Donald R. Prothero, _Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters_, 2nd ed. (2017), 427pp., on 161, 163, 168
** you do not have permission to see this link **

Naturally, these highly speculative ideas are very controversial but not impossible given what we know about the chemistry of clays and organic molecules.
...
What scientists _don't_ do is point to a complex system, say they can't imagine how it could have arisen by natural causes, and throw up their hands in surrender as creationists do.
...
If the reader still feels uncomfortable with the speculative nature of the research into the origins of life, we can put the whole issue aside for now.

David L. Abel, _Primordial Prescription: The Most Plaguing Problem of Life Origin Science_ (2015), 313pp., on 138

PDF:
** you do not have permission to see this link **
3.19.4 The spontaneous generation of a simple paper clip
Reductionism has paid many dividends in science.
Perhaps a much simpler model of origin than abiogenesis might help.
How does a paper clip come into existence?
Let’s suppose the happenstantial, spontaneous generation of an optimized paper clip were one’s scientific model for the origin of paper clips.
Would that model be scientifically _plausible_?
...
Not finding any empirical evidence in the recorded history of human observation, true believers in this model could still argue that we would need eons of time to observe such an occurrence.
That would be a tenable argument.
But, given such a contention, that eons of time would be required to observe such an occurrence, belief in the spontaneous generation of non-trivial paper clips would remain just that—a metaphysical belief.
It would have no empirical support.
It would become a basically non-testable and functionally non-falsifiable belief (some might say, “superstition”).

. Attackers use deception, trust, and urgency to steal credentials, spread malware, or gain unauthorized access to systems and physical buildings. 

• • Human Hacking: It focuses on manipulating human emotions—fear, curiosity, urgency, or helpfulness—rather than hacking software.
  • Techniques: Common methods include phishing (fraudulent emails), pretexting (creating a fabricated scenario), baiting (promising a reward), and impersonation of authority figures or trusted brands
    .

It is very difficult to explain to most people why an anecdote is not evidence. Do you understand why hearsay is generally not admissable in court?

An easy and obvious example: 

In 1 Corinthians 15:6 Paul reports that after the Resurrection, Jesus appeared to more than 500 "brothers" at one time. Most whom were alive at the time Paul wrote. Modern Christian apologists breathlessly repeat this claim as evidence for the Resurrection. Do you see the problem? Paul is repeating a story he was told about an event he did not personally witness. 

It doesn't matter who makes a claim. Claims aren't evidence. They require evidence. And the more extraordinary the claim the more extraordinary the evidence required.

But with aliens the task is rather easy.

Produce an alien.

But if they're shy, produce a piece of technology that could not be manufactured on earth.

Of course this is when the conspiracy theories begin. The evidence exists but it is being suppressed by Dark Forces active behind the scenes. The truth is out there but it is being hidden.  (Except of course for all the ex-govt agents trying to sell books.)

Do I sound cynical? All I can tell you is these opinions are not presuppositions with which I begin but conclusions I've reached after years of observation.  But I could be convinced. You just gotta do a heckuvalot better than this!

You think you have more credibility then Former Deputy Assistant Secretary Defense for Intelligence, Christopher Mellon ? 

"These things are real. They're here. This is happening now." - Christopher Mellon

Elizondo:
Chris has his source and his chain of custody. I never asked Chris and I do not know or want to know. 

Steefen:
So, Elizondo can only contribute to this thread so far. ...

Go on, make that case that you are more informed (have higher security clearance) than Elizondo, his professional community and Chris Mellon.

[I finished watching the video interview.]

And you, Stephen and all, say they and I, who side with Elizondo and his professional network have no credibility.
It's just your "Walt Disney"/status quo bias and opinion that overwrites all that.

There is a there here:

dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Yxcy5zz_3MCD6gG1rStQ4tARVo4Vkpe7VJ_RSDKCsr6jAoS86EIUkvpur1-S_aAOGPP1Uyp9kEGR4MFSht5AGpM6BvIv--2Oik16nrbBFRS8zLvBfS6-9zpR8a7aoSY2ifz_1LQo0iVoXw6rWCQYca0z8khrwQJ7PDzm4Y3E4UTg24zDDKvEa0hXXPclQHN-Zo9X0guiZVQHpQlGDmKDr5XYa2UvZOo1ISGKRxv6y10.HEwAhJjIIPBGHU2MPvbwyvzC4eOj3RILdr_aSR1M8oY&dib_tag=se&keywords=Luis+Elizondo&qid=1775320927&sprefix=luis+elizondo%2Caps%2C180&sr=8-2

(2020) is a highly regarded documentary directed by ** you do not have permission to see this link ** that presents a serious, evidence-based examination of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP/UFOs). It focuses on the history of sightings since WWII, featuring testimonies from high-ranking officials and credible witnesses to argue for a greater scientific study of the phenomenon.

• Role: Former intelligence officer who ran the Pentagon’s secretive Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) from 2009 to 2017.
• Contribution: Resigned in 2017 to raise awareness about UAPs, subsequently joining TTSA. He was featured in the History Channel series Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation.
• Significance: Known for confirming the existence of AATIP and facilitating the release of official Pentagon UFO videos. 

• Role: Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
• Contribution: Served as a national security advisor for TTSA and helped bring attention to the UAP issue through congressional channels.
• Significance: A prominent voice in advocating for government transparency regarding UAP encounters. 

• Founding: Founded in 2011 (and brought to public attention later) by musician Tom DeLonge.
• Mission: A "public benefit corporation" designed to research science and technology related to UAPs and other phenomena.
• Impact: It brought together former officials like Elizondo, Mellon, and Dr. Hal Puthoff to work with, and push for, government transparency on UAPs.
• Current Status: Elizondo and Mellon left TTSA in late 2020 to focus on independent lobbying and research for UFO transparency, according to reports. 

Steefen
for people considered leadership by the Pentagon and the Dept of Defense (not for Stephen, for people way above Stephen)

Jesus of Nazareth was not crucified by Pontius Pilate since neither that Jesus nor Nazareth existed at that time. Apocalyptic Christians in Rome were indeed guilty of trying to burn the city, confirmed by their own confessions when tortured under Nero. Astrology, spirit guides, reincarnation, prophecy, clairvoyance, ancient alien visitors to earth, advanced technologies of lost ancient civilizations, giants, dog-headed people (cynocephaly), remote-viewers in direct communication with aliens defending the earth from evil extra-terrestrials, ghosts, and goblins, crop circles, advanced technological structures underneath the pyramids, faked moon landings, etc. 

Please let me know if I've missed any of the more important contributions to this forum.

Inside The Black Vault: The Government’s UFO Secrets Revealed takes you on a journey within the secret world of unidentified aerial phenomenon that has plagued the military since at least the 1940s. Declassified records prove that the UFO topic is one of the most highly classified and most elusive subjects the U.S. Government has ever dealt with. Each chapter explores various agencies and their documents, and Greenewald breaks down the meaning of why some of the most important documents are relevant to proving a massive cover-up.

Along with declassified documents, Greenewald outlines the struggle it took him to get them. No other topic has proven so difficult, in more than 8,000 FOIA requests that he has filed. He explores why that might be and meets skeptics and debunkers head on, outlining why some of their more prominent rebuttals for it all cannot be true.

84% of the 579 ratings are 4 and 5 stars and this 84% say with Greenewald: skeptics and debunkers' rebuttals all cannot be true. 

Leslie Kean's book 2,693 ratings averaging 4.5 stars.
Leslie Kean bringing us Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials ON RECORD
vs
Stephen quoting no one.

"If you don't know much about UFOs, you must read this book. If you think that UFO reports are nonsense, this book will disabuse you of that notion. Leslie Kean's UFOs informs readers at every level of knowledge and belief. It could, and should, become the "tipping point" that leads to public acceptance of the reality of UFOs and all of its implications."
--Don Donderi, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, McGill University (Ret.)

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER  Impeccably researched, this riveting journalistic investigation separates fact from fiction, and documents ... government reactions to actual UFOs. 

Steefen
No need for me to continue because Stephen quotes no one at the level of a Pentagon Program head, he quotes no general, no pilot, no government official, no government contractor officer. He mentions Psychology. Well, Don Donderi, Ph.D. - Psychology contradicts Stephen's use of Psychology against UFOs.

Stephen isn't the only one to follow the subject from youth. John Greenewald, Jr. began researching government conspiracies at the age of 15. For more than two decades, he has turned his popular website, TheBlackVault.com, into one of the internet's premiere resources for officially declassified U.S. Government documents, totaling more than 2,000,000 pages. 

= = = 

I'll watch this video to see if John Greenewald, Jr. does a better job than Stephen in criticizing Luis Elizondo.

I'll pick up at 21:36 of 1hr 18 min.s.

On page 113 of that book, he holds up "The Family Tree of Life" as evidence of something.
Such a tree doesn't exist, except for in active imaginations.
** you do not have permission to see this link **

[on 113]"we share over 98 percent of our genome with the chimpanzee"
Incorrect.
It's been known for 20 years that the ~99% allegation is bogus.

Differences between human and chimpanzee genomes and their implications in gene expression, protein functions and biochemical properties of the two species - 10 Sept 2020
** you do not have permission to see this link **
It’s a difficult task to quantitate the exact percentage of differences between human and chimpanzee genomes.
In early works, divergence of human and chimpanzee genomes was estimated as roughly 1% [6].
This estimate was based on the comparison of protein-coding sequences and didn’t consider non-coding (major) part of DNA.
However, the idea of ~ 99% similarity of genomes persisted for a long time, until 2005 when nearly complete initial sequencing results of both human [7] and chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) [8] genomes became available.
It was found that genome differences represented by single nucleotide alterations formed 1.23% of human DNA, whereas larger deletions and insertions constituted ~ 3% of our genome [8].
Moreover, even higher proportion was shaped by chromosomal inversions and translocations comprising several megabase-long chromosomal regions or even entire chromosomes, as for the chromosomal fusion that took place when the human chromosome 2 was formed [9].

=============
human and chimpanzee genomes - 2005 Dec 15
** you do not have permission to see this link **
The chimpanzee genome sequence is a long-awaited milestone...
The difference between the two genomes is actually not approximately 1%,
but approximately 4%--comprising approximately 35 million single nucleotide differences

=============
as a preprint: Complete sequencing of ape genomes - Oct 5, 2024
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Advances in long-read sequencing and new assembly algorithms were needed to overcome the challenge of repeats and finish the first complete, telomere-to-telomere (T2T) assembly of a human genome^8,9.
...
Section II. Resource improvement highlights
Sequence divergence
The oft-quoted statistic of ∼99% sequence identity between chimpanzee and human holds for most of the genome when considering single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) (Fig. 2b).
However, comparisons of T2T [i.e. telomere-to-telomere] genomes suggest a much more nuanced estimate.

Complete sequencing of ape genomes - 9 April 2025
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Divergence and selection
Overall, sequence comparisons among the complete ape genomes revealed greater divergence than previously estimated (Supplementary Notes III–IV).
Indeed, 12.5–27.3% of an ape genome failed to align or was inconsistent with a simple one-to-one alignment, thereby introducing gaps.

New “Complete” Chimp Genome Shows 14.9 Percent Difference from Human Genome - May 21, 2025
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Look back at those numbers, “12.5–27.3%.”
The same numbers show up again buried deep in the Supplemental Data where they compare various ape to human genomes.
They’re findable if you know where to look, but should I say “buried” — or “hidden”?
From what I can tell, the Supplemental Data reports that the ape genome that is most similar to the human genome is the chimpanzee genome.
And it shows a 12.5 percent “gap-divergence” — i.e., difference — from the human genome!
And when you look at the “gap divergence” where the human genome is the target and the chimp is the query, the difference is 13.3 percent.
Let me be clear:
According to this study, the human and chimp genomes aren’t 98.8 percent the same (or 1.2 percent different) — as, for instance, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History claims (see my “Visitor’s Guide” for more).
In fact, they are no more than 87.5 percent similar — i.e., the human and chimp genomes are at least 12.5 percent different if not 13.3 percent different!
In fact, the 13.3 percent difference is more relevant since this reflects how similar the whole human assembly is to the chimp genome.

PDF
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Gap divergence is defined as the fraction of positions in the target haplotype that are not aligned to the other haplotype, which could be due to biological processes (e.g., gene loss/gain and insertions/deletions), missing data, or technical problems (e.g., alignment failure due to SVs, repetitive elements, etc.).

PDF
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Supplementary Figure III.12. Plots show 1 Mbp segments binned by gap divergence for each pairwise alignment.

** you do not have permission to see this link **
An Upper Estimate
And why is there a range of 12.5 percent to 27.3 percent in the main text?
That’s because the upper estimate of the non-alignability between the gorilla genome and human genome is a whopping 27.3 percent.
In fact, if we look at the Supplementary Figure III.12, we find the following percentages of “gap-divergence” between various ape genomes when compared to the human genome (non-sex chromosomes):

Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) vs human:
15.4 percent and 16.5 percent “gap-divergence” (i.e., minimum difference)

Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) vs human:
17.9 percent and 27.3 percent “gap-divergence” (i.e., minimum difference)

Bonobo (Pan paniscus) vs human:
12.5 percent and 14.4 percent “gap-divergence” (i.e., minimum difference)

Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) vs human:
12.5 percent and 13.3 percent “gap-divergence” (i.e., minimum difference)

** you do not have permission to see this link **
Adding in the Single Nucleotide Variation (SNV)
But there’s another type of variation between genomes also identified in the paper — single nucleotide differences (called “single nucleotide variations” or sometimes “short nucleotide variations” or SNVs).
Again, buried in the Supplemental Data we find Figure III.11 which shows the percentage of SNVs between human and various ape genomes reported in this study. Here’s what they found:

Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo abelii) vs Human:
~3.6 percent different

Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) vs Human:
1.9 percent – 2.0 percent different

Bonobo (Pan paniscus) vs Human:
1.5 percent – 1.6 percent different

Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) vs Human:
1.5 percent – 1.6 percent different

If we add the gap divergence to the SNV differences, we end up with these total degrees of difference between human and ape genomes:

Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo abelii) vs Human:
~19 percent – 20.1 percent different

Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) vs Human:
~19.8 percent – 29.3 percent different

Bonobo (Pan paniscus) vs Human:
~14.0 percent – 16.0 percent different

Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) (target) vs. Human:
~14.0 percent different

Human (target) vs. Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes):
~14.9 percent different

So now what we’re seeing is that there is about a 14.9 percent total difference between the human genome and the chimp genome.
That represents a much greater degree of difference than the often-claimed statistic that we are only 1 percent genetically different from chimpanzees!

** you do not have permission to see this link **
It’s also worth noting that compared to chimps, the human Y chromosome has a whopping 56.6 percent gap divergence (and 3.9 percent SNV divergence),
and the human X chromosome has 4.4 percent gap divergence (and 1.1 percent SNV divergence).
But that too is all buried in the Supplemental Data.

The funny part is that you think I'm not already thoroughly familiar with these cases.   I've been a student of the UFO (or UAPs or whatever we're calling them this week) phenomenon since I was a little boy. Of course early on the whole idea simply captured my youthful imagination.  (I still possess a few comic books and magazines published in the late sixties and early seventies that somehow survived all my moves and house cleanings over the years.) Later I began to see that this subject revealed more about human nature than it did any sort of contact with actual aliens.

The Aurora incident consists of nothing but local legends and anecdotes.  The Cape Giradeau incident was later revealed to be a hoax. The Roswell incident, most famous of all, was a military cover up of the testing of Cold War technology.  The military made up the UFO report to hide the truth!  The Washington incidents are rather more interesting.  But all we have are anecdotes.  One radar expert testified that the anomalous radar readings could have been produced by unusual weather patterns.   Not conclusive but strange weather is a lot more reasonable than flying saucers as an explanation. See Occam's Razor.   

You left out some other famous incidents in UFO mythology.  Major Mantell's jet crash in 1948.  And police officer Lonnie Zamora's sighting in 1964 near Socorro, New Mexico.   

That is your review of Imminent by Luis Elizondo

Lots of breathless claims.  No real evidence.  Elizondo has been caught in some errors of fact about some of the incidents to which he refers.  He also drags in telepathy, remote viewing and other bogus new age hoohah...  This has become a standard trope in UFO revelations.  The former "insider" who comes out and spills the beans.  

That is your review of Donald E. Keyhoe’s book, UFOs, The Flying Saucers Are Real

Wow now you're going back!  Keyhoe's books were some of the first about UFOs I ever read.   He was very influential in establishing the basic UFO mythology.  The idea of a massive government cover up.  Sensationalist, no evidence.  Reporting speculation as fact.  His early career writing sci-fi and fantasy for pulp magazines served him well. 

The UFO field was lots of fun until the 80s when the Abduction movement started.  Then it got all twisted and pathological.  I kinda lost interest. 

Steefen, have you ever read ** you do not have permission to see this link **?  Now I don't agree with all of Carl Jung's theories but he does show how much of the idea rests in human psychology rather than physics.   

You, on the other hand, have shown yourself repeatedly unwilling to listen to anything that doesn’t closely align with your beliefs. You make ludicrous claims that you want everyone to just accept.

Why should anyone have to demonstrate that pseudoscience is blatant nonsense? It’s not even supposed to be allowed on the forum.  But then neither are responses from questions posed to chatbots.  Or YouTube videos from dubious sources.  Yet, you persist.