11 ms·

Many of these are correspondences with random people with varying levels of credibility. Taken alone, we can't draw any conclusion from a single person claiming

Many of these are correspondences with random people with varying levels of credibility. Taken alone, we can't draw any conclusion from a single person claiming an observation of a UFO. Statistically, however, there needs to be a convincing psychiatric study that people with no history of mental illness and "good moral standing" in the community can have a single hallucinatory event, often with multiple witnesses and specific details common across different sightings, to discount these observers as crazy, like so many here do. What is the mechanism? Our society is mostly based on witness testimony and trust, at the end of the day (we are coming back full circle with the advent of deepfakes). I'm not talking about seeing a dot of light moving strangely in the distance or something seen for only two seconds. Skeptical people rightly point out that those typically have a prosaic explanation, and often not a very exceptional one. I'm referring to the "close encounters" in which the witness(es) couldn't possibly mistake the giant black triangle silent floating 50 feet over a car with dozens of witnesses. Or the ranchers who check on the strongest bull in their herd one day, and the next find it precisely mutilated about a field, along with a dozen others, with no blood to be found. Or the entire schools full of children reporting metal objects landing with beings coming out to communicate with them telepathically. I do not doubt that some of them are crazy, but all of them? With what mental illness?

hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
Sources? Which one do you believe to be true?
sjg007 6y ago
If the truth is out there, start with yourself.
philip142au 6y ago
With hypnotism its trivial, maybe a guy who previously worked at a travelling circus lost his job and goes around and hypnotises people to believe they saw a UFO.
paulryanrogers 6y ago
Mass hysteria can make otherwise rational people behave very irrationally. And once claims are made--for many cultures--it's difficult to recant without losing face. There's also the risk of being left out of a group if close companions make a claim. Growing up in a very charismatic flavor of Christianity I thought I 'experienced' a lot of phenomenon that I now look back on with contempt. People preach, seek out, and legit believe (despite no hard evidence) in supernatural healing, limbs regrowing, divine languages, divine laughter/joy, spontaneous creation of jewels, etc. IME the claims that become most popular are the ones impossible to falsify. So testimony is usually all that's left.
- lend000 6y ago
  > it's difficult to recant without losing face Not sure if that applies to this highly derided topic. I do agree the mass hysteria angle has a place in the digestion of all these accounts, but what is the mechanism? Is it reproducible? Is it only applicable to panic situations? What about when you have tangible forms of evidence to follow the account (such as air-to-ground and infrared radar [0])? Incidentally, that's the account that was convincing enough to get me interested enough in this subject to study it with an open mind. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings...
  - 55555 6y ago
    I agree it's worth studying and understanding. I feel like we're seeing quite a bit of it in the area of politics right now.
- skissane 6y ago
  > Growing up in a very charismatic flavor of Christianity I thought I 'experienced' a lot of phenomenon that I now look back on with contempt I firsthand experienced a charismatic Christian telling me a story about how one time his car wouldn't start, and then some stranger appeared to help him get it started again, and then once the car was running the stranger was gone – totally believable, everyday occurrence, except for my interlocutor's insistence that the stranger wasn't a human being, but actually an angel sent by God appearing in human form. I wonder what that random stranger would think if he knew he's been turned into an angel in the mind of the person he helped.
e2e8 6y ago
There are at this point billions of cameras running continuously or within arms reach. Instead of speculating about silly eye witness reports, lets wait for the physical evidence to materialize. Look how many videos there are of the Chelyabinsk meteor.
- lend000 6y ago
  If I linked 50 videos and photos (you could easily find some yourself with a search engine), I suspect you would say something like "look how easily you could do this with CGI." Sure, it's true, but using that No True Scotsman line of thinking, literally nothing will change your mind. So unless you have an answer to this alleged isolated hallucinatory mental illness that lacks any scientific rigor, can you really refute thousands of witnesses or the validity of their other forms of evidence, such as photos and videos?
  - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    Do we have any such examples with 50 different angles of the same UFO event? Whenever an actual event occurs (meteor, explosion, and so on) we have video footage from multiple angles uploaded almost immediately. If UFO activity was a frequent occurrence happening to thousands of people, it would be truly remarkable if it was never captured by multiple cameras somehow. As for dismissing reports: There are hundreds of millions of people in the US alone. If you go searching for claims, you can find thousands of people who will make similar mistaken or untrue claims about anything. At scale, the amount of misperception and misremembering is massive.
    - lend000 6y ago
      > Whenever an actual event occurs (meteor, explosion, and so on) we have video footage from multiple angles uploaded almost immediately. There are a few problematic assumptions in this line of thinking: you assume the event is as dramatic as a meteor or explosion, occurs in a highly populated area, and involves no discretion on the part of the object. This is typically not the case, although you could argue that people recalling the same specific details in smaller witness groups, but across many different incidents, could constitute the same idea. Even with this in mind, I can think of a few truly mass sightings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrozavodsk_phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrozavodsk_phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over... https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29342407 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29342407 And you should read these if you are interested in an account where either the Navy fabricated this weird hoax, fake data and got a squadron of pilots to lie about it very convincingly, or the whole event is real. Multiple radar, multiple pilot visuals, multiple angles. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings... https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33371/here-are-the-detailed-ufo-incident-reports-from-navy-pilots-flying-off-the-east-coast https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33371/here-are-the-det...
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
The ranchers got pranked by black helicopters stealhtily moving in from Kirtland AFB, NM for assessment of the downwind effects of nuclear testing. What better way of using cattle as bioindicators? Mew? Moo!
- inetknght 6y ago
  Got a link to a declassified report? Or is that just a rumor?
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    I wrote that in a joking way. But not totally. Because I remember having read a long time ago about these things, dived in deeper as I sometimes do, and came across this "theory". For one, most cases of especially strange cattle mutilation (I remember) were in helo range of Kirtland AFB. For another, the mutilations were described as chirugically precice. Sometimes just a large part (and including it) around the rectum. Which of course would concentrate all the "input", because it has to go "through there". And the blood, of course. And the areas were in the downwind parts of nuclear testing. So... not absolutely unreasonable, given the secrecy and ruthlessness of certain parts of government. But not proven or provable in any way at the moment. edit: you can look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders if you haven't heard of this before. edit: and of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtland_Air_Force_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtland_Air_Force_Base to get a feel why this one, out of all the bases
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      s/precice/precise ...sometimes i have the feeling that bits flip after i've typed and pressed send.
    - iSnow 6y ago
      >For another, the mutilations were described as chirugically precice. Sometimes just a large part (and including it) around the rectum. If some being, human or animal, gets killed and mutilations around the genitals or rectum occur, chances are high it's not some night-time military operation but sexually motivated.
names_are_hard 6y ago
Interesting question. To add to it, if indeed it is so easy for people to be misled into believing they saw things that they didn't, what does that say about eyewitness testimony in court used to convict suspected criminals? We discount people who make extraordinary claims because their claims contradict our understanding of the world. But if some percent of eyewitness testimony is totally fake even when it is unbelievable, shouldn't we also discount testimony at an even greater rate when it doesn't contradict our worldview? Or are we to believe that this particular tendency to see things that didn't happen is limited to aliens and not run of the mill murders?
- cher88 6y ago
  Reminds me of the "Mandela effect" https://ourcommunitynow.com/film/sinbads-shazaam-the-strange-case-of-a-movie-that-doesnt-exist https://ourcommunitynow.com/film/sinbads-shazaam-the-strange...
  - Intermernet 6y ago
    Speaking of which, I need to mention Internet Comment Etiquette on YouTube. Years ago he released a video on the Mandela effect, and then about a year ago he recreated the video, scene for scene, with subtle (and not so subtle) differences, and then deleted the original. A few people had mirrored the original, so it's possibly still findable. That's currently my best example of an entertainer playing the long game for a punchline!
apeace 6y ago
Worth looking up John Mack. He was a psychologist and Harvard professor who researched stories of alien abductions and tried to make sense of them from a psychological point of view. To the best of my understanding (do your own research), he hypothesized that many of these stories were true, even if the explanations were not really aliens. They were spiritual and cultural phenomena that people really experienced. > entire schools full of children reporting metal objects landing with beings coming out to communicate with them telepathically You're referring to the 1994 incident in Zimbabwe, which Mack famously studied. It's certainly an interesting one! I remember going through all the videos on the internet about that incident, and ultimately being unimpressed with the investigation. There were 60 kids at the school, Mack only interviewed a few. Why is that? I get the feeling they actually interviewed many more but cherry-picked stories to fit their narrative. There were also stories about UFO sightings in Zimbabwe in the days leading up to that event, I'm sure many of the kids had heard about it before they went to recess that day? I've never read any of his actual long-form publications on that incident though (don't even know if there are any), so perhaps I missed something. Back to your basic question: "how could all these people be crazy?" I don't think anyone knows, and I'm not sure many people are studying it. But even a super smart Harvard professor couldn't make a strong case one way or the other, even after studying a school full of children directly after one of the most compelling UFO sightings in history. So it's probably best to move on, assume it wasn't aliens, and wait for someone to capture an alien craft clearly on video. Personally I use it as a reason to upgrade my iPhone and get those sweet new cameras ;)
- endofreach 6y ago
  A good friend of mine, who came to Europe when he was 17, once said to me: "in Africa you see things that you just can not believe as a European". He told me how in places without electricity, small villages, really "creepy vibes" exist. For example one story where, in broad daylight there is a cow lying on the side of the road. Blood runs from the cow across the road to the other side. It's not broad daylight there, it's pitch black where the trail of the blood ends. The sky, the street, everything. He says almost every African from smaller areas knows these experiences. In the West, such things are horror stories. Another friend kind of jokingly said it might be „due to radiation, which affects the crazy energies of nature“ in the west. That‘s why we don‘t have these sightings. I know, no scientific contribution, but finally the possibility to share this story in a proper forum. Because what makes me think: my friend is smart, not crazy and told it very convincingly. At least in such a way that I believe that he has seen it. That doesn't make it real, I know, but kind of scary for a European. In corners of South America without infrastructure I have also experienced very strange situations and felt the darkest energies, had the weirdest encounters and strangest hallucinations... Anyways, i am glad that for me, these are just stories. I don‘t want to be the guy that has one of those encounters and then has to either forget about it or fight for his credibility.
BatteryMountain 6y ago
Interestingly, a good chunk of claims (ufo sightings, seeing aliens, crop circles, claims of abductions, probings, inter-dimensional communication, astral projection etc) seem to originate from America. Why is that? Why is the the rest of the world so quiet about this stuff?
- wiz21c 6y ago
  because it's CIA files ?
- skinkestek 6y ago
  Norway has Hessdalen and others. And crop circles I associate mostly with England.
- anonAndOn 6y ago
  We embrace nutters, charlatans, and second-rate sci-fi authors especially if they go on to found religions.
- King-Aaron 6y ago
  There are many cases from all over the world. Russia, South America, Australia, France, etc. In fact non-US governments are often a fair bit more open about it too.
rubyn00bie 6y ago
Well... I would probably say most of the time it's a combination of stress, bullshit, and someone(s) in denial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases If I had to guess most of these went down because the child or relative of someone powerful, authoritative, and very disconnected from reality (gullible), did some bullshit the powerful person couldn't reason about. Literally, leaving their brain unable to compute reality instead choosing (and very likely believing) "bat shit" as the reason... Depending on how powerful the person who just skipped-a-beat of reality; the narrative might never be questioned. cough trump cough I mean; like with UFOs, most of the imagery people use to describe are _known_ to them before the event. They're related to what the person knows and is capable of imagining. With all that said, I'm not trying to explain them all as bullshit or nonsense; but, the list without the bullshit is a lot smaller. I do think it's a bit unfortunate though as I'd love to speculate and wonder about something besides the trite psuedo-hallucinations all these stories contain.
- icare_1er 6y ago
  Does not really apply to radar operators and F16 pilots all having the same "mass hysteria" the same day...
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    I was going to say this as well. There have been recordings from aircraft hud cams of UFO’s. This doesn’t address the OPs question about hallucinations or hysteria or whatever, but it does give a little credence to a claim of a UFO. I’ve seen a UFO, by definition, something unidentified, unknown, then it was gone. My grandfather told stories of things he saw flying for Eastern Airlines and later American Airlines. My uncles who flew F-16s all saw strange things too. Ask any aviator that’s been flying heavy for 10+ years what strange things they have seen and they’ll have some stories. I’m glad we, as a people, are talking about it, without jumping to conclusions about what these objects are.
  - goodcanadian 6y ago
    There are indeed a handful of truly unidentified and truly interesting cases, but I stress that unidentified does not equate to alien spacecraft. That is an unjustified leap that far too many people are all too willing to make.
fsloth 6y ago
People are really easy to fool. It's not necessarily insanity, but rather confusing stimuli. People can interpret certain stimuli completely wrong. The thing is, the things we 'see' are pure reconstructions by the brain of the visual input - not the photons themselves. And sometimes the signals screw up our visual system, making us see weird shit mainly because the brain is trying to interpret the signal in one way and trying it's best to maintain this interpretation. This is not hallucination as such, it's just visual system getting confused. Personal experience: 1) when my son was 2, I woke up in the middle of the night and thought I heard something. I went to check his room. As I peered through the door I was 100% convinced I saw him walking in the room. But as I entered the room I realized that was not possible as he was several meters away from the position, a sleep. The carpet on the room was really colourful playmat. As I retraced my steps I realized the patterns on the carpet in the near darkness were close enough for my brain to interpret the visual signal as my son walking. In another circumstance I could have easily thought I saw a ghost (if I was so inclined). 2) This is even more weird. I give you the mating crows. I walked by some familiar trees planted next to an office building in bright daylight and noticed something black moving in one of them. I could not see immediately what it was until I realized it was two crows which appeared to be mating or fighting - and as I did not hear anything I guessed the latter. Being the curious naturalist I am I approached tree. Yep, crows. I tried get as close as I could - until I was right next to the tree and noticed the "crows" were actually a black plastic bag wriggling in the wind. This illusion was so convincing and powerful I've never been fooled so well by anything else. So, what do I conclude? I'm 40, and in the past 20 years I've seen two times strange events that I could have easily intepreted as proof of supernatural activity if I was so inclined - ghosts and some weird magic transfiguration. Based on this sampling, it's quite likely people have 'witnessed' all sorts of strange things their visual cortex has produced. I totally now believe people have actually seen ghosts - except it was all in their head and they weren't crazy - just their brain doing what it always does and missing the context a bit. Also makes you think how reliable eye witness statements are in some contexts that have short span and potential for confusion.
- NetOpWibby 6y ago
  The mind is spooky
tgv 6y ago
> Statistically, however, there needs to be a convincing psychiatric study Only if you can assume that everyone (without a mental illness) always knows and tells the literal truth. Which isn't the case, as has been proven over and over. Check witness studies and autobiographical memory.
yholio 6y ago
It's pretty easy to design the study if you observe that accounts of telepathic aliens descending from metallic crafts are strongly correlated with demographics subjected to cultural depictions of such aliens and crafts in popular media. It remains to this day largely an American phenomenon, and the secretive and technological nature of the cold war cannot be ignored as a factor. Brainwashing a school that aliens arrived seems preferable to leaking information about critical and advanced (for its era) defense technology.
alphabettsy 6y ago
Religious people and some entire groups make claims about experiences with God all the time.
dhnajsjdnd 6y ago
I recall reading a similar argument about the miracles of one of the Catholic saints (Joan of Arc, perhaps)?
pjc50 6y ago
As someone who was into this stuff as a kid, and read every book I could get my hands on, as well as a bit of academic study of the history of religious experience, I eventually grew into the conclusion: > people with no history of mental illness and "good moral standing" in the community can have a single hallucinatory event, often with multiple witnesses and specific details common across different sightings ... yes, they can. It's not a mental illness, it's "pareidolia" or something similar. The "face on mars" is a great example. The brain is a pattern-recognition neural net. It's really good at finding patterns. So good that it finds patterns which aren't there. Occasionally they can be really strong. Spookily, while typing this post, I saw a bright oval dot moving at high speed across my peripheral vision, outside the window. Just before it disappeared from view my bleary eyes resolved it as a seagull, being under-lit by the dawn light against houses and trees that are still in shadow. (I think we'd do well to recognize that there's no sharp boundary between "sane" and "mentally ill" either, and that "mentally ill" should not be used to automatically discount people! Schizophrenia is known to produce hallucinations as a common symptom, but not depression or bipolar, while migrane headaches can produce flashing lights in the field of vision but are not usually classified as a mental illness)
- riffraff 6y ago
  also, sheer numbers. If you have 10 people who don't smoke, exercise, eat healthy etc.. they're unlikely to get cancer. If you have 10 million, a lot of them will. Same for random hallucinations. One in ten people? Not likely. One in ten million? Practically certain.
  - lend000 6y ago
    16% having personally seen something seems a bit high for your logic [0]. Granted, I don't have data for the "close encounters," so most of these will be distant or unclear, short observations with prosaic explanations. I've never seen anything myself, but anecdotally, a group of sane family members did (a close encounter, at that) circa 1970, long before the secret military jet angle would have any credibility. Apparently more than half of people can share a similar personal or family anecdote. [0] https://www.syracusenewtimes.com/ufos-aliens-and-abductions-survey/ https://www.syracusenewtimes.com/ufos-aliens-and-abductions-...
MarcScott 6y ago
The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan delves into this quite a bit. It's years since I read it, but he talks about how in history people often suffered hallucinations and mass hallucinations that had a religious theme. They were visited by angels, demons, witches etc. In the 50s when Hollywood started churning out Sci-fi movies, the nature of these hallucinations altered and became all about UFOs.
- secfirstmd 6y ago
  On a side note I read recently that a lot of ghost sitings in the past may have been caused by Carbon Monoxide poisoning. Which maybe explain why it happens more often indoors and in older homes it seems.
Phemist 6y ago
I would happily recommend you to read "Hallucinations" by Oliver Sacks. This book is not about UFO sightings, but about how ordinary people can have wild hallucinations. For example, an elderly woman who would regularly have very vivid, daytime, hallucinations of a concert being played in her living room. She knew it was not "real", but it was comforting and a welcoming distraction from the isolation that elderly folk often suffer from. It is quite an eye-opening book.
chronolitus 6y ago
I have a feeling you would enjoy the All Gas No Brakes episode about bigfoot hunting in Minnesota. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsXhk1xmYAI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsXhk1xmYAI Having watched it, I suddenly have little doubt that we as a species are very capable of generating lots of witness accounts for any fantastical event.
goodcanadian 6y ago
I do not doubt that some of them are crazy, but all of them? With what mental illness? Not crazy, necessarily, but lacking critical thinking skills. I have seen things in the sky that I didn't know for certain what they were. I did not make the leap from, "I don't know," to "alien spacecraft," however. Some people come up with the most bizarre explanations for really rather mundane things, and then convince themselves of the truth of it. If someone is already primed with the bizarre idea, they are more likely to see it, too.
DrBazza 6y ago
If your starting view point isn't "there must be a rational explanation for this", then you're also unlikely to report things without bias, unconsciously, or otherwise. If you think "aliens!" before "probably a planet/bird/plane", you're going to forget or ignore lights, squawking, the sound of an engine and so on. Observer bias. Just look at the Ancient Aliens guy, if you take him at face value, everything is an alien, including piles of rocks on other rocks. Then look at James Randi. And it's 2020, everyone has a better camera in their pocket than at any time in history. Where's the evidence? The 'gimbal' video has been plausibly debunked. UFOs as alien spacecraft do not exist. Sorry. We don't live in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where it's full of 'teasers' that torment some random guy on a farm in the middle of nowhere having flown light-years to get here. UFOs as mis-identified natural or man made phenomena do exist.
krapp 6y ago
I'm reasonably convinced black triangles are mostly paredolia and hype like all UFO reports, and the rest are experimental stealth blimps[0,1] or some other kind of classified lighter than air technology. Not aliens and not anti-gravity. Cattle mutilations are real as well, and certainly not aliens. Probably some government agency doing tests or experiments, cults and natural predation. As far as "entire schools full of children reporting metal objects landing with beings coming out to communicate with them telepathically," children do make things up and confabulate, and children do suffer peer pressure. Mass hysteria does exist and has been documented. No one is saying that mental illness is responsible for every UFO case, but it is likely responsible for a lot of them. It's worth remembering, however, that human perception and memory are faulty and that a perfectly rational, clinically sane person can suffer hallucinations, misinterpret phenomena based on limited information, or have false memories. [0]http://www.thestealthblimp.com/ http://www.thestealthblimp.com/ [1]https://rimstar.org/space/jp_aerospace_balloon_airship_to_orbit.htm https://rimstar.org/space/jp_aerospace_balloon_airship_to_or... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases
sandworm101 6y ago
Mandatory XKCD on the subject: https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/ I dismiss all references to the quality of the witnesses. Such human factors are too muddy and debatable. Arguments about any one event, was that particular things real or not, wont ever answer the question. We must analyze UFO reports in an international context. The phenomena is very mush only reported in the western world. There is also a temporal association between UFO reports and contemporaneous Hollywood movies on the subject. A real phenomena, as in the XKCD above, should be country and culturally agnostic. Reports should ebb and flow with the number of potential witnesses, not the release dates of movies.
- goda90 6y ago
  I dislike this XKCD. Where is the line for the total number of photos and videos take of unidentified phenomenon? Has it gone down? Or has it actually gone up, but because of the exponentially growing amount of media being produced in the world, the people who are exposed to these photos and videos are proportionally tiny. Add on to that, the fact that phone cameras are terrible at distance. Ever try taking a picture of the moon with it? Your eyes can see much better than the photo taken by the average smartphone. And if the object is moving around quickly, do you have time to take your phone from your pocket, open the camera, focus on the object, and get a good picture before it is out of sight?
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    There is a line in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" about traffic accidents. One character says "we don't have any footage of real car crashes, but we know they happen." At the time of the story, no serious car crash had been captured on film. Now, because there are so many more cameras, we have plenty of such footage. A real phenomena should scale with the availability of potential witnesses, not shrink and disappear as more and better cameras come online.
    - goda90 6y ago
      Popular sentiment is that UFO videos/photos are fake. With a car crash, you have the aftermath, so you accept the video of the crash as being real. With a UFO, people more often dismiss it even if they lack an alternative explanation. This limits the spread of photographic evidence, and stories from witnesses. So witnesses may have increased, but you don't know about it. Dash cams, security cameras, and phone cameras all have targeted uses. They are "better cameras" for those uses. But they aren't better cameras for every use. As I was saying about the moon, some shots require more specialized equipment to get good detail. The number of people out with a DSLR and the right lens who knows how to properly take a shot of a flying object and is intently looking for flying objects has not really increased much.
Fjolsvith 6y ago
> Many of these are correspondences with random people with varying levels of credibility. Taken alone, we can't draw any conclusion from a single person claiming an observation of a UFO. > I do not doubt that some of them are crazy, but all of them? With what mental illness? This is so surreal. If this topic was about people claiming election fraud, there would be no doubt that they were all crazy and needed locked up.

hobby-coder-guy 6y ago

Sources? Which one do you believe to be true?

sjg007 6y ago

If the truth is out there, start with yourself.

philip142au 6y ago

With hypnotism its trivial, maybe a guy who previously worked at a travelling circus lost his job and goes around and hypnotises people to believe they saw a UFO.

paulryanrogers 6y ago

Mass hysteria can make otherwise rational people behave very irrationally. And once claims are made--for many cultures--it's difficult to recant without losing face. There's also the risk of being left out of a group if close companions make a claim. Growing up in a very charismatic flavor of Christianity I thought I 'experienced' a lot of phenomenon that I now look back on with contempt. People preach, seek out, and legit believe (despite no hard evidence) in supernatural healing, limbs regrowing, divine languages, divine laughter/joy, spontaneous creation of jewels, etc. IME the claims that become most popular are the ones impossible to falsify. So testimony is usually all that's left.

lend000 6y ago
> it's difficult to recant without losing face Not sure if that applies to this highly derided topic. I do agree the mass hysteria angle has a place in the digestion of all these accounts, but what is the mechanism? Is it reproducible? Is it only applicable to panic situations? What about when you have tangible forms of evidence to follow the account (such as air-to-ground and infrared radar [0])? Incidentally, that's the account that was convincing enough to get me interested enough in this subject to study it with an open mind. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings...
- 55555 6y ago
  I agree it's worth studying and understanding. I feel like we're seeing quite a bit of it in the area of politics right now.
skissane 6y ago
> Growing up in a very charismatic flavor of Christianity I thought I 'experienced' a lot of phenomenon that I now look back on with contempt I firsthand experienced a charismatic Christian telling me a story about how one time his car wouldn't start, and then some stranger appeared to help him get it started again, and then once the car was running the stranger was gone – totally believable, everyday occurrence, except for my interlocutor's insistence that the stranger wasn't a human being, but actually an angel sent by God appearing in human form. I wonder what that random stranger would think if he knew he's been turned into an angel in the mind of the person he helped.

e2e8 6y ago

There are at this point billions of cameras running continuously or within arms reach. Instead of speculating about silly eye witness reports, lets wait for the physical evidence to materialize. Look how many videos there are of the Chelyabinsk meteor.

lend000 6y ago
If I linked 50 videos and photos (you could easily find some yourself with a search engine), I suspect you would say something like "look how easily you could do this with CGI." Sure, it's true, but using that No True Scotsman line of thinking, literally nothing will change your mind. So unless you have an answer to this alleged isolated hallucinatory mental illness that lacks any scientific rigor, can you really refute thousands of witnesses or the validity of their other forms of evidence, such as photos and videos?
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  Do we have any such examples with 50 different angles of the same UFO event? Whenever an actual event occurs (meteor, explosion, and so on) we have video footage from multiple angles uploaded almost immediately. If UFO activity was a frequent occurrence happening to thousands of people, it would be truly remarkable if it was never captured by multiple cameras somehow. As for dismissing reports: There are hundreds of millions of people in the US alone. If you go searching for claims, you can find thousands of people who will make similar mistaken or untrue claims about anything. At scale, the amount of misperception and misremembering is massive.
  - lend000 6y ago
    > Whenever an actual event occurs (meteor, explosion, and so on) we have video footage from multiple angles uploaded almost immediately. There are a few problematic assumptions in this line of thinking: you assume the event is as dramatic as a meteor or explosion, occurs in a highly populated area, and involves no discretion on the part of the object. This is typically not the case, although you could argue that people recalling the same specific details in smaller witness groups, but across many different incidents, could constitute the same idea. Even with this in mind, I can think of a few truly mass sightings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrozavodsk_phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrozavodsk_phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over... https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29342407 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29342407 And you should read these if you are interested in an account where either the Navy fabricated this weird hoax, fake data and got a squadron of pilots to lie about it very convincingly, or the whole event is real. Multiple radar, multiple pilot visuals, multiple angles. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings... https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33371/here-are-the-detailed-ufo-incident-reports-from-navy-pilots-flying-off-the-east-coast https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33371/here-are-the-det...

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

The ranchers got pranked by black helicopters stealhtily moving in from Kirtland AFB, NM for assessment of the downwind effects of nuclear testing. What better way of using cattle as bioindicators? Mew? Moo!

inetknght 6y ago
Got a link to a declassified report? Or is that just a rumor?
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  I wrote that in a joking way. But not totally. Because I remember having read a long time ago about these things, dived in deeper as I sometimes do, and came across this "theory". For one, most cases of especially strange cattle mutilation (I remember) were in helo range of Kirtland AFB. For another, the mutilations were described as chirugically precice. Sometimes just a large part (and including it) around the rectum. Which of course would concentrate all the "input", because it has to go "through there". And the blood, of course. And the areas were in the downwind parts of nuclear testing. So... not absolutely unreasonable, given the secrecy and ruthlessness of certain parts of government. But not proven or provable in any way at the moment. edit: you can look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders if you haven't heard of this before. edit: and of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtland_Air_Force_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtland_Air_Force_Base to get a feel why this one, out of all the bases
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    s/precice/precise ...sometimes i have the feeling that bits flip after i've typed and pressed send.
  - iSnow 6y ago
    >For another, the mutilations were described as chirugically precice. Sometimes just a large part (and including it) around the rectum. If some being, human or animal, gets killed and mutilations around the genitals or rectum occur, chances are high it's not some night-time military operation but sexually motivated.

names_are_hard 6y ago

Interesting question. To add to it, if indeed it is so easy for people to be misled into believing they saw things that they didn't, what does that say about eyewitness testimony in court used to convict suspected criminals? We discount people who make extraordinary claims because their claims contradict our understanding of the world. But if some percent of eyewitness testimony is totally fake even when it is unbelievable, shouldn't we also discount testimony at an even greater rate when it doesn't contradict our worldview? Or are we to believe that this particular tendency to see things that didn't happen is limited to aliens and not run of the mill murders?

cher88 6y ago
Reminds me of the "Mandela effect" https://ourcommunitynow.com/film/sinbads-shazaam-the-strange-case-of-a-movie-that-doesnt-exist https://ourcommunitynow.com/film/sinbads-shazaam-the-strange...
- Intermernet 6y ago
  Speaking of which, I need to mention Internet Comment Etiquette on YouTube. Years ago he released a video on the Mandela effect, and then about a year ago he recreated the video, scene for scene, with subtle (and not so subtle) differences, and then deleted the original. A few people had mirrored the original, so it's possibly still findable. That's currently my best example of an entertainer playing the long game for a punchline!

apeace 6y ago

Worth looking up John Mack. He was a psychologist and Harvard professor who researched stories of alien abductions and tried to make sense of them from a psychological point of view. To the best of my understanding (do your own research), he hypothesized that many of these stories were true, even if the explanations were not really aliens. They were spiritual and cultural phenomena that people really experienced. > entire schools full of children reporting metal objects landing with beings coming out to communicate with them telepathically You're referring to the 1994 incident in Zimbabwe, which Mack famously studied. It's certainly an interesting one! I remember going through all the videos on the internet about that incident, and ultimately being unimpressed with the investigation. There were 60 kids at the school, Mack only interviewed a few. Why is that? I get the feeling they actually interviewed many more but cherry-picked stories to fit their narrative. There were also stories about UFO sightings in Zimbabwe in the days leading up to that event, I'm sure many of the kids had heard about it before they went to recess that day? I've never read any of his actual long-form publications on that incident though (don't even know if there are any), so perhaps I missed something. Back to your basic question: "how could all these people be crazy?" I don't think anyone knows, and I'm not sure many people are studying it. But even a super smart Harvard professor couldn't make a strong case one way or the other, even after studying a school full of children directly after one of the most compelling UFO sightings in history. So it's probably best to move on, assume it wasn't aliens, and wait for someone to capture an alien craft clearly on video. Personally I use it as a reason to upgrade my iPhone and get those sweet new cameras ;)

endofreach 6y ago
A good friend of mine, who came to Europe when he was 17, once said to me: "in Africa you see things that you just can not believe as a European". He told me how in places without electricity, small villages, really "creepy vibes" exist. For example one story where, in broad daylight there is a cow lying on the side of the road. Blood runs from the cow across the road to the other side. It's not broad daylight there, it's pitch black where the trail of the blood ends. The sky, the street, everything. He says almost every African from smaller areas knows these experiences. In the West, such things are horror stories. Another friend kind of jokingly said it might be „due to radiation, which affects the crazy energies of nature“ in the west. That‘s why we don‘t have these sightings. I know, no scientific contribution, but finally the possibility to share this story in a proper forum. Because what makes me think: my friend is smart, not crazy and told it very convincingly. At least in such a way that I believe that he has seen it. That doesn't make it real, I know, but kind of scary for a European. In corners of South America without infrastructure I have also experienced very strange situations and felt the darkest energies, had the weirdest encounters and strangest hallucinations... Anyways, i am glad that for me, these are just stories. I don‘t want to be the guy that has one of those encounters and then has to either forget about it or fight for his credibility.

BatteryMountain 6y ago

Interestingly, a good chunk of claims (ufo sightings, seeing aliens, crop circles, claims of abductions, probings, inter-dimensional communication, astral projection etc) seem to originate from America. Why is that? Why is the the rest of the world so quiet about this stuff?

wiz21c 6y ago
because it's CIA files ?
skinkestek 6y ago
Norway has Hessdalen and others. And crop circles I associate mostly with England.
anonAndOn 6y ago
We embrace nutters, charlatans, and second-rate sci-fi authors especially if they go on to found religions.
King-Aaron 6y ago
There are many cases from all over the world. Russia, South America, Australia, France, etc. In fact non-US governments are often a fair bit more open about it too.

rubyn00bie 6y ago

Well... I would probably say most of the time it's a combination of stress, bullshit, and someone(s) in denial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases If I had to guess most of these went down because the child or relative of someone powerful, authoritative, and very disconnected from reality (gullible), did some bullshit the powerful person couldn't reason about. Literally, leaving their brain unable to compute reality instead choosing (and very likely believing) "bat shit" as the reason... Depending on how powerful the person who just skipped-a-beat of reality; the narrative might never be questioned. cough trump cough I mean; like with UFOs, most of the imagery people use to describe are _known_ to them before the event. They're related to what the person knows and is capable of imagining. With all that said, I'm not trying to explain them all as bullshit or nonsense; but, the list without the bullshit is a lot smaller. I do think it's a bit unfortunate though as I'd love to speculate and wonder about something besides the trite psuedo-hallucinations all these stories contain.

icare_1er 6y ago
Does not really apply to radar operators and F16 pilots all having the same "mass hysteria" the same day...
- gabereiser 6y ago
  I was going to say this as well. There have been recordings from aircraft hud cams of UFO’s. This doesn’t address the OPs question about hallucinations or hysteria or whatever, but it does give a little credence to a claim of a UFO. I’ve seen a UFO, by definition, something unidentified, unknown, then it was gone. My grandfather told stories of things he saw flying for Eastern Airlines and later American Airlines. My uncles who flew F-16s all saw strange things too. Ask any aviator that’s been flying heavy for 10+ years what strange things they have seen and they’ll have some stories. I’m glad we, as a people, are talking about it, without jumping to conclusions about what these objects are.
- goodcanadian 6y ago
  There are indeed a handful of truly unidentified and truly interesting cases, but I stress that unidentified does not equate to alien spacecraft. That is an unjustified leap that far too many people are all too willing to make.

fsloth 6y ago

People are really easy to fool. It's not necessarily insanity, but rather confusing stimuli. People can interpret certain stimuli completely wrong. The thing is, the things we 'see' are pure reconstructions by the brain of the visual input - not the photons themselves. And sometimes the signals screw up our visual system, making us see weird shit mainly because the brain is trying to interpret the signal in one way and trying it's best to maintain this interpretation. This is not hallucination as such, it's just visual system getting confused. Personal experience: 1) when my son was 2, I woke up in the middle of the night and thought I heard something. I went to check his room. As I peered through the door I was 100% convinced I saw him walking in the room. But as I entered the room I realized that was not possible as he was several meters away from the position, a sleep. The carpet on the room was really colourful playmat. As I retraced my steps I realized the patterns on the carpet in the near darkness were close enough for my brain to interpret the visual signal as my son walking. In another circumstance I could have easily thought I saw a ghost (if I was so inclined). 2) This is even more weird. I give you the mating crows. I walked by some familiar trees planted next to an office building in bright daylight and noticed something black moving in one of them. I could not see immediately what it was until I realized it was two crows which appeared to be mating or fighting - and as I did not hear anything I guessed the latter. Being the curious naturalist I am I approached tree. Yep, crows. I tried get as close as I could - until I was right next to the tree and noticed the "crows" were actually a black plastic bag wriggling in the wind. This illusion was so convincing and powerful I've never been fooled so well by anything else. So, what do I conclude? I'm 40, and in the past 20 years I've seen two times strange events that I could have easily intepreted as proof of supernatural activity if I was so inclined - ghosts and some weird magic transfiguration. Based on this sampling, it's quite likely people have 'witnessed' all sorts of strange things their visual cortex has produced. I totally now believe people have actually seen ghosts - except it was all in their head and they weren't crazy - just their brain doing what it always does and missing the context a bit. Also makes you think how reliable eye witness statements are in some contexts that have short span and potential for confusion.

NetOpWibby 6y ago
The mind is spooky

tgv 6y ago

> Statistically, however, there needs to be a convincing psychiatric study Only if you can assume that everyone (without a mental illness) always knows and tells the literal truth. Which isn't the case, as has been proven over and over. Check witness studies and autobiographical memory.

yholio 6y ago

It's pretty easy to design the study if you observe that accounts of telepathic aliens descending from metallic crafts are strongly correlated with demographics subjected to cultural depictions of such aliens and crafts in popular media. It remains to this day largely an American phenomenon, and the secretive and technological nature of the cold war cannot be ignored as a factor. Brainwashing a school that aliens arrived seems preferable to leaking information about critical and advanced (for its era) defense technology.

alphabettsy 6y ago

Religious people and some entire groups make claims about experiences with God all the time.

dhnajsjdnd 6y ago

I recall reading a similar argument about the miracles of one of the Catholic saints (Joan of Arc, perhaps)?

pjc50 6y ago

As someone who was into this stuff as a kid, and read every book I could get my hands on, as well as a bit of academic study of the history of religious experience, I eventually grew into the conclusion: > people with no history of mental illness and "good moral standing" in the community can have a single hallucinatory event, often with multiple witnesses and specific details common across different sightings ... yes, they can. It's not a mental illness, it's "pareidolia" or something similar. The "face on mars" is a great example. The brain is a pattern-recognition neural net. It's really good at finding patterns. So good that it finds patterns which aren't there. Occasionally they can be really strong. Spookily, while typing this post, I saw a bright oval dot moving at high speed across my peripheral vision, outside the window. Just before it disappeared from view my bleary eyes resolved it as a seagull, being under-lit by the dawn light against houses and trees that are still in shadow. (I think we'd do well to recognize that there's no sharp boundary between "sane" and "mentally ill" either, and that "mentally ill" should not be used to automatically discount people! Schizophrenia is known to produce hallucinations as a common symptom, but not depression or bipolar, while migrane headaches can produce flashing lights in the field of vision but are not usually classified as a mental illness)

riffraff 6y ago
also, sheer numbers. If you have 10 people who don't smoke, exercise, eat healthy etc.. they're unlikely to get cancer. If you have 10 million, a lot of them will. Same for random hallucinations. One in ten people? Not likely. One in ten million? Practically certain.
- lend000 6y ago
  16% having personally seen something seems a bit high for your logic [0]. Granted, I don't have data for the "close encounters," so most of these will be distant or unclear, short observations with prosaic explanations. I've never seen anything myself, but anecdotally, a group of sane family members did (a close encounter, at that) circa 1970, long before the secret military jet angle would have any credibility. Apparently more than half of people can share a similar personal or family anecdote. [0] https://www.syracusenewtimes.com/ufos-aliens-and-abductions-survey/ https://www.syracusenewtimes.com/ufos-aliens-and-abductions-...

MarcScott 6y ago

The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan delves into this quite a bit. It's years since I read it, but he talks about how in history people often suffered hallucinations and mass hallucinations that had a religious theme. They were visited by angels, demons, witches etc. In the 50s when Hollywood started churning out Sci-fi movies, the nature of these hallucinations altered and became all about UFOs.

secfirstmd 6y ago
On a side note I read recently that a lot of ghost sitings in the past may have been caused by Carbon Monoxide poisoning. Which maybe explain why it happens more often indoors and in older homes it seems.

Phemist 6y ago

I would happily recommend you to read "Hallucinations" by Oliver Sacks. This book is not about UFO sightings, but about how ordinary people can have wild hallucinations. For example, an elderly woman who would regularly have very vivid, daytime, hallucinations of a concert being played in her living room. She knew it was not "real", but it was comforting and a welcoming distraction from the isolation that elderly folk often suffer from. It is quite an eye-opening book.

chronolitus 6y ago

I have a feeling you would enjoy the All Gas No Brakes episode about bigfoot hunting in Minnesota. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsXhk1xmYAI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsXhk1xmYAI Having watched it, I suddenly have little doubt that we as a species are very capable of generating lots of witness accounts for any fantastical event.

goodcanadian 6y ago

I do not doubt that some of them are crazy, but all of them? With what mental illness? Not crazy, necessarily, but lacking critical thinking skills. I have seen things in the sky that I didn't know for certain what they were. I did not make the leap from, "I don't know," to "alien spacecraft," however. Some people come up with the most bizarre explanations for really rather mundane things, and then convince themselves of the truth of it. If someone is already primed with the bizarre idea, they are more likely to see it, too.

DrBazza 6y ago

If your starting view point isn't "there must be a rational explanation for this", then you're also unlikely to report things without bias, unconsciously, or otherwise. If you think "aliens!" before "probably a planet/bird/plane", you're going to forget or ignore lights, squawking, the sound of an engine and so on. Observer bias. Just look at the Ancient Aliens guy, if you take him at face value, everything is an alien, including piles of rocks on other rocks. Then look at James Randi. And it's 2020, everyone has a better camera in their pocket than at any time in history. Where's the evidence? The 'gimbal' video has been plausibly debunked. UFOs as alien spacecraft do not exist. Sorry. We don't live in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where it's full of 'teasers' that torment some random guy on a farm in the middle of nowhere having flown light-years to get here. UFOs as mis-identified natural or man made phenomena do exist.

krapp 6y ago

I'm reasonably convinced black triangles are mostly paredolia and hype like all UFO reports, and the rest are experimental stealth blimps[0,1] or some other kind of classified lighter than air technology. Not aliens and not anti-gravity. Cattle mutilations are real as well, and certainly not aliens. Probably some government agency doing tests or experiments, cults and natural predation. As far as "entire schools full of children reporting metal objects landing with beings coming out to communicate with them telepathically," children do make things up and confabulate, and children do suffer peer pressure. Mass hysteria does exist and has been documented. No one is saying that mental illness is responsible for every UFO case, but it is likely responsible for a lot of them. It's worth remembering, however, that human perception and memory are faulty and that a perfectly rational, clinically sane person can suffer hallucinations, misinterpret phenomena based on limited information, or have false memories. [0]http://www.thestealthblimp.com/ http://www.thestealthblimp.com/ [1]https://rimstar.org/space/jp_aerospace_balloon_airship_to_orbit.htm https://rimstar.org/space/jp_aerospace_balloon_airship_to_or... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases

sandworm101 6y ago

Mandatory XKCD on the subject: https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/ I dismiss all references to the quality of the witnesses. Such human factors are too muddy and debatable. Arguments about any one event, was that particular things real or not, wont ever answer the question. We must analyze UFO reports in an international context. The phenomena is very mush only reported in the western world. There is also a temporal association between UFO reports and contemporaneous Hollywood movies on the subject. A real phenomena, as in the XKCD above, should be country and culturally agnostic. Reports should ebb and flow with the number of potential witnesses, not the release dates of movies.

goda90 6y ago
I dislike this XKCD. Where is the line for the total number of photos and videos take of unidentified phenomenon? Has it gone down? Or has it actually gone up, but because of the exponentially growing amount of media being produced in the world, the people who are exposed to these photos and videos are proportionally tiny. Add on to that, the fact that phone cameras are terrible at distance. Ever try taking a picture of the moon with it? Your eyes can see much better than the photo taken by the average smartphone. And if the object is moving around quickly, do you have time to take your phone from your pocket, open the camera, focus on the object, and get a good picture before it is out of sight?
- sandworm101 6y ago
  There is a line in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" about traffic accidents. One character says "we don't have any footage of real car crashes, but we know they happen." At the time of the story, no serious car crash had been captured on film. Now, because there are so many more cameras, we have plenty of such footage. A real phenomena should scale with the availability of potential witnesses, not shrink and disappear as more and better cameras come online.
  - goda90 6y ago
    Popular sentiment is that UFO videos/photos are fake. With a car crash, you have the aftermath, so you accept the video of the crash as being real. With a UFO, people more often dismiss it even if they lack an alternative explanation. This limits the spread of photographic evidence, and stories from witnesses. So witnesses may have increased, but you don't know about it. Dash cams, security cameras, and phone cameras all have targeted uses. They are "better cameras" for those uses. But they aren't better cameras for every use. As I was saying about the moon, some shots require more specialized equipment to get good detail. The number of people out with a DSLR and the right lens who knows how to properly take a shot of a flying object and is intently looking for flying objects has not really increased much.

Fjolsvith 6y ago

> Many of these are correspondences with random people with varying levels of credibility. Taken alone, we can't draw any conclusion from a single person claiming an observation of a UFO. > I do not doubt that some of them are crazy, but all of them? With what mental illness? This is so surreal. If this topic was about people claiming election fraud, there would be no doubt that they were all crazy and needed locked up.