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Comment by LeoJiWoo | Hacker News Reader

The hunt for aliens suddenly cropping up in the nytimes has the feel of a distraction.

The video itself felt like one of those old bigfoot vidoes.

I want to believe in aliens as a huge fan of star trek (TNG is best :) ), but I feel skeptical for now.

I think its more of a gorilla marketing tactic for the new Tom Delonge fringe science company that he is trying to get investors for.

He also has a line up of books,movies, films , and documentaries to sell.This smells like a marketing tactic with convenient timing to get some hype and buzz going with the fringe sciences.

Yep, as much as I want to believe, which is more likely?

1. Our understanding of physics is very wrong and this is the very first time we've seen any phenomena that overwhelmingly demonstrates that; OR

2. Someone shopped up some videos for distraction and/or marketing? Perhaps there's going to be an expensive military-industrial spending activity that needs public support?

"Our understanding of physics is very wrong" - this seems very likely to me. Pretty much all scientists have been proven wrong so far in significant ways. The entire structure of the universe makes no sense without tons of dark matter and dark energy we can't observe, which sounds a lot like the way we used to balance the equations of orbits so the earth was the center of the galaxy.

https://youtu.be/Zgk8UdV7GQ0?t=71

2. I think this alleges a pretty large conspiracy theory on the order of 9/11 being faked. There is a wide body of evidence from a lot of reputable witnesses of unexplained phenomena. The idea that the military fabricated that video and the pilots who are the witnesses is more ridiculous to me than "Our understanding of physics is very wrong"

>The entire structure of the universe makes no sense without tons of dark matter and dark energy we can't observe

It's not directly observable, but it's effects are certainly observable in the surrounding organization of baryonic matter. It could very well be an incorrect assumption, but we would need some evidence to the contrary to change our minds, no?

edit: spelling

> It's not directly observable, but it's [sic] effects are certainly observable

You could say the same thing about the ether, the centrifugal force, and the argument about flat earth.

My money is on dark matter's effects being due to some as-yet-undetectable acclerative force, maybe due to deformative effects of gravity that are only apparent at massive scales. Some sort of extension of GR that takes into account local clustering of energy that it isn't yet doing. But I'm no cosmologist.

Is that what the cosmological constant is all about?

I'm not saying it is definitely wrong and no one should believe it because it is the best working theory. Based on the track record of science though it is very unlikely that it is 100% correct.

> pretty large conspiracy theory

Actually for just this present couple of HUD camera vids, it's just a couple of videos, a couple of guys doing interviews maybe, and a few wonks at the pentagon PR office. I'm ready to keep an open mind either way.

It's also the pilots who are on the record and have a history of integrity, anyone else who saw those videos before and after edits, the air traffic controllers that day.

Our current understanding of physics is extremely accurate at predicting almost everything we know about. Dark/matter/energy are theories to explain one area physics doesn't easily explain right now, the orbital velocity of stars in galaxies. But excess matter/energy would explain it fine.

One video that's easily misinterpreted is not enough to overturn any physical law we currently understand.

With new research, we are finding caveats and inaccuracies in many of our previously understood "laws" of physics and nature. Chemistry is a good example of this. Several 20th century chemists came up with widely accepted theories/models that were only shortly thereafter disproven by further research.

It's healthy to recognize the limitations of science. Awareness of the limitations of a tool make sure we don't wast time using it where it really doesn't help. Not to mention that a sense of academic humility is often part of the open-mindedness that precedes counterintuitive, surprising findings.

Recognition of the limitations of science only comes after better science provides a more accurate model, and demonstrates those limitations. That's how science works. It's not always wrong, it's incrementally more and more correct.

What's being asked here is not to accept the limitations of science, but to simply assume that science is wrong and that skepticism based on it should be ignored. So let me ask you this, on what basis would you attempt to study or possibly falsify any UFO claim, or even find the truth behind it, if skepticism and science can't be trusted?

skepticism of science based on the accuracy of prior theories is appropriate. Newtonian physics seemed correct for 99% of observable phenomena, but it was in fact very wrong about some basic underlying ideas of how the universe works. That is basically true of every past scientific theory, so it is probable that our current physics does not accurately describe the universe.

I don't see how you could falsify the ufo claims over o'hare airport in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O%27Hare_International_Ai...

It is extremely likely that people did observe an unidentified flying object in the air that day. That doesn't mean it was aliens, but it was something. That seems true for this recent video footage as well. It is more likely that people observed something vs a grand conspiracy.

Unfortunately, there don't appear to be many credible, impartial or first-party sources linked to that wikipedia article. The best appears to be a Chicago Tribune article[0], but that only contains direct quotes from employees who claim not to have seen anything, and indirect (and sometimes contradictory) descriptions by other witnesses.

The common details seem to be that it was "dark grey" and "well defined," and displayed no lights. It can be difficult to correctly estimate the size of an object in the sky, so the disagreement about that doesn't necessarily discredit the story. The conclusion reached that it was a "weather phenomenon" doesn't sufficiently explain it.

Interestingly, there appears to be evidence that airport personnel contacted the FAA about it which turned up in a FOIA request, but I don't know if that audio is anywhere, or verified.

[0]http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2007-01-01/travel/chi-070...

To respond to your question:

> So let me ask you this, on what basis would you attempt to study or possibly falsify any UFO claim, or even find the truth behind it, if skepticism and science can't be trusted?

You would be unable to conclude anything about a UFO claim if your own methodology is not falsifiable. To believe any one tool of reasoning is infinitely powerful, strikes me as zealous and closed-minded.

By the way, your premise that "skepticism and science can't be trusted" is a straw man. I didn't say that.

Science is an epistemological philosophy coupled with a method of empirical testing. Just because a good scientist comes up with a theory, doesn't make his theory science.

If I observe something and I create a hypothesis, that hypothesis is not "science." It's an idea, a proposition. I have to exhaustively demonstrate its validity empirically, or (if I can't be exhaustive) express the limitations of its validity as demonstrated.

Thus, if I draw a conclusion that is later disproven, I failed somewhere in my reasoning. I drew a conclusion that, while perhaps supported by my evidence, was later shown to be an overreach.

If you support skepticism, you also have to be skeptical of science. A good scientist is a critical thinker, always trying to find holes in his own work and determine how he could disprove his own conclusions.

Since science is empirical, there isn't "better science" and "worse science." There is only a complete demonstration of a phenomenon or method, an incomplete such demonstration, and a totally theoretical conception.

"To the best of my knowledge" is a smart phrase to hear out of a scientist's mouth. It would be naive to assume that everything we believe to be correct, is actually correct. This has never been true in history, and it will not be true for the present set of scientific beliefs.

Thus, we should be skeptical about our own findings and beliefs. Scientists should be philosopher-experimenters, not zealots.

I agree with everything you've said here, and I believe most science and most scientists operate in the way you describe.

>By the way, your premise that "skepticism and science can't be trusted" is a straw man. I didn't say that.

Fair enough, but that does seem to a the general theme of this subthread.

>To believe any one tool of reasoning is infinitely powerful, strikes me as zealous and closed-minded.

Yes, but no one is actually making that claim about science. I'm certainly not, and I doubt most scientists do, either.

So, to the best of anyone's knowledge, the current models of physics appear true enough that photographic or video evidence of UFOs alone are not sufficient to discredit them. Those models may be inaccurate, as all models are, but there's no reason to believe they're entirely wrong.

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