From our new writer at Alieneight: Ben Worthen

I remember when I was younger (9-10 years old) just starting to form my opinions of things like Alien existence.  Oddly drawn to all things which were unknown and unproven, yet, fearful, as though I knew it was real.

Watching shows like “Unsolved Mysteries”, and then later the “X-files”, and as I moved into adulthood, seeing documentaries of Roswell, reading books which included the Christopher Columbus Unidentified Submerged Object account during his voyage to the Americas. These experiences ignited within me a desire to know the truth.

As life followed, I found it increasingly difficult to spend time reading about aliens, and connecting the dots so to speak.  I fell into crowds where believing in aliens might well alienate me from my “friends”. I became heavily involved in discussions which felt taboo, but only every once in a long while.  The fanaticism with which Alien believers portrayed their beliefs was off-putting to me. My religious upbringing kept me from going too far away from the accepted beliefs of my church.  I still had a desire to find out the truth, but my belief was trending towards that of a non-believer.  After all, the only fascinating stories of alien encounters were unsubstantiated frenzied stories from uneducated hillbillies in back country areas of poor regions around the world.  The descriptions of “aliens” were so varied and different that it was hard to take them seriously.  Yes there were nagging bits of information that left the imagination to run wild, but nothing was concrete enough to prove anything.

The brain is a powerful thing.  It can perhaps dream up ideas of what we want to see, and “make” us see those things.  We could be fooled perhaps by our views of what was interesting, or of what we fear.  Did I just see a ghost? Did I just feel something behind me in this dark house?  Was that light in the sky that just disappeared, a UFO?  Why can’t I remember what happened on that long stretch of highway?  Does all the military secrecy mean that there are UFO’s at Area 51?  What about the stories I hear?

I dismissed the idea as something too farfetched to be reality.

And then it happened.  Over the course of four months time, I had what I believe to be, at minimum 12 separate alien encounters between myself and several other friends.  I had seen what all those uneducated, back woods “liars” had seen.  The “fire in the sky”, the “Greys”, the “reptilians”, and I KNEW that what I was seeing was not fake.  It was not staged.  It was NOT a figment of my imagination. I was not the only person involved.  I was from an upper middle class neighborhood in Southern California, I didn’t even know any rednecks, and I couldn’t possibly be convinced that what had happened to me was not real.

I was no longer a skeptic.  In fact, the only thing to this day that I am skeptical about is whether or not to share my experiences.  Would people believe me? Would I continue to believe myself when faced with retelling of these events?  Would I be able to maintain my position in my career, my life, and also tell people with the conviction that I have, that Aliens exist?  Would I alienate myself from the other parts of my life and lifestyle?

With regards to Aliens, the fear I have is more of respect than anything.  I cannot say I am not scared of the things I have seen or experienced, but I don’t feel helpless.  I have seen enough to never question it, but only enough to pique my interest.  I have experienced enough to scare me, but only enough to make me want to find out more.

I don’t have an abduction story.  I have never been probed.  I have never been violated by an alien life form on a ship somewhere. I don’t think I have at least, but somewhere inside me, I know that there is hidden within my defense mechanisms and the deep crevasses of my mind and memory, more than what I now know. Somewhere inside me, part of my stories that I do decide to tell, aren’t complete.  Like I can’t remember, or it’s too tough to talk about.

I have experienced time loss (dramatically so, provable by timestamps, travel records, gas receipts, and mileage readings), I have seen things I cannot explain like shape shifting, and I have come face to face with multiple types of aliens. Or at least that’s what I believe.

I want to share these experiences with you so you can take from it, what truth you want to believe, and leave behind those things you may feel are too fantastical to believe…

It doesn't take much time or research into the UFO phenomena to realize that there are easily as many people trying to discredit the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors as there are those who try to prove its existence. Skeptics have always been with us and that is not entirely a bad thing. At their best, an educated and informed skeptic helps keep legitimate research from being overwhelmed by the more hysterical or emotional elements. It is necessary to look long and hard at what is being reported and shown to help determine the relative validity of any given report.

This is especially needed with what sometimes appears to be an army of hoaxers who attempt to misinform and ridicule those who have actual experiences with the unknown. The state of computer graphics has advanced to the point that a clever and talented craftsman can construct digital images that are virtually indistinguishable from an actual photograph. This makes it much harder to quickly accept a digital photograph as real without it having first been subjected to qualified scrutiny to search for any evidence of duplicity. It is almost ironic that in order to try and gain proof of a high technology, the low-tech Polaroid has less chance of being used in a successful hoax than any of a vast array of equipment that could give us greater detail and better imagery of these unknown things that fly through our skies.

Yet, for all the advantages a serious skeptic can bring to the UFO investigations, so many of them seem to become mere ridiculers of anything outside a narrow worldview. So many attack any seriously presented report or evidence presented regardless of the facts that can be gleaned from them. Even when serious scientists devote their time and skills to analyzing evidence presented as coming from a UFO, these non-scientists will so often shout down logic. It is as though the louder they ridicule, the more likely people will accept their unstudied opinion as facts, even when it is in direct conflict with discovered knowledge.

An example can be found in one of the major UFO research reports available. While the summarizing conclusion to the Condon Report was slanted to try and discredit the UFO phenomena, many of the facts revealed in the pages of the report itself were anything but discrediting. The skeptics, for the most part, seem to laud the "conclusion" while ignoring the many instances that were clearly not explainable by normally occurring causes and events.

It is necessary for the interested individual to become their own skeptic and research the UFO phenomena with as open a mind as they can. Check on both the sources of the reports and the sources of those "explaining" what the sighting was. No matter how much you wish to believe, it is necessary to develop the mindset that a sighting or report is plausibly explainable. It is also necessary for those who disbelieve to keep in mind that humans are not the possessors of all knowledge and that there could well be unknown, and even extraterrestrial, things in this universe. Only through an objective investigation can the truth of this phenomenon be uncovered and undeniable knowledge is found as to whether we are alone in the universe or not.

Are aliens really real? The answer from officials on this matter is a clear denial of their existence. The explanations they provide on each reported sighting seem to be very convenient and some times ridiculous. It is not such a far fetched idea when you consider that we exist here on this earth; why do we choose to believe we are the only form of life in a galaxy of so many planets and solar systems? Why wouldn’t Aliens drop in to see what exists on our planet when we are constantly sending space shuttles and telescopes into the atmosphere to see what exists on other planets? Wouldn’t you just assume that other life exists on other planets and they would be just as interested in us as we would be of them?

The most Famous Alien Evidence

In 1947 the famous Roswell crash occurred. It was clamed that the US Government had recovered alien bodies and debris from a Ranch located in Roswell, New Mexico. A UFO crash site had been discovered by a Farm Hand and the US Army were called by the local Sheriff to investigate.
The US military at first gave reports that they had found a UFO crash site and had collected all the debris. It was transported to three different US military sites for storage and investigation. Later that day the reports had been changed to the discovery of an experimental military weather balloon belonging to a secret operation called ‘Mongol’.

The Cover Up
The owner of the Ranch was ordered not to discuss the incident with the media. There was a recorded interview with the ranch hand that discovered the crash site; the radio station that ready to play it to the world was ordered not to play a recorded interview due to its content. The cover up was very successful and even UFO enthusiasts accepted that it was a weather balloon. The cover up was very successful. The subject was put to rest until many years later when an interview occurred with Jesse Marcel, the only person known to have accompanied the Roswell debris from where it was recovered. Over the next few years, the accounts he and others gave elevated Roswell from a forgotten incident to perhaps the most famous UFO case of all time. It is still investigated and discussed to this day. It seems that most people would prefer to believe that Aliens aren’t real but evidence seems to indicate that their existence is warranted.

This is just a glimpse of the evidence to support the existence of Aliens. I use the Roswell report as a base of hard evidence that involved an abundance of government involvement and concealment. This evidence is highly documented and confirmed and the Government stills use weak claims to discount the evidence. They claim that most reports from reputable people are disordered accounts from warped military memories; it is just mixed memories of military crash sites, trauma from viewing dead bodies and their age. They were not suggesting that they were malicious accounts purposely made up to fool the public; just the sad mind of people who had served in the military for a long time.

So are aliens really real? It is up to you to decide.

This is the place to ask questions and to post all your thoughts and opinions. Just fill the comment box below and you are set:

While the vast majority of the reports of strange objects in our skies have been explained as some natural occurrence or object, there are still some that have defied all attempts to debunk or refute the event. One such sighting occurred May 11, 1950 at a farm near McMinnville, Oregon.

Mrs. Evelyn Trent was walking back to her house after feeding some of the livestock when she noticed what appeared to be a metal, disk shaped object moving slowly in her direction from the northeast. She called for her husband Paul, to come see the object as well. After witnessing the strange object, Mr. Trent went back into the house and got his camera. He was able to take two photographs of the object before it picked up speed and disappeared into the west. The speed of its departure was enough to cause Mrs. Trent's dress to rustle in its wake.

The Trent's, along with Mrs. Trent's father who lived next door, all saw the object. They described the flying object as being about thirty-foot across and silvery-bright mixed with bronze. The object had a flat bottom surface and was completely soundless.

The Trents believed what they had seen was most likely some unknown Army vehicle and did not get overly excited at the time. It was in fact some time before Mr. Trent even had the film developed. When he mentioned it to his banker friend, Frank Wortmann, the banker got him to allow the photos to be displayed in the bank's front window. There they drew the curiosity of a local reporter, Bill Powell, who convinced Mr. Trent to loan the negatives to him.

Thus began an odyssey in which the negatives were extensively examined and repeatedly published. It was during their publication in "Life" magazine in July of 1950 that the negatives were misplaced and remained lost for seventeen years in their photo archives. Once rediscovered, the negatives were again studied for indications of forgery. The astronomer and investigator for the Condon Committee UFO Research Project, William Hartmann, determined the photos genuine and one of the best examples of an unknown object being witnessed and photographed.

While the skeptics, Philip Klass and Robert Sheaffer, tried to debunk the photographs in the 1980's, their own analysis was subsequently shown to be flawed and biased. The McMinnville UFO photographs have continued for sixty years to be beyond anyone's ability to explain just what it was that passed over the Trent's farm that fateful day in 1950.