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If you mash together every claim that has ever been made about UFO's like you're doing here you certainly arrive at an absurd picture. However not all claims a

If you mash together every claim that has ever been made about UFO's like you're doing here you certainly arrive at an absurd picture. However not all claims are equally credible by a long shot. For example while there are certainly lots of rumors flying around about crash retrievals I have not seen any explicit claim by a credible individual (Bob Lazar certainly doesn't count) of actually having first hand knowledge of such occurrences. I suspect that those rumors have originated due to compartmentalized government secrecy where almost no one is aware of what the other guys are doing. It's basically a game of telephone with extreme secrecy as an added ingredient. The only claims I'm really interested in are the ones where you have multiple credible, on the record, eyewitnesses claiming multi-modal detection of phenomena exhibiting behavior that is clearly beyond current human capabilities, such as the 2004 Nimitz incidents. Once you consider the possibility of non-human intelligences being involved it also becomes very hazardous to attempt to understand the motives behind their actions. For all we know our entire reality could be constructed in an alien laboratory designed to measure the development of our individual and collective intelligence by observing our reactions to strange events. That said I do admit to having a lot of trouble trying to understand why craft that are apparently capable of hypersonic travel would spend hours moseying down the California coast from Catalina to Guadalupe islands. I mean if they were trying not to be noticed why not avoid the Nimitz CSG completely ? And if they wanted to be noticed wouldn't they have done something a little more dramatic than floating along at 100 knots (they didn't exhibit any spectacular behavior until an attempt was made to actually intercept them) ?

jerf 6y ago
"That said I do admit to having a lot of trouble trying to understand why craft that are apparently capable of hypersonic travel would spend hours moseying down the California coast from Catalina to Guadalupe islands." This is more my point than the true combination of every possible claim. It's more, go beyond arguing about whether something did or did not happen, and consider, what does it imply if it did? People are often too bedazzled by the immediate arguments around what may have happened to consider this argument, but it's a very powerful, simple logical tool that can be useful in resolving those questions. You tend to get rather silly answers for a lot of this stuff if you take it seriously. Especially when you consider what tech looks like in 2021 and what feasible tech looks like in another 50-100 years, to say nothing of thousands. Aliens with interstellar travel tech but apparently no computers to speak of, no internet, no protein folding projects, no awareness of how useful satellites can be rather than literally flying down, apparent ignorance of how much of the universe isn't on planet earth (there is almost no conceivable resource-based argument for them to be here because everything is more abundant out there with no crazy animals running around bothering you) etc. the whole thing just comes off very silly. One of the things you don't get crazy answers for is classified, but fully human craft. It just there are humans (military or whatever) with capabilities we don't know. That is not a terribly crazy theory; if you look at the past at how long things stayed classified and extrapolate into the present time, it isn't completely out of the question that the military may have some things that are fully 20-30 years ahead of civilian tech, in very particular branches of development. (I don't think it's plausible that they are uniformly ahead of civilian development by that amount, but it's very plausible to have spikes in very certain areas. We have very significant evidence of the NSA having similar spikes in crypto math.) Combine the possibility of real sightings, with a real experiment to see how people react (we have the entire term "trial balloon" for that, because it's a thing we know humans do), and just a bit of misinterpretation of what's happening by the people watching it, and it's not hard to see this as a very significant possibility. (In fact, if you study what the military has done to its own people at times, it's not even slightly hard to believe this was a deliberate test of something. Even ignoring the unproveable rumors or what other militaries have done, and skipping the unethical stuff, we know militaries will test and trial things on their own people on a routine basis. Even things as simply as the drills not really labelled "drills" until later are examples.) And I think people lean way too hard on "but aliens could be incomprehensible!". They are bounded by living in the same universe as us, needing to survive to accomplish any other goal, needing energy and mass resources which are exclusionary (if X is using them Y doesn't get to, and all the subsequent game theory that implies), etc. That doesn't mean that we'll understand them to the n'th degree but it does put some bounds on how "cloud cuckoo land" they can be before it's just absurd.
- tgflynn 6y ago
  > One of the things you don't get crazy answers for is classified, but fully human craft. If the craft involved in the Nimitz incident were human then I would be even more puzzled by their behavior because I think I have a pretty good idea of human motivations and behavior. If they're "alien" (by which I don't necessarily mean extraterrestrial, just unknown non-human entities) then at least I can fall back on the argument that I may not be able to understand their motivations and behavior. Also there are many obstacles to explaining them as secret US technology. For one thing a number of knowledgeable people have indicated that no the US military doesn't test secret technology on completely uninformed participants. That's just not the way it's done. Also if it was secret US technology why did they let it leak ? Surely they would have made sure that people like Fravor and Day signed NDA's. On the other hand if the leak was intentional (ie. to send some kind of message to adversaries) then why wait 13 years before making it public ? Basically it just doesn't add up. > That doesn't mean that we'll understand them to the n'th degree but it does put some bounds on how "cloud cuckoo land" they can be before it's just absurd. I think here you're vastly underestimating the potential weirdness of things we don't know about.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
Izkata 6y ago
> > It's that they also seem to use them in ways that under other circumstances we'd call "lacking purpose", i.e., they're just cruising along in one direction at twice the speed of sound, then all of a sudden go "oh, crap! I'm going the wrong way!" and slam themselves 120 degrees in another direction in a fraction of a second. > > It's that we also have to believe these apparently advanced aliens tend to crash surprisingly often, and that they don't want to be seen but just sort of accidentally get seen a little bit. > That said I do admit to having a lot of trouble trying to understand why craft that are apparently capable of hypersonic travel would spend hours moseying down the California coast from Catalina to Guadalupe islands. I mean if they were trying not to be noticed why not avoid the Nimitz CSG completely ? And if they wanted to be noticed wouldn't they have done something a little more dramatic than floating along at 100 knots (they didn't exhibit any spectacular behavior until an attempt was made to actually intercept them) ? These at least are pretty easy to put together: Teenage aliens out for a joyride.

jerf 6y ago

"That said I do admit to having a lot of trouble trying to understand why craft that are apparently capable of hypersonic travel would spend hours moseying down the California coast from Catalina to Guadalupe islands." This is more my point than the true combination of every possible claim. It's more, go beyond arguing about whether something did or did not happen, and consider, what does it imply if it did? People are often too bedazzled by the immediate arguments around what may have happened to consider this argument, but it's a very powerful, simple logical tool that can be useful in resolving those questions. You tend to get rather silly answers for a lot of this stuff if you take it seriously. Especially when you consider what tech looks like in 2021 and what feasible tech looks like in another 50-100 years, to say nothing of thousands. Aliens with interstellar travel tech but apparently no computers to speak of, no internet, no protein folding projects, no awareness of how useful satellites can be rather than literally flying down, apparent ignorance of how much of the universe isn't on planet earth (there is almost no conceivable resource-based argument for them to be here because everything is more abundant out there with no crazy animals running around bothering you) etc. the whole thing just comes off very silly. One of the things you don't get crazy answers for is classified, but fully human craft. It just there are humans (military or whatever) with capabilities we don't know. That is not a terribly crazy theory; if you look at the past at how long things stayed classified and extrapolate into the present time, it isn't completely out of the question that the military may have some things that are fully 20-30 years ahead of civilian tech, in very particular branches of development. (I don't think it's plausible that they are uniformly ahead of civilian development by that amount, but it's very plausible to have spikes in very certain areas. We have very significant evidence of the NSA having similar spikes in crypto math.) Combine the possibility of real sightings, with a real experiment to see how people react (we have the entire term "trial balloon" for that, because it's a thing we know humans do), and just a bit of misinterpretation of what's happening by the people watching it, and it's not hard to see this as a very significant possibility. (In fact, if you study what the military has done to its own people at times, it's not even slightly hard to believe this was a deliberate test of something. Even ignoring the unproveable rumors or what other militaries have done, and skipping the unethical stuff, we know militaries will test and trial things on their own people on a routine basis. Even things as simply as the drills not really labelled "drills" until later are examples.) And I think people lean way too hard on "but aliens could be incomprehensible!". They are bounded by living in the same universe as us, needing to survive to accomplish any other goal, needing energy and mass resources which are exclusionary (if X is using them Y doesn't get to, and all the subsequent game theory that implies), etc. That doesn't mean that we'll understand them to the n'th degree but it does put some bounds on how "cloud cuckoo land" they can be before it's just absurd.

tgflynn 6y ago
> One of the things you don't get crazy answers for is classified, but fully human craft. If the craft involved in the Nimitz incident were human then I would be even more puzzled by their behavior because I think I have a pretty good idea of human motivations and behavior. If they're "alien" (by which I don't necessarily mean extraterrestrial, just unknown non-human entities) then at least I can fall back on the argument that I may not be able to understand their motivations and behavior. Also there are many obstacles to explaining them as secret US technology. For one thing a number of knowledgeable people have indicated that no the US military doesn't test secret technology on completely uninformed participants. That's just not the way it's done. Also if it was secret US technology why did they let it leak ? Surely they would have made sure that people like Fravor and Day signed NDA's. On the other hand if the leak was intentional (ie. to send some kind of message to adversaries) then why wait 13 years before making it public ? Basically it just doesn't add up. > That doesn't mean that we'll understand them to the n'th degree but it does put some bounds on how "cloud cuckoo land" they can be before it's just absurd. I think here you're vastly underestimating the potential weirdness of things we don't know about.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

Izkata 6y ago

> > It's that they also seem to use them in ways that under other circumstances we'd call "lacking purpose", i.e., they're just cruising along in one direction at twice the speed of sound, then all of a sudden go "oh, crap! I'm going the wrong way!" and slam themselves 120 degrees in another direction in a fraction of a second. > > It's that we also have to believe these apparently advanced aliens tend to crash surprisingly often, and that they don't want to be seen but just sort of accidentally get seen a little bit. > That said I do admit to having a lot of trouble trying to understand why craft that are apparently capable of hypersonic travel would spend hours moseying down the California coast from Catalina to Guadalupe islands. I mean if they were trying not to be noticed why not avoid the Nimitz CSG completely ? And if they wanted to be noticed wouldn't they have done something a little more dramatic than floating along at 100 knots (they didn't exhibit any spectacular behavior until an attempt was made to actually intercept them) ? These at least are pretty easy to put together: Teenage aliens out for a joyride.