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This whole fuss around UFO and all other acronyms is a self perpetuating clusterfuck that feeds off the unknown and resulting to unhelpful labels. Including the

by 404mm 4y ago

This whole fuss around UFO and all other acronyms is a self perpetuating clusterfuck that feeds off the unknown and resulting to unhelpful labels. Including the headline of this article. Stuff is flying in our airspace and we need to focus on identifying those objects. Of course the likelihood of alien technology is rather low. That’s not the point. The point is we need to stop labeling and jumping to conclusions so we can open up to actual discussions that may lead to proper scientific examination of evidence.

sigspec 4y ago
Well said. It is very on brand for us to be arguing about semantics and labels instead of the actual issue.
simonh 4y ago
I don't think it is at all established that unidentified stuff is flying into our airspace, Chinese spy balloons notwithstanding. This narrative doesn't take one other factor into account. The notorious, well known, extremely well documented and researched fact that humans are incredibly poor witnesses. The flaws and failure modes in our perceptive and recall facilities are so extensive it's amazing we survived as a species at all. I suppose it comes down to the fact that as long as perceiving a potential danger that isn't there doesn't directly get you killed, it's better to err on the side of caution rather than risk ignoring something that could be an actual threat. So before we start considering the infinitesimally low but possibly non zero chance that an unexplained observation is actual extra-terrestrials that travelled many lightyears to stick a probe up someone's butt, lets first consider the chance that the detection was simply mistaken. After all, we have huge numbers of very well documented cases of people, including pilots, navigators, radar operators, etc including even whole teams of specialists definitively and provably getting something wrong. It happens alarmingly often. Aircraft and nautical navigation errors, collisions, target misidentifications, blue on blue incidents. Tragedies such as the highly trained command crew of the USS Vincennes getting target identification and tracking systematically wrong at multiple levels of review despite multiple contra-indicators and shooting down an airliner. So wouldn't we expect there to be quite a large number of such cases where we never discover the source of the error, or ever positively identify the actual reason for the inaccurate observation. Given the number of provable known cases, it seems plausible that we should expect there to be a rather large number of unproven ones, whether aliens exist and are occasionally flying around over our heads or not. So really, large numbers of unexplained but false detections are to be expected, right?
JohnFen 4y ago
We don't know what the evidence is -- it's all classified. For all we know, the government(s) know exactly what these thing are and just aren't saying. All we can do is speculate right now, and speculating wildly unlikely phenomena for which there is almost no evidence of having happened before seems illogical.

by 404mm 4y ago

sigspec 4y ago

Well said. It is very on brand for us to be arguing about semantics and labels instead of the actual issue.

simonh 4y ago

I don't think it is at all established that unidentified stuff is flying into our airspace, Chinese spy balloons notwithstanding. This narrative doesn't take one other factor into account. The notorious, well known, extremely well documented and researched fact that humans are incredibly poor witnesses. The flaws and failure modes in our perceptive and recall facilities are so extensive it's amazing we survived as a species at all. I suppose it comes down to the fact that as long as perceiving a potential danger that isn't there doesn't directly get you killed, it's better to err on the side of caution rather than risk ignoring something that could be an actual threat. So before we start considering the infinitesimally low but possibly non zero chance that an unexplained observation is actual extra-terrestrials that travelled many lightyears to stick a probe up someone's butt, lets first consider the chance that the detection was simply mistaken. After all, we have huge numbers of very well documented cases of people, including pilots, navigators, radar operators, etc including even whole teams of specialists definitively and provably getting something wrong. It happens alarmingly often. Aircraft and nautical navigation errors, collisions, target misidentifications, blue on blue incidents. Tragedies such as the highly trained command crew of the USS Vincennes getting target identification and tracking systematically wrong at multiple levels of review despite multiple contra-indicators and shooting down an airliner. So wouldn't we expect there to be quite a large number of such cases where we never discover the source of the error, or ever positively identify the actual reason for the inaccurate observation. Given the number of provable known cases, it seems plausible that we should expect there to be a rather large number of unproven ones, whether aliens exist and are occasionally flying around over our heads or not. So really, large numbers of unexplained but false detections are to be expected, right?

JohnFen 4y ago

We don't know what the evidence is -- it's all classified. For all we know, the government(s) know exactly what these thing are and just aren't saying. All we can do is speculate right now, and speculating wildly unlikely phenomena for which there is almost no evidence of having happened before seems illogical.