More UFOs Than Ever Before
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
The element isn't fantastical, and anyone with a basic understanding of chemistry would expect it to exist (albeit, not for very long); Lazar's attributed properties to it were (and are). As a side note, since 2010, the entire bottom row of the Periodic Table has now been filled out with synthetic elements (and names since 2016).
The default answer is always going to be "no" for some people and "yes" for others. These are the folks who just have to have a firm answer. The actual answer is "nobody knows"
I also want to believe, so I tend to be extremely skeptical of any UFO stories. But looking throughout history, I have to admit that I am in no position to make a decision one way or another. A bunch of really respected guys made some observations of a thing with instrumental evidence that we don't understand? Cool. There's something we don't understand. Spinning up some tale of the atom bomb or aliens? That's just to sell books to the rubes. We don't know. That's okay.
If there are other intelligent lifeforms around, and if they have any developmental parallels in their society to ours, they probably think of us as nothing more than a particularly advanced form of fungus. And if they were to come here to observe, they'd either use a blind or come and go in such a way to create the kind evidential noise we currently see in the public record. So while I wish something is going to come along and settle this, it ain't going to happen.
http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange...
http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange...
The explanation is he worked on particle accelerators as a mechanic (not a physicist), and they were shooting particle beams into the sky. However since this is all likely classified he would be forced to stick to his UFO story.
The US military probably does not want plasma balls because they look pretty.
The burden of proof for a 'real' ufo is heavy, and nobody makes any real effort. Its reasonable to dismiss the entire topic as overheated descriptions of normal phenomena.
Neil Degrasse Tyson commented on this by saying that the difference between a layperson seeing a UFO and an astronomer (or whatever) is that the latter knows what strange natural phenomenon they're looking at (or at least can conceive that its natural based on other similar things that they do know) while the layperson doesn't and therefore jumps to conclusions that someone who spends a lot of time looking at the sky wouldn't.
Essentially the same thing NDT said.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-dea...
Of course there are going to be more UFO sightings domestically. Where else are we going to develop and test these things?
It's well known that the government is happy to feed conspiracy theorists disinformation in order to protect classified information[1], like the existence of secret weapons.
I have a suspicion that there is an old-boys-club of high-level military guys pushing UFO conspiracies for some purpose. At the very least, muddying the waters can help mask any civilian reports of potential classified aircraft. At the worst it can act as a lightening rod to redirect public thirst for unearthing military secrets. When guys like Bob Lazar and Tom DeLonge show up they must be happy to get free dissemination of their programs.
I'd even go so far to believe that Bob could have been one of a few that were set up by the military using an elaborate stage-show with the hope of creating false leaks. The idea of the military staging the kind of things Bob reports after psychologically filtering for types of people who believably exaggerate is not beyond possibility in my mind. You may not have to work very hard at tricking someone if you find the kind of person who really wants to be tricked.
This is the thesis of the documentary "Mirage Men".
The author compares meeting the neighbors with meeting God.
> My relationship to UFOs is like my relationship to God.
I call this "cognitive leverage". There's a sort of if-then structure: IF aliens exist THEN something-something-God. The THEN-clause is too psychologically immense so the brain invalidates the IF-clause and organizes thought and perception in alignment with the result.
> I want to believe, but find it hard.
> I wish I could see one for myself, as I wish I could see the Virgin Mary floating above the yellow roses in my backyard.
Would you want to meet somebody that made that big a deal about it? It would be wildly uncomfortable for anyone but a megalomaniac, eh?
The reason the "G-men" don't openly talk about the UFOs, and the reason the spacemen don't land on the White House lawn, is right there: it would cause too much trouble because humans are nuts.
One classic way that this sort of denial of reality presents itself is in trivially invalid reasoning, for example when Cohen postulates that we can hide the existence of ultra-tech aircraft but not UFOs.
And here is a textbook rationalization:
> Belief in UFOs is really no stranger than any other sort of belief, no stranger than a belief in prophets or ancient codes.
That fails to account for e.g. his own neighbor who "had been in the military when he saw the UFO." and who presumably believes in UFOs only because he has seen one. He wasn't raised in a UFO cult, eh?
...or all of planet Earth, whichever comes first. Hint: it's not the former.
If that's the case, I don't think we should speculate too quickly on how they would interpret the signal.
However it does seem like there has actually been action taken by an alleged UFO. Look at the following link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-dea...
There's a youtube video with testimony given by a commander that I can't find at the moment, but it's pretty insane.
It’s not that they came here centuries after the nuclear tests, because even if they have FTL that is the shortest time frame that makes sense unless a nuclear explosion causes some signals that some how move faster than light which both violates physics as we know it and would be really unlikely to go unnoticed based on just how much data we have from nuclear blasts and nuclear reactors.
And in general the gamma burst form a nuclear explosion is so minuscule on galactic scales that it’s unlikely they can even pick it up over the background noise.
A spectral analysis of the atmosphere of the earth and the detection of fission borne radioactive isotopes is a much more likely method which means they would need to be actively observing the earth to detect it and still the same light speed capped timeline is in effect.
All of this is. You can either live in something resembling the real world, or LARP your life away in a weird fantasy. If I were going to do the latter, I wouldn't pick this particular fantasy, it's boring and unoriginal. Try reading some good science fiction instead.
In less than 200 years, we went from rioting farmers at the mercy of nature to the most powerful war-faring nation on the planet with the ability to turn a war in which other superpowers struggled. We went from the bloodiest battle numbering over a thousand dead to obliterating entire cities and hundreds of thousands of people with just two bombs.
I would've thought that as we raise the standard of life in our society, we'll inevitably create technology that will be used to become more efficient at killing, but it's actually turning out to be the opposite -- as we get better at waging war, we're developing the technology that will raise our standard of life.
The one time I thought I was seeing something unexplainable out on the highway at night (thankfully revealed, after ten minutes or so, to be the oddest atmospheric occlusion of the moon I’ve ever seen), the one thought on my mind was “man, I really don’t want to be one of those people who’s seen a UFO.”
You just reminded me of the Saturday Night Live sketch Close Encounter. It's one of the funniest things they've done.
There are three videos:
#1: Classified SECRET. It hasn't flown yet, but it's going to be really great. See this cool mockup!
#2: Classified OFFICIAL USE ONLY. It flies! Well, hovers about 1m off the ground in ground effect. Wobbles too much. But with our elaborate testing program, a NASA wind tunnel, and maybe with more powerful engines and active stabilization, it can work!
#3: UNCLASSIFIED. Well, here we are flying this thing around the back lot at NASA Ames as a hovercraft. Not too useful, but cool looking.
It's a nice video history of a failed project.
Meantime, the Army was also funding the UH-1, the "Huey" helicopter, which started flying around the same time and was far more useful. So the Army killed off the disc project and ordered a few thousand Hueys. The USAF, meanwhile, had figured out that swept back wings worked in high-speed flight, and didn't need to fool with discs.
I haven’t ever heard of a corresponding increase in UFO videos. It’s awfully convenient none of these suspected aliens buzz crowds full of people with 4k60Hz/40MP phone cameras.
Cameras have never been better and in such widely available quantities, in just about every cell phone, and UFO pictures have never been worse.
Also Occam's Razor. Far more likely to be an Earth-bound phenomena.
Roswell: has technology to fly light years, but crashes in (possibly bad) Earth weather. Erm, ok.
The argument from governmental incompetence isn't terribly compelling to me. The occasional leaks of vast cover-ups -- like the extent of the NSA's surveillance apparatus -- suggest that the government is in fact quite good at keeping sensitive information hidden from the public.
The UFO phenomena appears to me to track more closely with the rise of the extraterrestrial in popular sci-fi. It starts with the War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938, made even more compelling perhaps by the events of World War I and the technological advancements that would have seemed to be happening at break-neck speed at the time, and seen through the lens of a global tension as events began leading up to World War II. It was based on a story written in the late 1800s which was just another of many popular British invasion works of fiction at the time, just with an element of science fiction, owing to Wells' training as a science teacher.
From there we have the rapid progression of Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Space Ghost, Lost in Space, Star Trek, Unsolved Mysteries, The X Files, and a whole pile of other shows, movies, comic books, and magazines. Frequency of UFO reports [1] seems largely US-centric and tracks pretty well with metrics like number of hours of TV watched [2]. It also correlates well with the most common locations for the sightings: in rural areas, who have in recent years shifted their interest in conspiracy theories from the great UFO coverup and towards QAnon and the deep state and all that.
So while the nuclear age may have inspired some of the fiction, it looks to me like it's the entertainment age that created UFO mass hysteria. For the people involved, any phenomena they experienced -- strange lighting, whether real or imagined, or sleep paralysis, or the delirious effects of a sleep aid, or, maybe, proximity to experimental aircraft -- would all be best explained by the fiction they were most familiar with: extraterrestrials.
As cultural interest has shifted towards domestic issues, and we have begun to explore space ourselves, and ubiquitous surveillance has spread to every person's pocket but has yet failed to produce any clear, incontrovertible evidence for alien spacecraft, reports of UFO sightings have likewise been trending downwards.
[1]: http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxevent.html
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-...
edit: as I was writing this, ~reggieband posted a comment to this thread that pretty sweetly exemplified my main points: he was watching a Joe Rogan podcast, and thinks that Bob Lazar is being duped into being a part of a government conspiracy to conceal classified aircraft.
If you look at religions, they all resemble optimization algorithms to build civilizations with different attributes; one could seed different "rules" to different parts of the world and observe which rules become the dominant ones and which kind of civilizations they bring. Moreover, having a conflict between different civilizations that couldn't be reconciled by any other way than a total annihilation, it could provide a needed impetus for progress as the permanent conflict it brings forces people to develop quickly and throw out inefficient ways to survive. From this point of view, globalization might be worse for our progress as species; USA vs China competition might be a needed conflict to progress in any meaningful way.
This totally misrepresents evolution. DNA isn’t programmed to adapt to local changes, but rather it’s not programmed to perfectly reproduce without errors. Some errors are useful and get passed on, most errors are either useless or harmful and don’t. And lots of small changes equals a large change — we don’t have to be able to leap a mountain in a single bound to reach the top, either literally or metaphorically, just make a lot of small steps.
On the contrary, the complexity is so trivial it’s something I did in 30 minutes, on a laptop, in 2008, as a “prove it to myself” response to a young-Earth Baptist Creationist.
What we can’t do is simulate full-lifecycle organ-scale multi-cell protein folding in real time, but that’s a very different thing.
Separately, as an algorithm, evolution also has easily characterisable failure modes (local minima), and we do observe those failure modes in organic examples.
But, to emphasise, the fact artificial evolution requires us to write our own fitness functions is merely an implementation detail; these algorithms work because evolution works. They produce novel solutions without the authors of the programs creating the solutions.
Fortunately my point has no dependency on any specific fitness function, natural or programmed — my argument has been that the original claim “We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design;” totally misrepresented evolution, that in fact evolution totally can make sudden-looking jumps (a point which in retrospect I don’t think I properly justified, even if my list of examples was intended that way), and that it’s trivial to demonstrate this by writing a genetic algorithm.
This is irrelevant to my argument. If the simplified version is capable of doing what you have said is unexplained, it is unreasonable to assume that the more complicated version will fail to be capable of the same.
> I never understood how anyone calling themselves a scientist could make such a leap, but obviously it's popular and people made a "scientific" career doing just that...
Occam’s Razor. Start with the simplest possible model, make a prediction, look carefully at reality to see if you were wrong (an act which is easier the simpler the model), and only update the model when reality disagrees with it.
Me coding a genetic algorithm can easily reproduce the entirety of any specific human’s genome if I pick the correct fitness function. Pretty pointless to do so beyond proof of concept, but proof of concept is enough to make the point in this case.