4 ms·

It’s unfortunate that this topic has such stigma around it that many researchers are afraid to study it for fear it’ll delegitimise them or ruin their career.

It’s unfortunate that this topic has such stigma around it that many researchers are afraid to study it for fear it’ll delegitimise them or ruin their career. You may be surprised at how many people you know have had experiences of their own, or know someone close who has, but don’t talk about it for fear of judgement. For all the hundreds of thousands of anecdotal reports that exist, and documented cases involving hundreds of witnesses, there is so little research into the phenomenon. Most of it is dismissed as mass hysteria, rather than investigated to determine if that assumption is true. That said, it’s not exactly a phenomenon that can easily be studied - the results are not repeatable. As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think we need to stop calling it a conspiracy theory, and instead call it just a theory. Remember there was a time when it was considered a conspiracy to say the the earth revolves around the sun.

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
> As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. After seeing the declassified Navy videos [0] I'm not sure how much more extraordinary evidence we can get. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/pentagon-declassifies-ufo-videos-taken-by-navy-pilots.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/pentagon-declassifies-ufo-vi...
- postalrat 6y ago
  I don't think the videos really show much. To me the real evidence is the public testimony of the 4 pilots and others.
  - jordwest 6y ago
    Absolutely, David Fravor’s (the pilot who actually chased the thing) interview with Joe Rogan[1] was one of the most compelling eyewitness accounts I’ve seen, and with that the associated video has a lot more context. If these things really do behave in the way he’s described, ET or not it suggests a fundamental leap in technology - it baffles me that there isn’t more interest. [1] https://youtu.be/Eco2s3-0zsQ https://youtu.be/Eco2s3-0zsQ
- cbgonz 6y ago
  Well... it really depends on how you look [0] at it [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M
  - shadowprofile77 6y ago
    I truly don't understand why everybody keeps referencing the Mick West debunking video of the UFO footage. I actually corresponded on the guy about inconsistencies in his own debunking claims and he gave no satisfactory justification for his extremely superficial arguments, which essentially focus on his own perceptions of inconsistencies in the footage itself and simply disregard weeks of repeated sightings, radar tracking and up-close eye-witness encounters between trained, professional pilots and the objects themselves in the air. These are pilots who on at least a couple of these occasions observed the objects from fairly close range, in broad daylight and had their observations at least partially confirmed at the same time by also professional operators of sophisticated tracking systems (radar etc) onboard the Navy's ships. In the case of the Nimitz "tic-tac" UFO events from late 2014 this happened especially, during weeks leading up to the brief video that was finally captured. Mick West simply disregards all of this and in an email I wrote to him even claims that the weeks of incidents previous to the video being captured were "separate" events from the video because they didn't concretely, confirmably show the same thing.... What? An absurd conclusion. Debunking with a critical eye is good and necessary but sometimes one gets the feeling that certain internet debunkers feel a need to debunk at all costs because that's their label, even if their own "rational" interpretations make leaps of logic much worse than simply admitting that something inexplicable was observed.
GuB-42 6y ago
The thing is, when people talk about UFOs, we always think "aliens", when in fact, it is just as the acronym suggests: unidentified flying objects. They wouldn't be unidentified if we knew they were aliens. Aliens are an extraordinary claim, we need to check out a lot of things before we start considering them. Take the "life on Venus" recent claim. There was a lot of work done to even consider it. They used results from several observatories, analyzed every known explanations to rule them out one after the other, and even now they still consider it unlikely compared to other currently unknown chemistry. So if you see a scientist and tell him, I saw a flying saucer, it was aliens, he will laugh at you because there are thousands of other explanations to look for first. On the other hand "mass hysteria" is also a lousy explanation. In reality, I think they are usually optical illusions. For example, the moon may appear like something else in unusual atmospheric conditions, and if you cross-reference the position of the moon with some UFO sightings, you get a lot of correlations. Other cases include small, close objects like insects appear like large, fast objects, this is common among pilots who are trained to look for other planes. There are also many psychological effects that aren't hysteria, for example it is common for people to "remember" things that never happened, which is also a big problem in a court of law: our memories are unreliable. Add to that defective equipment, pranks, etc... and you can probably cover most of the sightings. Then there is a small minority of true mass hysteria, secret programs, unexplained physical phenomena, etc... and only then you can start to consider aliens. And to make thing worse, more often than not, there is very little data.
- jordwest 6y ago
  For sure, the data is a big problem. But I think to compare with your Venus example - that’s an area where there’d probably be hundreds of astrophysicists around the world who’d jump at the chance to work on that publicly. With this phenomenon however, it’s like the polar opposite. Nobody wants to associate themselves with it, so even if there is something worth studying, we’re not studying it.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  > They wouldn't be unidentified if we knew they were aliens. Technically, you can become a UFO if you turn off your transponder. You are flying AND you are not broadcasting your identity. I'll show myself out.

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago

> As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. After seeing the declassified Navy videos [0] I'm not sure how much more extraordinary evidence we can get. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/pentagon-declassifies-ufo-videos-taken-by-navy-pilots.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/pentagon-declassifies-ufo-vi...

postalrat 6y ago
I don't think the videos really show much. To me the real evidence is the public testimony of the 4 pilots and others.
- jordwest 6y ago
  Absolutely, David Fravor’s (the pilot who actually chased the thing) interview with Joe Rogan[1] was one of the most compelling eyewitness accounts I’ve seen, and with that the associated video has a lot more context. If these things really do behave in the way he’s described, ET or not it suggests a fundamental leap in technology - it baffles me that there isn’t more interest. [1] https://youtu.be/Eco2s3-0zsQ https://youtu.be/Eco2s3-0zsQ
cbgonz 6y ago
Well... it really depends on how you look [0] at it [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M
- shadowprofile77 6y ago
  I truly don't understand why everybody keeps referencing the Mick West debunking video of the UFO footage. I actually corresponded on the guy about inconsistencies in his own debunking claims and he gave no satisfactory justification for his extremely superficial arguments, which essentially focus on his own perceptions of inconsistencies in the footage itself and simply disregard weeks of repeated sightings, radar tracking and up-close eye-witness encounters between trained, professional pilots and the objects themselves in the air. These are pilots who on at least a couple of these occasions observed the objects from fairly close range, in broad daylight and had their observations at least partially confirmed at the same time by also professional operators of sophisticated tracking systems (radar etc) onboard the Navy's ships. In the case of the Nimitz "tic-tac" UFO events from late 2014 this happened especially, during weeks leading up to the brief video that was finally captured. Mick West simply disregards all of this and in an email I wrote to him even claims that the weeks of incidents previous to the video being captured were "separate" events from the video because they didn't concretely, confirmably show the same thing.... What? An absurd conclusion. Debunking with a critical eye is good and necessary but sometimes one gets the feeling that certain internet debunkers feel a need to debunk at all costs because that's their label, even if their own "rational" interpretations make leaps of logic much worse than simply admitting that something inexplicable was observed.

GuB-42 6y ago

The thing is, when people talk about UFOs, we always think "aliens", when in fact, it is just as the acronym suggests: unidentified flying objects. They wouldn't be unidentified if we knew they were aliens. Aliens are an extraordinary claim, we need to check out a lot of things before we start considering them. Take the "life on Venus" recent claim. There was a lot of work done to even consider it. They used results from several observatories, analyzed every known explanations to rule them out one after the other, and even now they still consider it unlikely compared to other currently unknown chemistry. So if you see a scientist and tell him, I saw a flying saucer, it was aliens, he will laugh at you because there are thousands of other explanations to look for first. On the other hand "mass hysteria" is also a lousy explanation. In reality, I think they are usually optical illusions. For example, the moon may appear like something else in unusual atmospheric conditions, and if you cross-reference the position of the moon with some UFO sightings, you get a lot of correlations. Other cases include small, close objects like insects appear like large, fast objects, this is common among pilots who are trained to look for other planes. There are also many psychological effects that aren't hysteria, for example it is common for people to "remember" things that never happened, which is also a big problem in a court of law: our memories are unreliable. Add to that defective equipment, pranks, etc... and you can probably cover most of the sightings. Then there is a small minority of true mass hysteria, secret programs, unexplained physical phenomena, etc... and only then you can start to consider aliens. And to make thing worse, more often than not, there is very little data.

jordwest 6y ago
For sure, the data is a big problem. But I think to compare with your Venus example - that’s an area where there’d probably be hundreds of astrophysicists around the world who’d jump at the chance to work on that publicly. With this phenomenon however, it’s like the polar opposite. Nobody wants to associate themselves with it, so even if there is something worth studying, we’re not studying it.
rbanffy 6y ago
> They wouldn't be unidentified if we knew they were aliens. Technically, you can become a UFO if you turn off your transponder. You are flying AND you are not broadcasting your identity. I'll show myself out.