4 ms·

Well for UFOs (I.E. something that is flying that is hard to identifying, not exactly ALIENS!), I think it's two things. 1. Phone and security cameras are good

by ssully 5y ago

Well for UFOs (I.E. something that is flying that is hard to identifying, not exactly ALIENS!), I think it's two things. 1. Phone and security cameras are good for objects in close distance. The farther the object, the worse the quality. Best example I have is that I live close to a flight path of a local airport. I've tried to take photos (with an iPhone 11) of interesting airplanes to send to my friends who work in aviation, but the pictures are usually crap. I don't have an exact metric, but I would say its something like every 1 or 2 pictures out of 10 is good enough to identify the plane. 2. There actually are a lot of modern UFO videos on Youtube and the rest of the web that you can spend hours watching. It's just that they are mostly taken with phone cameras, so your video categories will basically be: "that's clearly someone practicing their CGI skills", "that looks like trash/that's clearly a drone", "That's neat and I can't really explain it". I dug through a few popular subreddits and youtube channels last month as we saw an influx of UFO stories in the media and this was basically my experience. It's a fun way to kill some time, but yeah you aren't going to get the high quality videos you want.

JulianMorrison 5y ago
Also cellphone cameras didn't generally do well in low light. "Fuzzy unfocused blob of light" is a whole genre of UFO videos. This may be becoming less of an issue with the newest generation of cameras.
- wpietri 5y ago
  It will not become less of an issue, because better cameras just push the liminal bubble out farther. There will always be something far enough away to be ambiguous, and that will be the new proof of UFOs. That is how it has gone for decades of improvement in recording technology.
wpietri 5y ago
What you're ignoring is that now we have orders of magnitude more data (e.g., the YouTube video you mention) but still no more signal. Just like it was in 1970s, the strongest we've got is still "that's neat and I can't explain it". This is like "God of the gaps" theology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps The claimed phenomenon keeps retreating to exactly fit into the gaps of our ignorance. And it will always keep retreating, because filling in the unknown with quasi-anthropomorphic entities is what humans have been doing since long before they invented Zeus and Thor. Is it possible it's all UFOs or angels or Huginn and Muninn running errands for Odin? Sure. But there is no more reason to favor one explanation over the other. And the world is full of infinite things we don't have enough data to explain. Why is that particular bird outside your window right now? Why is it singing the song it does? One explanation is that space aliens are using it to spy on you; the birdsong is how it communicates to coordinate observations with other birds. Maybe the iPhone 11 just isn't good enough to show the construction flaws in the feather patterns that would prove it too is a UFO. But that theory is exactly as valid as "the explanation for this video is UFOs" and we should treat them with equal weight.
- ssully 5y ago
  I will just start by saying that I think UFO stuff is interesting, but I am not convinced it's aliens. Just fun to read up on every few years. With that said, I don't know how we will get beyond "that's neat and I can't explain". My belief is these UFO's are man made or natural phenomena. In order to fully explain them all, it requires us to know what is man made (disclosure from governments), and then study and understand the natural phenomena. If this was actually aliens, then I don't think we will get past the "this is neat and I can't explain" unless they want us to. The way I reason with it is that it is the equivalent of if we time traveled a fighter jet or submarine to the 14th century. People back then would have no way to reason or prove what they were seeing unless we landed those vehicles and demonstrated to them. Even then, they would probably think the machine were a creation of pure evil or something.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    We will never get beyond "that's neat and I can't explain" because there will always be liminal events. Your "it could be aliens" argument applies exactly as well to fairies, angels, demons, demi-gods, wizards, Satan, time travelers, humans from other dimensions, etc. If you weight one of them more highly than the others, you should examine why. But the answer won't be in the evidence.
- gadf 5y ago
  What you're ignoring is that "signal" is in the interpretation. You're blind to that. You can crank up data, and wind down your "signal" to confirm your existing biases. In fact that's what you need to do to preserve your "no unexplained" belief system. And that's what you see, people reaching for every more crazy explanations to pretend they didn't see what they saw: "the pilots hallucinated, and the battlegroup sensors all hallucinated, at the same time, repeatedly, over a few months" I like the liminal theory but this isn't the same thing.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Nah. As I mentioned, I believe alien life is very likely to exist somewhere in the universe. I'd be fucking thrilled if it were to drop by for a visit. Fairies and wizards and dragons and whatnot would be cool too. But that doesn't prevent me from seeing that all of these have been on the margins for a long time, and continue to be on the margins despite the massive increase in our ability to document things over the last couple centuries.

by ssully 5y ago

JulianMorrison 5y ago

Also cellphone cameras didn't generally do well in low light. "Fuzzy unfocused blob of light" is a whole genre of UFO videos. This may be becoming less of an issue with the newest generation of cameras.

wpietri 5y ago
It will not become less of an issue, because better cameras just push the liminal bubble out farther. There will always be something far enough away to be ambiguous, and that will be the new proof of UFOs. That is how it has gone for decades of improvement in recording technology.

wpietri 5y ago

What you're ignoring is that now we have orders of magnitude more data (e.g., the YouTube video you mention) but still no more signal. Just like it was in 1970s, the strongest we've got is still "that's neat and I can't explain it". This is like "God of the gaps" theology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps The claimed phenomenon keeps retreating to exactly fit into the gaps of our ignorance. And it will always keep retreating, because filling in the unknown with quasi-anthropomorphic entities is what humans have been doing since long before they invented Zeus and Thor. Is it possible it's all UFOs or angels or Huginn and Muninn running errands for Odin? Sure. But there is no more reason to favor one explanation over the other. And the world is full of infinite things we don't have enough data to explain. Why is that particular bird outside your window right now? Why is it singing the song it does? One explanation is that space aliens are using it to spy on you; the birdsong is how it communicates to coordinate observations with other birds. Maybe the iPhone 11 just isn't good enough to show the construction flaws in the feather patterns that would prove it too is a UFO. But that theory is exactly as valid as "the explanation for this video is UFOs" and we should treat them with equal weight.

ssully 5y ago
I will just start by saying that I think UFO stuff is interesting, but I am not convinced it's aliens. Just fun to read up on every few years. With that said, I don't know how we will get beyond "that's neat and I can't explain". My belief is these UFO's are man made or natural phenomena. In order to fully explain them all, it requires us to know what is man made (disclosure from governments), and then study and understand the natural phenomena. If this was actually aliens, then I don't think we will get past the "this is neat and I can't explain" unless they want us to. The way I reason with it is that it is the equivalent of if we time traveled a fighter jet or submarine to the 14th century. People back then would have no way to reason or prove what they were seeing unless we landed those vehicles and demonstrated to them. Even then, they would probably think the machine were a creation of pure evil or something.
- wpietri 5y ago
  We will never get beyond "that's neat and I can't explain" because there will always be liminal events. Your "it could be aliens" argument applies exactly as well to fairies, angels, demons, demi-gods, wizards, Satan, time travelers, humans from other dimensions, etc. If you weight one of them more highly than the others, you should examine why. But the answer won't be in the evidence.
gadf 5y ago
What you're ignoring is that "signal" is in the interpretation. You're blind to that. You can crank up data, and wind down your "signal" to confirm your existing biases. In fact that's what you need to do to preserve your "no unexplained" belief system. And that's what you see, people reaching for every more crazy explanations to pretend they didn't see what they saw: "the pilots hallucinated, and the battlegroup sensors all hallucinated, at the same time, repeatedly, over a few months" I like the liminal theory but this isn't the same thing.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Nah. As I mentioned, I believe alien life is very likely to exist somewhere in the universe. I'd be fucking thrilled if it were to drop by for a visit. Fairies and wizards and dragons and whatnot would be cool too. But that doesn't prevent me from seeing that all of these have been on the margins for a long time, and continue to be on the margins despite the massive increase in our ability to document things over the last couple centuries.