even exist.

 

 The world operates in chaos, and the events that caused five extinctions and allowed human development could not be counted on to happen in the same sequence or any sequence.   If any one of the gargantuan number of random natural choices that led to our development didn’t happen we would not be the alpha life form on this planet, and most likely not exist.

 

That homo-sapiens exist on the earth at all is strictly the result of a random number of events – uncontrolled chaos.

 

We should not be searching for alien life, because that uses us, humans, as the standard. Instead, we should be looking for extraterrestrial life.

 

I find it ludicrous that we constantly search for intelligent life.   Who the hell are we to use our human intellect as a standard for intelligence?  We still have people claiming that the Earth is flat, that the Earth is six thousand years old, and that a six hundred-year-old man loaded two of every animal on Earth in a boat and repopulated the world after an extinction flood. 

 

Life on other planets might be plant-based, aquatic-based, microscopic, avian, insect, or even some form of non-carbon-based life not yet imagined.

 

 There are certainly other random lifeforms in this universe than us.

 

Are there aliens among us?  Yes.   Many of us look at humanity and feel we don’t belong. 

the Ol’Buzzard

 

 

 

UFO SIGHTINGS

 

Beliefs are different than facts.   Often things or events that people would like to be true, they choose to believe are true, with no factually authenticated proof to substantiate the belief.

 

Since 1947 a good proportion of our population has lined up in a belief that UFOs from outer space have systematically been visiting our planet.

 

Sightings of unexplained aerial phenomena have been offered as proof, while the lunatic fringe has often made preposterous claims of alien contact and even alien abduction.

 

 George Adamski  wrote numerous books and had a large following

 in 1952 George Adamski claimed to have met a "Nordic Alien" named Orthon (shown in the picture).

Later he met two more aliens named Firkon and Ramu who invited him aboard their ship for a

 philosophical discussion.

   

Let’s do a beginning dive into one aspect of space travel required for an advanced civilization to visit the planet Earth.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (x 60)

11,160,000 miles in one minute (x 60)

669,600,000 miles in one hour (x 24)

16,070,400,000 miles in one day (x 365)

5,865,696,000,000 miles in one year (one lightyear)

 

The fastest spacecraft launched from Earth travels 429,000 miles per hour.

One lightyear miles divided by the spacecraft’s speed

5,865,696,000,000 / 429,000 = 13,672,951 years for our spacecraft to travel one lightyear distance. 

Our nearest star is Proxima Centauri at 4.2 lightyears away from Earth. 

13,672,951 x 4.2 = 57,426,394.   The number of years for our spacecraft, at our current technology, to fly to our closest star.

 

Astrophysicists are particularly interested in stars in the Goldilocks Zone: a planet with similar temperatures to Earth; not too hot, not too cold, but just right, that could sustain life as we know it.

 

Astronomers have located five planets about the same size as Earth (similar gravity) circling the star Trappist 1.   Three of these planets are in the Goldilocks zone.  

Trappist 1 is 40 lightyears from Earth.

13,672,951 x 40 = 546,981,040 years.

With our current technology, it would take our spacecraft five hundred and forty-six million, nine hundred and eighty-one thousand and forty years to travel to a planet of Trappist 1.

 

That’s a fucking long way away (for Yellowdog Granny).

 

Einstein spoke of wormholes and bending time.  And if an alien lifeform had that kind of technology, why would they bother spending seventy-five years observing earthlings?  

They would surely see the human race as a destructive virus destroying its own habitat.  

They would more than likely wish to make contact with whales that have larger brains than humans and live a peaceful existence. 

Suggested reading: UFO by Garrett M. Graff

 

Alien life next

the Ol'Buzzard

 

 

 

 

I'VE BEEN AWA

 

I’M BACK.   I think!

 

Every blogger eventually burns out for a spell.   Over the past year, I have posted just enough to keep the blog active.  

I had some medical problems; but the real cause was that I was so tired of constantly seeing Trump’s face on the news, on blogs, and occupying my post, that I needed a break.   

I long for a time when a person runs for President, is elected, and then forgotten about for four years until the next election season. 

In the few years I have left I do not need aggravation over something which I have no control. 

Am I a cynic?   Yeah, I fucking am.

I served in Viet Nam where over 58,000 military men and women lost their lives over nothing.   Hundreds of thousands more carried injuries and mental trauma from the killing that took place on both sides – then we retreated in shame.   What did those deaths accomplish?   Absolutely nothing; because we went right back to wars. 

The propensity of young men wishing to be warriors feeds the death mill of wars in the name of patriotism, while politicians collect their salaries and go home each night.   

Human beings are a dangerous and destructive species. We populate the earth at an unsustainable rate.  We are one of the few animal species that actively kill our kind.  At the start of the industrial revolution, we began the systematic march toward the destruction of the world’s climate.    We are the only species with the ability to press a button and cause a catastrophic extinction event. 

In the time I have left, I will attempt to enjoy my wife, my cat, my books, and the simple pleasures.   Life is too important to squander on patriotism, politics, religion, …

But like the frog carrying the scorpion across the river, it is our nature.

 

 

the Ol’Buzzard