How UFO culture took over America | Hacker News Reader

How UFO culture took over America

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Growing up I was really into UFOs and watching UFO documentaries is still a guilty pleasure of mine. One of the things that struck me is that people who investigate UFOs are their own worst enemies. Often, while watching documentaries, people will say "I've never believed in UFOs until I saw one". For the longest time statements like that really confused me. How could you not believe that people sometimes see things that they can't identify? Then I realized that to most people UFO means alien spacecraft. UFO people have pushed the "I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's totally aliens" narrative to the point that the entire field is tainted.

As the article mentions, it seems like the idea of aliens visiting the Earth has become almost some sort of religion. The other thing is that actual science isn't very sexy. I'm reminded of the Hessdalen lights, unidentified aerial lights that have been appearing over a valley in northern Norway for several decades. There's a monitoring station there with all sorts of instruments, but there still isn't a definitive explanation for the lights. "These are alien spaceships" is definitely a much more thrilling explanation than "we have several possible explanations, mostly involving some sort of plasma in the atmosphere".

One of the documentaries I was watching was by the History channel and it was really bad. They didn't even attempt to present prosaic explanations and took everything at face value. One episode even talked about native Americans being descended from aliens and being able to summon UFOs. I know the History channel is complete trash, but this series was apparently done in collaboration with MUFON.

The entire thing has been tainted so completely that it can actually interfere with real science. The study of upper atmospheric light was likely held back for years because pilots who saw it were afraid to mention that they saw lights in the sky.

These things are almost certainly worthy of study, but the entire field of interest needs to be completely cleansed of the woo and pseudoscience that plagues it.

I have only seen a few bits and pieces of various UFO documentaries, but one segment really stuck with me. It was space shuttle footage showing a side view of the earth with several little white dots, a thruster fires the a second or so later they all move. They the do a calculation assuming one of those dots was in earths atmosphere to get some insane acceleration. But, looking at the footage I just saw paint flecks disturbed by an expanding gas cloud from the thruster.

It’s all about trying to prove a world view and or entertainment rather than any kind of real investigation of odd lights etc. We may dislike it, but the History channel is extremely profitable and one of the most watched channels on TV. Cheap content plus wide audiences equals profit.

On the contrary, I believe "Ancient Aliens" ought to be required viewing for all citizens in democracies.

What is the difference between "our UFO expert says it was aliens. What if it were true?" and "our defector says there are Weapons of Mass Destruction. What if it were true?"

Compare the higher orders often necessary in propaganda analysis:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm

> "The formula works best in the treatment of monitored materials of which the source is known. First point to note is the character of the source. There are several choices on this: the true source (who really got it out?) and the ostensible source (whose name is signed to it?); also, the first-use source (who used it the first time?) and the second-use source (who claims merely to be using it as a quotation?). Take the statement: "Harry said to me, he said, 'I never told anybody that Al's wife was a retired strip-teaser.' Mind you, I don't pretend to believe Harry, but that's what he said, all right." What are the possible true sources for the statement of fact or libel concerning Al's unnamed wife? What are the alternatives on ostensible sources? First use? Second use? The common sense needed to analyze this statement is of the same order as the process involved in analyzing the statement: "Reliable sources in Paris state that the visit of the American labor delegation has produced sensational repercussions in Moscow, and that Moscow, upon the basis of the American attitude, is determined to press for unification of the entire German labor movement."

Then again, my impression of government UFO studies owes more to known behaviour of extant intrastellar species than unknown behaviour of putative interstellar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24405503

>I know the History channel is complete trash, but this series was apparently done in collaboration with MUFON.

The history channel is not complete trash. They have good experts on there and their productions are beautiful - what are you comparing them against?

>These things are almost certainly worthy of study, but the entire field of interest needs to be completely cleansed of the woo and pseudoscience that plagues it.

Yeah, the guy who invented Newtonian physics believed in an all-powerful Creator-God who created the world in a week or so. It would be fun to see you sit down with him and explain to him that the basis of his worldview was, in your opinion, 'woo'.

>The other thing is that actual science isn't very sexy.

Actual science also doesn't explain very much. It punts on the question of consciousness and on the question of ultimate things - the two most significant questions that a person seeking 'scienza' could probably ask.

>The history channel is not complete trash. They have good experts on there and their productions are beautiful

The History channel uncritically presents any wild ideas that get them viewers. Here are some of the things they presented during an episode on Native Americans and aliens:

* Native Americans are descended from aliens

To start, I'm going to gloss over the unsavory implications of saying something that could be re-worded as "certain ethnic groups aren't fully human". They gave absolutely no evidence for this, no explanation as to why native Americans in particular and not Europeans or Asians. The entire thing reeked of the "noble savage" trope. Plus the ignorance in assuming that there weren't dozen of different native tribes.

* Alien spacecraft use native reservations as refuges from the government because of existing treaties

The evidence they gave for this was an eye-witness who claimed to see a craft that was being followed by a government helicopter, only for the helicopter to break off its pursuit after the craft crossed onto native land. So, these crafts can travel between stars, but can't outmaneuver a helicopter? Also, call me cynical, but I can't imagine that the government would deign to respect native treaties in such a situation. What could the tribal government even do to protest a violation of such treaties? Who would take them seriously?

* Native Americans can telepathically summon/control UFOs, allegedly due to their alien heritage

I'm an American and yet I can't summon predator drones. I can't even summon an Uber without a credit card. Seriously, what kind of authentication system is that?

* The aliens gave the natives medical knowledge

Except when it really matters, like during those smallpox epidemics. They couldn't even share knowledge about variolation?

>Yeah, the guy who invented Newtonian physics believed in an all-powerful Creator-God who created the world in a week or so. It would be fun to see you sit down with him and explain to him that the basis of his worldview was, in your opinion, 'woo'.

And yet you never see chemistry textbooks based on Newton's alchemical theories. You do see textbooks on Newtonian physics because the work that Newton started was empirically tested over centuries and when its predictions failed, new theories were created and empirically tested to supersede them.

>Actual science also doesn't explain very much.

Science explains the ebb and flow of the tides. It explains the dance of eclipses and the never-ending cycle of the seasons. What explanation comes from a psychic who claims to channel the spirit of a 10,000 year old alien who lived in Atlantis?

I agree but that is not in everybody's interest.

Lex Fridman recently had David Fravor on his podcast and they spoke about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E

After having discarded every sighting reported by individuals as unverifiable and unplausible so far, this one is finally different. It's the combination of respected fighter pilots, instrument recordings with authenticity asserted by Pentagon, visual confirmation of the object and multiple observers involved that makes this incident unique and remarkable.

there's actually nothing remarkable about it and in fact most of the more exciting claims of the footage can be put into context with basic trigonometry[1], and Lex should have questioned much of what Fravor said in that podcast. I hope it doesn't turn into the next Joe Rogan show.

[1]https://youtu.be/PLyEO0jNt6M

This interview with Fravor is much longer and more detailed than any I have seen. Most of the interview is about piloting in general but his description of the Tic Tac encounter in particular is especially fascinating.

This conversation was deeply frustrating. I'm ordinarily a huge fan of Fridman's show, but he gave this guy an inch and he took a mile. Essentially using recourse to expertise (and constant references to military acronyms) to give credence to claims to go way beyond what he directly experienced. It's pretty clear that despite his protestations Fravor enjoys the limelight and had become pretty inducted into the 'ufologist' community.

His experience is interesting and valid. His conclusions were anything but. Most notably, given the US govts well documented history of experimenting on members of the military, which seems more likely: a) That (as he clearly believes) intelligent aliens with anti-gravity and necessarily ftl drives cross the vast chasms of interstellar space to buzz some aviators or b) that this was the result of either a natural phenomena or a psychological experiment on the airmen themselves. When we eliminate the almost certainly impossible, a whole range of improbable but vastly more likely alternatives present themselves.

You are replacing his conclusion with your own and calling it his.

There were two jets there with two people in each. That's one hell of a psychological to pull off to get them all to see the same thing.

I don't care to delve deep into this, but were all four people in contact with each other during the event and/or before recording what they saw? As that alone is enough to get them to see the same thing.

Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1235/

If only there was a network of automatic telescopes watching the sky 24/7.

Oh, there is.[1] GEODSS, with pairs of automated telescopes, picks up satellites, larger space junk, and incoming missiles and asteroids. It has a star catalog and a satellite orbital catalog, and reports anything it doesn't already have on file.

One of the GEODSS sites is no longer used by the USAF, and it's now run by MIT to detect near earth orbit asteroids.[2] The University of Arizona also has Spacewatch, with two automated telescopes.[3] Those two between them have discovered several hundred thousand minor asteroids.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillan...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Near-Earth_Asteroid_Re...

[3] https://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/

With a billion cellphone cameras out there there are both things that have become more believable because there is video now. And things less believable Because no one has really captured them. An example of the former is tornadoes which footage was rather rare until cameras become commonplace. An example of the latter is Bigfoot with not much new imagery.

Now what category would you assign UFOs?

The receptive field on a cell phone camera is absolutely miniscule, and lenses are designed to widen the camera's field of view such that they can effectively capture nearby objects.

Combine that with camera software being designed to enhance conventional images, and low-light performance on CMOS sensors being abysmal, and photos of anything at any reasonable distance are necessarily degraded to such a point that you may well have been better off not taking the photograph in the first place.

Trying to decent take photo of a low-flying aircraft is tricky enough for your average user, who has to hold their camera steady while tracking a moving object and wrestling with autofocus looking for anything that might be a face. I don't think the camera ubiquity argument holds much water with respect to the UFO phenomena, outside of the most preposterous annecdotes.

Was the existence of tornadoes really ever in doubt? I mean the connection between tornadoes and hook echos on weather radar has been know since at least the 50s and Ted Fujita is well known for his work on tornadoes during the 70s. I was really into meteorology as a kid during the late 90s and early 2000s and I don't remember ever reading anything that implied that there was doubt that tornadoes existed.

Tornados are supposed to be pretty common in LA, where they are called, instead, "weather events".

There are lots of places that have more or less frequent tornadoes where real estate people and homeowners would rather they not be mentioned.

“Although Los Angeles County has never experienced the monsters that terrorize the midwest, tornadoes, albeit smaller ones, are not unknown here. Since 1950, at least 42 tornadoes were reported to have occurred in Los Angeles County. Most were quite small, covering short distances and doing little or no damage.”

— http://www.laalmanac.com/weather/we701.php

Doppler weather radar didn't exist in the 50's.

> The first known radar observations of a confirmed tornado were made at the Illinois State Water Survey on the 9th of April 1953.

http://www.chill.colostate.edu/w/CHILL_history#The_First_Tor...

> Now what category would you assign UFOs?

"Poorly-defined term, verging on motte-and-bailey."

Anything in the sky someone can't identify is a UFO. Someone sees Venus, doesn't know what it is, Venus is now a UFO. But because "UFO" is associated with "extraterrestrial aliens visiting Earth" saying that people see UFOs is taken for being equivalent to saying that people see extraterrestrial aliens.

Phone cameras are great at capturing tornadoes and terrible at capturing tiny objects in the sky. Even worse at night.

Given the number of photos I have taken with my phone that appeared to just be empty sky, but if I zoomed way in and scrolled around I would eventually stumble onto a blurry blob that was probably the plane I had been trying to photograph, I'm not so sure that the XKCD you cited is right when it comes to things in the sky.

Assuming these UFOs are vessels from off-earth and want their presence to remain hidden then why do the space aliens persist in buzzing US air bases.

So that people think they are American vessels obviously.

Why would I assume they want their presence to remain hidden?

> Why would I assume they want their presence to remain hidden?

Why don't they land in time Square or go on a reality television program?

Form whatever idea you will of all this chaff, one thing is indisputable. You yourself can file a FOIA request at the Pentagon requesting "cockpit videos cleared for release to Louis Elizondo in the Fall (September-October) of 2017" and you'll get a copy of those videos directly from the horse's mouth.

As an ultra-skeptic who is drawn toward primary sources, I've been following the cluster of these stories closely for years with an eye to their provenance. More I thought about all this, I think the whole thing collapses to two life-changing possibilities, rationalizing my way down directly from the videos:

1) No new physics.

Cockpit videos - faked by military for a psyop campaign, coordinated with patriot testimonies by credible individuals. Navy patents filed by the US Navy on behalf of Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais and document leaks added to effect more confusion. There's a precedent for this type and scale of operation going back to the Star Wars program days, where Reagan himself participated in attempting to drain the Soviet Union's R&D budget.

If the videos were planted for personal gain by a soon-to-be-laid-off employee, Elizondo, and then engineered into credibility through the FOIA chain of custody - it explains why and how, but doesn't explain everyone else's participation, unless the military chose to exploit the incident and launch a psyop campaign in its wake. If the Navy patents were entirely unrelated to all this, perhaps an innocent case of fraud, incompetent bosses doubling down on made up claims by an employee yoked to their own careers.

2) Discovery of new physics.

Cockpit videos - show maneuvering capabilities we're plainly unfamiliar with.

Leaked Carrier Strike Group report details that behavior and those capabilities in far greater detail than speculating at potato-quality camera smudges will: https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document...

Pilot's testimony of the encounter - shared by Insanity in comments here - demonstrates the pilot's expertise and credibility in greater detail: https://youtu.be/aB8zcAttP1E?t=4264

Patents filed by the US Navy on behalf of Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais - imply expensive engineering of impossible inventions without being able to adequately explain the physics behind them: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31798/the-secretive-in...

Reports of other unknown craft stalking secret nuclear depot sites - imply someone remotely observing neutron emissions, which I understood is beyond our ability to detect or pinpoint at distances over a few dozen yards: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35674/the-bizarre-myst...

Tangentially related, we have two claims to a technology that if proved working will revise physics as we know them, Mach Effect thrusters and the famous EmDrive. The lesser known one is a result of Dr. Jim Woodward's divergent theory of inertia as a result of gravitational interactions of everything in the universe. He started work on his theory and prototype drive after claiming to have seen a flying object that violated known physics and therefore he knew they must work somehow and started working it out backwards: https://www.wired.com/story/mach-effect-thrusters-interstell...

Partial resolution:

There are two papers by Dr. Martin Tajmar out of Dresden due to be released in February 2021. He's tightly lipped about what's in them, but he's an expert on the matter. He and his team built and launched a solid state gallium ion drive into space and demonstrated their orbital correction capabilities. Over the years he tested several prototypes of both the EmDrive and the Mach Effect thrusters and dismissed them in various iterations of his thrust measurement experiments, the latest published works describing the observed miniscule effects as thermal vibrations and interactions of the Earth's magnetic fields with power lines in the test chamber. But they were inconclusive.

This time around, Tajmar built a magnetic shielding chamber meant to exclude those effects. One paper is for analysis of the conventionally microwave-described EmDrive, and other one is for its laser version. Mark your calendar and the papers might put a nail in parts of this coffin.

The publication date is somewhat telling. The papers were meant to be released in the Space Propulsion 2020 conference this month but due to Covid-19 they were delayed until March. It's a stretch that a significant scientific breakthrough would be delayed, but, on the other hand he is a German.

Tajmar himself wasn't hopeful prior to the latest measurement experiment: "This is such an extraordinary claim that you must, as Carl Sagan said, have extraordinary proofs. You must be really super sure on that. Without that, it's just a fairy tale.”

I'm a fan of military aircraft theories. Both videos are off the US coast in waters patrolled by military.

The perfect place to test something you don't want anyone else to find if it crashes. And over the ocean, the best place to test something radioactive.

I think nuclear drones could have this kind of physics defying performance. It's funny to think the US would build thousands of nuclear reactors, weapons, boats, but no planes. Especially when they were proven viable in the 60's.

There's nuclear planes out there. Probably drones. I'm sure of it

The objects in the Navy footage behave basically the same as the WWII-era "foo fighters" that the article mentions.

Seems me that this eliminates the "advanced aircraft built by humans" explanation.

I also think it's extremely unlikely that any hypothetical aliens would have the technology to send vehicles to the Earth, but be unable to do better than semi-randomly swarm around warplanes for decades.

IMO, it's an obscure natural phenomenon, like red sprites, and we just haven't figured out what it is about the environments whete they've been encountered that makes them more likely to be seen by military aviators and less so by civilian aircraft.

I'm far from the first person to suggest this, but one of the recurring problems with imagining alien encounters is that we tend to base it on encounters between different branches of the human race, e.g. the First Nations meeting European colonists for the first time. But statistically, what are the chances of intelligent life evolving on another planet and developing spacecraft at anything close to the same time as we did? Basically zero. Either they haven't even developed electrical systems yet, or they did so hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago. If we ever run into spacefaring aliens, they won't have vehicles that are the equivalent of an F-22 to our Sopwith Camel or even an ancient Chinese warship. They'll have technology that's so far beyond our own that we may not even be able to understand why someone would want to accomplish what it does. i.e. as Alastair Reynolds once put it, the equivalent of trying to explain to a stone-age proto-human what ETERNAL BLUE is. We won't even have the context to understand.

I think you can view biology as an advance technology that is far beyond our understanding and capability to reproduce. We don't have any of the problems you claim we would when trying to understand it.

3) Some testing of some parts of something like https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Beam , meaning chasing holographic apparitions projected somehow from somewhere.

Or simply several invisible beams of whatever making the air glow/shine where they cross, sweeping, and theryby moving that spot.

No real new physics at all, except of the massively improved capability to project holograms over vast distances.

Edit: Think of a cat, chasing the dot of a laser pointer.

Meow!

Shared delusions can be fun and entertaining. As long as they dont rob you or your family important resources or make you do dangerous things.

I will just leave this here.

http://kirkmcd.princeton.edu/JEMcDonald/mcdonald_aaas_69.pdf

The UFO shows that I see on the history channel and the like are completely disheartening to me. The problem is not the people believe in UFOs or that there are shows about them; rather it seems the show is intentionally stroking a specific type of right wing conspiracy theory regarding the fact that the government is hiding information from the public and that the government’s power comes mainly from their exclusive harnessing of alien information and alien technology.

I see it as a direct and logical continuation, in fact even a normalization, of the conservative tendency to disregard research, experts, and complicated logical reasoning. It is much easier to think that aliens gave us the transistor than it is to realize that there are in fact people out there who are very smart and dedicated. The fact that these types of shows are shown on a channel called “the history channel” borders on criminal irresponsibility in my view.

> right wing conspiracy theory regarding the fact that the government is hiding information from the public

You mean information like the existence of the surveilance that Snowden proved?

That notion was taken credibly by sensible people even before the Snowden leak. Snowden was hardly the first leak, after all, just the most spectacular.

If the US government can't even keep its own spy programs secret without repeated leaks, it's hard to believe they've managed near-100% success with their alien guests since '47.

agreed hard to keep secrets, but compartmentalized research into abstract weapons/physics/non-earthlings is probably easier for employees to digest ethically speaking than breaking the law to exert control over your fellow citizens

UFO is real by definition, and after reading a number of Wikipedia articles that cite various official reports by many governments, I started to believe that evidences already showed that there are definitely some (1%?) UFOs which cannot be attributed to known natural phenomena or man-made technologies. Of course, I don't think they are alien spacecrafts, and alternative explanations, such as unidentified natural phenomena are more likely. However, there are two problems regarding to UFOs. The first problem is, it's not a single phenomenon, but a class of different phenomena, potentially hundreds of different things. The next problem is, their appearances are entirely unpredictable, you cannot just wait at a place and keep observing it with a rack of instrumentation. These two problems mean that UFO will continue to be an open question for many decades, if not forever, and most researches will not recognize them as an genuinely unknown physical phenomena.

Consider Ball Lightning [0]. It's real, and there are 200 years of anecdotal reports from everywhere in the world. Yet, until recently, it was not recognized as a real phenomenon by many researchers in the scientific communities - for good reason, "I never saw one in my life, and why should I believe these random stories on ball lightning, if there's no irrefutable data recorded by a scientific instrument?" But because of its unpredictable nature, it's highly unlikely to carry a scientific observation to begin with. It was only scientifically observed in 2014, for a duration of only 1.6 seconds [1], by a coincidence. If arguing for the existence of ball lightning is that difficult, now imagine the case of UFO.

I believe a lot of data can be potentially gathered on UFO - acoustic, optical, radar, or X-ray measurements are all possibilities. However, because of the not-a-single-phenomenon and unpredictable nature of UFOs, such scientific investigations will never be funded. And even if there are funded, such projects will be a wild-goose chase on unpredictable UFOs, and such UFOs will disappear before you are ready to do some observations on them. It's unlikely to find anything significant. And don't even mention that UFO's popular connotation of aliens alone is enough to discredit the potential scientific efforts of investigations.

On the other hand, hypothetically, imagine that UFOs could always appear at a specific geographical locations in a predictable manner, only then the members of academia will start treating it seriously and real researches will be funded. But it's not going to happen.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24886-natural-ball-li...

First of all, it's important to distinguish very clearly between UFOs and "aliens from another world visiting us". The two are not at all necessarily related and the public discourse, especially in mass media, UFOlogy dogma and literature, only weakens arguments because of this forced connection based on tenuous leaps of logic.

By definition, any unidentified object in the sky is a UFO unless it's clearly identified, as many here have already mentioned. Thus, for one thing, many UFOs can simply be this: things that may or may not be natural but which have some rational explanation and have not been clearly labeled as such.

However, and more importantly I think, is the possibility that even a genuinely inexplicable UFO event (such as the 1978 nuclear storage events linked to in another comment here [1], the 2004 Nimitz UFO incidents and the 2014 and 2015 events among others) may not be the classical aliens in the sky concept that gets pushed despite little substance, though it might indeed be a case of unknown objects moving around human installations with a certain frequency. The latter is a highly documented, definitively observed phenomena, the former is very shaky assumption and absolutely nothing more. Evidence of unknown objects moving in seemingly incredible ways abounds. There is no evidence at all of those objects being ships from another world in the galaxy or Universe.

What this boils down to is that UFOs as a genuinely, currently inexplicable phenomena could very well be completely real. They might even be corporeal expressions of an intelligent nature. This however doesn't have to mean that they came from space or from aliens in any classical sense. They could have come from a completely unknown source that doesn't get nearly as much attention as the UFOs = aliens supposition. Certain authors have covered this with their own speculations and arguments, such as Jacques Vallee, Micheal Persinger, and even others with more sensationalist arguments like John Keel. None of them are necessarily less likely to be wrong than those who argue that we're dealing with aliens, and at least some of these arguments seem more plausible than the dogmatic skeptic stance of completely disregarding all sightings as anything except humans being confused by normal, known phenomena.

An important sub-point to the previous paragraph is that the government might seem to be playing stupid not because of some giant coverup of secret knowledge or much less clandestine contact with extraterrestrials, but the (to me) much more likely possibility of a general attempt to cover up that they also have no clue what's going on whenever they come across cases that none of their resources let them explain. It's possible that (as is common with any kind of organizational thinking) they detest looking stupid and prefer looking ambiguous to admitting ignorance of something completely outside their ability to control or monitor clearly.

1. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31798/the-secretive-in...

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