Pretty remote.

The movie industry is on the right track though. Just looking at the diversity of body plans on this planet over the last 500 million years, all you have to do is add a big brain case to any of them and you instantly have an alien morphology that is very unlike a bipedal huminoid. Most shapes border on the halucinogenic!!

Visit the SETI Home page to learn more about some plans for searching for intelligent civilizations, and the new sister project called Phoenix. All of these searches are guided by the famous Drake Equation which attempts to quantify just how likely it is that the Milky Way contains any extant civilizations TODAY. Depending on educated guesses to the various factors, there could either be just one, US, or millions!

Not withstanding the tales of UFO's abducting humans or UFO sightings, and the work by such organizations as the Mutual UFO Network, there are many reasons to feel skeptical about these reports. If you visit the UFOs : A Closer Look by Chris Lambright, or the Skeptical Inquiror sites, you will get a fair appraisal of how scientists view the issue of 'contact' and the so-called evidence that so many people have offered to support their claims. As Carl Sagan has often said, "Extraordinary claims require and DEMAND extraordinary evidence". I do not understand why this is regarded as such a controversial idea by the many who claim to 'believe' we have been contacted. I do not care if there have been 100,000,000,000 'anecdotes' about sightings, abduction and the rest. I only demand what any court of law or scientific research has required for hundreds of years now; genuine evidence, and a genuine effort by the gatherers to challenge the credibility of the evidence they are using.

The hoaxters who created the famous crop circles in England came forward several years ago and described in detail how they did it all. They were pretty well ignored, and crop circles are still taken as 'evidence' of something supernatural or alien going on. My great fear is that simply the crush of population numbers will eventually be all that is required for even the craziest of ideas to become 'law' and then we will be once again on the lethal rode into the Dark Ages where the value of critical thinking and hard evidence is no longer respected. Politically, this will be disastrous because in this fertile ground of superstition and 'belief' will grow the new Hitlers where all truths are relative and facts are subject to political interpretation.

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