that ETs are visiting Earth, I’ll remain skeptical. The more of these pseudoscientific UFO television programs I watch, the more skeptical I become. The producers of these shows apparently choose to ignore the fact that the well-known cases they feature have been debunked, and they like alien-hunting cowboy nbutjobs and showing UFO "investigators" running around outside in the dark scaring the bejeebies out of each other (or pretending to): "OH MY GOD! WHAT WAS THAT? DID YOU SEE THAT?" It’s about Entertainment, not Enlightenment.

I read several science articles recently that said there are thought to be at least two billion planets out there that, like Earth, orbit their parent stars, have liquid water and lie in “the habitable zone.” The nearest of these planets to Earth is believed to be "only" 12 light-years away.

5,865,696,000,000 (1 light-year in miles) x 12 light-years = 70,388,352,000,000 miles (70 trillion, three hundred eighty-eight billion, 352 million miles.)

Only 12 light-years away?

Just because I don’t believe we’re being visited by ETs doesn’t mean I don’t like them. Here’s my latest alien deco piece.

that I don't believe ufos are traveling from other galaxies.

There are planets that have elliptical orbits, also comets (Haley's) and they come around at times we may or may not know. If they have an advanced civilization, it would not be impossible if as they approached their orbit near and around the sun, that some of them stopped at earth...

and their descendent's may still be here...in the earth, in the moon, and in exchange for technology, are protected by the government.

They have more to fear from us than us from them...

and I tend to think that if aliens visited Earth, we wouldn't know about it, as they might look like anything; ashtrays, for example. I don't think that intelligent life that evolved completely separate from our planet would look "humanoid" at all, and certainly not like these grays they speak about. Advanced intelligent life I think would probably have melded with machines and the machines themselves might have taken on an organic aspect and wouldn't look like heavy and rigid pieces of metal.

But 12 light years I think would be easily negotiated by an advanced civilization that could travel at a considerable fraction of the speed of light. And if the members of these civilizations are virtually immortal, they might have evolved a different perception of time than humans and several years of travel might appear normal to them. Also, if they are truly an advanced space culture, their empires would probably have spanned many light years of space over the millennia, so that coming to Earth might not involve that much distance.

But until there's something more substantial than photos, radar images, burnt and irradiated patches on the ground at supposed landings and the like (I want an actual craft or pilot) I will not easily accept that they've come to Earth yet. And maybe like scientist Jacques Vallee suggests, they are not extraterrestrials at all but something far stranger, something we haven't thought of yet.

Some were in my family so obviously I would know if they had a habit of telling fish stories.

Some were co-workers that I worked with for ten to thirty years. Over that length of time people who love to make up stories usually make up a good number.

None said they were abducted or that a UFO landed a football field away. Most just saw something very unusual in the sky. My son in law said that while driving through a remote rural area of Florida he witnessed something taking off from a field and heading straight up. He's a skydiver and familiar with helicopters and stated it definitely wasn't one. I have lived with him for the last six years and he never tells stories.

Of course most of these sightings could be explained if investigated. Therefore I remain unconvinced but still open minded.

I used to believe in UFOs, but then I lost interest. Then i became fascinated in the human need to believe in sky creatures. We cannot see but a sliver of the spectrum of light; hear but a sliver of sound through an improbable mechanical set of bones, a flap of skin and some tiny hairs; and feel only the grossest of textures. We move dully through a vibrant world of fantastic phantasmagoria, with only the cliff notes of reality. And what we do perceive is adulterated and fudged by our human wiring. We are prone to illusions, we ignore, forget, and just don't see what we aren't expecting. We see human forms and faces in trees, toast, and shrouds. Our genes and biology play tricks on us. We see our reflection in the sea and we call it god. We see a flash in the sky and we call it a UFO, and we imagine it is a ship full of angels, or devils...but always a reflection of something we already know. Its a false mystery, a bad magic trick we play on ourselves as we wile away our lives, chained to the wall in Platos cave, interpreting shadows of truths.

But here's the weird part.

The objects that cast the shadows into our sensate world, the true objects beyond our ken, are the well and truly alien beings we wish for, pray to... We see their shadow and we call it a UFO. That's the best our monkey minds can conjure when confronted with the echo of a transcendental song. It may stir the heart and enflame the mind, but it is not the thing in itself. Which is why, after millennia of sitings, there is no empirical data.

be difficult to believe humans could even comprehend their presence. Also, difficult to believe their transportation/teleportation mechanisms would even remotely be similar to our frame of reference. As I understand, they could be well over a billion years more advanced than us. That said, there are a lot of hucksters making big money off of hopefuls.