UFOs and Polar Bears

After seeing this headline concerning France declassifying UFO reports (the French website is here but high traffic has already crashed its servers once),I thought I would share my own UFO sighting story.

About two years ago, a friend of mine had a miscarriage. She and her husband were very excited about having their first child. Knowing them as well as I do, they didn't even have to tell me she was pregnant; I knew it as soon as they suggested we get together for dinner, when they planned to tell me, and my suspicion was confirmed the moment I saw her. Over the next couple of months after the miscarriage, it seemed like everyone around her was getting pregnant. One Sunday evening, she called to ask if she could come over. One of her husbands closest friends had just called to say that he and his wife were expecting as well, and my friend REALLY needed to get out of the house, have a cigarette, and rant to someone (her husband, also my good friend, was in Law School at the time, and would of course have comforted his wife when he needed to be concentrating on his school work).

Anyway, as we talked, and I mostly listened, I became distracted by an object in the sky. It appeared to be hovering so I took an interest thinking if might be coming towards or heading away from us. After a couple of minutes I pointed it out to my friend, as it wasn't getting larger or smaller, just hanging there in the sky. It hung there for a couple minutes more, then abruptly shot off out of sight. We were astounded! Now, I'm not saying it was alien, but it was a UFO to me (by definition an Unidentified Flying Object).

So, what does this have to do with polar bears? I was thinking of making a post with this comparison, even before seeing the UFO story. Recently, an abandoned polar bear cub (now named Knut) was adopted by the Berlin Zoo. This has created a lot of debate with certain animal rights groups, who feel that the Zoo has interfered with the natural selection process by not allowing the incredibly cute cub to die as it otherwise would have. The debate stems from the mother abandoning Knut and his twin, who died of exposure, and the Zoo resorting to hands on nurturing of the little guy. They feel that this unnatural rearing will result in Knut being incapable of a normal polar bear life.

So do these people (the animal activist) think that Zoo life is a realistic recreation of wild polar bear habitat, and that should all the polar bears be released to the wild, which isn't going to happen anyway, the transition will have no effect on the bears - they'll be behaviorally identical to their wild born and raised counterparts? When did they develop this prime directive to the exclusion of the animals health and continued living?

So the conclusion is this: Perhaps alien life forms do exist, and like these animal rights people, they're taking a watch and see approach; they could intervene and help us keep from destroying ourselves and the planet we live on, but that intervention would upset the natural progression of the path we've set ourselves on. After all, homo sapiens have only been around for a relatively short while, and perhaps after we annihilate ourselves a superior sentient life may emerge in a couple of million years with whom the aliens will deign to interact.