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I’m a Physicist Who Searches for Aliens. U.F.O.s Don’t Impress Me
- oxymoran 5y agoIf you are going to make the claim that they are Russian or Chinese drones, please explain how they flew all the way to the US coast and then hung out for hours. That sort of fuel life is less believable than aliens.
- pc86 5y agoI'm paywalled from the article but it's pretty well known that both Russian and China have subs close to, or even in, US territorial waters on a fairly regular basis.
- jamestimmins 5y agoDo you know why they do this? Outside of wartime, I don’t see an obvious benefit.
- teilo 5y agoWere you alive during the cold war? That's what I think this is. A kind of cold war against a terrestrial foe, in this case one with superior technology.
- JulianMorrison 5y agoThey don't count on being "outside of wartime" when they need them. Also, for the big powers, it's really always wartime. Some times are just colder than others.
- dsr_ 5y agoHow do you know your super-quiet sub is undetectable by the most likely adversary? You send in the super-quiet sub on a series of probes, each time getting closer, until there's contact and possibly an incident. Now you know how good the adversary is!
- Tarq0n 5y agoTapping undersea cables is a major use of submarines in peacetime.
- maxqin1 5y agoCouldn't these drones be drifting in orbit until ready for operation? No fuel would be required until after reentry. Info beamed back to the "mother ship."
- capableweb 5y agoLaunch them from small naval vessels (or submarines maybe?) that don't show up on radar, a la Millennium Challenge 2002
- teilo 5y agoThis is what I generally see happening any time these things come up. A dismissive half-answer that does not address the physical requirements of the phenomenon. I am not in the "it's aliens" crowd. But I am also not shutting down half my brain so as to ignore the the materials science and exotic energy requirements that would be necessary to reproduce these phenomena. I am a strong proponent of Occam's Razor. But in order to use Occam's Razor, you have to account for all observations, not dismiss half of them. As to their being drones: almost certainly. And that's actually the scariest thought. If they are, in fact, hypersonic drones (whatever the origin), then we are in deep shit.
- gfodor 5y agoGiven that in a century or two it seems possible we would be incentivized and capable enough to cobble together intergalactic autonomous probes to blanket the galaxy and prevent any external civilization from wiping us all out, it seems most likely to me we should expect to find such a system already exists first.
- ericmay 5y agoBetter yet - why aren't people claiming or thinking hard that these are U.S. drones and capabilities? Maybe they're showing them off to Russia and China?
- jmull 5y agoHere's my theory: The aliens do have advanced technology such that they could remain hidden from us, but choose to appear to us in patterns consistent with human mythological sightings -- fleeting/mysterious/ambiguous/infrequently -- due to their own inscrutable alien social norms. That is, they are friendly, and this is the strange way they show it... I think it's so as not to "rudely" impinge too strongly on our sense of reality. Especially our place within the universe, since we believe we are at the top. (just having fun with this)
- me_me_me 5y agowhy would they bother? It just doesnt make sense for them to play stupid games. To what end would they do it?
- JulianMorrison 5y agoThat's actually a really interesting question given the complexity of the whole phenomenon.
- s_fischer 5y agoMaybe they're just trolling us for pure entertainment. I imagine it would get boring up there for them, silently watching an intellectually inferior lifeform day after day.
- gremlinsinc 5y agoI would so troll, if I were an alien.
- JulianMorrison 5y agoIf you dig into the UFO reports out there - most of which are much less detailed and documented, but also more various and flat out weird than the ones the Pentagon is giving the thumbs up to - then you start to see parallels and linkage with reports of cryptids, with ghosts and spirits, and with fairies and other historical folklore critters. The "ETs in nuts-and-bolts spaceships with a Prime Directive" hypothesis doesn't really hold up as a general explanation for a number of reasons. But that leaves a much stranger and more confusing phenomenon.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoUFO are cool, they don't need to be from aliens to be cool. New weather phenomena? So cool! Strange illusion? Still cool! Technical prowess from a foreign gov? Super cool!
- zinekeller 5y ago> Technical prowess from a foreign gov? Super cool! ... and depending on your viewpoint, super scary!
- JulianMorrison 5y agoI think some of the people behind the current "disclosure" are definitely pushing that angle. Russians have flying saucers! Fund us plz & thank.
- mywittyname 5y agoThey could also be the ones behind the developments. So not only can you scare the population into securing more funding, but they serve as an implicit threat to other governments: if these things can evade an F35-A, what hope does a MiG have? Plus, it's a good sales tactic.
- gmadsen 5y agoTo be clear, the pentagon for the last 70 years has kept a tight lip on any UFO information, and is only now creating a report after forced compliance. Even the stuff Harry Reid did a while back was fought against by the pentagon. Their position seems to be, anything we don't know that is in our airspace is a threat, and none of it is the public's business
- JulianMorrison 5y agoThe TTSA disclosures of videos were snuck out without going through proper channels, if not exactly fully unofficial. And they did get groused at for that. But there was a point, I think in late 2019, when they made a very unforced admission that the videos were real. it would have been much more normal and typical of their previous behaviour to just stick to "we can neither confirm nor deny". And that, in itself, is interesting.
- scottrogowski 5y ago"scientists like me and my colleagues are on the threshold of gathering data that may be relevant to the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. But this evidence involves subtle findings about phenomena far away in the galaxy" I'm very curious about this. It sounds like more than the standard spectroscopy that looks for organic compounds and other life signatures. Could anyone provide some more context?
- gremlinsinc 5y agoI'm guessing they're referring to the James Webb Telescope which has taken like decades longer than planned. there's even an xkcd on it: https://xkcd.com/2014/ https://xkcd.com/2014/
- motoboi 5y agoUnless pentagon is engaged in a disinformation campaign, the data made available this year make this debunking article very data-poor. Even Obama came on record in an interview saying there are real videos, which show unexplainable movement and trajectories [1]. Of course Obama could have been misinformed, they could have been unable to better analyze the images. 1 - https://wgntv.com/news/barack-obama-talks-about-ufos-again-on-late-night-television/ https://wgntv.com/news/barack-obama-talks-about-ufos-again-o...
- CyanLite4 5y agoThe videos are real. But, just because we can’t explain it doesn’t mean it’s outer space aliens. Any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic (or outer space alien technology).
- JulianMorrison 5y agoThe military is bending over backwards not to favor the outer space aliens hypothesis. It's "unexplained aerial phenomena". Not knowing what it is makes it interesting enough.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoSometimes a bug on the lens also looks like magic.
- sumedh 5y agoHow does that bug show up on the radars of two ships?
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoOperator error https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27354181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27354181
- draw_down 5y ago
- CyanLite4 5y agoThis article makes the most sense. Occam’s Razor. TLDR: hypersonic drones. If it truly was E.T. they would be much faster and could easily evade basic radar technology from the early 1900s.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago> and could easily evade basic radar technology from the early 1900s. Only if they needed to. Wasn’t there a story with the SR-71 that it could show up on some radar and have missiles launched against it but the evasive move for that was to just accelerate because it was faster than the missiles.
- CyanLite4 5y agoSo are you suggesting E.T. has faster-than-light vehicles that can travel across the galaxy, breaking all known laws of physics in the process, and has intentionally avoided public contact, but still can’t dodge plain ol’ radio waves with radar? There’s gotta be an XKCD comic somewhere that has an alien engineer telling his managers that the FTL engines work fine but they should probably do more testing on the radio cloaking device...
- JulianMorrison 5y agoHypersonic things are hot, and they go in straight lines, or else they have big engines and obvious control surfaces. A hypersonic thing that has no engine and no control surfaces is basically a thrown rock and the navy is perfectly capable of recognizing it as such. Absolutely nothing human that is hypersonic can do that from a dead stop hover without a really unsubtle plume of rocket exhaust.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago> Absolutely nothing human that is hypersonic can do that from a dead stop hover without a really unsubtle plume of rocket exhaust. Or they're just small close objects moving much less violently. Don't discount the "bug on the lens" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiKyfd6hA0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiKyfd6hA0
- pedrocr 5y agoThere's a moment in a Gabriel García Márquez novel where the villagers are completely unimpressed by the invention of the airplane as they had all already tried out the flying carpet in the county fair and in comparison the airplane looked cumbersome. This article reads like someone complaining that their cool science work will not get the public recognition they think they deserve because the common standard for alien discoveries is way too high. > "Powerful telescopes that will soon be operational may be capable of detecting city lights on the night side of planets that orbit distant stars" Hopefully that "may" is not carrying too much load as this would be incredibly cool.
- Jabbles 5y agoMaybe if the alien city covers the entire planet and consists mostly of searchlights. Otherwise, the "may" and "soon" are too optimistic. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_exoplanets#Direct_imaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_exoplanet...
- NaN1352 5y ago> But scientifically speaking, there is little to warrant that connection. Nothing more annoying than people pretending they are open minded about extraterrestrial life when they are not. Plus the need to defend one’s "credibility". Nobody talking about ufos as non-scientists pretends they are doing science. Just excitement, and interesting questions. A very healthy exercise, essential part of philosophy, metaphysics in particular... Questions which open our mind and help reconsider the "mundane" also, by reframing it. Who is this guy writing for? Nobody. Or himself. "Look at me I am a very rational person, that does not believe in fairytales". As Alan Watts said: "science is the art of prediction". edit: Perhaps explaining my thinking better: - a lot of science is in fact predictions aka theories / models based on what is deemed sufficient, correlated observations - as long as the model fits with the data, it is an acceptable explanation, it still is not "truth"... and if the model doesn’t fit anymore than just discard it, that’s how science progresses So in light of that, if/when we have sufficient observations, why would a theory that we may be visited by extraterrestrial life, ie. that these UAP may be crafts of extra terrestrial origin, why should such a theory be more problematic or less "scientific" than any other? The article reminds me of the rejection and resistance even physicists receive as in the Oumuamua story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ʻOumuamua#Alien_object_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ʻOumuamua#Alien_object_hypothe... He was on Joe Rogan explaining how much resistance he met even among his peers but thankfully he doesn’t care about social media... because lets call it for what it is : what the author ofthe article does indirectly is continue a long line of shaming others who dare put theories (aka predictions) that are unconventional.
- pohl 5y ago"Open minded" is not necessarily a virtue. Sometimes it's a weakness. QAnon adherents are, in ways, open minded.
- jmkni 5y ago> Powerful telescopes that will soon be operational may be capable of detecting city lights on the night side of planets that orbit distant stars or the telltale mark of reflected light from planet-wide solar-collecting arrays or the distinctive sign of industrial chemicals in a planet’s atmosphere. All of these “technosignatures,” should we find evidence of them, will be small effects. If we do detect such things, you better believe that my colleagues and I will go to extraordinary lengths to eliminate every possible source of error and every possible alternative explanation. That is nuts, and incredibly exciting!
- gadf 5y agoYes but probably those planets will be thousands of years in the past. We should also spend money studying the things that are here now. Scary as it is to look for the "monster under the bed"
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoIMHO, the strong argument against this being real is how it is "perpetually liminal", i.e. just on the threshold of verification, but staying there. It never quite crosses over into solid evidence. The signal never improves. Even over decades, it never proceeds from a sighting to an artefact in a museum. The results never change from "promising" to "promise fulfilled".
- JulianMorrison 5y agoAt least some of that is humans. Those videos got leaked, and then tentatively confirmed, but is the military releasing all the other gubbins they have, like radar tracks and voice transcripts? Are they heck.
- tgflynn 5y agoWhat if that's exactly the effect that the source of the phenomenon is trying to achieve ?
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoWhy would they? What if you're overthinking it?
- tgflynn 5y agoWhy do human scientists force mice to find their way through strange mazes ?
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoYou've basically re-invented capricious elves and pixies. It's an exercise in medievalist superstition dressed up in a cheap sci-fi veneer. Waste of time.
- JulianMorrison 5y agoWait until you dig into the lore on capricious elves and pixies and realise that it overlaps UFO lore in the kinds of weirdness it contains, despite being recorded by people separated by centuries, continents, and cultures.
- the__alchemist 5y ago> What a scientist needs are precise measurements from multiple viewpoints provided by devices that register various wavelengths (visual, infrared, radar). Fighter jets (Like the Navy HUD showed in the article?) have radars, targeting pods with high zoom, IR, TV, and laser-range-detectors, and fly in formation. These radars show the altitude and airspeed of anything they pick up. They also are always recording displays that would save this information. My building's concierge loves talking about UFOs. I try to steer him towards articles etc on the latest exobiology info. Real stuff can capture that desire for something exotic just as well. Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World is a great read for the psychology and history behind the UFO phenomenon.
- raverbashing 5y ago> Fighter jets (Like the Navy HUD showed in the article?) have radars, targeting pods with high zoom, IR, TV, and laser-range-detectors, and fly in formation. Yes. Also very possible that they have something else that's classified but gives an extra layer of plausibility.
- ZanyProgrammer 5y agoI think most people assume the U in UFO stands for alien, but I think it's more likely it stands for "top secret military aircraft (manned or unmanned) of human origin that the overwhelming majority of military pilots and air traffic controllers aren't going to have clearance to know about".
- mhh__ 5y agoIf the SR-71 could go as fast as it did using 50s technology I don't see why modern classified tech wouldn't be similarly impressive. Just look at how far racing cars have come since then for example, largely due to the rise of computers.
- throwaway743 5y agoPulling between 500-800Gs is a huge feat as that force would instantly kill any human being and would obliterate any constructed craft we're capable of building.
- gadf 5y agoExtraordinary until proven otherwise. Extraordinary conservatism results in extraordinary ignorance. I know you've taken it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall. It always gets bloody, always. It's the threat of not just the way of doing business, but in their minds it's threatening the game. But really what it's threatening is their livelihoods, it's threatening their jobs, it's threatening the way that they do things. And every time that happens, whether it's the government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people are holding the reins, have their hands on the switch. They go bat shit crazy. -- John Henry, Moneyball What’s most frustrating about the U.F.O.s story is that it obscures the fact that scientists like me and my colleagues are on the threshold of gathering data that may be relevant to the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. -- This dude, real life Translation: PWEASE don't take mah funding because ahm noloonger sexy enough I think his fear is overblown. There's room for both. RT arrays are another form of sensor. Money will not dry up. Surprises me tho that if objects are ETs no RT array data has leaked. Super coverup? No data? Common-sense objections arguable from both sides. Why no White House Lawn big reveal? Maybe they big-revealed in People's Park in Shanghai...or Red Square in Moscow, or Phoenix, AZ. Or Prime Directive. Why anyhow would they go through our government, when we're, as "Joe Rogan" says, "chimps with nukes", why would "elected officials" mean anything to them? The woo-fringe likes to say the "benevolent ETs" are "seeding out consciousness" for eventual "mass disclosure" and "human evolution". What if it's more like there's no open contact because that's not their point, they get seen sometimes because it's not that important (we can't do shit anyway), and we're actually an agricultural product or a science experiment (to them, at least)? What if the government "knew" that. They'd never fucking say it. What a big fucking let down and popping the bubble of our "great civilization" and our "fantastic fucking egos". No one in power is going to "spill the beans" on the "real inside track" of people with more power than them. The only chance they got is to cling to the mystery, like the priest caste of old (that Jesus beat the shit out of in the temple, and accused of hypocrisy), and get power by being the "mediators" to real power. Or what if it all happened like the SSP-whistleblowers want you to believe. Vatican had contact in the past. Nazi Germany built a craft through ET telepathic instructions to the Vrill society. Co-opted by Hitler. Secret Antarctic base. Operation Highjump. Operation Paperclip. Breakaway civilizations. Mars Germans. CIA Dark Fleet. Secret space program. We have anti-gravity craft and age-regression and time-travel tech hewn from the reversed-engineered carcasses of ET trojan horses, developed in collusion with aliens in exchange for "treaties" for them to continue their "shady dealings" on Earth. A massive secret society. We've already colonized the solar system. Earth is a backwater of humanity that has already reached the stars. Why not clue us in? Aliens, Burke: Okay, look. What if that ship didn't even exist, huh? Did you ever think about that? I didn't know! So now, if I went in and made a major security issue out of it, everybody steps in. Administration steps in, and there are no exclusive rights for anybody; nobody wins. So I made a decision and it was... wrong. It was a bad call, Ripley. It was a bad call. Why not clue us in? Why keep Earth in the dark? It's easier to control. Why surrender your corporate monopoly on interstellar trade? Why does the CIA have security clearances? Why does DoD (etc) keep information in siloed SAPs? Protects their secrets. Protects their advantage. Why read in the whole of the Earth population? No fucking way. No way would we risk out bottom line. Simple corporate economics. Fuck you, Earth. We don't care about telling you the truth. We only care how we can squeeze every goddamned dollar out of every goddamned opportunity. Fuck humanity. It's all about the Benjamins. Why not like that? So many other things are. Even if "chimps with nukes" got anti-grav tech and codes for the cosmic intergalactic portals so we can jump to other stars, why would you assume we'd be operating in a way that was more advanced, more enlightened, less corrupt, less greedy, than we do in a place like Burma? in HK? In anyway there's a buck to be made, and laws not yet made. The truth is a sad reflection of our worst characteristics. And the finger of blame can be pointed squarely back at the government and the big corporates in secret advanced tech who collude with them. That truth is never coming out. Because there's "too much to lose". Fuck the public. The only thing that matters is the "people who matter." This is all a controlled narrative. You'll never get the truth. The best we're gonna get a rained-down, rosey-glassed, disinformed, fantasy. And that's all we'll ever be trusted with. Sad, sad, sad, sad sad. But what can you expect from humanity? Not a fucking iota more, that's for sure. Sorry for the defeatist cynicism: hope you take it as a motivator: don't accept the story you get fed. Find a way to work it out for yourself. Whatever it takes. It's worth it.
- Pelic4n 5y agoI encourage anyone with enough interest in this matter to read "Confrontations: A Scientist's Search for Alien Contact" and "The Invisible College" by Jacques Vallée. Vallée is an astrophysicist and computer scientist who spent a solid chunk of his life studying UFOs. In Confrontation, he describe his try to find proofs that UFOs are from an ET origin, only to be swallowed in a maelstrom of cults, governement disinfo campaigns, high-strangeness, bullshit artists, and all around memetic pollution making the field opaque to scientific inquiry. The conclusion of this book is that studying UFOs is not a scientific problem as much as an intelligence one, where getting access to reliable data is almost impossible. In the Invisible College, he provides a lot of data compiled by him and peers from UFO encounters cases he studied, most of them never appearing in the media for preventing witness testimony contamination, and show that this data doesn't fit any simple to digest narrative, such as "aliens", the psychosocial hypothesis or "advanced human tech prototypes".
- skindoe 5y agoHave you listened to Jacques Valleé on Joe Rogan, he definitely believes in Aliens...
- sandworm101 5y ago>> most of them never appearing in the media for preventing witness testimony contamination That prevents post-event witness contamination. One really confounding aspect is pre-event contamination. There are links between media depictions and later witness testimonies.
- Pelic4n 5y agoYes, exactly. It was done that way to isolate common attributes of encounters which did not have circulated in the media or the general UFO lore yet. J. Allen Hynek, the lead of project Blue Book, encountered the contamination issue very early in his works, and a huge amount of his research is to this day unpublished to prevent that from happening. As you might notice, this is the complete opposite of how scientific inquiry works. As Vallée concluded, this is an intelligence problem before a scientific one. From that standing, we can understand an UFO encounter as a cybernetic system, not just a physical event. Which leads to consider the UFO phenomenon as informational phenomenon with informational effects on cultures, thoughts and ideas. A lot of Vallée's work is exploring this, which is really fascinating.
- gadf 5y agoScientific analysis of why the "it's probably not extraordinary" claim on the Navy sensor data is bullshit: ESTIMATING FLIGHT CHARACTERISTICS OF ANOMALOUS UNIDENTIFIED AERIAL VEHICLES[0] More like that: https://www.explorescu.org/publications https://www.explorescu.org/publications [0]: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/10/939 https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/10/939
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoI looked at the Tic Tac explanation in that article (section 2.4.3); I assert it's ... weak. The object is tracking left with respect to the aircraft, as seen by the increasing left azimuth reported from the sensor. However, that azimuth is reported in units of whole degrees, with the sensor field-of-view being 0.7 degrees at 1x zoom or 0.35 degrees at 2x zoom. The rate of azimuth change is about 0.3 degrees per second based on some simple stopwatch measurements. In other words, if the sensor loses lock and ceases to track the target, you would expect the object to appear to accelerate left out of frame. At the 2x zoom, the angular distance across half the field-of-view (i.e. from the middle to the left edge) is 0.175 degrees; so you'd absolutely it to disappear in ~0.5 seconds. You can see some "bobbling" of the lock as the operator switches between zoom levels in the video, and indeed the apparent sudden movement of the object occurs immediately after one increase in zoom level. The data presented is equally consistent with this theory, but the article doesn't address that possibility at all - instead assuming that the explanation can only be due to kinematics of the object. So, yeah, weak.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoI also checked on the journal that published this analysis; it turns out that the principle author of the article is also the editor-in-chief of the journal... also the publisher of the journal (MDPI) has been on-and-off the lists of predatory journal publishers for some years.
- gadf 5y agoThat's good analysis. But by your standard of equally consistent your analysis also must be judged as weak. I don't think either theory are weak. They're just theories consistent with the evidence. So that's kind of strong. Also I agree with you on the journal. Probably not the best example. I'd just rather people try to analyze than dismiss it irrationally so even a dodgy journal, with a comprehensive analysis is better. I don't think we should "default to trust" something just because it's in a journal. Likewise no default to distrust. None of the radar data released recently about Omaha shows extraordinary speeds or Gs. So maybe nothing in the hard data shows any smoking gun evidence of super speeds. That might be deliberate by the Navy but such speculation doesn't change facts we have. I dislike the "smearing of witnesses" and default to "explained" attitude brought to this, which is interesting and justifies curiosity. Witnesses are unreliable but Navy aviators are trained witnesses, experts in the domain of estimating speed, distance, aircraft type, maneuvering - and you have a handful of them who have come forward saying they saw dozens of these things over days. And people want to just pretend the Navy doesn't know the difference between a plane and a bird, or doesn't know how to read their sensors or calibrate them to remove artefacts. I'm not saying you're disputing there is a real object detected, but some people say it's a fly on the glass or something ridiculous. I dislike these contemptuous dismissals of trained observers and supposedly best-in-class top-secret sensors. So I want to see more analysis and curious discussion ... less arrogant dismissal. Even the points that are not in contention are extraordinary: no control surface, no heat signature, no propulsion signature, extended time-on-station, active jamming, foreknowledge of CAP point, apparent thermoptic/radar cloaking (or superspeed) re it can vanish and appear almost instantly. They say the things dropped from space to sea-level in a second. That's amazing. I think a valid alternative is that they were able to hack/delude the radar into thinking they just appeared. Just like how they disappeared. It's seems possible a smooth white object could be covered in some sort of optical/thermal/radar distorting materials, that could make it vanish to sensors even if it was still there. That's not the explanation I believe, but I think it's a valid alternative in light of a lack of discriminating evidence. I don't have any explanations for the violation of aerodynamics, lack of heat, wake, or extended "battery life". I would sure love to know how it did that. That's extraordinary. Until proven otherwise. I think you can question the data a bit, and the witnesses a lot, but when you start reaching hard to twist everything into an "explained away" narrative, you're missing the signal that's there. And it seems crazy, to do mental gymnastics that requires a coincidence of all the failures, repeated, over time: the Pentagon is lying or doesn't know it's a bird, or a stick of gum on the sensor, the aviators are hallucination, the sensors (across the entire battle group) are malfunctioning at the same time and erroneously reporting internally-consistent tracks, that then coincide with positions seen by aviators visually, this didn't just happen as a glitch in one moment, but consistently, over days, and months (according to some people). As these strange skythings have also happened to thousands of civilians and other servicepeople around the world over decades. It's crazy to paint it as "a coincidence of errors and hallucinations". I'm not saying anyone who says that is crazy, just the idea itself, because I guess to them it seems crazy to say it's aliens. Maybe this thing is all a weird and elaborate way for the US govt to do a big reveal of some new exotic drone tech it has and make sure everyone in the world is watching. Could be truth of it, but I think the mileage attainable from running with the "we don't know / mystery" narrative is probably higher than tying it all up in a neat little bow right now. I don't think any of this will answer the question of aliens/not - it's entirely possible to be having a dealing with aliens in secret, and then do this "semi-public" reveal in parallel and keep the two things isolated, maybe deliberately, maybe to plunge the secret alien connection further into the depths of secrecy. I think the key thing is the big reveal is about control. Seems various factions have been coming forward over time to leak things out, now someone needs to get out in front of this, unified front, unified messaging, and recapture control of the narrative.
- drcode 5y agoIf the CIA ever released an incontrovertible UFO video (i.e. the UFO landing, aliens stepping out and doing a hula dance, all at 8K video resolution) along with multiple sober military officials saying they saw the whole scene transpire with their own eyes, I'd still put the odds that the report is real at one in 1000. The fact is that there are just too many imaginable ways that such a video artifact could be released, even by well-meaning officials, and still be fake: As the OP article states, the secrecy in government agencies creates many perverse, confusing incentives that can have unintended consequences.... and we never have enough of "provenance" of any artifact to be able determine its veracity. For instance, how do we know that the military doesn't have a secret computer graphics team that was tasked with making a demo video of what a UFO may look like, based on eyewitness testimony? Then, the infamous Navy videos accidentally leaks, but the CG team is super-secret, so officials have to pretend they are real, to protect the secrecy of their CG team? (I'm not saying that's what happened, I'm saying this is one of 1000 possible mundane explanations for these videos) In summary, I don't think the CIA/military are technically capable of providing incontrovertible evidence for anything, they are simply not built to be trustworthy on these kinds of matters. This is because the scientific method requires open access to their data gathering process, which goes against their obsession with secrecy.
- StavrosK 5y agoThis is my view as well. It's more than a bit fishy that most UFO sightings are from the US, and not uniformly distributed around the world.
- gadf 5y agoSampling bias. Try searching in languages other than English. Belgium UFO wave. Mexico City UFOs. UFOs in South America. I think it's fishy that most SSP/SAP insider people with so called UFO related leaks come from the US (and further, are white dudes), because it seems like these programs would be global. But you can definitely find UFO reports happening around the world. Want a rabbit hole? Search "不明飞行物在中国" on Baidu and go to the videos page. The world's a lot bigger than your media shows it
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- ballarak 5y agoI hope everyone commenting in this thread revisits these words after the Pentagon's UAP report is released and performs an honest reflection on their thought processes.
- mehphp 5y agoWhat do you think it will reveal?
- gremlinsinc 5y agoWe're probably more likely to find out if aliens exist on July 18th, than what the pentagon releases. Just saying... and that likelihood is extremely low.
- major505 5y agoI thinked about that a lot. I came to some conclusions: 1. Certainly theres life somewhere in the the universe. Inteligent? Problably not. We as humans tend to think that intelligence is necessary for survival, but other species, with the exception when dealing with us, seens to do fine without that. 2. IF they are inteligent, they are bound to the same physical principals that us humans are, so that's a reason why we didn't make contact. Maybe. 3. I don't think that they are extraterrestrial, maybe some type of advanced drone, but not out of earth. 4. If the are indeed aliens, the reason why they don't land and present themselfs is maybe because they just don't care. If what people are saying is true, they may be so advanced that for them, we are like antes or something, insignificant, and problably not worth attention.
- gremlinsinc 5y agoDonald Hoffman has a paper supporting the premise that we're in a simulation. There's a number of good youtube video interviews with him. He doesn't seem to be a charlatan, or one of those ancient alien fakes. If they are from another VR headset, or outside our reality, then their "physics" is also different because all laws of science only apply to our reality, (and math, math is universal across all realities, the only constant)... I've heard some surmise it might be easier to transverse universes in a multiverse, (which could be "stacked" like an onion has layers), so they could be coming from there, or they could have been here a very long time, and they're really just living "hidden" on venus, and looking for greener pastures. Could even just be time-travel experiments from ourselves in the future. It doesn't have to be aliens, but it could be... and it probably isn't, and it's still interesting that there's that small chance, which is smaller than us finding it through telescopes, but that chance is still pretty darn cool.
- major505 5y agoOne of my friends said that maybe they are advanced drones from Russia or China, but if they are this advanced in aeronautical technology I think they would have invaded the ocident already. I like the idea of time travelling drones, but it seems a bigger stretch than alien tech.
- hourislate 5y agoJoe Rogan (Spotify Podcast) had Neil degrasse Tyson on a couple of days ago for a discussion on all the UFO/UAP videos and information. It was interesting how Neil basically tore apart the whole subject. I'm no where near as smart as folks like Neil or Elon and both have dismissed the UFO phenomena as unlikely. Their arguments really are pretty strong but people want to believe there is something more out there. Anyway, it was a great discussion, Neil is a pleasure to listen to.
- gadf 5y agoThey're both arrogant unfortunately. I thought the views of Neil on UFOs, like the views of Joe on psychics were really low value. They're both engaging in "let's selectively ignore evidence and witnesses to preserve existing biases and our existing preferred beliefs" but neither of them see it. They're a mirror of each other: Neil wants to gaslight on UFOs, and Joe wants to gaslight on psychics. And their big platform and audience everyone laps it up. Really, truly sad. But hey, it's OK. People step towards truth but slowly.
- rahimiali 5y agoThe author describes their research agenda below. It sounds like they expect alien civilization to exactly mirror human civilization: "detecting city lights on the night side of planets that orbit distant stars or the telltale mark of reflected light from planet-wide solar-collecting arrays or the distinctive sign of industrial chemicals in a planet’s atmosphere. All of these “technosignatures,” should we find evidence of them, will be small effects. If we do detect such things, you better believe that my colleagues and I will go to extraordinary lengths to eliminate every possible source of error and every possible alternative explanation. This will take time and careful effort."
- cgriswald 5y agoThis is an active search. They are looking for things they know they can detect and which—if detected—will provide them with enough certainty that they're looking at output from an alien civilization to warrant further investigation. We may stumble upon something novel, like Tabby's Star[0], and ultimately determine it is caused by an alien civilization or not. This sort of passive search is fine; but generally speaking, if aliens do things differently than we do, they will either be invisible to us, or we won't know we're looking at them even if we see them. We don't know enough to have any kind of active search for aliens that aren't like us in some way. Even searches for things like Dyson swarms are informed by speculating about our own needs. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabby%27s_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabby%27s_Star
- wydfre 5y agoThe best quote I've got on UFOs is from Leroy Chiao, a former ISS commander. "Probably some sort of secret military program" [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1eWnHHMrck&t=30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1eWnHHMrck&t=30s
- curation 5y agoThe relevant question is why does the search for aliens/ufo's remain in our customs. The one 100% certain thing is that humans have for centuries needed to see something mysterious in the sky. Our metanarrative, as "first world", means that when we do this universal human questioning as we build our symbollic reality, it must originate from 'objective' categories like science and governments and military and not religion.
- csdtx 5y agoI saw a UFO once, and it looked and behaved exactly like everyone says it does. Silvery oval shape, hovering and moving left/right in a straight line before accelerating at an insane rate. Moved across the sky in a quarter of a second. It was about half a nail's width at arm's length distance. I did hear a stereotypically UFO hovering sound a few minutes later even though there was nothing anywhere around me. Either this is psychological and people have some kind of built-in hallucination effect for this specific phenomena in the sky. Which is interesting and should be studied. Or it's the real thing. And if it's real it's not going to affect our life by any amount unless we want it to. If the aliens wanted to land and share information or anything else with us they would have done it already, and we can't force them to do any such thing so who cares. I am also extremely skeptical of Roswell type claims of crashed craft, unless the aliens have horrible QA engineers or we get millions of visitors per century I doubt they would crash one of their flying cars on our planet.
- joering2 5y agoSpeaking of seeing UFOs, my best experience with unidentified objects was October 16th last year in Florida / Poinciana on what was moonless night around 5am morning. I believe this is Starlink satellite. Any other ideas? https://i.ibb.co/ryNRd9C/2021-04-26-07-15-41.jpg https://i.ibb.co/ryNRd9C/2021-04-26-07-15-41.jpg https://i.ibb.co/zXZRp5B/2021-04-26-07-15-34.jpg https://i.ibb.co/zXZRp5B/2021-04-26-07-15-34.jpg Edit: photos has not been altered other than iOS auto resizing.
- JulianMorrison 5y agoThe second one is an out of focus blob and the first is a nondescript dot. It'd probably be more interesting to hear what it was doing. Satellites go fairly fast across the sky but they go in straight lines at a constant speed, and they don't stop, reverse or turn.
- joering2 5y agoSecond one is not out of focus. its a zoom of the first shot. Did over 100 shots on both iPhone and with DSLR all looked the same. It just "hanged" there for about 20 minutes and then vanished. Did not move at all, did not change the lighting.
- Mc_Big_G 5y agoThe sudden wave of UFO propaganda has me wondering, "Why now?". Will UFOs suddenly become the new enemy we must mobilize against?
- zmix 5y agoFrom the article: Scientists can’t accurately gauge distances or velocity from a pilot’s testimony [...] What a scientist needs are precise measurements from multiple viewpoints provided by devices that register various wavelengths (visual, infrared, radar). I thought, this is exactly what the 2004 Nimitz case provided? Plus the testimony of "Top Gun" pilots, who are under constant psychological monitoring, whose eyes must be in 1A shape (friend/foe distinction within the fraction of a second), who are well studied and trained in practical avionics... What I do not understand here: * on the one hand you got data from the most advanced radar network of its time, one, that has been created specifically for this task: detect flying objects of unknown origin. * on the other hand you got T.O.P. pilots, Aces, witnessing the same and the answer of this scientist is: * there is no data from different point of view * witnesses are unreliable And each time, somebody tries to come up with an example on what it could have been, the probability of the example holds only, unless you disregard the rest of the information.
- treesprite82 5y agoHere's a good explanation of the Nimitz FLIR1 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1di0XIa9RQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1di0XIa9RQ
- zmix 5y agoThanks! I am actually subscribed to his channel. And while I respect and enjoy the great lengths he goes in his analysis, again, it's just a single point of view, that leaves us with all the other questions open.
- ffhhj 5y agoI suddendly feel an urge to play X-COM UFO Defense again :)