Thoughts on extraterrestrial life? UFOs?
I am a skeptic about most pseudoscience. However, when it comes to extraterrestrial life, I do keep an open mind on the subject.
I had an experience when I was 18 years old. (Yes, I was sober). I was on my way to work at about 4:30 A.M. At the time I was living in a semi-rural area in Ohio, just outside Columbus. I was driving down a road, when something in the sky caught my eye in my left field of vision. I slowed down and saw a large triangular or arrowhead shaped object in the sky. It had steady red lights on its exterior. The object was nearly hovering, or maybe drifting slightly. It was just above a treeline. Unusually low for a large aircraft.
I was about a quarter mile away from it. I rolled down my window and didn't hear any noise at all. I observed it for about 10 seconds. I got the creeps and drove off. About 15 minutes later, I saw the same object, this time at a much higher elevation, probably several thousand feet, in the sky, and in the same westerly direction. I saw it for maybe 30 seconds and it seemed to fade away in the still dark morning sky. There were other people that saw it in the parking lot of the place I worked at. We were all like "WTF was that?"
This isn't to convince anybody. Just sharing an experience I had. I'm not sure what exactly I saw. It wasn't a commercial aircraft nor was it a conventional blimp. It was way too low and slow moving. Certainly may have been a military aircraft. As far as a drone, I'm not sure either but it was quite large, as in 737 large.
What prompted this was a video that people are talking about from a ring doorbell of a series of lights seen about 30 miles east of Cincinnati. Looks like something very high energy in the atmosphere.
Given time and the depth of space, logically I don't think we can discount the possibly of other carbon based life forms like us and some not so like us. Have they visited or are they visiting? Maybe if they're more intelligent and advanced. Some might be less advanced, and some I would say are only at the level of germs and viruses.
I also had an incident when I was younger where I saw a UFO...an unidentified flying object. With my UFO, 11 people saw it from different vantage points, a physician who had his pilots license also witnessed it and called the FAA to inquire. It was back in the late 70's so, drones didn't exist. The local where it happen has had previous sightings. To this day nobody knows what it was.
There's nothing in principle wrong with the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrials but UFO sightings are always rare, distant, and poorly photographed, and it seems that if someone came here from light years away they would not be that coy about it. So I tend to consign it to unusual visual phenomena that are explainable in other ways ranging from atmospheric phenomena to hoaxes.