Why Look at Flying Saucers?
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
You may be surprised at how many people you know have had experiences of their own, or know someone close who has, but don’t talk about it for fear of judgement.
For all the hundreds of thousands of anecdotal reports that exist, and documented cases involving hundreds of witnesses, there is so little research into the phenomenon. Most of it is dismissed as mass hysteria, rather than investigated to determine if that assumption is true.
That said, it’s not exactly a phenomenon that can easily be studied - the results are not repeatable. As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I think we need to stop calling it a conspiracy theory, and instead call it just a theory. Remember there was a time when it was considered a conspiracy to say the the earth revolves around the sun.
After seeing the declassified Navy videos [0] I'm not sure how much more extraordinary evidence we can get.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/pentagon-declassifies-ufo-vi...
If these things really do behave in the way he’s described, ET or not it suggests a fundamental leap in technology - it baffles me that there isn’t more interest.
Mick West simply disregards all of this and in an email I wrote to him even claims that the weeks of incidents previous to the video being captured were "separate" events from the video because they didn't concretely, confirmably show the same thing.... What? An absurd conclusion.
Debunking with a critical eye is good and necessary but sometimes one gets the feeling that certain internet debunkers feel a need to debunk at all costs because that's their label, even if their own "rational" interpretations make leaps of logic much worse than simply admitting that something inexplicable was observed.
Aliens are an extraordinary claim, we need to check out a lot of things before we start considering them. Take the "life on Venus" recent claim. There was a lot of work done to even consider it. They used results from several observatories, analyzed every known explanations to rule them out one after the other, and even now they still consider it unlikely compared to other currently unknown chemistry. So if you see a scientist and tell him, I saw a flying saucer, it was aliens, he will laugh at you because there are thousands of other explanations to look for first.
On the other hand "mass hysteria" is also a lousy explanation. In reality, I think they are usually optical illusions. For example, the moon may appear like something else in unusual atmospheric conditions, and if you cross-reference the position of the moon with some UFO sightings, you get a lot of correlations. Other cases include small, close objects like insects appear like large, fast objects, this is common among pilots who are trained to look for other planes. There are also many psychological effects that aren't hysteria, for example it is common for people to "remember" things that never happened, which is also a big problem in a court of law: our memories are unreliable. Add to that defective equipment, pranks, etc... and you can probably cover most of the sightings.
Then there is a small minority of true mass hysteria, secret programs, unexplained physical phenomena, etc... and only then you can start to consider aliens.
And to make thing worse, more often than not, there is very little data.
With this phenomenon however, it’s like the polar opposite. Nobody wants to associate themselves with it, so even if there is something worth studying, we’re not studying it.
Technically, you can become a UFO if you turn off your transponder. You are flying AND you are not broadcasting your identity.
I'll show myself out.
It may be that all these claimed observations are the product of some sort of collective psychosis, as this article appears to assume, but that's just one hypothesis among many others. Empirical questions require empirical investigation, not ignoring the question.
We know there's something out there; it's occasionally seen by people who report it, and who who often somehow fail to bring proper cameras with them. It could be aliens, foreign governments, or more mundane explanations like weather phenomena. We just don't know what it is yet.
I think it's pretty disingenuous to present those two takes as being equally bad. Yes we don't know everything and leaving room for extraordinary things to happen is healthy, but I have yet to see evidences that aliens have cause a UAP. On the other hand we have good empirical evidence that sighting of unusal phenomenas with perfectly mundane explanations can, and do, create testimonies of so called "alien visitations". We even have pretty good psycho-sociological explanations for why this happens.
So without even looking at the specific details of a particular UAP sighting, coming at it from the angle of "people probably saw weird stuff and their brains filled the gap" is the right approach in my opinion. That doesn't mean we have to stop here of course, but it is a sensible default position.
Neither have I but the title of this article is "why look at flying saucers", not "why believe in ET visitation".
> We even have pretty good psycho-sociological explanations for why this happens.
What well accepted psychological explanation is there for 4 naval aviators reporting an encounter with an object that appeared to defy our knowledge of aerodynamics in clear weather and broad daylight in the exact location they were vectored to by an Aegis radar system ?
Not good.
My best alternative explanations is:
top secret research project going out of their way to fool everyone, possibly with the help of a few pilots and radar operators :-)
* Super High Density energy storage mechanism, that when being used actually cools down instead of heating up
* An energy source that isn't based around burning fossil fuels for propulsion, that is highly efficient.
* A device that could atleast in theory be using some kind of an inertial cancellation mechanism.
Any of this could be a solution to climate change. Why would our own governments lie and put the future of this planet in jeapordy?. Just so they can win the next war but lose a Future?.
The idea that this is some kind of a secret research project doesn't add up.
Personally, if I was tasked with making sure everyone respected the American Army I'd make sure to hire a magician and keep that hire very very secret.
I'm not saying there aren't any serious technical breakthroughs.
But I'd still hire the best reliable magician I could get.
After all, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and my bet is that it goes the other way too. (Some replace "magic" with "rigged demo" and that too is true - and possibly relevant.)
Also, I think it is Penn or Teller who says something along the lines of: there's one thing people constantly underestimate when it comes to magic and that is how incredibly far magicians are willing to go to conceal their tricks.
If this is the case it is way better do like they do today and selectively leak stuff and then let everyone, friends and enemys, fill out the blanks :-)
And then I better understood the stupendous energy requirements for a two-way trip to even the very closest neighboring solar system. And it is just not practical, even for a civilization at the end of the technology development tree.
We might see one-way probes, but they are as likely to be a part of hegemonizing swarm, looking to convert all usable matter in the solar system into computronium. Certainly they're not going to just faff around, kidnap a few people and then leave quietly.
When aliens visit, everyone will know. Luckily, we haven't seen any evidence of Kardashev type-2 civilizations nearby, so we may be good for a while. Though that's also sort of depressing, as it is weak evidence that life is not too common across the galaxy.
How do we know what the end of the technology development tree looks like? There are just so many mysteries that remain within our current understanding of science, we can’t say for sure that it’s not easy (for example) to bend space time or some other possibility that makes faster than light travel possible. Quantum entanglement, for example, breaks many of our assumptions about the impossibility of FTL travel.
> When aliens visit, everyone will know.
Maybe, but perhaps a civilisation that has survived the great filter would look differently at civilisations they stumble upon. Maybe, like we do when searching for microbes on Mars, they would try not to disturb the life they discover.
This is all just speculation of course, but I think when looking at this topic it’s all too easy to apply a human centric view on what’s possible and what’s not, and the truth is we just know so very little. Or, we know a lot, but there are so many more mysteries than solved problems.
>Quantum entanglement, for example, breaks many of our assumptions about the impossibility of FTL travel.
Quantum entanglement can produce correlated measurements between systems, even when the entangled systems are separated by large distances. In a sense, this can be used to measure the state of an entangled system at great displacement "faster" than it would take light to travel from that distant system to the observer. However, the state of the entangled systems is prepared before the systems are separated from one another (at much less than the speed of light.) Any attempt to change the state of one of the entangled systems (at a distance) breaks the entanglement. Entanglement cannot be used to communicate information from one point to another faster than the speed of light. It certainly doesn't allow FTL transfer of matter/energy.
Isn’t the state still a probabilistic one at that point though? As in it’s not until it’s observed later that both particles instantaneously collapse into a correlated state. But the precise outcome of the observation isn’t determined before they’re separated.
My understanding of quantum mechanics is far too limited to really dive into this, but my point isn’t that it enables FTL communication or travel directly.
Rather my understanding is that it appears to break our previous assumptions - physicists haven’t yet settled on a way to unify relativity and quantum physics [1] which leaves many possibilities open. We still just don’t know enough to say it’s definitely impossible.
This is blind arrogance.
Have a look at a few links. So first off, chemical propulsion is right out:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/why-chem...
You really need something like anti-matter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel
You're still looking at hundreds of years or more for a nearby two-way trip.
It is far more practical to send out probes one-way (which is quite slow), and then build the infrastructure at the destination to receive transmitted mind-states.
The initial probes take a long time to reach their destinations, because they have to have means to deaccelerate. The faster you accelerate, the more mass you have to carry with you to deaccelerate.
How do you know other planets do not have elements that have anti-matter properties?
So, if magic exists, there also might be aliens. Got it.
> How do you know other planets do not have elements that have anti-matter properties?
Well, we haven't observed anything that gives even a hint that something like that exists.
The matter / antimatter disparity is still quite a mystery. But we don't see any evidence of antimatter out there in any significant quantities. So if aliens want to use it, they have to make it the hard way, just like we do.
Beyond current state-of-the-art technology would make manufacturing and containment of antimatter easier, but even then it is a long way from practical.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The point is it's arrogant to say what's impossible for all time, because nearly everything we do today was impossible a short thousand years ago.
I never said impossible, I said impractical.
If you are content with really long travel times (thousands or tens of thousands of years one-way), then of course you can travel to other stars.
By the time such means are available, I doubt that entities will bother with shipping matter two ways over such distances.
Also, if you're talking about an uploaded or otherwise synthetic consciousness, that entity may be experiencing time a 100x or more faster than a baseline human does now. So a then thousand year trip would seem like a million years. That's a long time to stay away.
Certainly we would have failed at that task of predicting our own limits and desires just hundreds of years ago, nevermind an alien race.
The problem is people want to have really muddled conversations about that. The people having the second kind of conversation yelling at the people having the first kind of conversation is probably the most frustrating element of all, especially when they strike a morally superior pose which is, IMHO, entirely unjustified.
If you want to ignore all current science and astrophysics when you discuss aliens... fine. Be my guest. No sarcasm. I have some beliefs on that front myself. BUT... you need to be aware that you're basically engaging in groundless speculation, and in particular, you have no grounds to be yelling at people about their groundless speculation.
We can have a much more grounded discussion about what aliens could look like if we are largely correct about science. And there's no need to accuse people about being "arrogant" if they choose to have that discussion, because frankly, of the two, it's the more interesting one. The "well, what if we're wrong about everything?" may seem like fun for a moment, but there's no there there, really. What if we're wrong about everything? Well, what if we are? What if we're all just in an ancestor simulation... but the descendants running it are super-advanced honey bees running their ancestors and we just happen to be around? Well... what if? There's nowhere to go, or if you prefer, there's nowhere you can't go, which is actually the exact same thing.
On the other hand, if we stick to biology and cosmology and relativity and science in general, we can have all sorts of interesting discussions. What about that result on Venus? That's a question rich enough to build a concrete career on. What would aliens look like in our real universe? How much more advanced could they be? Would they, in fact, build rather human-sized spaceships that are apparently capable of crossing the interstellar void, but not flying around in our atmosphere without crashing into things? Would they in fact need to keep kidnapping humans over and over for decades on end? Sensible discussions can be had on these matters if we start from a concrete base. The whole "But what if we're, like, wrong about everything and we're, like, actually soap bubbles floating in the wind?" discussion has nowhere interesting to go, because it creates just one big undifferentiated and indistiguishable mismash of what ifs.
I do think we have to ground any interesting discussion by what is possible within the limits of science. Otherwise we're just talking fantasy.
For the most part, I do not think we should discuss the limits of engineering, that is what's practical or not, because we're nobody to say what is practical to a type II or type III civilization.
My dad's astronomy professor told the class it's impossible by the laws of physics to create a telescope that can see exoplanets. He went through the equations to show you could never build a telescope mirror to accomplish that. What he didn't think of is we found other ways to create bigger telescopes and we used gravitational lensing to zoom in on a distant star. Nothing in our understanding of physics changed to allow that, merely a change in how we looked at the problem. That's why it's so arrogant. We don't know everything about what is possible or not, and one day we might just see a way around limitations that seem absolute today. Our short history is filled with us doing that again and again.
Yes, my apologies for the implication. I deliberately wanted to pick a more sensible comment to post under.
"For the most part, I do not think we should discuss the limits of engineering, that is what's practical or not, because we're nobody to say what is practical to a type II or type III civilization."
There's two aspects to engineering we can talk about; fundamental limits, and whether we can attain those fundamental limits.
If you look up the concept of computronium, you'll find a discussion of the fundamental limits of data storage in our universe, for instance. Proposing an alien civilization that exceeds those is stepping into fantasy. We can sensibly discuss what just isn't possible.
On the other hand, given that the "fundamental limit" is "the number of bits you can encode on the event horizon of a black hole", it's at least plausible to consider that no possible engineering project could ever create such a storage device. It's hard to talk about the "what is possible" side.
However, some number of fundamental limits might turn out not to be fundamental or there might be a way around rather than through them. We can't be 100% sure of what's impossible, but it is stepping into the realm of the extremely unlikely, at least from our current understanding of the universe.
Perhaps we have a highly advanced neighbor that values their privacy and has the technology to remain concealed from our "primitive" observation capabilities? Again, not likely but it's fun to think about.
> And then I better understood the stupendous energy requirements to shout/yell/make noise for a two-way round trip of sound waves from one county to the very closest neighboring county. And it is just not practical, even for a civilization at he end of the technology development tree (as known to us 1k years ago).
If we were to look at communicating via radio waves with the technology of the ancient Greeks, they might wonder how we could possibly shout loud enough to be heard so far away.
And why, if visits from another world were possible, would everyone know? If I found myself in ancient Greece and talked over a walkie talkie, it would be the same as something with crazy advanced travel technology just stopping by on their safari trip through our solar system.
When I was a kid I found all the talk of UFOs interesting. I had a fascination with space (and still do) and wanted to believe in that future.
What changed is in more recent years I inadvertently approached the problem from the other direction. By that I mean you look at what mankind's future is likely to be like which can be extrapolated to the future other other spacefaring civilizations and the implications of that on the Fermi Paradox.
It's a deep topic but basically the obvious energy future is to use all the Sun's energy output (rather than <1 billionth) and it's essentially just an engineering problem (albeit a massive one) to collect and use that power. And that future is a Dyson swarm. And those aren't the least bit subtle.
There are two parts I like about this:
1. It is based on the current understanding of physics. No magic tech or negative mass is required. If FTL is possible (and I include wormholes under FTL) or if breaking thermodynamics is possible we should be seeing a ton more not less of these things; and
2. The beauty of a lot of thought experiments with the Fermi Paradox is we don't need to decide what civilizations will do on average. Instead, if any one civilization doesn't fit that mold the whole argument falls apart. The more civilizations there are the less likely that counterargument becomes.
So with regards to UFOs, there are two common explanations among devotees:
1. Aliens and alien technology; or
2. Advanced technology governments are hiding.
In a world where the speed of light is a universal speed limit, (1) just becomes preposterous. The idea that someone would spend thousands of years getting here, hiding their presence and cooperating with governments just defies logic.
As for advanced technology... in 1947? Really? I just don't believe people are capable of that AND keeping it secret for decades. Of course people will say they haven't kept it secret and disinformation has made us all not believe it.
This fascination with UFOs just seems so... pointless.
If aliens exist they will be alien. They will not be a bit weird with our naive ideas of sort-of-better alien tech. They will be something entirely different, and very likely able to do entirely unexpected things.
Imagine a species which has roughly the same intelligence advantage over humans as humans have over cats. Most of what humans spend their time doing today is incomprehensible to cats. Virtually all of math, physics, the Internet, the arts, philosophy is far beyond the imagination of an animal which hasn't evolved past a need to find food, sex, and occasional snuggles.
Now imagine a species which stretches the comparison to human-vs-ant. Not only are humans activities unimaginable, they're invisible. Even though ants live in the middle of them.
Ant perception is tuned to pheromone trails, foraging, and occasional ant wars, and ants don't have much of a concept of freeways, telecommuting, corner supermarkets, house renovation projects, or Amazon Prime - even though they may be surrounded by them.
Not only do ants not understand them, they cannot see them, except for those rare occasions where ants become a nuisance and a human decides to wipe them out.
It's irrational and naive to assume that we are the most evolved of all possible intelligences in a universe which is as big as this one is, and whose operation we really don't understand. We could be well surrounded by alien activities which are far outside our conceptual grasp - except for those occasions when the aliens take a passing interest, with strange and incomprehensible consequences.
Until the two first bombs were dropped it was either unknown or, to those who realized the potential: considered impossible with the technology available at the time.
I wonder what is just out of reach for us today, or what scientists are secretly working on today.
Also, one step ahead, like you I also think what we are capable of seeing and understanding might be very limited compared to other beings.
The bombs were built specifically because scientists theorized that it would be possible to generate large bombs with their knowledge of atomic energy.
They underestimated the scale of the bombs.
Govt's dont pour billions of dollars into impossible technologies.
Below is my attempt to add a little more detail so it doesn't sound unrealistically straightforward:
...because a few scientists theorized that it could be possible to generate large bombs with their knowledge of atomic energy and because politicians became desperate enough to give it a chance.
The rationale for the Dyson Swarm future it can be built incrementally, requires tech we basically have and can scale massively. The consequence is that it's not remotely subtle. These things have a distinct signature because the only way to get rid of heat in space is to radiate it away and that has a distinct IR signature.
Given all this we can reasonably conclude that there isn't a massive set of Dyson swarms within a pretty huge light cone.
So the problem of "you don't know what's possible" is that for each new known unknown (eg whether FTL is possible, whether fusion will ever work as a viable power source) and unknown unknown it gets _more_ likely we'll see these things not less.
Let's say there are 5 spacefaring civilizations in the MIlky Way other than us. The odds that 0 of them go this route and choose to remain "hidden" is much more possible than if, say, there were 1000 spacefaring civilizations in the Milk Way. In a universe with FTL those numbers (5 and 1000) now use a much bigger volume as their basis. Perhaps the Local Group. Perhaps the entire Universe.
Here's the other big problem with "You don't know what's possible": if we can't conceive of some super-advanced technology or higher existence, what are the odds that other civilizations can't either? If we're 1 of 5, we may be the sole dumb kid on the block. But out of 1000? I'd be willing to bet there are others sufficiently like us operating under similar constraints with outcomes we can reason about in aggregate.
Let me put this in perspective. Human peak energy usage is estimated at about 10^11 W (Watts). Years ago a Russian physicist postulated the Kardashev scale for energy, which is pretty simple:
- K1 (Kardashev-1) civilizations use the power output of a planet)
- K2 civilizations use the power output of a star
- K3 civilizations use the power output of a galaxy.
Obviously these aren't absolute units (eg stars have different power outputs) but it's a useful framework. Carl Sagan came along later and simplified the scale somewhat to:
- K1 = 10^16W
- K2 = 10^26W
- K3 = 10^36W (which implies ~10B stars in the "galaxy")
So if we were to advance to being a K2 civilization around our own Sun we would have access to a truly mind-boggling amount of energy. To give just one example, we could essentially sterilize the Milky Way in about 100,000 years trivially without any object going further than the orbit of Mars.
So you don't even need to decide if civilizations would on average do this or not. You just have to decide how likely is that _none_ would. 0 out of 5 doesn't defy belief here. 0 out of 1000 gets more incredulous.
So back to our alien UFOs, the odds that no one does this, a civilization advances beyond this point, they discover FTL, they use it to come here and they hide their presence from most of us. they remain basically undetected in an era where everyone basically has a high-definition camera in their pocket (as opposed to the 50s and 60s) and somehow reveal themselves when they have technology we couldn't even imagine... simply defies belief.
1. Life, by its very nature, capitalizes on improbability. It cheers when the bouncy ball miraculously ends up somewhere no one expected and had an effectively zero probability of going there. It cheers when someone beats all odds. It cusses when the technology doesn’t work when it’s needed but worked every moment until that point. It sells when a stock unexpectedly goes high.
2. It ignores the fact that life is made up of individuals and some of those individuals will be sentimental. They will fight to the death to keep their night sky and keep things the same. To require the energy of the star is to have either a massive population or some tech (like an Alcubierre drive) that needs it. But if it’s population, then a very large percentage will probably fight very hard to forgo a Dyson swarm/sphere.
For that reason alone, we should be utterly terrified to find one, because to build one requires not only tech, but a culture that doesn’t value sentiment and/or FTL tech. Also for that reason, I expect 99% of civilizations to never build one.
I could be completely wrong. Probably am. But that’s my 2¢ and thank you for your comment. It was my favorite.
Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men
The interview is long but the whole thing is worth a listen. I challenge anyone to listen to the whole thing and then deny something odd was happening in the Pacific.
Let's say we believe with confidence that this debunking is correct and that these videos show a bird or balloon or some explainable phenomena.
The next step is to look at the eyewitness testimony and reports from the people involved in this case - several Navy fighter pilots including a commanding officer of a squadron of aircraft onboard the Nimitz - and decide if we think the likely outcome is that they 1) did see radio signatures of these 'birds or balloons' moving at speeds beyond what is possible according to our understanding of physics, 2) were they collectively deluded or mistaken or misled by software bug across multiple technologies (radar including the AEGIS radar of an American aircraft carrier fleet), or 3) were they all lying.
I don't think any of the debunking address the possibilities of these witness testimonies, only the video that we do have. Which sort of makes sense in that we only _can_ address the physical evidence that is in front of us as members of the public, but shouldn't we at least acknowledge it seems somewhat unlikely that several members of the Navy with thousands of hours of training onboard both fighter jets and also in the radar rooms of Destroyers all collectively believed they were seeing physically impossible maneuvers by multiple targets, or that these tracking systems are that unreliable, or that they all collectively decided to lie about these videos and make up a story? Dismissing a video as showing a bird or balloon subject to parallax is great, but those explanations fall down if we choose to believe the report that they had radar tracking these objects at impossible velocities.
Perhaps the lying is the most logical possibility if this is a planned piece of government disinformation / muddying of the waters around technology or UFO/UAPs for some strategic reason, but let's at least discuss the topic before saying 'it was a bird or balloon, slam dunk, case-closed'.
It seems to me that all this is an elaborate disinformation campaign of some kind, possibly to encourage near-peers from blowing research money on junk or cover some other program like UFOs did for the B-2 or F-117, or the project is either impractical enough or close enough to practical use to justify lifting the veil of secrecy somewhat. It hides in a quantum state of maybe, much like many of the things Ben Rich, former skunkworks director may or may not have said about how advanced their tech was.
[1]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31798/the-secretive-in...
[2]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33859/blasting-the-air...
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. One of the transcripts was something akin to "you won't believe it, but it's back over there" - there's no claim by the radio operator that they "saw" a track move at speed X, it could just as well be taken as "it was here, and then it was back there". Unless the object was squawking an IFF or transponder code, how would they know it's the exact same object?
Since we don't have that evidence - guy claims before he could even lock up the E2C tapes a pair from the USAF appear on a Naval Carrier (like teleported or what?) to take them.
All the worlds most advanced collection systems, optical and radar and all we have are fuzzy videos no better than a bigfoot video. The only decent video is debunked by someone actually doing the math.
My point is that debunking the video is pretty pointless and the video really is almost a side note compared to the real judgment call one has to make which is whether a verbal anecdote about sensor data from a US Navy squadron commander on an aircraft with millions of dollars of sensor R&D working with radar operators in a fleet that is worth billions deserves more weight than the verbal anecdote of an Iowa farmer who saw a light moving in the sky.
If you're only interested in hard data and hard evidence then the entire thing is almost pointless as any UFO videos could just be doctored anyway.
The story is they came in by helicopter.
Tales about them doing things way beyond the capabilities of human technology are either (1) someone being mistaken because the visibility is poor or they are on drugs or whatever. (2) Exaggerations for a good story. Or (3) disinfo to scare the Russians.