I haven't read this whole thread. I simply don't have that kind of time. But it appears to me that most people here are assuming that "UFO" means "alien spacecraft."

Let's parse the phrase. Noun: "Object." Okay, that's pretty general. Can't do much with that. Adjective: "Flying." Well, that's fairly definite. It means that the Object is moving through the air, not walking, swimming, or burrowing through the ground. Another adjective: "Unidentified." AHA! Now here's where the fun starts.

If the Unidentified Flying Object can be identified as an alien spacecraft, then that leaves a long list of very interesting questions. But the Flying Object is no longer "Unidentified."

"Unidentified" means "I don't know what it is," or "I can't put a label on it."

I see Unidentified Flying Objects all the time. They fly over where I live. I see lights moving through the night sky. From the sound that accompanies them, I assume that many of them are airliners on their way to the Seattle-Tacoma airport to the south. But I often can't see enough of them to tell if they are Boeing, Douglas, Air Bus, or what, nor if they are twin-engine or four-engine. Sometimes something will fly over and even hover awhile. Sounds like a helicopter to me, but since the only things I can see in the night sky are lights, I can't positively identify it as such.

On one occasion, as night was falling and I was walking from the garage where I had just parked my car to the apartment, I heard an object overhead and looked up to see bright lights, and a shape that looked for all the world like the Klingon battle cruiser that Kirk and the crew commandeered in Star Trek: The Voyage Home. But since all I could see of it was a silhouette, I tend to doubt that it really was a Klingon Warbird.

Speaking of birds, I can identify robins, crows, pigeons, ducks, geese, swans, flamingos (pink plastic and live), seagulls, and a number of others of our feathered friends, but (not counting the pink plastic flamingos) there are many of these "Flying Objects" that I can't "Identify." There are avid bird watchers who can, however.

There is an incredible amount of sheer bushwah and bovine droppings surrounding the whole UFO/Flying Saucer mythos. The vast majority of such is just plain baseless speculation and general nonsense. It's one helluva leap from an "Unidentified Flying Object" to alien visitors and all that implies.

But am I open to the idea that there are other civilizations out there? Most definitely. I would be very surprised if there were not, As Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster) says in the movie Contact, if there was no one in this whole immense universe but us, "it would be an awful waste of space."

I think we need to be bit more precise—well, perhaps a bit less precise—in our use of expressions like "Unidentified Flying Object" and it's more widely used acronym, UFO, and not just instantly leap to the conclusion that something we see but can't identify is, ipso facto, an alien spaceship.

I keep an open mind.

Don Firth