Thinking that dozens of individuals, and maybe hundreds of their successors by now, could keep secret, on orders from the military, the biggest news of all time, for the rest of their lives, is only marginally less dumb than thinking that tens of thousands of dedicated, idealistic, and educated NASA administrators, engineers, and technicians, who would have had to be party to a gigantic deception to have pulled off faked moon landings, would have actually done so and then kept quiet, to the last man, for 30 years...unreasonable beyond description. That's the problem with grand theories of secret conspiracy: they fail the common-sense test, in this case the one concerning pesky human nature, incompetence, inefficiency, and fallibility.
As for deathbed statements being unimpeachable, this is manifest nonsense, and based on no objective data whatever, just wishful thinking--a lot like belief in ETs, in fact. People might have any number of reasons for leaving behind them a lie. (Input from a trial lawyer or a judge on the statement about admissibility would be enlightening, but irrelevant to what actually IS.) What about deathbed statements of the soldiers and airmen who cleaned up the Corona debris, if they had said that there was absolutely nothing to the stories? Would you have accepted THAT as gospel?
Remember: the first response to a claim of the unprecedented should be, again, the common-sense test: WHAT IS MORE LIKELY: that an unsubstantiated claim that the most awesome, most longed-for, most significant, and seemingly most improbable event in human history has just occurred is actually true, or more likely that a human being--member of that most fallible, devious, untrustworthy, deception-prone race--is mad, hallucinating, interpreting or recalling events incorrectly (testimony of eyewitnesses is documentedly error-prone and notoriously so among those who toil in the criminal justice system), or JUST MAKING UP A STORY?
Think about it, do the math, and decide for yourself.
--howard
on 6/2/02 2328, Art F Brooks at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Sorry I am late but, I must comment on Mr. Zani comments.
Art
I would like to say that you are making common mistakes in you interpretation.
(1) Life on other planets, intelligent or not, does not have to be like life on Earth. It is egoistical to think it would be.
(2) Because we do not have the full understanding of interstellar space travel does not meat that it is impossible. People said man would never fly and that the human body could not withstand speeds necessary to fly 100 years ago. Look at what we have done in a short time.
(3) As far as cover ups go, I spoke to people who lived in Roswell in 1947 and it was not a weather balloon that crashed. The military went nuts and did everything, including treating people with bodily harm to cover up something that crashed and was found in Corona. http://www.cseti.org/crashes/016.htm has a video of Mr. Jim Ragsdale's (an eye witness) testimony in the hospital as he was dying. A dying man's testimony is considered to be true and my be entered as evidence in any court of law.
