5 ms·

The discussion is basically answered by this short picture: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374167754404630528 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13741677

by _ph_ 5y ago

The discussion is basically answered by this short picture: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374167754404630528 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374167754404630528 Not only has the quality of cameras increased increadibly in the last decades, especially thanks to modern digital cameras, but in the last 10 years, most of us are carrying a quite good camera in their pocket all of the time. This would easily allow for documenting any strange phenomena. And that this works is shown. When the meteor struck chelyabinsk some years ago, there where plenty of videos thanks to dash cams. When recently debries of a SpaceX second stage reentered the atmosphere near Seattle, there were plenty of videos taken showing this event. This is not even taking into account all the advanced amateurs, who are shooting images of the ISS in orbit, or even any professionals, whose job it is to track the air and space around earth for things. Any metal part in orbit is tracked by NORAD for obvious reasons. So, where are such videos showing the aliens? It is obvious, that people constantly are seeing things which are not directly explainable, especially to non-scientists. But somehow they are not recorded. One good explanation is: a lot of them are recorded and in the record, they are easily identifiable as what they really are and no longer mentioned.

mjburgess 5y ago
Any phenomenon which decreases in rate proportional to our ability to measure it is very unlikely to exist. This reasoning applies to all historical mumbojumbo: ufos, bigfoot, ghosts, etc. These ideas are plausible insofar as they are constructed to be almost unmeasurable. The preponderance of camera phones today means we have 1bn+ people able to measure their environment at abitary frequencies, and all such phenomena have essentially disappeared. Either somehow all ghosts, bigfoots, aliens, etc. are disappearing because we are measuring them; or they never existed. NB. These ideas "go together" only socially, ie. believed by a secular-religious community. The objects they describe have no intrinsic relationship (bigfoot is not like a ghost). When you have a class of such ideas, it is likely they are wholesale false (ie. mythological). It is possible to somewhat statistically predict P(IdeaSet is Mythological) by the degree to which each idea in the set is in a common domain with the other ideas. A conspiracy/mythology is an IdeaSet which is mostly disjoint.
- zionic 5y ago
  >Any phenomenon which decreases in rate proportional to our ability to measure it is very unlikely to exist. Military UFO sightings have only increased as we have deployed more sophisticated RADAR/LIDAR/Thermal/EWAR systems. In the nimitz case they had just recently been upgraded. AEGIS/SPY-1 detected objects entering theater at 80,000+ ft, that quickly dropped to sea level. The tracks then disappeared from radar and the carrier groups sub gets a sonar hit in the same location of something going 200MPH under water. We have complex multi-spectrum/multi-system detection events of objects/crafts capable of trans-medium travel, a capability no known adversary has.
  - simonh 5y ago
    >In the nimitz case they had just recently been upgraded Fancy new equipment that's new to it's operators, who aren't familiar with it's capabilities and behaviour, using it in a highly complex environment. What could possibly go wrong. When I see an instrument measure something at some extreme level, which suddenly drops to another extreme level, personally I think instrument auto-recalibration. We had a host suddenly decide it was logging events from 30 years ago, then switch back to 'today'. Turns out it wasn't aliens or ghosts, just a glitch in NTP.
choxi 5y ago
Phone cameras have improved in resolution but their optical zoom hasn't gotten much better. The Chelyabinsk meteor is easy to see without any zoom because of the contrail and glow from burning in the atmosphere, but the UFOs that people claim to see don't leave any signatures. They're often reported as just shapes moving in strange ways or balls of light. The few witness testimonies I've seen often estimate the size of the UFO being smaller than a commercial airliner, I believe David Fravor said the Tic Tac was about the size of an F-18 hornet. If they also move as fast and erratically as people often claim, it's not that surprising there isn't more photographic evidence. And there actually are quite a few photos and videos captured of UFO phenomenon, but they get posted on obscure areas of social media and never make mainstream news. The videos are often debunked as weather balloons, flairs, or something else prosaic. In some cases the debunking theory is confirmed because e.g. we can confirm that skydivers with flairs were in the same region as the video was taken. In most cases it's just a video of a small object in the sky and there's no way to confirm what it is. Re: NORAD, Jacques Vallee claimed in a Joe Rogan interview that (either the ARTCC or NORAD) do see thousands of objects on radar every month that get classified as "uncorrelated targets" and are ignored because they don't show any inbound trajectory toward the US.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  Both the resolution and the optical magnification have gotten better. Initial mobile phones had an equivalent to a 28mm lens in the 35mm format, today you get 50-70mm equivalents too. In any case, a modern smartphone even with a rather wide angle lens does still get more details than an average eye. So what people indeed are seeing are strange lights which move around, which well, are just some lights they can't explain. And the smartphone will show that rather clearly. And that is just smartphones, that is not talking about all the high-power digital cameras now being quite ubiquitous, one would expect at least some interesting shots popping up on the internet.
Eupolemos 5y ago
Not really. A lot of the cases have always been hoaxes or ignorance. Slow moving lights in the skies photographed by exited "believers". The few remaining good cases are difficult to document. First of all, go out and take a picture of a bird. You get just one chance and it must be flying fast. Your result will not be very good. This our baseline. Now look at the Nimitz incident. They measured a move of stationary at 80k feet to 80 feet in less than a second - something like 1200g, IIRC. 1200g is a downright silly number. Now just take a good picture of this /s The best current theory IMO is that this is done my manipulating/creating geodesic lines. This will create "gravity lensing" (like Einstein crosses) further blurring the craft. Anyone serious but curios should take a look at uaptheory.com - it is good work on display by someone who understands physics and relativity. We won't get a good picture because they move ridiculously fast.
- mekkkkkk 5y ago
  That measurement came from a radar cluster for which an update was being tested the same day. The radar data that was quickly grabbed from the strike group (tinfoil explanation: coverup), was actually retrieved for diagnostics and post-mortem for the test which had apparently failed.
  - king_magic 5y ago
    The Nimitz incident apparently took place over an entire week. All that instrumentation was wrong... for an entire week? Doesn't pass the smell test. > They were logged as high as eighty thousand feet, and as low as the ocean’s surface. After about a week of radar observations, Commander David Fravor, a graduate of the élite Topgun fighter-pilot school and the commanding officer of the Black Aces squadron, was sent on an intercept mission. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/how-the-pentagon-started-taking-ufos-seriously https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/how-the-pentag...
bitcurious 5y ago
Here’s a completely bizarre experience I had that I attributed to bad luck. I saw a weird triangular drone/plane flying close to an airport. I went to take a picture of it (to identify later) and my phone died. Just up and black screened. An hour later I was eating dinner and turned back on with ~43% battery power remaining. It wasn’t a particularly cold day, but I attributed to an old battery not handling the temp well. I don’t think it was aliens, or even a UFO (except to me.) …but if it was an alien UFO, I wouldn’t be surprised if the folks who traversed space to be here could ID a lens and disable my phone.
- mclightning 5y ago
  Same argument could be stretched to say..."same folks could hide themselves from your eyes"
- _ph_ 5y ago
  Yes, it is an odd coincidence, but as you write, a bad battery or just a weak contact is the likely explanation. The alternative would assume that there are aliens, which are able to disable your smartphone from the distance, but are not able to make their vehicles somewhat look like current human vehicles. At minimum, they should paint "Pepsi" or "Nike" on them, and no one would notice them :)
- jeffreyrogers 5y ago
  Could've been this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_RQ-170_Sentinel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_RQ-170_Sentine...
  - negroni 5y ago
    I've seen those twice on the west side of Puerto Rico. Spooked the hell out of me at the time because they fly very low and make virtually no sound.
  - bitcurious 5y ago
    I bet that was it! Thanks!

by _ph_ 5y ago

mjburgess 5y ago

Any phenomenon which decreases in rate proportional to our ability to measure it is very unlikely to exist. This reasoning applies to all historical mumbojumbo: ufos, bigfoot, ghosts, etc. These ideas are plausible insofar as they are constructed to be almost unmeasurable. The preponderance of camera phones today means we have 1bn+ people able to measure their environment at abitary frequencies, and all such phenomena have essentially disappeared. Either somehow all ghosts, bigfoots, aliens, etc. are disappearing because we are measuring them; or they never existed. NB. These ideas "go together" only socially, ie. believed by a secular-religious community. The objects they describe have no intrinsic relationship (bigfoot is not like a ghost). When you have a class of such ideas, it is likely they are wholesale false (ie. mythological). It is possible to somewhat statistically predict P(IdeaSet is Mythological) by the degree to which each idea in the set is in a common domain with the other ideas. A conspiracy/mythology is an IdeaSet which is mostly disjoint.

zionic 5y ago
>Any phenomenon which decreases in rate proportional to our ability to measure it is very unlikely to exist. Military UFO sightings have only increased as we have deployed more sophisticated RADAR/LIDAR/Thermal/EWAR systems. In the nimitz case they had just recently been upgraded. AEGIS/SPY-1 detected objects entering theater at 80,000+ ft, that quickly dropped to sea level. The tracks then disappeared from radar and the carrier groups sub gets a sonar hit in the same location of something going 200MPH under water. We have complex multi-spectrum/multi-system detection events of objects/crafts capable of trans-medium travel, a capability no known adversary has.
- simonh 5y ago
  >In the nimitz case they had just recently been upgraded Fancy new equipment that's new to it's operators, who aren't familiar with it's capabilities and behaviour, using it in a highly complex environment. What could possibly go wrong. When I see an instrument measure something at some extreme level, which suddenly drops to another extreme level, personally I think instrument auto-recalibration. We had a host suddenly decide it was logging events from 30 years ago, then switch back to 'today'. Turns out it wasn't aliens or ghosts, just a glitch in NTP.

choxi 5y ago

Phone cameras have improved in resolution but their optical zoom hasn't gotten much better. The Chelyabinsk meteor is easy to see without any zoom because of the contrail and glow from burning in the atmosphere, but the UFOs that people claim to see don't leave any signatures. They're often reported as just shapes moving in strange ways or balls of light. The few witness testimonies I've seen often estimate the size of the UFO being smaller than a commercial airliner, I believe David Fravor said the Tic Tac was about the size of an F-18 hornet. If they also move as fast and erratically as people often claim, it's not that surprising there isn't more photographic evidence. And there actually are quite a few photos and videos captured of UFO phenomenon, but they get posted on obscure areas of social media and never make mainstream news. The videos are often debunked as weather balloons, flairs, or something else prosaic. In some cases the debunking theory is confirmed because e.g. we can confirm that skydivers with flairs were in the same region as the video was taken. In most cases it's just a video of a small object in the sky and there's no way to confirm what it is. Re: NORAD, Jacques Vallee claimed in a Joe Rogan interview that (either the ARTCC or NORAD) do see thousands of objects on radar every month that get classified as "uncorrelated targets" and are ignored because they don't show any inbound trajectory toward the US.

_ph_ 5y ago
Both the resolution and the optical magnification have gotten better. Initial mobile phones had an equivalent to a 28mm lens in the 35mm format, today you get 50-70mm equivalents too. In any case, a modern smartphone even with a rather wide angle lens does still get more details than an average eye. So what people indeed are seeing are strange lights which move around, which well, are just some lights they can't explain. And the smartphone will show that rather clearly. And that is just smartphones, that is not talking about all the high-power digital cameras now being quite ubiquitous, one would expect at least some interesting shots popping up on the internet.

Eupolemos 5y ago

Not really. A lot of the cases have always been hoaxes or ignorance. Slow moving lights in the skies photographed by exited "believers". The few remaining good cases are difficult to document. First of all, go out and take a picture of a bird. You get just one chance and it must be flying fast. Your result will not be very good. This our baseline. Now look at the Nimitz incident. They measured a move of stationary at 80k feet to 80 feet in less than a second - something like 1200g, IIRC. 1200g is a downright silly number. Now just take a good picture of this /s The best current theory IMO is that this is done my manipulating/creating geodesic lines. This will create "gravity lensing" (like Einstein crosses) further blurring the craft. Anyone serious but curios should take a look at uaptheory.com - it is good work on display by someone who understands physics and relativity. We won't get a good picture because they move ridiculously fast.

mekkkkkk 5y ago
That measurement came from a radar cluster for which an update was being tested the same day. The radar data that was quickly grabbed from the strike group (tinfoil explanation: coverup), was actually retrieved for diagnostics and post-mortem for the test which had apparently failed.
- king_magic 5y ago
  The Nimitz incident apparently took place over an entire week. All that instrumentation was wrong... for an entire week? Doesn't pass the smell test. > They were logged as high as eighty thousand feet, and as low as the ocean’s surface. After about a week of radar observations, Commander David Fravor, a graduate of the élite Topgun fighter-pilot school and the commanding officer of the Black Aces squadron, was sent on an intercept mission. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/how-the-pentagon-started-taking-ufos-seriously https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/how-the-pentag...

bitcurious 5y ago

Here’s a completely bizarre experience I had that I attributed to bad luck. I saw a weird triangular drone/plane flying close to an airport. I went to take a picture of it (to identify later) and my phone died. Just up and black screened. An hour later I was eating dinner and turned back on with ~43% battery power remaining. It wasn’t a particularly cold day, but I attributed to an old battery not handling the temp well. I don’t think it was aliens, or even a UFO (except to me.) …but if it was an alien UFO, I wouldn’t be surprised if the folks who traversed space to be here could ID a lens and disable my phone.

mclightning 5y ago
Same argument could be stretched to say..."same folks could hide themselves from your eyes"
_ph_ 5y ago
Yes, it is an odd coincidence, but as you write, a bad battery or just a weak contact is the likely explanation. The alternative would assume that there are aliens, which are able to disable your smartphone from the distance, but are not able to make their vehicles somewhat look like current human vehicles. At minimum, they should paint "Pepsi" or "Nike" on them, and no one would notice them :)
jeffreyrogers 5y ago
Could've been this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_RQ-170_Sentinel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_RQ-170_Sentine...
- negroni 5y ago
  I've seen those twice on the west side of Puerto Rico. Spooked the hell out of me at the time because they fly very low and make virtually no sound.
- bitcurious 5y ago
  I bet that was it! Thanks!