And thanks for stopping by. It might be a bleary-eyed Sunday morning thing, or maybe an effect of my basic mathtardation, but I’m not sure I’m following your point. It looks like you’re saying that, as confirmed by mathematical scrutiny, the formation of the solar system was governed (or just influenced?) by powers that can’t be accounted for by scientific observation. Is that correct?

-Eric S.

1) Barring exotic circumstances, it seems that most recovery scenarios will negate the ‘flying’ aspect of UFOs. That is to say that, for the purpose of identification, that we should adopt the unspoken understanding that the ‘flying’ aspect of UFOs include objects that a) have been (but are no longer) flying, b) are demonstrably capable of flight, whether or not they are currently flying, or c) can be demonstrated (or reasdonably inferred) to be a component of an otherwise unidentified flying object’s apparatus. As such, the object itself may not only no longer be flying, it may of itself be incapable of flight. Identified objects meeting these criteria (eg, IFOs): Apollo re-entry craft, Skylab debris, Kal El’s Kryptonian escape pod.

2) ‘Identified’ is relative. This object, quite possibly something along the lines of a brake pad manufactured by a company named Seley, only qualifies as evidence of a UFO through a loop hole: the fact that when people like you and me speak of UFOs, what we really mean is extraterrestrial space craft. Which, I hope we can all agree, this is not.

But toss this one in your processing unit: how long does something have to be under observation before it’s no longer subject to scrutiny? For the sake of discussion, I’m going to propose a benchmark: if something has been with us for as long as we have been recording history, that it gets a semi-official pass. Which isn’t to say it gets a pass by the scientific community: lord knows, those guys are still giving mitochondria a hard time, and the mitos have been with us a good long time.

Still, it’s rare to hear intelligent debate about the potentially off-world origins of anything you see regularly, whether it’s some fantastic spectacle (i.e., Stonehenge, the pyramids at Giza, the crash site in Roswell, NM) or something so commonplace it practically escapes notice (i.e., anything you see on the Discovery networks). Why? I suspect at least in part because, if these things do in fact have non-terrestrial origins, we’re okay with that. The notion goes like this: something crashlanded here 250,000 years ago and asimilated into our ecosystem? At this point, it might as well be earthling. Hell, my people have only planted their feet on this hunk of land for maybe 200 years, and we consider ourselves American.