I presume by "cardinal number", LittleHawk means "prime number"...

LittleHawk, I would take exception to your assertion that

Skeptics generally remain skeptics, because their emotional safety net is built around just that...and they will not bother to investigate further on the matter.

I'm sceptical, not bcos I can't be bothered to investigate, but bcos I've yet to see compelling evidence for it. Plenty of accounts of UFOs, so maybe they do exist, but I've yet to see any clear evidence (non-faked clear pictures, ie. not weather balloons or smears on a grainy film, or physical evidence). And don't tell me about government coverups and shite like that - it's amazing how governments can be so bad at running the country, but are so good at covering up alien activity (I know it's a Terry Pratchett line :-) Obviously personal experience or the personal experience of someone I trusted would change my mind, but until there's clear evidence, I'm a sceptic.

Incidentally, there's plenty of accounts of Nessie sightings too, but there's no evidence (unfaked, anyway!), no sonar scans have found anything, and there's not enough fish in Loch Ness to sustain an animal of that size. Hence I'm sceptical of that too, but if someone found some proof, I'd be prepared to change my mind.

And LittleHawk, "sceptic" does NOT mean "we're not prepared to believe". It means "there's no proof, so rational thinking says it probably isn't the case", but it doesn't mean we wouldn't change our minds if given proof.

Personally, I find some folk's blind faith in UFOs, ley lines, magnetic therapy and crystal healing to be a near-religious conviction, and the key point with a religion is that you don't try to prove it, you just BELIEVE. In fact, as Christianity and Islam have shown, when you prove scientifically that a religious belief is wrong (eg. the Flood didn't cover the entire world), there's some ultra-believers who just won't accept it. If it were possible to prove beyond doubt that UFOs didn't exist at all, and what you saw was a hallucination or some freak weather phenomenon, would you be prepared to accept that, or would you still stick with your version? If someone proves that UFOs DO exist, I'm fine with that - it'll fsck up the world something chronic, but it'd be indisputable. Would you be able to accept it if someone proved the negative?

The obvious next question - how do I explain crop circles then? Well, like UFO sightings, there's so many fakes that you'll have a hell of a job to find real "unexplained" ones. Sure, maybe a UFO with a tractor beam could explain it, but that's a "deus ex machina" explanation - an alien with a tractor beam could also be stopping my car from starting in the morning, and I couldn't prove it one way or the other. Now if someone can show me a crop circle which couldn't have been produced by folks armed with boards who walked through the crops carefully, which has been examined by impartial scientific investigators (as opposed to New-Agers, or "Erich von Daniken"s with a vested interest), and which conveys a message, I'll be interested. 3 concentric rings isn't exactly a message, is it? If this is being done by aliens to attract our attention, assuming these ultra-intelligent aliens can't be bothered to write or jam our TVs or whatever, why do they do it? If it's communication, then it can only be to test us, to see if we can understand it, but then how do we write back and say, "The answer's 3.1415927 - next question..."? Communication HAS to be 2-way, and I've yet to see any way to talk back. Unless they want us to scribble something in the grass ourselves, in which case they're going to be mightily confused by all the crop circles around Glastonbury! :-) And if it's just the space-ship's landing-pads where it touched down (assuming they've got anti-gravity drive so they don't need rockets which would burn the crop), then the 30-50-70 arrangement has no more mathematical significance than the spacing of wheels on your car, so that's out!

Grab.