> Ok, how many people here have seen a ghost? Or believe in them? Believe in them WITHOUT having seen one?

I don't believe in them at all. Most of these modern ghost stories boil down to overactive imaginations, tricks of light and shadow, odd acoustics, or breezes. It's fear of the unknown. It's your mind playing tricks on you.

When I was on vacation, we were eating lunch at a pub. I dropped a cucumber slice; it hit my backpack at just the right angle and shot across the floor, bouncing along the uneven floor boards. In her peripheral vision, my wife saw the cucumber slice dashing across the floor. Because it happened so fast, because she wasn't focused on it, and because one doesn't normally associate small whitish things scampering across the floor with cucumbers, she thought it was something else. When she recalled it, she could see the little white mouse running across the floor.

This is how ghost tales come about.

> Or an unmistakable alien spacecraft.

I believe it is highly likely that there are planets elsewhere in the universe that support life. However, I think it is highly unlikely that we have been visited by aliens. To do so would mean that the aliens would have to be relatively close to us. They would have to be advanced enough to attempt interstellar flight. Finally, the timing would have to be correct.

On the wonderful television mini-series Cosmos, there was a sequence with a galactic calendar. Suppose that all of time from the creation of the universe to now encompassed just one year, Carl Sagan says. Human civilization would occupy the last few seconds of the final day of the year.

Now, imagine an alien civilization both close enough to Earth to visit it as well as advanced enough to do so. What are the odds that they would have the technology to send space craft to Earth on the final few moments of December 31st? I find it more probable that this alien civilization existed on December 27th and died out on the 28th. Or on any other day around the end of the year.

-Faux "ghosts and aliens can make for interesting stories, but fiction is all they are" Pas