I think it is 'more likely' that the Earth is capable of generating more than ONE sentient being, in the billions of years it has been here, RATHER than inter-stellar aliens choosing Earth to visit repeatedly.
Please provide evidence that they actually exist. Your story doesn't count, unless you can corroborate it with some hard evidence.
What I saw was intelligently driven. Their actions weren't random, as they interacted with each other.
See above.
It is a more simple explanation, I think, to accept that 'we' aren't as special as we'd like to believe, rather than require that they expended untold amounts of fuel to buzz a few nature walkers.
As soon as cave men could paint on cave walls, we see images of 'sky gods'/heavenly agents/UFO's. They have been here, for as long as men could record that fact.
This is called "paredolia". Don't feel bad for falling for it--we all do to some extent, it's hard-wired into humans. However, the mere fact that you (and others) see a UFO doesn't mean that they DREW a UFO. To shamelessly plagerize a French example, what you see as a snake eating an elephant, they may have seen as a hat.
[QOUTE]This line of reasoning is the genesis behind my "I don't believe in aliens", statement.
I see no reason to demand they came 'from' anywhere... The Earth is clearly capable of producing sentient beings. SURELY this is not a new thing. [/QUOTE]You have a hypothesis. That is good. And it can be tested. That's even better! All you need to do is find the evidence of an advanced infrastructure capable of building a spacecraft--meaning mines, heavy industry, heavy metals and other toxins, glass, and the like. Until you actually find it, you can't argue as if it's been proven (and no, your story doesn't count as evidence--EVEN IF TRUE!--because there are multiple explanations for it).
That said, I concede that 'I' am no more special than anyone else.
And if you want timely truth, I recommend you abandon skepticism, because the two are in conflict.
This has nothing to do with the skeptical movement. The problem is, you expect us to believe something that contradicts massive amounts of evidence, from multiple fields, and violates basic laws of logic, without offering any evidence to support it. A rational person cannot accept such an argument.
The Earth has brought forth others...before us.
Now you're playing MY game. What evidence is there for any other advanced civilization? All of the paleontological evidence suggests that life before us didn't use advanced tools (they may have used sticks to eat termites or ants, but nothing as advanced as a lever). Really, nothing prior to the Cenozoic had a shot--their brains are not developed for thinking the way ours are (we can tell from casts of the brain case, or more recently CAT scans and the like). During the Cenozoic we had animals with bigger brains, but nothing until the human lineages used complicated tools (and of those, only a handful used anything as advanced as a spear, and only humans went significantly further; we have the weapons they used, so we have a good handle on what their technological aptitude was). Furthermore, animal corpses desicate in specific ways. Birds and some reptiles arch their backs, for example. It's a function of the failing of muscles. Anyway, if we find an animal in one of those possitions we can deduce that it died naturally--it wasn't burried. Burrials are also associated with material possesions--weapons, jewelry, and other such things. Most of the animals we find in the fossil record either were burried in a natural death pose or were disarticulated. And none until the human lineage were burried. There's other proofs as well, but any one of them shatters your idea.
So, sorry, no, the Earth did NOT produce any other advance species. Or, more precisely, there's absolutely no evidence of such a species.
