"I can accept the possibility there are humanoid life forms, it's just that the chances of it happening once are infinitesimally small, so the chances of it happening twice are even more remote."

They are? How do you figure that? You're merely making a rather odd and arbitrary assumption when you say that...an assumption which proceeds from a specific (and popular) tradition in our present scientific culture.

I don't think we have any way of really knowing what the chances are of something occurring until we know all the relevant factors that are involved.

To know all the relevant factors we would have to know about everything in the whole Universe, not just about everything on this one planet here.

And we don't even know about everything on this one planet.

Therefore, I submit that we are in no real position to offer any certainty whatsoever on the chances of humanoid forms occurring once, twice, or any other number of times. To think we are is just whistling in the wind.

We make unfounded assumptions (because they fit some pet theory). They soon become commonly accepted assumptions. After that people start imagining that they are not just assumptions, but virtual certainties. That's where faith comes in.

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It's impossible NOT to believe in "UFOs", unless it's impossible for anyone to fail to identify some flying object that they see. ;-) That's why I don't use the term UFO much any longer. I use the term AFO instead. "Alien Flying Object" ...meaning something which definitely appears to be an intelligently piloted machine, and one NOT of Earthly origin...not something which is simply an "unidentified object in the sky".

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"I can see we're going to have some sort of alien aparthied in the future; if you don't have two arms, hands, eyes, ears and one mouth and nose you're not going to be considered 'humanoid' and somehow inferior."

In truth, stigweard, such alien aparthied would be virtually inevitable...just as it is inevitable that most people will be nicer to good looking people than they are to "ugly" people. We are far more likely to initiate friendly and useful communication with someone who fairly closely resembles us than with something that looks like a pile of spaghetti with some waving tentacles and is the size of a greyhound bus... (grin)

It may not be fair....but it's common sense that people would react that way.

However, there might be a possible exception to the humanoid rule, I suppose. What if some aliens showed up who looked like cute little fluffy space bunnies? Well, I can see people being quite inclined to get friendly with such unscary looking aliens as that. In such a case, the humanoid looking aliens might actually find themselves at a cultural disadvantage as compared to the Space Bunnies. Doonesbury did a comic strip episode once along that very sort of theme. An alien being was wreaking havoc on the Earth, but when put on trial in the US Congress he was largely forgiven for it because he was so cute and lovable looking...so "telegenic". It was a satire directed at Oliver North.