Aliens, extraterrestrial life, little green men, inhabiters of another world, whatever name you have for them everyone has an opinion on them. Some people stand behind rigid religious beliefs and denounce their existence all together, while others claim to have actually been taken up into spaceships in "abductions." What I will present here is a view of my own on extraterrestrials and why. I am not going to go as far as say I have credible sources for everything I will say, this is about what I learned over years of inquiring, this is not some report used to convince people of my views, I don't care if you don't believe the same way I do. If you want to find more information out there then I leave that to you, the information is out there.
When I first started becoming curious about the whole alien thing I didn't know much. I knew of stories of people being abducted, I knew of UFO reports, and that was about it. But as my search continued I found so much to conflict these stories, and such interesting and logical explanations. I learned more about the universe, and the immensity of it. I read reports about the odds of finding life at the same developmental cycle of evolution as our own. And I also read a great deal of science fiction novels exploring encounters with extraterrestrial life. I watched countless space documentaries focusing on not only intelligent life, but even micro-biological life, and more documentaries just scratching the surface of what different kinds of life could exist. After all this I have developed my own theories of all this, most of which could be proven or disproven within the next few decades, but isn't that the great thing about living in this day and age? In any event, I await these discoveries eagerly.
Alien Abduction Stories:
When I first heard stories of people being "abducted by aliens" I laughed. But as I heard more, and the "credible" people they came from I began to wonder why so many people would make up lies. So I searched for information about hypnosis, because most of these people blacked out during their experiences, and used hypnosis to recover this "lost time". The more I learned about hypnosis the more I began to discover that it is not generally regarded by the scientific community as a credible form of memory retrieval. Testimony from witnesses gained through hypnosis is not admissible in a court case, for this reason. The problem with it is that it does not necessarily retrieve lost memories, instead it takes a person back to an experience, with all the thoughts and ideas of society, and the person performing the hypnosis, and creates an explanation suitable for the person based on all these things. A blackout due to something as simple of lack of sleep could turn into an abduction quite easily with enough imagination. Now, I do realize that some people say they have scars, implants, strange diseases after these abductions, and as much as I hate to say that these people are lying, I believe either they are or there is another explanation, since these cases are so rare.
Why remember something as specific as an alien abduction? This never occurred prior to one couple's public account of an abduction in the 1960s. Abduction supporters will attribute this to being when the aliens began taking human test subjects, but is there another explanation? During centuries past people have had experiences that were much like the alien abductions, but these people didn't see aliens. What they described was situations in which demons, gods, or other mythical creatures that took them to various places. These creatures did not have any particular form, they had all sorts of forms, from angelic in form to fire-breathing beast, so it would be hard to say that these people were "abducted by aliens" since they do not fit any of the stereotypes. What they do show is people have such experiences, memories, etc, of prominent creatures of their time making visits to them. I don't believe this is all people making up stories, I believe that sometimes when people feel they "lose time" that their mind comes up with a reason for this episode, using the culture's magical beasts and gods to fill in the missing pieces. I have no fear of being taken from my bed at night or getting lost on a country road and losing 3 hours in a spaceship.
UFOs
First of all I must get something straight. UFO means Unidentified Flying Object. Saying you don't believe in UFOs is like saying you don't believe in a car you don't recognize the model of. All it means is any object that is flying and you cannot identify, terrestrial or not, it could be a bird or a Frisbee. And so I must rename this section: "Alien Spaceships." Maybe it's not as cool sounding but it's definitely more accurate. I know that almost everyone has seen some sort of unexplained lights in the sky, I have seen footage of these kind of lights that people believe could not have any explanation whatsoever of their occurrence. But what is to say people aren't looking hard enough FOR these explanations? Is the sky, and all of the gases and irregularities of it's makeup all understood and observed? I believe it's possible that some of these "lights in the sky" are just tricks of light, or people imagining them due to WANT to see them, or something like lack of sleep or chemical stimulants. Also, it has been shown that some can be explained by secret government testing. As much as people oppose such secret testing, the only way it can be kept out of potential enemy hands is by shielding it from the entire country. But no matter what your views are on that, after testing some planes, etc, it was found that the light formations, and maneuvers of these vehicles matched some of the UFOs that people mistook for alien vessels. So I am pretty sure that this explains a lot of what people see, even if all aren't explained away by officially released findings by the US government, I am sure they will be in the future, or are so secretive or simply failed so they will never be released. In any event, I don't think it's aliens.
Other Life-forms, Not Necessarily Intelligent
When taking into consideration the size of our universe, I believe, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is some sort of life outside of our world. I also think it would be conceited to believe otherwise. Even if it is only micro-biological life-forms, there is extraterrestrial life out there, even if we have yet to see it. With all the development of science into the nature of life, where life continues to be able to exist, it would not be hard to fathom it springing up on worlds other than our own. The discovery of life elsewhere would have significant scientific as well as religious ramifications, although I believe the religious ones will be explained away the way all other scientific achievements are that oppose the church. But I am not bound by some sort of believe that limits my speculations. I am exceedingly curious to find life on other planets, to see if it has the same basic structure as life on earth does, to see how random our evolution is when we compare their composition to our microbes. The experiments are endless, as is my curiosity. Currently in the scientific community there are those out there with beliefs centered on a few moons in our own solar system that may house microorganisms, and one of the most promising is Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. Without getting into too much detail, they are planning trips there in the future to discover what the surface of Europa is made out of, and whether there is life there. The current belief is that the surface of Europa is covered with ice, with a vast ocean beneath it, and with the abundance of life in the water here on earth, scientists theorize that there is life under that ice. But I go off on a tangent, the point is that there MUST be life out there, in some shape or form, whether we find it orbiting Jupiter, or a million light years away.
Other Intelligent Life Forms In The Universe
There are several theories about the immensity of the universe, whether it goes on forever or not, if it can. Well I am not completely sure what I believe about that yet, but I do know that the universe is bigger than anything I could ever imagine. So, I do believe that there are societies out there that we would consider intelligent. Whether they are on the same level as us, or have any sort of same structure is really difficult to theorize, but given the size of the universe I believe it's all together possible to find life forms that might be at a level to share information with us and have some sort of desire for contact. I don't believe they would necessarily be Humanoid, or even in an intelligent form we could recognize by looking at them, but I think that they exist. I believe right now that any sort of contact would definitely be of their effort, as our current technology might have enough power to find some sort of signal in the vast expanses of space, but to act upon that signal in an effort to communicate would probably be beyond our capabilities. And certainly making a visit to one of these other civilizations is far, far beyond anything we could accomplish even in the next 100 years. But yes, I believe it may exist.
When talking about living things, I was mostly going by an essay I wrote a couple years ago, about the Characteristics Of Living Things.