7 ms·

More UFOs Than Ever Before

45 points by prismatic 7y ago

dmoy 7y ago
Unmentioned in the article (or I missed it because I just woke up) is the fact that lockheed's skunkworks started pumping out weird shit around the end of WWII. Seems like that would have some effect.
allnightowl 7y ago
Maybe it’s hysteria, but I’ve seen 2 clear examples of UFOs/UAPs with my own eyes and I can assure anyone reading this that multiple types of craft either not of this world or ultra top secret are a part of our reality.
- nprateem 7y ago
  But what about this author who's never seen one who says they don't exist? Surely you'll reconsider what you saw!?!?
- theli0nheart 7y ago
  Can you explain in more detail what you saw / what happened?
lostgame 7y ago
Wow. An interesting nod to the incredibly fascinating third season of David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks', whose brilliant eighth episode and the accompanying Secret History of Twin Peaks and Final Dossier novels were astounding examples of historical fiction. I was quite impressed as to just how deep that rabbit-hole went.
- criddell 7y ago
  Every time I read a Paris Review article linked from here, I'm glad I did. They've published a lot of great stuff that you can easily read in a short sitting.
nerf_javascript 7y ago
The end of the article is really crazy when you look at it -- Stimson growing up w/ great-grandma who was told stories by GW as a child, advising Truman about the atomic bomb. That "one life" thing really shocks you into perspective... In less than 200 years, we went from rioting farmers at the mercy of nature to the most powerful war-faring nation on the planet with the ability to turn a war in which other superpowers struggled. We went from the bloodiest battle numbering over a thousand dead to obliterating entire cities and hundreds of thousands of people with just two bombs. I would've thought that as we raise the standard of life in our society, we'll inevitably create technology that will be used to become more efficient at killing, but it's actually turning out to be the opposite -- as we get better at waging war, we're developing the technology that will raise our standard of life.
- Sharlin 7y ago
  To be fair, in 200 years most of the developed world went from bickering nobles and rioting peasants to a bunch of powers capable of waging megadeath war. Industrialization is like that. Honestly, the transition of the Soviet Union was even more impressive, going from an agrarian backwood to a hydrogen-bomb-wielding superpower in less than fifty years, albeit cutting some corners in the process.
antonvs 7y ago
> Some suggest it was the first atomic bomb [that] sent a shock wave across the universe. It registered in distant solar systems as deep-sea earthquakes register with us. It was a clarion call. It said: DANGER! It meant the previously harmless human race had gotten ahold of matches that could immolate all of creation. ...or all of planet Earth, whichever comes first. Hint: it's not the former.
- exabyte 7y ago
  Assuming that UFO's are being controlled by an alien species and that they are in fact more frequent since the event of nuclear explosions on earth, then I think the safest assumption we can make is that the nuclear event sent a strong enough signal to notify them of our existence. If that's the case, I don't think we should speculate too quickly on how they would interpret the signal. However it does seem like there has actually been action taken by an alleged UFO. Look at the following link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-deactivated-nukes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-dea... There's a youtube video with testimony given by a commander that I can't find at the moment, but it's pretty insane.
  - dogma1138 7y ago
    Well the problem with that is that they would need to be passing by only a few light years from earth to detect it, if it’s even detectable on astronomical scales. It’s not that they came here centuries after the nuclear tests, because even if they have FTL that is the shortest time frame that makes sense unless a nuclear explosion causes some signals that some how move faster than light which both violates physics as we know it and would be really unlikely to go unnoticed based on just how much data we have from nuclear blasts and nuclear reactors.
    - exabyte 7y ago
      yeah but you're also assuming that they're subject to the same dimensions of time and space as we are
mortenjorck 7y ago
> I wish I could see one for myself, as I wish I could see the Virgin Mary floating above the yellow roses in my backyard. When I said this to my neighbor, who runs a blog called I Saw One Too, he shook his head sadly and said, “No you don’t. You really don’t.” The one time I thought I was seeing something unexplainable out on the highway at night (thankfully revealed, after ten minutes or so, to be the oddest atmospheric occlusion of the moon I’ve ever seen), the one thought on my mind was “man, I really don’t want to be one of those people who’s seen a UFO.”
- criddell 7y ago
  > man, I really don’t want to be one of those people who’s seen a UFO You just reminded me of the Saturday Night Live sketch Close Encounter. It's one of the funniest things they've done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfPdYYsEfAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfPdYYsEfAE
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
There are so, so many atmospheric phenomenon that can produce 'ufos'. Every time someone sees a jetliner compressed by humidity and heat into a row of dots (the windows) around a cigar shape, they're convinced its the first time anyone has ever seen such a thing. The burden of proof for a 'real' ufo is heavy, and nobody makes any real effort. Its reasonable to dismiss the entire topic as overheated descriptions of normal phenomena.
- leeoniya 7y ago
  crown flashes and ball lightning have to be some of the strangest https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CPk0mKVnnCs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CPk0mKVnnCs
  - Gravityloss 7y ago
    Whoa. It's a completely different class of dynamic phenomenon, unlike anything I've ever seen. Thank you for posting.
  - DoctorOetker 7y ago
    I had seen this beautiful crown flash before, I was hoping to see some ball lightning of similar quality?
- dkersten 7y ago
  > There are so, so many atmospheric phenomenon that can produce 'ufos'. Neil Degrasse Tyson commented on this by saying that the difference between a layperson seeing a UFO and an astronomer (or whatever) is that the latter knows what strange natural phenomenon they're looking at (or at least can conceive that its natural based on other similar things that they do know) while the layperson doesn't and therefore jumps to conclusions that someone who spends a lot of time looking at the sky wouldn't.
  - DrBazza 7y ago
    There's also psychological research (IIRC) that shows that those who believe in the paranormal will likely think they've experienced something that matches their beliefs (UFOs exist), and skeptics (or rationalist, or whatever word you prefer), never experience anything they would describe as paranormal. Essentially the same thing NDT said.
scottmsul 7y ago
I think there's probably something to the UFO phenomenon. However I'm convinced Bob Lazar is a fraud. It's a tricky case because certain parts of his story are verifiable, like that he worked at Los Alamos and that his friends did see a moving light in the sky. The best explanation I've seen is here: http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange-places/looking-at-the-bob-lazar-story-from-the-perspective-of-2018/ http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange... http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange-places/bluefire-main/bluefire/particle-beams-and-saucer-dreams/ http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange... The explanation is he worked on particle accelerators as a mechanic (not a physicist), and they were shooting particle beams into the sky. However since this is all likely classified he would be forced to stick to his UFO story.
- clubm8 7y ago
  Why would someone want to shoot a particle accelerator into the sky? (The article mentions plasma balls, but as a non physicist I wonder still "Why?") The US military probably does not want plasma balls because they look pretty.
  - scottmsul 7y ago
    Radar spoofing, it's mentioned in the second link. But the author admits it's only a guess.
- dkersten 7y ago
  Seeing unknown/strange things in the sky above a secret military test facility or air force base really doesn't seem that baffling or strange to me.
exabyte 7y ago
"Robert Jamison, a retired USAF nuclear missile targeting officer, told of several occasions having to go out and 're-start' [nuclear] missiles that had been deactivated, after UFOs were sighted nearby. Similar sightings at nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union and in Britain were related. ... The incidents were never officially explained." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-deactivated-nukes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-dea...
goda90 7y ago
The argument that the government wouldn't be able to cover something like that up is kind of weak imo. They had just spent years keeping the Manhattan project under wraps and they were starting to ramp up all sorts of spying and secrets surrounding the Cold War. And for info that does get out(like numerous eye witnesses), we've seen real life examples of how effective the strategy of treating believers like they're nuts is when it comes to other government programs like PRISM. People talked about NSA spying for years but got dismissed until we got some big document dumps.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
archgoon 7y ago
> Lazar believed these were the components of a nuclear reactor powered by an element then unknown on earth: element 115, which, once dismissed as fantastical, was synthesized into existence in a Moscow lab in 2003 The element isn't fantastical, and anyone with a basic understanding of chemistry would expect it to exist (albeit, not for very long); Lazar's attributed properties to it were (and are). As a side note, since 2010, the entire bottom row of the Periodic Table has now been filled out with synthetic elements (and names since 2016). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscovium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscovium
aplummer 7y ago
I’ve always assumed people were seeing vehicles like this one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar
- Animats 7y ago
  Oh, that thing. It was a lemon. A cool looking lemon, but a lemon.[1] There are three videos: #1: Classified SECRET. It hasn't flown yet, but it's going to be really great. See this cool mockup! #2: Classified OFFICIAL USE ONLY. It flies! Well, hovers about 1m off the ground in ground effect. Wobbles too much. But with our elaborate testing program, a NASA wind tunnel, and maybe with more powerful engines and active stabilization, it can work! #3: UNCLASSIFIED. Well, here we are flying this thing around the back lot at NASA Ames as a hovercraft. Not too useful, but cool looking. It's a nice video history of a failed project. Meantime, the Army was also funding the UH-1, the "Huey" helicopter, which started flying around the same time and was far more useful. So the Army killed off the disc project and ordered a few thousand Hueys. The USAF, meanwhile, had figured out that swept back wings worked in high-speed flight, and didn't need to fool with discs. [1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/army_saucer/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/army_saucer/
  - 725686 7y ago
    Holy cow, the Hiller Flying Platform rocks!
    - Animats 7y ago
      If you're in Silicon Valley, there's one at the Hiller Aviation Museum. They have a good collection of strange VTOL craft.
UFODocThrowaway 7y ago
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/assessment-situation-statement-position-ufos.pdf https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/assessment-s...
spease 7y ago
First thing I thought of is this: https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/ I haven’t ever heard of a corresponding increase in UFO videos. It’s awfully convenient none of these suspected aliens buzz crowds full of people with 4k60Hz/40MP phone cameras.
- DrBazza 7y ago
  Came here to post that exact link. Cameras have never been better and in such widely available quantities, in just about every cell phone, and UFO pictures have never been worse. Also Occam's Razor. Far more likely to be an Earth-bound phenomena. Roswell: has technology to fly light years, but crashes in (possibly bad) Earth weather. Erm, ok.
DanielBMarkham 7y ago
There is an epistemological truth here that is overlooked: for any non-reproducible phenomenon, physical or psychological, we can make no judgments on what happened. The default answer is always going to be "no" for some people and "yes" for others. These are the folks who just have to have a firm answer. The actual answer is "nobody knows" I also want to believe, so I tend to be extremely skeptical of any UFO stories. But looking throughout history, I have to admit that I am in no position to make a decision one way or another. A bunch of really respected guys made some observations of a thing with instrumental evidence that we don't understand? Cool. There's something we don't understand. Spinning up some tale of the atom bomb or aliens? That's just to sell books to the rubes. We don't know. That's okay. If there are other intelligent lifeforms around, and if they have any developmental parallels in their society to ours, they probably think of us as nothing more than a particularly advanced form of fungus. And if they were to come here to observe, they'd either use a blind or come and go in such a way to create the kind evidential noise we currently see in the public record. So while I wish something is going to come along and settle this, it ain't going to happen.
bitL 7y ago
If UFOs are real, it's unlikely they started to appear only recently and most likely had Earth as their playground (vacation destination/ZOO), and maybe even originating life. Who knows, maybe this is some alien university project on how to make life on a distant planet from the scratch? We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design; maybe somebody was doing alien PhD in a better bipedal design in carbon-based life forms and just planted results here to see how they proliferate... If you look at religions, they all resemble optimization algorithms to build civilizations with different attributes; one could seed different "rules" to different parts of the world and observe which rules become the dominant ones and which kind of civilizations they bring. Moreover, having a conflict between different civilizations that couldn't be reconciled by any other way than a total annihilation, it could provide a needed impetus for progress as the permanent conflict it brings forces people to develop quickly and throw out inefficient ways to survive. From this point of view, globalization might be worse for our progress as species; USA vs China competition might be a needed conflict to progress in any meaningful way.
- ben_w 7y ago
  > We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design; This totally misrepresents evolution. DNA isn’t programmed to adapt to local changes, but rather it’s not programmed to perfectly reproduce without errors. Some errors are useful and get passed on, most errors are either useless or harmful and don’t. And lots of small changes equals a large change — we don’t have to be able to leap a mountain in a single bound to reach the top, either literally or metaphorically, just make a lot of small steps.
  - bitL 7y ago
    The problem with this thinking is that it completely disregards the time complexity/probability of that happening. So having certain "bits flipped" in DNA in a certain sequence in multiple representatives of the same species in the same location for the change to propagate has too low probability, especially when the number of instances of biological species was usually quite low due to constant struggle for survival; the complexity of growing e.g. a new leg because you somehow need it is again unthinkable with our current computing power (we can't even model that properly with reinforcement learning on fastest supercomputers). So as a conclusion, theory of evolution is fitting for small adaptive changes but is either too optimistic or outright wrong for large jumps inside species; we are obviously missing something very important there. Listening to Dawkins I can agree with his local adaptations arguments but then he suddenly makes a jump and says "and this happens all over millions of years" and that somehow makes that happen, which is a position of faith and not science. Better would be if biologists finally admitted we have no clue about mechanism that allows these jumps; references to random sampling are laughable and fitting freshmen at a university and I am saddened this is accepted - we are likely going to miss some great discoveries because somebody will be insisting on this ridiculous hypothesis instead of figuring out the proper algorithm behind it.
Animats 7y ago
Where are the Instagram photos?
- twic 7y ago
  Any time a meteor or whatever goes anywhere near Russia, there's dashcam footage of it. If there are UFOs, they're avoiding Russia.
fucking_tragedy 7y ago
We're in an era where there's an arms race in the lightweight and unmanned aircraft space between the most powerful nations on Earth. Of course there are going to be more UFO sightings domestically. Where else are we going to develop and test these things? It's well known that the government is happy to feed conspiracy theorists disinformation in order to protect classified information[1], like the existence of secret weapons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men
reggieband 7y ago
I have a more dark and cynical outlook on UFOs and their continued presence in our culture. I watch Joe Rogan and I saw most of his interaction with Lazar as well as his even weirder interaction with Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge. In both cases I got the impression that they were dupes. Tom had these crazy stories about high-level military officers bouncing him around between each other. They all seemed to be giving him a wink-and-nudge that he was on to something and he should keep digging. They actively encouraged him to publicly share whatever he learned. I have a suspicion that there is an old-boys-club of high-level military guys pushing UFO conspiracies for some purpose. At the very least, muddying the waters can help mask any civilian reports of potential classified aircraft. At the worst it can act as a lightening rod to redirect public thirst for unearthing military secrets. When guys like Bob Lazar and Tom DeLonge show up they must be happy to get free dissemination of their programs. I'd even go so far to believe that Bob could have been one of a few that were set up by the military using an elaborate stage-show with the hope of creating false leaks. The idea of the military staging the kind of things Bob reports after psychologically filtering for types of people who believably exaggerate is not beyond possibility in my mind. You may not have to work very hard at tricking someone if you find the kind of person who really wants to be tricked.
- fucking_tragedy 7y ago
  > I have a suspicion that there is an old-boys-club of high-level military guys pushing UFO conspiracies for some purpose. At the very least, muddying the waters can help mask any civilian reports of potential classified aircraft. At the worst it can act as a lightening rod to redirect public thirst for unearthing military secrets. This is the thesis of the documentary "Mirage Men".
thaumaturgy 7y ago
I was hoping in the beginning that this would present some interesting new explanation for UFO ... hysteria, but it didn't really get there. The argument from governmental incompetence isn't terribly compelling to me. The occasional leaks of vast cover-ups -- like the extent of the NSA's surveillance apparatus -- suggest that the government is in fact quite good at keeping sensitive information hidden from the public. The UFO phenomena appears to me to track more closely with the rise of the extraterrestrial in popular sci-fi. It starts with the War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938, made even more compelling perhaps by the events of World War I and the technological advancements that would have seemed to be happening at break-neck speed at the time, and seen through the lens of a global tension as events began leading up to World War II. It was based on a story written in the late 1800s which was just another of many popular British invasion works of fiction at the time, just with an element of science fiction, owing to Wells' training as a science teacher. From there we have the rapid progression of Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Space Ghost, Lost in Space, Star Trek, Unsolved Mysteries, The X Files, and a whole pile of other shows, movies, comic books, and magazines. Frequency of UFO reports [1] seems largely US-centric and tracks pretty well with metrics like number of hours of TV watched [2]. It also correlates well with the most common locations for the sightings: in rural areas, who have in recent years shifted their interest in conspiracy theories from the great UFO coverup and towards QAnon and the deep state and all that. So while the nuclear age may have inspired some of the fiction, it looks to me like it's the entertainment age that created UFO mass hysteria. For the people involved, any phenomena they experienced -- strange lighting, whether real or imagined, or sleep paralysis, or the delirious effects of a sleep aid, or, maybe, proximity to experimental aircraft -- would all be best explained by the fiction they were most familiar with: extraterrestrials. As cultural interest has shifted towards domestic issues, and we have begun to explore space ourselves, and ubiquitous surveillance has spread to every person's pocket but has yet failed to produce any clear, incontrovertible evidence for alien spacecraft, reports of UFO sightings have likewise been trending downwards. [1]: http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxevent.html http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxevent.html [2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-did-tv-watching-peak/561464/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-... edit: as I was writing this, ~reggieband posted a comment to this thread that pretty sweetly exemplified my main points: he was watching a Joe Rogan podcast, and thinks that Bob Lazar is being duped into being a part of a government conspiracy to conceal classified aircraft.
carapace 7y ago
This is very well-written, from my point of view it's a showcase of how the mind works to prevent cognitive dissonance. The author compares meeting the neighbors with meeting God. > My relationship to UFOs is like my relationship to God. I call this "cognitive leverage". There's a sort of if-then structure: IF aliens exist THEN something-something-God. The THEN-clause is too psychologically immense so the brain invalidates the IF-clause and organizes thought and perception in alignment with the result. > I want to believe, but find it hard. > I wish I could see one for myself, as I wish I could see the Virgin Mary floating above the yellow roses in my backyard. Would you want to meet somebody that made that big a deal about it? It would be wildly uncomfortable for anyone but a megalomaniac, eh? The reason the "G-men" don't openly talk about the UFOs, and the reason the spacemen don't land on the White House lawn, is right there: it would cause too much trouble because humans are nuts. One classic way that this sort of denial of reality presents itself is in trivially invalid reasoning, for example when Cohen postulates that we can hide the existence of ultra-tech aircraft but not UFOs. And here is a textbook rationalization: > Belief in UFOs is really no stranger than any other sort of belief, no stranger than a belief in prophets or ancient codes. That fails to account for e.g. his own neighbor who "had been in the military when he saw the UFO." and who presumably believes in UFOs only because he has seen one. He wasn't raised in a UFO cult, eh?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rasz 7y ago
more sightings, less pictures

45 points by prismatic 7y ago

dmoy 7y ago

Unmentioned in the article (or I missed it because I just woke up) is the fact that lockheed's skunkworks started pumping out weird shit around the end of WWII. Seems like that would have some effect.

allnightowl 7y ago

Maybe it’s hysteria, but I’ve seen 2 clear examples of UFOs/UAPs with my own eyes and I can assure anyone reading this that multiple types of craft either not of this world or ultra top secret are a part of our reality.

nprateem 7y ago
But what about this author who's never seen one who says they don't exist? Surely you'll reconsider what you saw!?!?
theli0nheart 7y ago
Can you explain in more detail what you saw / what happened?

lostgame 7y ago

Wow. An interesting nod to the incredibly fascinating third season of David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks', whose brilliant eighth episode and the accompanying Secret History of Twin Peaks and Final Dossier novels were astounding examples of historical fiction. I was quite impressed as to just how deep that rabbit-hole went.

criddell 7y ago
Every time I read a Paris Review article linked from here, I'm glad I did. They've published a lot of great stuff that you can easily read in a short sitting.

nerf_javascript 7y ago

The end of the article is really crazy when you look at it -- Stimson growing up w/ great-grandma who was told stories by GW as a child, advising Truman about the atomic bomb. That "one life" thing really shocks you into perspective... In less than 200 years, we went from rioting farmers at the mercy of nature to the most powerful war-faring nation on the planet with the ability to turn a war in which other superpowers struggled. We went from the bloodiest battle numbering over a thousand dead to obliterating entire cities and hundreds of thousands of people with just two bombs. I would've thought that as we raise the standard of life in our society, we'll inevitably create technology that will be used to become more efficient at killing, but it's actually turning out to be the opposite -- as we get better at waging war, we're developing the technology that will raise our standard of life.

Sharlin 7y ago
To be fair, in 200 years most of the developed world went from bickering nobles and rioting peasants to a bunch of powers capable of waging megadeath war. Industrialization is like that. Honestly, the transition of the Soviet Union was even more impressive, going from an agrarian backwood to a hydrogen-bomb-wielding superpower in less than fifty years, albeit cutting some corners in the process.

antonvs 7y ago

> Some suggest it was the first atomic bomb [that] sent a shock wave across the universe. It registered in distant solar systems as deep-sea earthquakes register with us. It was a clarion call. It said: DANGER! It meant the previously harmless human race had gotten ahold of matches that could immolate all of creation. ...or all of planet Earth, whichever comes first. Hint: it's not the former.

exabyte 7y ago
Assuming that UFO's are being controlled by an alien species and that they are in fact more frequent since the event of nuclear explosions on earth, then I think the safest assumption we can make is that the nuclear event sent a strong enough signal to notify them of our existence. If that's the case, I don't think we should speculate too quickly on how they would interpret the signal. However it does seem like there has actually been action taken by an alleged UFO. Look at the following link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-deactivated-nukes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-dea... There's a youtube video with testimony given by a commander that I can't find at the moment, but it's pretty insane.
- dogma1138 7y ago
  Well the problem with that is that they would need to be passing by only a few light years from earth to detect it, if it’s even detectable on astronomical scales. It’s not that they came here centuries after the nuclear tests, because even if they have FTL that is the shortest time frame that makes sense unless a nuclear explosion causes some signals that some how move faster than light which both violates physics as we know it and would be really unlikely to go unnoticed based on just how much data we have from nuclear blasts and nuclear reactors.
  - exabyte 7y ago
    yeah but you're also assuming that they're subject to the same dimensions of time and space as we are

mortenjorck 7y ago

> I wish I could see one for myself, as I wish I could see the Virgin Mary floating above the yellow roses in my backyard. When I said this to my neighbor, who runs a blog called I Saw One Too, he shook his head sadly and said, “No you don’t. You really don’t.” The one time I thought I was seeing something unexplainable out on the highway at night (thankfully revealed, after ten minutes or so, to be the oddest atmospheric occlusion of the moon I’ve ever seen), the one thought on my mind was “man, I really don’t want to be one of those people who’s seen a UFO.”

criddell 7y ago
> man, I really don’t want to be one of those people who’s seen a UFO You just reminded me of the Saturday Night Live sketch Close Encounter. It's one of the funniest things they've done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfPdYYsEfAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfPdYYsEfAE

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

There are so, so many atmospheric phenomenon that can produce 'ufos'. Every time someone sees a jetliner compressed by humidity and heat into a row of dots (the windows) around a cigar shape, they're convinced its the first time anyone has ever seen such a thing. The burden of proof for a 'real' ufo is heavy, and nobody makes any real effort. Its reasonable to dismiss the entire topic as overheated descriptions of normal phenomena.

leeoniya 7y ago
crown flashes and ball lightning have to be some of the strangest https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CPk0mKVnnCs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CPk0mKVnnCs
- Gravityloss 7y ago
  Whoa. It's a completely different class of dynamic phenomenon, unlike anything I've ever seen. Thank you for posting.
- DoctorOetker 7y ago
  I had seen this beautiful crown flash before, I was hoping to see some ball lightning of similar quality?
dkersten 7y ago
> There are so, so many atmospheric phenomenon that can produce 'ufos'. Neil Degrasse Tyson commented on this by saying that the difference between a layperson seeing a UFO and an astronomer (or whatever) is that the latter knows what strange natural phenomenon they're looking at (or at least can conceive that its natural based on other similar things that they do know) while the layperson doesn't and therefore jumps to conclusions that someone who spends a lot of time looking at the sky wouldn't.
- DrBazza 7y ago
  There's also psychological research (IIRC) that shows that those who believe in the paranormal will likely think they've experienced something that matches their beliefs (UFOs exist), and skeptics (or rationalist, or whatever word you prefer), never experience anything they would describe as paranormal. Essentially the same thing NDT said.

scottmsul 7y ago

I think there's probably something to the UFO phenomenon. However I'm convinced Bob Lazar is a fraud. It's a tricky case because certain parts of his story are verifiable, like that he worked at Los Alamos and that his friends did see a moving light in the sky. The best explanation I've seen is here: http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange-places/looking-at-the-bob-lazar-story-from-the-perspective-of-2018/ http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange... http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange-places/bluefire-main/bluefire/particle-beams-and-saucer-dreams/ http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange... The explanation is he worked on particle accelerators as a mechanic (not a physicist), and they were shooting particle beams into the sky. However since this is all likely classified he would be forced to stick to his UFO story.

clubm8 7y ago
Why would someone want to shoot a particle accelerator into the sky? (The article mentions plasma balls, but as a non physicist I wonder still "Why?") The US military probably does not want plasma balls because they look pretty.
- scottmsul 7y ago
  Radar spoofing, it's mentioned in the second link. But the author admits it's only a guess.
dkersten 7y ago
Seeing unknown/strange things in the sky above a secret military test facility or air force base really doesn't seem that baffling or strange to me.

exabyte 7y ago

"Robert Jamison, a retired USAF nuclear missile targeting officer, told of several occasions having to go out and 're-start' [nuclear] missiles that had been deactivated, after UFOs were sighted nearby. Similar sightings at nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union and in Britain were related. ... The incidents were never officially explained." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-deactivated-nukes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-dea...

goda90 7y ago

The argument that the government wouldn't be able to cover something like that up is kind of weak imo. They had just spent years keeping the Manhattan project under wraps and they were starting to ramp up all sorts of spying and secrets surrounding the Cold War. And for info that does get out(like numerous eye witnesses), we've seen real life examples of how effective the strategy of treating believers like they're nuts is when it comes to other government programs like PRISM. People talked about NSA spying for years but got dismissed until we got some big document dumps.

deleted 7y ago
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archgoon 7y ago

> Lazar believed these were the components of a nuclear reactor powered by an element then unknown on earth: element 115, which, once dismissed as fantastical, was synthesized into existence in a Moscow lab in 2003 The element isn't fantastical, and anyone with a basic understanding of chemistry would expect it to exist (albeit, not for very long); Lazar's attributed properties to it were (and are). As a side note, since 2010, the entire bottom row of the Periodic Table has now been filled out with synthetic elements (and names since 2016). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscovium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscovium

aplummer 7y ago

I’ve always assumed people were seeing vehicles like this one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar

Animats 7y ago
Oh, that thing. It was a lemon. A cool looking lemon, but a lemon.[1] There are three videos: #1: Classified SECRET. It hasn't flown yet, but it's going to be really great. See this cool mockup! #2: Classified OFFICIAL USE ONLY. It flies! Well, hovers about 1m off the ground in ground effect. Wobbles too much. But with our elaborate testing program, a NASA wind tunnel, and maybe with more powerful engines and active stabilization, it can work! #3: UNCLASSIFIED. Well, here we are flying this thing around the back lot at NASA Ames as a hovercraft. Not too useful, but cool looking. It's a nice video history of a failed project. Meantime, the Army was also funding the UH-1, the "Huey" helicopter, which started flying around the same time and was far more useful. So the Army killed off the disc project and ordered a few thousand Hueys. The USAF, meanwhile, had figured out that swept back wings worked in high-speed flight, and didn't need to fool with discs. [1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/army_saucer/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/army_saucer/
- 725686 7y ago
  Holy cow, the Hiller Flying Platform rocks!
  - Animats 7y ago
    If you're in Silicon Valley, there's one at the Hiller Aviation Museum. They have a good collection of strange VTOL craft.

UFODocThrowaway 7y ago

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/assessment-situation-statement-position-ufos.pdf https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/assessment-s...

spease 7y ago

First thing I thought of is this: https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/ I haven’t ever heard of a corresponding increase in UFO videos. It’s awfully convenient none of these suspected aliens buzz crowds full of people with 4k60Hz/40MP phone cameras.

DrBazza 7y ago
Came here to post that exact link. Cameras have never been better and in such widely available quantities, in just about every cell phone, and UFO pictures have never been worse. Also Occam's Razor. Far more likely to be an Earth-bound phenomena. Roswell: has technology to fly light years, but crashes in (possibly bad) Earth weather. Erm, ok.

DanielBMarkham 7y ago

There is an epistemological truth here that is overlooked: for any non-reproducible phenomenon, physical or psychological, we can make no judgments on what happened. The default answer is always going to be "no" for some people and "yes" for others. These are the folks who just have to have a firm answer. The actual answer is "nobody knows" I also want to believe, so I tend to be extremely skeptical of any UFO stories. But looking throughout history, I have to admit that I am in no position to make a decision one way or another. A bunch of really respected guys made some observations of a thing with instrumental evidence that we don't understand? Cool. There's something we don't understand. Spinning up some tale of the atom bomb or aliens? That's just to sell books to the rubes. We don't know. That's okay. If there are other intelligent lifeforms around, and if they have any developmental parallels in their society to ours, they probably think of us as nothing more than a particularly advanced form of fungus. And if they were to come here to observe, they'd either use a blind or come and go in such a way to create the kind evidential noise we currently see in the public record. So while I wish something is going to come along and settle this, it ain't going to happen.

bitL 7y ago

If UFOs are real, it's unlikely they started to appear only recently and most likely had Earth as their playground (vacation destination/ZOO), and maybe even originating life. Who knows, maybe this is some alien university project on how to make life on a distant planet from the scratch? We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design; maybe somebody was doing alien PhD in a better bipedal design in carbon-based life forms and just planted results here to see how they proliferate... If you look at religions, they all resemble optimization algorithms to build civilizations with different attributes; one could seed different "rules" to different parts of the world and observe which rules become the dominant ones and which kind of civilizations they bring. Moreover, having a conflict between different civilizations that couldn't be reconciled by any other way than a total annihilation, it could provide a needed impetus for progress as the permanent conflict it brings forces people to develop quickly and throw out inefficient ways to survive. From this point of view, globalization might be worse for our progress as species; USA vs China competition might be a needed conflict to progress in any meaningful way.

ben_w 7y ago
> We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design; This totally misrepresents evolution. DNA isn’t programmed to adapt to local changes, but rather it’s not programmed to perfectly reproduce without errors. Some errors are useful and get passed on, most errors are either useless or harmful and don’t. And lots of small changes equals a large change — we don’t have to be able to leap a mountain in a single bound to reach the top, either literally or metaphorically, just make a lot of small steps.
- bitL 7y ago
  The problem with this thinking is that it completely disregards the time complexity/probability of that happening. So having certain "bits flipped" in DNA in a certain sequence in multiple representatives of the same species in the same location for the change to propagate has too low probability, especially when the number of instances of biological species was usually quite low due to constant struggle for survival; the complexity of growing e.g. a new leg because you somehow need it is again unthinkable with our current computing power (we can't even model that properly with reinforcement learning on fastest supercomputers). So as a conclusion, theory of evolution is fitting for small adaptive changes but is either too optimistic or outright wrong for large jumps inside species; we are obviously missing something very important there. Listening to Dawkins I can agree with his local adaptations arguments but then he suddenly makes a jump and says "and this happens all over millions of years" and that somehow makes that happen, which is a position of faith and not science. Better would be if biologists finally admitted we have no clue about mechanism that allows these jumps; references to random sampling are laughable and fitting freshmen at a university and I am saddened this is accepted - we are likely going to miss some great discoveries because somebody will be insisting on this ridiculous hypothesis instead of figuring out the proper algorithm behind it.

Animats 7y ago

Where are the Instagram photos?

twic 7y ago
Any time a meteor or whatever goes anywhere near Russia, there's dashcam footage of it. If there are UFOs, they're avoiding Russia.

fucking_tragedy 7y ago

We're in an era where there's an arms race in the lightweight and unmanned aircraft space between the most powerful nations on Earth. Of course there are going to be more UFO sightings domestically. Where else are we going to develop and test these things? It's well known that the government is happy to feed conspiracy theorists disinformation in order to protect classified information[1], like the existence of secret weapons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men

reggieband 7y ago

I have a more dark and cynical outlook on UFOs and their continued presence in our culture. I watch Joe Rogan and I saw most of his interaction with Lazar as well as his even weirder interaction with Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge. In both cases I got the impression that they were dupes. Tom had these crazy stories about high-level military officers bouncing him around between each other. They all seemed to be giving him a wink-and-nudge that he was on to something and he should keep digging. They actively encouraged him to publicly share whatever he learned. I have a suspicion that there is an old-boys-club of high-level military guys pushing UFO conspiracies for some purpose. At the very least, muddying the waters can help mask any civilian reports of potential classified aircraft. At the worst it can act as a lightening rod to redirect public thirst for unearthing military secrets. When guys like Bob Lazar and Tom DeLonge show up they must be happy to get free dissemination of their programs. I'd even go so far to believe that Bob could have been one of a few that were set up by the military using an elaborate stage-show with the hope of creating false leaks. The idea of the military staging the kind of things Bob reports after psychologically filtering for types of people who believably exaggerate is not beyond possibility in my mind. You may not have to work very hard at tricking someone if you find the kind of person who really wants to be tricked.

fucking_tragedy 7y ago
> I have a suspicion that there is an old-boys-club of high-level military guys pushing UFO conspiracies for some purpose. At the very least, muddying the waters can help mask any civilian reports of potential classified aircraft. At the worst it can act as a lightening rod to redirect public thirst for unearthing military secrets. This is the thesis of the documentary "Mirage Men".

thaumaturgy 7y ago

I was hoping in the beginning that this would present some interesting new explanation for UFO ... hysteria, but it didn't really get there. The argument from governmental incompetence isn't terribly compelling to me. The occasional leaks of vast cover-ups -- like the extent of the NSA's surveillance apparatus -- suggest that the government is in fact quite good at keeping sensitive information hidden from the public. The UFO phenomena appears to me to track more closely with the rise of the extraterrestrial in popular sci-fi. It starts with the War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938, made even more compelling perhaps by the events of World War I and the technological advancements that would have seemed to be happening at break-neck speed at the time, and seen through the lens of a global tension as events began leading up to World War II. It was based on a story written in the late 1800s which was just another of many popular British invasion works of fiction at the time, just with an element of science fiction, owing to Wells' training as a science teacher. From there we have the rapid progression of Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Space Ghost, Lost in Space, Star Trek, Unsolved Mysteries, The X Files, and a whole pile of other shows, movies, comic books, and magazines. Frequency of UFO reports [1] seems largely US-centric and tracks pretty well with metrics like number of hours of TV watched [2]. It also correlates well with the most common locations for the sightings: in rural areas, who have in recent years shifted their interest in conspiracy theories from the great UFO coverup and towards QAnon and the deep state and all that. So while the nuclear age may have inspired some of the fiction, it looks to me like it's the entertainment age that created UFO mass hysteria. For the people involved, any phenomena they experienced -- strange lighting, whether real or imagined, or sleep paralysis, or the delirious effects of a sleep aid, or, maybe, proximity to experimental aircraft -- would all be best explained by the fiction they were most familiar with: extraterrestrials. As cultural interest has shifted towards domestic issues, and we have begun to explore space ourselves, and ubiquitous surveillance has spread to every person's pocket but has yet failed to produce any clear, incontrovertible evidence for alien spacecraft, reports of UFO sightings have likewise been trending downwards. [1]: http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxevent.html http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxevent.html [2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-did-tv-watching-peak/561464/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-... edit: as I was writing this, ~reggieband posted a comment to this thread that pretty sweetly exemplified my main points: he was watching a Joe Rogan podcast, and thinks that Bob Lazar is being duped into being a part of a government conspiracy to conceal classified aircraft.

carapace 7y ago

This is very well-written, from my point of view it's a showcase of how the mind works to prevent cognitive dissonance. The author compares meeting the neighbors with meeting God. > My relationship to UFOs is like my relationship to God. I call this "cognitive leverage". There's a sort of if-then structure: IF aliens exist THEN something-something-God. The THEN-clause is too psychologically immense so the brain invalidates the IF-clause and organizes thought and perception in alignment with the result. > I want to believe, but find it hard. > I wish I could see one for myself, as I wish I could see the Virgin Mary floating above the yellow roses in my backyard. Would you want to meet somebody that made that big a deal about it? It would be wildly uncomfortable for anyone but a megalomaniac, eh? The reason the "G-men" don't openly talk about the UFOs, and the reason the spacemen don't land on the White House lawn, is right there: it would cause too much trouble because humans are nuts. One classic way that this sort of denial of reality presents itself is in trivially invalid reasoning, for example when Cohen postulates that we can hide the existence of ultra-tech aircraft but not UFOs. And here is a textbook rationalization: > Belief in UFOs is really no stranger than any other sort of belief, no stranger than a belief in prophets or ancient codes. That fails to account for e.g. his own neighbor who "had been in the military when he saw the UFO." and who presumably believes in UFOs only because he has seen one. He wasn't raised in a UFO cult, eh?

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rasz 7y ago

more sightings, less pictures