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I like to entertain myself with the idea that perhaps what's driving the recent spotlight on UFOs is not that we are seeing/detecting them, but that we are dete

I like to entertain myself with the idea that perhaps what's driving the recent spotlight on UFOs is not that we are seeing/detecting them, but that we are detecting more and more of them. Maybe governments around the world have always known about objects flying/floating around. And that was fine because there are many natural causes that could explain these blips on radar. Many weather phenomena or man made objects could explain people "seeing" UFOs. Buzz Aldrin famously saw glowing objects flying around in space but he does not necessarily believe they have ET origin. But recently, there's simply way more of these objects everywhere, and nobody knows for sure what these are. This worries some people because, well, what if they're Chinese spy balloons or drones? Remember when the US military shot down a couple balloons some time ago and it made the news? This is a potential threat to the national security and it makes sense that they have put together teams for the retrieval of these objects. The government may not believe they have ET origin, but they now see them more as potential threat to the national security. Of course, I would definitely find it enjoyable and exciting if there is some "otherworldly" intelligence behind these objects.

joshuahedlund 3y ago
All entertaining to speculate, but it's classic human-centered thinking to suppose that aliens would be regularly appearing a few thousand feet or so from us, but never ever anywhere in the rest of the billions of miles of our solar system and everywhere else in between here and wherever they came from (in addition to their conveniently never appearing within clear view of regular citizens' phones or cameras and never clearly interacting with our physical world in any way)
- prirun 3y ago
  > but never ever anywhere in the rest of the billions of miles of our solar system and everywhere else in between here and wherever they came from How would you or anyone else know this?
  - joshuahedlund 3y ago
    No one has a monopoly on the sky. Amateur astronomers track active satellite missions, discover asteroids, mine public sky survey data to analyze stars, etc, etc. If there was anything out of the ordinary on the visible spectrum regularly showing up in our solar system (especially if it involved a lot of beelining towards Earth), it couldn't be hidden.
    - nomel 3y ago
      This simply isn't true, when whole asteroids sneak up on us: https://www.livescience.com/surprise-asteroid-flyby#:~:text=Scientists%20were%20unaware%20of%20the,closest%20point%2C%20according%20to%20CNET https://www.livescience.com/surprise-asteroid-flyby#:~:text=.... > rest of the billions of miles of our solar system Which we have to send satellites out to see, which image minuscule windows of space. Here are some of the very best pictures from ground based telescopes: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-ground-based-images-planets-pic-net-pro-am.html https://phys.org/news/2017-07-ground-based-images-planets-pi... Entire continents of Earth would be missed with that sort of resolution. And, with the need to average over time, whatever massive structure would have to stay relatively still. Most detection of distance objects is through occlusion of stars, not direct sensing. Good luck trying to find something something smaller moving at high/relativistic speeds, which would be a fairly reasonable requirement for not having to plan ahead for a multi thousands of years space trip. I don't really believe that space ships are flying around in our solar system, but I don't think us not seeing them, with our limited sensing, acts as any sort of counter evidence.
- 100721 3y ago
  In this context, it actually makes sense to think in a human-centered way. Consider how many planets are capable of supporting intelligent (as we know it). Now suppose we detect evidence of industrial behavior (certain pollutants, nuclear detonation, etc). Would we not laser focus on that one planet and observe it with everything we have - including sending reconnaissance drones? Furthermore, would we not want to avoid detection where possible, in case life does exist on said planet and it turns out to be an existential threat to humanity? Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever see you.
  - joshuahedlund 3y ago
    > Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever see you. Still human-centric to assume they would know what we can detect.
  - heavyset_go 3y ago
    > Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever see you. Feels like we're approaching a God of the gaps scenario here, but with aliens.
    - NotSuspicious 3y ago
      Comparing "God-of-the-gaps" to the UAP/UFO Phenomenon only makes sense if there is abundant, first-hand evidence for God that goes back several generations at least, is seen in numerous, opposing human-cultures and only can be ignored by debunking paradigms that vacillate wildly between a smug misunderstanding of pop-epistemology and the deeply, irrationally conspiratorial. Actually, now that you mention it . . . https://www.ufohastings.com/ https://www.ufohastings.com/ https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/ https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/ https://www.uaptheory.com/ https://www.uaptheory.com/
    - 3y ago
- bloopernova 3y ago
  I'd love to look at this solar system panopticon that you apparently have access to. We know vanishingly little about the day to day movements of the largest solar system objects. Anything smaller than a medium city is incredibly difficult to find and track.
  - KineticLensman 3y ago
    > Anything smaller than a medium city is incredibly difficult to find and track Sorry, but we routinely track asteroids that are less than 100 metres in size [0]. We track objects in orbit down to a few cm in size [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_Terrestrial-impact_Last_Alert_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_Terrestrial-impact_La... [1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debris.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debr...
    - TechBro8615 3y ago
      While we do successfully track many asteroids (for at least part of their orbital periods), this does not mean that we track every asteroid, or even anywhere close to it. In fact, the vast majority of detected asteroid impacts were not predicted by tracking systems before they collided with our planet. This Wikipedia article [0] presents data measuring the (in)effectiveness of the current tracking systems ("the vast majority are still missed"), and describes flaws in the current approach, such as "blind spots" that exist for various reasons depending on tracking methodology, e.g.: > all ground-based telescopes have a large blind spot for any asteroids coming from the direction of the Sun.... [but even] space-based telescopes which can observe a much larger region of the sky around Earth.... still cannot point directly towards the Sun. From this perspective, not only do we fail to track every asteroid, but there are specific and predictable "blind spots" where we cannot track any objects. So if the argument is that aliens could park their ship where we can't see it, then it's not a sufficient counterargument to claim that we track a lot of asteroids, because (a) we still miss the vast majority of them, and (b) many of those we miss for predictable reasons that could be exploited by an adversary who wants to hide an object from our tracking systems. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_prediction#Effectiveness_of_the_current_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_prediction#Eff...
- tbrownaw 3y ago
  > classic human-centered thinking to suppose that aliens would be regularly appearing a few thousand feet or so from us, but never ever anywhere in the rest of the billions of miles of our solar system One, rich humans sometimes like to go see exotic wildlife, why wouldn't aliens? Two, how would we know if there were aliens looking around other places? > and never clearly interacting with our physical world in any way "Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints."
- madaxe_again 3y ago
  “never appearing within clear view of cameras” - the signal to noise ratio is abysmal, but they have and do. Thing is, accepting the idea of the extraordinary and inexplicable is rather difficult for humans. Doug Adams explained it pretty succinctly with his idea of the “somebody else’s problem” field, whereby you could paint a mountain bright pink, and it would become invisible to a majority of observers through its sheer jarring improbability and discontinuity with core beliefs about the nature of things. My background is physics. I’m well versed in “weird but explicable stuff”, I don’t take anything on faith, and I have seen, with multiple witnesses, a truly inexplicable thing, without resorting to what a big part of me still regards as mummery. We all saw the same thing. We all talked about it, puzzled over it, frantically checked the news for an explanation. The thing is, the people who I was with at the time, they all remember the incident, the sonic booms… and seeing a helicopter in distress, which was the story in the press later that day. The shift to “it was a helicopter” was amazingly quick. It wasn’t a helicopter. I know what I saw - or rather, I know that I saw something that was absolutely not a helicopter, that fighter jets approached to then have disappear in a sudden cloud - and yet, a big, big part of me yearns to believe that I saw a helicopter, as the alternative is… well, posting stuff that you’ll read and will go “this guy is clearly nuts”, and me being inclined to agree, as again, it isn’t comforting in the slightest to hold in your mind the knowledge that things are not quite as they appear. There’s even footage of the thing, freely available on YouTube, and there’s evidently no point in anyone removing it or so-forth, as anyone who thinks it’s real is clearly crazy. I haven’t been quite the same since.
  - thrtythreeforty 3y ago
    You should link the YouTube footage!
    - madaxe_again 3y ago
      Just went looking - it’s gone, it seems - the only videos I can find are from “believers” and aren’t of what I saw. There is, however, a still from it in this article with the heading “Unexplained:” https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2129133/amp/Sonic-boom-rocks-large-Britain-Typhoon-jets-despatched-helicopter-emitting-hijacking-signal.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2129133/amp/Sonic-b... It hung in the sky exactly like a brick wouldn’t, and had a weird, knobbly shape - and as the jets approached, it became clear it was pretty sizeable. It was also quite definitely what the typhoons were there to investigate, as they immediately flew towards it, and I would be prepared to write it off as a weather balloon were it not for the ensuing cock-and-bull story, and the cloud that materialised around it as they neared.
vanillax 3y ago
Defense is contracted out. So private mil-tech companies can develop high tech items with high paid engineers and sell it to the military...
nomel 3y ago
> Maybe governments around the world have always known about objects flying/floating around. David Grusch talks about this in one of his interviews: https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/we-are-not-alone-the-ufo-whistleblower-speaks/ https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/we-are-not-alone-the...

joshuahedlund 3y ago

All entertaining to speculate, but it's classic human-centered thinking to suppose that aliens would be regularly appearing a few thousand feet or so from us, but never ever anywhere in the rest of the billions of miles of our solar system and everywhere else in between here and wherever they came from (in addition to their conveniently never appearing within clear view of regular citizens' phones or cameras and never clearly interacting with our physical world in any way)

prirun 3y ago
> but never ever anywhere in the rest of the billions of miles of our solar system and everywhere else in between here and wherever they came from How would you or anyone else know this?
- joshuahedlund 3y ago
  No one has a monopoly on the sky. Amateur astronomers track active satellite missions, discover asteroids, mine public sky survey data to analyze stars, etc, etc. If there was anything out of the ordinary on the visible spectrum regularly showing up in our solar system (especially if it involved a lot of beelining towards Earth), it couldn't be hidden.
  - nomel 3y ago
    This simply isn't true, when whole asteroids sneak up on us: https://www.livescience.com/surprise-asteroid-flyby#:~:text=Scientists%20were%20unaware%20of%20the,closest%20point%2C%20according%20to%20CNET https://www.livescience.com/surprise-asteroid-flyby#:~:text=.... > rest of the billions of miles of our solar system Which we have to send satellites out to see, which image minuscule windows of space. Here are some of the very best pictures from ground based telescopes: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-ground-based-images-planets-pic-net-pro-am.html https://phys.org/news/2017-07-ground-based-images-planets-pi... Entire continents of Earth would be missed with that sort of resolution. And, with the need to average over time, whatever massive structure would have to stay relatively still. Most detection of distance objects is through occlusion of stars, not direct sensing. Good luck trying to find something something smaller moving at high/relativistic speeds, which would be a fairly reasonable requirement for not having to plan ahead for a multi thousands of years space trip. I don't really believe that space ships are flying around in our solar system, but I don't think us not seeing them, with our limited sensing, acts as any sort of counter evidence.
100721 3y ago
In this context, it actually makes sense to think in a human-centered way. Consider how many planets are capable of supporting intelligent (as we know it). Now suppose we detect evidence of industrial behavior (certain pollutants, nuclear detonation, etc). Would we not laser focus on that one planet and observe it with everything we have - including sending reconnaissance drones? Furthermore, would we not want to avoid detection where possible, in case life does exist on said planet and it turns out to be an existential threat to humanity? Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever see you.
- joshuahedlund 3y ago
  > Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever see you. Still human-centric to assume they would know what we can detect.
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  > Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever see you. Feels like we're approaching a God of the gaps scenario here, but with aliens.
  - NotSuspicious 3y ago
    Comparing "God-of-the-gaps" to the UAP/UFO Phenomenon only makes sense if there is abundant, first-hand evidence for God that goes back several generations at least, is seen in numerous, opposing human-cultures and only can be ignored by debunking paradigms that vacillate wildly between a smug misunderstanding of pop-epistemology and the deeply, irrationally conspiratorial. Actually, now that you mention it . . . https://www.ufohastings.com/ https://www.ufohastings.com/ https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/ https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/ https://www.uaptheory.com/ https://www.uaptheory.com/
  - 3y ago
bloopernova 3y ago
I'd love to look at this solar system panopticon that you apparently have access to. We know vanishingly little about the day to day movements of the largest solar system objects. Anything smaller than a medium city is incredibly difficult to find and track.
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  > Anything smaller than a medium city is incredibly difficult to find and track Sorry, but we routinely track asteroids that are less than 100 metres in size [0]. We track objects in orbit down to a few cm in size [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_Terrestrial-impact_Last_Alert_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_Terrestrial-impact_La... [1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debris.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debr...
  - TechBro8615 3y ago
    While we do successfully track many asteroids (for at least part of their orbital periods), this does not mean that we track every asteroid, or even anywhere close to it. In fact, the vast majority of detected asteroid impacts were not predicted by tracking systems before they collided with our planet. This Wikipedia article [0] presents data measuring the (in)effectiveness of the current tracking systems ("the vast majority are still missed"), and describes flaws in the current approach, such as "blind spots" that exist for various reasons depending on tracking methodology, e.g.: > all ground-based telescopes have a large blind spot for any asteroids coming from the direction of the Sun.... [but even] space-based telescopes which can observe a much larger region of the sky around Earth.... still cannot point directly towards the Sun. From this perspective, not only do we fail to track every asteroid, but there are specific and predictable "blind spots" where we cannot track any objects. So if the argument is that aliens could park their ship where we can't see it, then it's not a sufficient counterargument to claim that we track a lot of asteroids, because (a) we still miss the vast majority of them, and (b) many of those we miss for predictable reasons that could be exploited by an adversary who wants to hide an object from our tracking systems. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_prediction#Effectiveness_of_the_current_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_prediction#Eff...
tbrownaw 3y ago
> classic human-centered thinking to suppose that aliens would be regularly appearing a few thousand feet or so from us, but never ever anywhere in the rest of the billions of miles of our solar system One, rich humans sometimes like to go see exotic wildlife, why wouldn't aliens? Two, how would we know if there were aliens looking around other places? > and never clearly interacting with our physical world in any way "Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints."
madaxe_again 3y ago
“never appearing within clear view of cameras” - the signal to noise ratio is abysmal, but they have and do. Thing is, accepting the idea of the extraordinary and inexplicable is rather difficult for humans. Doug Adams explained it pretty succinctly with his idea of the “somebody else’s problem” field, whereby you could paint a mountain bright pink, and it would become invisible to a majority of observers through its sheer jarring improbability and discontinuity with core beliefs about the nature of things. My background is physics. I’m well versed in “weird but explicable stuff”, I don’t take anything on faith, and I have seen, with multiple witnesses, a truly inexplicable thing, without resorting to what a big part of me still regards as mummery. We all saw the same thing. We all talked about it, puzzled over it, frantically checked the news for an explanation. The thing is, the people who I was with at the time, they all remember the incident, the sonic booms… and seeing a helicopter in distress, which was the story in the press later that day. The shift to “it was a helicopter” was amazingly quick. It wasn’t a helicopter. I know what I saw - or rather, I know that I saw something that was absolutely not a helicopter, that fighter jets approached to then have disappear in a sudden cloud - and yet, a big, big part of me yearns to believe that I saw a helicopter, as the alternative is… well, posting stuff that you’ll read and will go “this guy is clearly nuts”, and me being inclined to agree, as again, it isn’t comforting in the slightest to hold in your mind the knowledge that things are not quite as they appear. There’s even footage of the thing, freely available on YouTube, and there’s evidently no point in anyone removing it or so-forth, as anyone who thinks it’s real is clearly crazy. I haven’t been quite the same since.
- thrtythreeforty 3y ago
  You should link the YouTube footage!
  - madaxe_again 3y ago
    Just went looking - it’s gone, it seems - the only videos I can find are from “believers” and aren’t of what I saw. There is, however, a still from it in this article with the heading “Unexplained:” https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2129133/amp/Sonic-boom-rocks-large-Britain-Typhoon-jets-despatched-helicopter-emitting-hijacking-signal.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2129133/amp/Sonic-b... It hung in the sky exactly like a brick wouldn’t, and had a weird, knobbly shape - and as the jets approached, it became clear it was pretty sizeable. It was also quite definitely what the typhoons were there to investigate, as they immediately flew towards it, and I would be prepared to write it off as a weather balloon were it not for the ensuing cock-and-bull story, and the cloud that materialised around it as they neared.

vanillax 3y ago

Defense is contracted out. So private mil-tech companies can develop high tech items with high paid engineers and sell it to the military...

nomel 3y ago

> Maybe governments around the world have always known about objects flying/floating around. David Grusch talks about this in one of his interviews: https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/we-are-not-alone-the-ufo-whistleblower-speaks/ https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/we-are-not-alone-the...