I was going to stay out of this, but I'm just going to hit a couple of spots here.

> I'm going to try to pull all the sub-threads together, and answer the objections here.
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> History shows that many scientists are indeed closed-minded.

Many humans are closeminded; scientists are human (at least the ones I know), therefore some of them will also be closeminded. I do think that the training reduces the percentage of this though.



> Another topic: UFO's. Many scientists will readily admit that intelligent life probably exists elsewhere in the universe. They just don't think that it's visiting us. Why? Because feasible space travel is not possible for the human population, and will not be for many years. Therefore, they flatly state that "true" UFO's cannot exist. They absolutely refuse to consider the likely level of technology that an intelligent species even 1,000 years ahead of us would have. Also, many, many scientists will not admit that just because something is theorically impossible now does not necessarily mean that it will always be impossible. Therefore, all UFO sightings MUST be debunked or explained away. Now I will readily admit that most UFO sightings--perhaps even 98%--are in fact identifiable or explanable. But in their mad rush to discredit all sightings,
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> And finally, many scientists absolutely refuse to look at or consider studies done on certain subjects, such as UFO's, no matter how rigorously done, simply because the subject is not "scientific."


The subject of Unidentified Flying Objects is of interest to me, but I don't believe they're visiting spacecraft. By the way, most people who use the term "UFO" take it to mean "flying saucer" type things, but changed the name to make it sound more scientific. I will use the term flying saucers now as it's more precise for the discussion.

Also, the subject isn't amenable to scientific study. Such study of a physical phenomenon requires either observation or experiment.

Observation: You want a trained observer with equipment to record any process or event that occurs. With no way to predict when or where these might happen, setting up anything reasonable would be prohibitively expensive in time, money and manpower.

Experiment: You need to have the phenomenon or materials ready to hand. The results need to be repeatable, so you need enough of what you're studying to do it again. The cost issue again rises.

These two reasons wouldn't totally prevent research except for one further reason. Flying saucers aren't being studied, not because the "technology" they use is more "advanced" than ours, but because for UFOs to be flying saucers that come here and behave as eyewitnesses report violates both physical law and reason.

In conclusion, until some means of propelling something large enough to transfer information faster than light is based on rigorous theory, or even better, demonstrated, truly scientific study of the subject will be hard to find.