On New Years day I attended an annual party wherein I sat with an old friend who called me the night before to tell me he was bringing along clear and unequivocal evidence for not only the existence of UFO’s but that they were the product of Nazi scientists. He kept his word while I and several other guests looked on to his “evidence”. It amounted to a few minutes of film footage (downloaded onto a laptop computer) of a WWII bombing run over Germany as taken from the bomber. It was punctuated by the expected shuddering of the camera as the plane was buffeted about by the anti aircraft fire. The two pieces of “unarguable evidence” consisted of two very rapid frames of flak bursts. One in particular was a close by burst to the plane which swirled around in a whirlpool effect then abruptly left. To him and apparently some others where he retrieved this footage from are of the opinion that this second in particular were actual footage of a UFO flitting about amidst a flotilla of American bombers.
To me and the others in witness that this was nothing out of the ordinary. The others were either or both stunned or too polite to say what they thought but I was asked directly and I responded that it was clearly just an ordinary flak burst on the starboard side of the plane which was filming the event. He became puzzled that anyone would dare challenge such “clear evidence” and I went on to say that first of all the picture was far from clear, and there was flak bursting about all over the place, the “object” at the center of attention was translucent and ethereal and it dissipated as suddenly as it appeared just as I would expect a puff of smoke to do at such an altitude with the air currents at such altitudes plus the slip stream of the bomber squadron, I found it very ordinary and humdrum not to mention just as I would expect during such an event.
He suddenly closed down his computer without further discussion stormed away and became distant the rest of the night and acted rather insulted. This is exactly how someone would and does react when their claim of having witnessed a “miracle” has been challenged and scoffed at. This again is exactly what I mean by “the need to believe”. People who go about their lives in search for these things find ways of accepting and rationalizing practically anything that would in their own minds validate and ratify their own beliefs thus awarding them a large level of comfort and stability. This is preferable to them than to accept reality as it is which is stark, unpleasant, and so impossible for them to ingest that they’d rather waste their lives in search of the most bizarre and unfruitful means which gives them comfort and stability.
Let’s return to the aforementioned incident for more analysis before I summarize. If the conversation had lasted longer I would have asked the following questions:

1. If the Germans had built these machines then why would they risk them amidst all that anti aircraft fire not to mention the machine guns of the allied bombers? If they were that advanced they’d be of vital importance so why put them in harm’s way? Especially if they were not to knock the enemy bombers out of the sky?
2. If they were in possession of such weapons why didn’t they just annihilate all allied aircraft and thus win the war?
3. If they did develop this technology then why aren’t we using flying saucer to travel from New York to Los Angeles today in minutes rather than hours? What’s more, why haven’t we developed the “ultimate weapon” and destroyed all hostile nations at our own whim?

There are others which beg to be asked but these stand as foremost in the pile. I would also have to insist upon the basic tenet of scientific inquiry which is that, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, and having said that, a mere few frames of film footage is nowhere near approaching that, especially when the explanation is so painfully obvious that to reach the same conclusion one would have to jump across an intellectual chasm as big as the Grand Canyon to miss all the more probable explanations to arrive at the one professed as the “unequivocal” one.
In fact, later in the day he and others did engage in conversation about is there extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe. To them (and especially to him) the likelihood of other civilizations in the universe is the same thing as “believing in UFO’s”. I had to not only disagree but clarify that these are actually two totally different propositions. One is could there be other civilizations besides our own in the vastness of space. This took on the characteristics of a theological discussion because the names and quotations of Billy Graham and other religious figures were raised to indicate that they likewise believed that there are other “people” elsewhere in the universe”. Firstly it needs to be recognized that the conversation immediately drifted away from a scientific one to a religious nature. Having said that I add that my input was that it is one thing to say that you accept the possibility for other races to have developed in other solar systems, and it is quite a different discussion as to whether or not you think those intelligence have visited Earth. I posited that I indeed hope they never find us because the lesson of history is that whenever one race find another and one is exceptionally more advanced that the other the lesser advanced one always ends up on the short end of the deal. But the big point I make here is that the distinction between these two propositions was totally lost on the others in the conversation and could not grasp how I could accept on and not the other. In summary, it was a matter of a religious nature and not science and they were completely unable to comprehend the difference, which further illustrates my point about how big a problem the need to believe is.
The answer and conclusion to all of this is that many people just can not bear reality and daily life as it is so they go about in search of fantastic explanations, most of which can not be scrutinized and as such will remain unchallenged. So they have for the most part found a safe place for their minds to dwell. Still others have a need for such “conspiracy theories” because they have to quench another need to constantly be in search of enemies, grievances, people or groups to blame the world’s ill upon, and to essentially feed their own prejudices with a methodology that on some level they find can’t be challenged. They will dismiss people like me as part of the conspiracy or just willing to be blinded by the conspiracy which seeks to educated the masses about the truth that this or that is being withheld from us by some evil force. This is what is known as a complex for having to feel that they possess “special knowledge” which places them on a pedestal and affords them a sense of “specialness” that they can find no where else.
So to close out this chapter on this sad but amazing subject, this is all evidencial as well as indicative of how deeply people can delude themselves and thus how deeply ingrained the “need to believe” is in many.