The title is a bit deceiving: rather than an overt comparison of religion to aliens, it is a comparison of the fanaticism from zealots of religion, to that of the fanaticism from zealots of the alien culture.  It’s a bit of a challenge being an observer of this scenery (the alien culture): most of what is available for knowledge or for entertainment or for reinforcement is unsubstantiated; a large portion of that is completely fabricated.  Regardless of personal experiences and knowledge, some people fabricate stories to strengthen the case for aliens and extraterrestrial existence.

True believers don’t need fakery to enhance their perception or understanding of these things: they know what they believe.  But there is a type of person in existence that will try to persuade others to believe their beliefs at any cost.  Perhaps it is to prove a point; maybe it is to rationalize their personal beliefs; maybe for comfort; maybe because they have an axe to grind, but whatever the reason, it exists.

It makes it hard for those who are true believers and want to find out more information and gain the respect of the scientific and mainstream communities, as they are discredited every time a new hoax comes out or another story is disproven.  Every time that a bad youtube video comes out or a lie is perpetuated through local resources the task gets tougher to convince others that aliens do exist.

These zealots would have the mainstream believe that what they portray is real; but in reality, they don’t make money per se, or gain fame necessarily, they simply want to show people that which cannot be denied.  But the truth is out there, and with the far reaching avenues like the internet available to the public, it is not both easier to share “alien experiences” and have them disproven regardless of what really happened.

Invariably a good hoax will be disproven at some point, as the technology now has finite limitations and access to this technology exists everywhere.  It is not the same as catching a fuzzy figure on 8mm tape in the late 1970’s or an unclear 110 exposure on camera of a series of lights in a dark sky, or even several eyewitness accounts.  Now if you fake something, the digital signature sometimes is enough to give you away.  Even with incredible planning, some part of the story is bound not to match up, and a fake account will be exposed to discrediting.  Cell phone cameras have so much more capability than even the best commercial cameras did 15 years ago; video has lost the ability to be manipulated without telltale signs of editing.  In all, there is not as much leeway to make something staged as it was some years ago.  Truth seekers have availability to technologies to debunk hoaxes.

There have been many instances of videos that look real, and seem legit, but have inaccuracies or awkward poorly thought out premises and concerns.  What little hope they bring to an alien culture enthusiast or firsthand believer, is quickly removed when they stark reality and the element of doubt creeps in because someone behaved like an amateur.

For example: a video is floating around about a Siberian alien found in the snow and it is awkwardly realistic.  But the setting and the obvious filming mistakes make it easily recognizable as a hoax.  The man filming, makes a sweep to his friend and then a much farther sweep all the way in the opposite direction.  He then essentially picks up a dark spot in the snow many yards ahead of his position and zooms in on it to reveal that it is an alien body.  Two seconds of camera time on his friend, then immediately to a figure in the snow some distance and then he zooms in on it to reveal that it is a very intact Alien body half buried in the snow and ice.  He then focuses on the alien for one minute more and the video ends.  And the holder of the camera uploads it to youtube without contacting authorities and figuring out what else he can do to prove that the “alien” is actually that: an alien?  No follow up to show the body removed, or to prove that it is anything more than a latex casting of a well thought out alien resembling puppet.  Certainly it has a believable subject, as the alien is quite a specimen, but the unrealistic “chance” capturing of it on video when he pans straight to it and zooms in, makes it much less reasonable.  No substantiation videos to prove that it wasn’t just a staged piece of footage, no back story to speak of, and not full removal of the body to show that it is hardened and stiff from the ice, or that it is real in its natural movements or composition.

This is just one example, and certainly cannot be proven easily to be real or fake, but it certainly seems unrealistic.  Such a find if real, would certainly warrant a further more detailed investigation of the capturing of video to support it.

This is just one example of an unfair piece of “evidence” which falls flat in the argument that aliens do exist.  It simply distances the truth that much farther from the audience it seeks to persuade.  When someone actively perpetuates an alien encounter of any kind that is not truthful, it weakens the core of evidence in existence, and it makes fools of those who champion it in its early stages, such that their credibility outside of the internet forums of believers is nonexistent.

One day we as believer all hope that the truth comes out in an inexcusable and unchallengeable way, but we should not lower ourselves to fabrications to gain momentum or believers, it’s unnecessary and only hurts the cause.  The truth will one day be undeniable.  Will you be one who can hold their head up high to say “I told you so!” without having resorted to fakery?

This 2008 video hadn’t been out too long before it went viral. The thirst for knowledge is so great that all segments of the population are looking for things they can believe in.  So far no one has been able to disprove the video, and perhaps more than the viewer’s desire to believe in this, is the realism that is experienced in the video.  The Grey being interrogated is so close to what someone would think they are: diminutive, breathing beings, without the ability to outwardly communicate through traditional communication.  There is almost a connection with this creature that extends beyond what is readily apparent.

It’s not a matter of believing or not believing, as a majority of this community has already made up their minds as to whether they believe; but whether this situation was handled properly.  What are the origins of the video? Where did it come from? Where did the subject of the video go? Who was the interrogator?  Why was the Grey Alien so harshly treated? Are all Grey Aliens so calm?  Even if it is hoax, it has enough similarity to other accounts, to at least cause one to think about these questions.

What are the origins of the video?  Originally the video was billed as a covert recording made by two men, later arrested for trespassing of some sort.  The video was not in their possession, or not known at the time of their arrests, allegedly.  The video leaked and then became an internet sensation.  It has been talked about often and hosted on many websites, with arguments on both sides of the fence as to whether it is a genuine and real video.

Enhancements (lighting and filtering) to the video made by others who have been looking into the origins show more background and more footage inside the video which lend credibility to its realism.

The CGI industry cannot compete with the level of work done on this video, and what’s most puzzling is the original poster of this video has come out saying he fabricated the video, and has given his other CGI movies as proof that he has the capabilities to do such a thing-perhaps in an effort to get some work in CGI/puppetry for videos.  Case closed right? Wrong. What’s the catch? His ‘other’ work is horrible, not nearly as good quality as the footage in the video.  It simply cannot be matched at this level by some of the leading players in the CGI industry.  The movement and subtle work on the face and upper body of the Grey is too good to be CGI or a combination of CGI and puppetry. He most definitely did not produce this video.

There are numerous videos attempting to debunk this video as a hoax, but none provide a real threat to the authenticity, as they all fall short in convincing the viewer that this is not a real video of a real breathing subject.

Where did the subject of the video go?  If it were faked, surely someone would come forward to claim their spot as the most talented CGI artist in the world and make a name on the merit of this ‘production’.  If it’s real, and there is any truth to the story about the Alien being interrogated in Brazil by Military, then perhaps the little guy simply got disposed of after his useful life was over (providing medical and physiology information to those working with him).  Surely if a government agency were involved, they would not want to have to explain themselves, or deal with the fallout of such an incident, and would try hard to discredit the video and keep the spotlight off of their involvement.

Surely, in a country such as Brazil, more outside government agencies would be involved including the U.S.  It’s interesting to note that the Grey seemed so docile considering that there are mixed stories about the behavior and aggressiveness of Greys.   Of course there are different types of grey aliens, but it seems when faced with at least some aggression by the person talking to it, the creature did not attempt to cause problems.

This creature seemed lost and afraid.  Most viewers don’t really understand the angry tone the man in the video is using seems more like a young man trying to be tough, after he realizes the creature isn’t going to do something (this could also have been used to instill false realism if the video was faked).  There is certainly a realistic tone to the process, and given the back story (which very well could have been fabricated) it seems plausible enough that it wasn’t.

Many people viewing the tape feel surer than any other supposed alien encounter about its realistic portrayal.  It seems certainly to be beyond current technology to produce something of this quality without incredible resources, and even then, it would be incredibly difficult and time consuming, and would probably not have stayed in its current state this long.  Any person who has the type of skill set available to produce a hoax of this quality, would do one of two things by now (almost 3 years after its release): admit to the hoax and try to obtain work for services; or try to produce another hoax and release it to watch more and more viewers be taken in by their scheme.  Neither has happened, and it lends a considerable amount of credibility to the video.

No one has come forward to admit they know anything about the night/people/alien in question either, which just reeks of government involvement as well.

No one has come forward to admit to being part of any type of cover up, which continues to build up the credibility of the video.  Usually within a few years, you begin to see hoaxes unravel, after the perpetrator has had their fun, or some person will come forward due to conscience concerns.  This video seems so real, has every element of intrigue, and leaves so much unanswered: it simply leaves every viewer wanting more.

For those that know aliens exist, it gives hope for some future interaction, hopefully next time it happens, the human contingent uses a bit more responsibility.

One of the most damaging aspects of UFO research and investigation comes in the form of people who, for whatever reason, perpetuate a hoax or tell an outright lie about an unidentifiable sighting. So often a UFO is seen so briefly that there is not time to take pictures or capture other credible proof and the witness has only the value of their word to lend weight to the information they share. Liars not only dilute this trust in another person's honestly but also inject often misleading and confusing elements to the UFO phenomena that may take years, if ever, to weed out and eliminate. Those who bring forth film and photographs of some object they have constructed and photographed are even worse.

An example of how a lie can run around the world is the 1897 report from a Mr. Alexander Hamilton of Yates Center, Kansas. One night he reportedly saw a cigar shaped UFO hovering over the field of his farm as humanoid aliens roped one of his calves and attempted to draw it into their craft. The report was printed in the local newspaper along with the sworn statements of other civic leaders and the editor as to Mr. Hamilton's honesty. Other newspapers around the country quickly picked up this story and the "calfnapping" entered ufology as a fact for nearly a hundred years.

It was not until 1977 when Robert Schadewald did an intensive records investigation that the truth finally was exposed. It seems that Mr. Hamilton, along with the newspaper editor and a number of the other civic dignitaries who espoused him were all part of a "liars club" in the town and the story was just one of their entries into the yearly competition.

The case of the Hudson Valley Lights spanning the majority of the 1980's is an example of a group of hoaxers attempting to confuse legitimate reports. Beginning in 1981, a huge V-shaped craft was often seen passing slowly over the area. It was always at night and the patterns of multi-colored lights were quite noticeable. Some of the more notorious sightings came from such facilities as the Indian Point Nuclear Plant in Buchanan, New York. A number of times guards and supervisors at the nuclear power plant witnessed a huge craft over their plant. It was described as being approximately 1,000 feet across. Sometimes it hovered as close as 30 feet from the reactor and once a Security Supervisor had begun to initiate a call to the military to see if they could shoot down the unknown object threatening the reactor. By 1983 a group of investigators associated with Dr. J. Allen Hynek took up station in Hudson Valley to study the recurring appearances of this huge craft.

Then enters a group of deliberate hoaxers called the "Stormville Flyers" who thought to confuse the issue and confound the people in the area. Piloting a group of ultra-light airplanes, they rigged extra bright lights to their craft and would infrequently take to the air, flying in formation to make it appear from the ground that their individual planes were in fact just a part of a larger craft. Occasionally they would break apart and perform other maneuvers just to keep the UFO reports from being too consistent. The only possible way to differentiate the real UFO sightings from the hoaxers was in the reports of sound. The huge craft reported at Indian Point was silent. Often the reports, especially the ones where the lights seemed to perform independent movements, spoke of a low buzzing sound. However, the damage was done and these deceptive airmen had corrupted the data from Hudson Valley.

Such "practical jokes" have helped feed the cause of debunkers and skeptics while diluting the validity of countless honest reports of strange unidentified craft in our sky. Now even what "proof" or pictures as can be captured are instantly taken as fake unless they can irrefutably prove their veracity. Was the model of a "spaceship" found in a house previously occupied by Edward Walters of Gulf Breeze, Florida, a plant created and positioned by skeptics to discredit his photographs and stories or did he actually fake the pictures himself? He passed several polygraph tests and there were unexplained anomalies in the ground around where he said the craft landed.

With the number of lies and hoaxers that have muddied the waters of UFO investigation it is just that much harder to know what to believe. Meanwhile, if the alien pilots of real extraterrestrial craft have a sense of humor, they must surely be doing their equivalent of laughing at our species because of our, oh, so human practice of discrediting each other's integrity.

Officially the Chinese government holds that there is no such thing as UFO's from another planet. Their stance is that the reports of such unearthly craft are the products of the fevered insane minds of Americans and other occidental sensationalism. That stance has yet to keep unidentified flying objects from showing up there, it merely means that there are fewer reports that are allowed to be made. Sometimes their problem makes itself so apparent there is little way to completely hide the issue.

On July 7, 2010, at approximately 9:00 p.m. local time, something unknown appeared on the tracking radar of the Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport. Handling nearly fifteen million passengers a year, Hangzhou Xiaoshan is the ninth busiest airport in all of China, serving the city of Hangzhou, the provincial capital of Zhejiang Province. When an unidentifiable craft began to hover above the airport it was necessary for the Airport's officials to act in the interest of air traveler safety. In all, eighteen incoming flights were waved off and directed to other locations as the airport suspended normal operations for four hours. With such activity occurring with an international cast of witnesses, a media storm began as this sighting could not be totally ignored.

A few days later the Xinhua News Agency, a state-run media outlet, reported that an air traffic control official stated that there were no conclusions as to the cause of the sighting. The China Daily, however, reported that "a source with knowledge of the matter" had reported that the object seen over Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport "had a military connection." The report was very ambiguous in that it was not stated anywhere what that connection was or whose military it might have belonged to. To further confuse the issue of this mysterious sighting, a number of photographs purported to be of the UFO in question quickly spread across the Internet. For the most part they were quickly debunked as tweaked airplane and helicopter photos and one old shot dug up from an archive. Even comparing them to actual photographs of the airport show that there is no resemblance to the airport and the buildings in the photographs.

To compound the problem of people reporting something that the government says does not exist, less than two weeks later, another mysterious object spent more than an hour hovering in the sky over the city of Chongqing's Shaping Park. Witnesses said it looked like four lantern-like objects that formed a diamond pattern. This was not the first time an unidentified flying object had buzzed the city of Chongqing.

On August 23, 2009 what was described as a twinkling V-shaped object spent several minutes hovering in the same spot. The lights which the hundreds of witnesses said flashed red, blue, green, and yellow, was bright white on the ends and red at the V junction. An identifiable airplane that passed near the craft was much lower than the UFO being observed.

Also coming out of China is the excellent video of a large disk making a slow passage over an apartment building in the city of Nanjing on August 17, 2006.

Flying saucer - August 17, 2006, Nanjing, China

The craft was filmed in broad daylight and is such a good capture of a flying disk it is no surprise that many debunkers and skeptics want to decry it as hoaxed. While the rest of the world doesn't get to hear too much about them, it is a sure bet that the Chinese are aware of the strange objects showing up in their skies even if the government doesn't want them to talk about it.

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.

Official and government agencies of UFO study have run the gambit from absolute denial to releasing sighting reports to finally disbanding their study groups. You would think that with such powerful militaries studying the phenomena of unidentified craft in our skies they would have actually found something out but according to their own conclusions they are still clueless. There is a movement growing to turn over the study, if not full investigations, to a new set of seekers.

College students are for the most part, young, bright, and able to see without the constraint society has put on people as they grow accustomed to the status quo. The Niagara County Community College of New York, a state run school, has suggested that since their area of the country averages over fifty sighting reports a month (that's nearly two per day) that the subject should be allowed as a serious elective study course at the college. Philip Haseley, an anthropology professor at the school, feels it is a "serious area of study" and should be included as a mainstream topic. "(A sighting) happens to millions of people (around the world)," he said. "It's about time we looked into this as a worthy area of study. It's important that the whole subject be brought out in the open and investigated."

Just because Professor Haseley is also the head of the Western New York Mutual UFO Network does not diminish the validity of his call for serious study of the phenomena of UFO's by college students. His group of investigators already use the best possible scientific manner in their field investigations, including radar, meteorology, and astronomy to gather their evidence of aerial anomalies. Who better than the intelligent, knowledge seeking students of the College to analyze this data and use their fresh new insights into attempting to piece this puzzle into a scholarly conclusion.

More colleges and universities might lend their support to gaining the extra resources and minds of their young people to examine their own area's sightings. There were over four hundred sighting reports taken by the British Ministry of Defense last year alone, before they decided to quit bothering themselves with unknown objects intruding into their airspace. If the world governments and military already know what these objects are, they should come clean with that knowledge rather than try to sweep it under the rug. If they are still stumped for an explanation, why not let the youth that will make up the next generation of leaders get involved in research that has the collegiate oversight to assure good, useable data in dealing with what has become a worldwide epidemic of UFO sightings and encounters.

With the topic becoming a serious collegiate course, the era of offhand ridicule of witnesses can come to an end. By allowing serious study and investigation at the university level, there should be less hesitation on the part of witnesses to share their experience. With luck, this more serious approach should improve the process of winnowing out hoaxes and give greater credence to those events that can be labeled as real even if they are as yet unexplained.