UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

What I don't get is the arrogance of every side about this subject. We have no answers. We have no understanding. The government seems to be about to admit as much. But the true believers are sure, and the true debunkers, yourself included, are sure. To me, you're both just tin foil hat flunkies clinging to your own special precious version of the coming apocalypse. Your own special cult. Why can't people be more: (Ca) open to nuance and ambiguity and comfortable with their not being a resolution right now, and (Cb) genuinely curious and accepting of other people's perspectives rather than so "sweaty fear sprung" to be full of conviction that everyone who doesn't swallow their brand of belief on the matter is clearly a crank?

More specifically, in your case, you have an actual mirror case of crank-iness: you have a conspiracy for the creation of all the evidence, rather than a conspiracy for the suppression of it. I mean, don't you see that parallel? And aren't you a little suspicious of that?

That's what I mean. I don't blame you specifically. Something about this topic seems to short-circuit everyone to leap logic and arrive directly at certainty. It's a big human blindspot. I wonder why this topic triggers it? Maybe because we don't have any answers, but the stakes, perhaps, are so high.

I'm sorry but your casual debunking, dressed up as reasonableness, is no better than the crankiest of crank theories. Let's all do better, so... meet you somewhere in the middle. :) ;P xx

Fairies, ghosts and angels don't show up on radar or FLIR and the Inspector General of the DoD has never launched an investigation into how they have been handled by that department.

There are certainly some reports that stand up beyond this level of scrutiny.

I don't understand the assertion that "aliens are more likely than (a laundry list of other supernatural things)". The most significant point against modern day alien contact isn't really that "aliens don't exist"; that seems foolish to think. Its that space is insanely vast, and a civilization would need faster-than-light travel to travel across it in any decent amount of time; faster than light travel is roughly on the same level of "physically possible by our understanding of physics" as Time Travel or Dimensional Travel.

So, its a stretch to think its aliens, but you might as well also believe it could be any of those other things. In fact, I could envision a far-out argument for time travel being more likely; if they're both pretty incomprehensible from a physics standpoint, maybe we flipped their improbability. Maybe time travel is actually more possible than FTL travel. And here's one absolute certainty; across the four dimensions, the dimensionally nearest form of advanced, sentient life is You, ten seconds from now.

This is the justification for that. However, they don't "almost never break down and laugh and crow about their jokes". They do this all the time. It's just that when they do this, it moves from the category of "hardest-to-explain UFO cases" to the category of "known hoaxes". It's an obvious selection effect, not something that requires deeper explanation.

This reasoning applies to all historical mumbojumbo: ufos, bigfoot, ghosts, etc. These ideas are plausible insofar as they are constructed to be almost unmeasurable.

The preponderance of camera phones today means we have 1bn+ people able to measure their environment at abitary frequencies, and all such phenomena have essentially disappeared.

Either somehow all ghosts, bigfoots, aliens, etc. are disappearing because we are measuring them; or they never existed.

NB. These ideas "go together" only socially, ie. believed by a secular-religious community. The objects they describe have no intrinsic relationship (bigfoot is not like a ghost). When you have a class of such ideas, it is likely they are wholesale false (ie. mythological).

It is possible to somewhat statistically predict P(IdeaSet is Mythological) by the degree to which each idea in the set is in a common domain with the other ideas. A conspiracy/mythology is an IdeaSet which is mostly disjoint.

And there actually are quite a few photos and videos captured of UFO phenomenon, but they get posted on obscure areas of social media and never make mainstream news. The videos are often debunked as weather balloons, flairs, or something else prosaic. In some cases the debunking theory is confirmed because e.g. we can confirm that skydivers with flairs were in the same region as the video was taken. In most cases it's just a video of a small object in the sky and there's no way to confirm what it is.

Re: NORAD, Jacques Vallee claimed in a Joe Rogan interview that (either the ARTCC or NORAD) do see thousands of objects on radar every month that get classified as "uncorrelated targets" and are ignored because they don't show any inbound trajectory toward the US.

A lot of the cases have always been hoaxes or ignorance. Slow moving lights in the skies photographed by exited "believers".

The few remaining good cases are difficult to document. First of all, go out and take a picture of a bird. You get just one chance and it must be flying fast. Your result will not be very good. This our baseline.

Now look at the Nimitz incident. They measured a move of stationary at 80k feet to 80 feet in less than a second - something like 1200g, IIRC. 1200g is a downright silly number.

Now just take a good picture of this /s

The best current theory IMO is that this is done my manipulating/creating geodesic lines. This will create "gravity lensing" (like Einstein crosses) further blurring the craft.

Anyone serious but curios should take a look at uaptheory.com - it is good work on display by someone who understands physics and relativity.

We won't get a good picture because they move ridiculously fast.

I saw a weird triangular drone/plane flying close to an airport. I went to take a picture of it (to identify later) and my phone died. Just up and black screened. An hour later I was eating dinner and turned back on with ~43% battery power remaining. It wasn’t a particularly cold day, but I attributed to an old battery not handling the temp well. I don’t think it was aliens, or even a UFO (except to me.)

…but if it was an alien UFO, I wouldn’t be surprised if the folks who traversed space to be here could ID a lens and disable my phone.

The fastest possible speed for any material object to travel at is incredibly slow compared to any meaningful distance. It is millenia just from the sun to the edge of our solar system, let alone to anything "near by".

The universe is not the kind of place where living things can travel "between worlds". This is scifi -- and it is no coincidence UFO sightings peak in the era of Star Treck, and space races.

P(All life is organic | All known chemistry) ~= Very High

P(All intelligent organic life degrades) ~= Very High

thef.

P(Alien Life Lasts Long Enough To Travel | Above ) ~= Very Low

Physics & Chemistry basically rule out alien contact.

Once you insert these priors into your reasoning the "D - it's aliens!" becomes extraordinarily implausible.

It's remarkable this author finds D-Aliens more likely than D-SecretSociety. The latter only requires plausible localised advancements in knowledge and conspiracy; the former requires believing everything we know about biochemistry and physics to be radically incorrect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul

Alien intelligence would also be alien enough if it wasn't interstellar. Interplanetary, inter-dimensional or subterranean would be alien by my standard, too.

The Videos might have been plausibly explained, but i would argue that the pentagon has certainly more footage and sensor data to base their statement on.

And please do try to take photos of planes in the night sky with your smartphone camera. The image quality is not great.

If you can generate almost infinite energy to cross deep space to probe some humans I'm not sure I would take such an alien race serious. It would be more like how global factions on earth fight over resources, so I subscribe more to the Dark forest view of things. If they reckon crossing deep space is worth it, they will come over here to invade not to probe and troll farmers.

And let’s be real, if there was a high quality photo, you would just claim it was photoshopped. You need to see it to believe it, and that’s fair.

I really don't buy the argument that our advanced phone cameras are capable of capturing conclusive images of anything unexplainable, since they can barely capture good images of things that are explainable.

This assumes resource competition, which isn't a guarantee. Colonialism was driven by the need for open markets, resources, and vanity satisfaction from a declining class of European elites.

It's very likely that we don't have anything that a technologically advanced civilization would actually need. In this case, the situation would be more akin to Amazon coexisting with brick and mortar coffee shops, and less like Netflix competing with video rental shops.

So while I agree that the most likely outcome of a technologically more advanced alien civilization encountering us would be a pretty nasty one ... there's a remote possibility that we would instead be a curiousity to them and that they might treat us as we now treat the Sentinelese.

Note: there has been contact between the Sentinelese and the outside world, some peaceful (I found something about Indian expeditions in the early 90s) some a little less so (the British kidnapping six islanders). But it didn't result in their extinction or being colonized, and they remain isolated.

My guess is that an extraterrestrial intelligence investigating the Earth would be very stealthy, for two reasons: firstly because, like scientists, they want to observe life on Earth without disturbing it, and secondly because they will naturally suspect that other extraterrestrial intelligences are also lurking around the Earth and will also want to observe those, if possible, and will understand that they'll have a better chance of spotting those other extraterrestrial intelligences if those other extraterrestrial intelligences don't spot them first and take evasive action.

So my conclusion from all this is that it's quite plausible that multiple extraterrestrial intelligences are already lurking around the Earth, with their probes disguised as tiny insects, for example, and probably they are not all aware of each other's presence.

They may be observing you now!

If so, good point.

I don't think this holds true when one side is far superior to the other, of a different species, and doesn't really require the same resources as the inferior species.

Example: I'm not out to destroy the squirrels in my woods, even though occasionally they do something that inconveniences me, because they are not a threat and I want nothing of their acorn or walnut resources.

They can be very entertaining to watch however.

This is not totally correct, if you assume they have to survive countless conflicts (in which such advanced technology, it means aggressive ones would destroy themselves), you may end up with extraordinarily peaceful species.

But resources are abundant in space, and there's nothing that can be found on Earth (barring life, specifically) that can't be found in orders of magnitude greater quantities elsewhere. It's like our entire solar system is a buffet but we're the only dish with flies buzzing it. If you're looking for a meal, you wouldn't even bother with that.

Weren't the Vikings, later Normen, far less advanced than the places they raided? They absorbed the technology, the land and culture and used it to conquer and form what is present-day England.

Maybe we'll beat the aliens with our savagery.

If the people in the movie are not lying, are not taken out of context, and are not mistaken.

To be fair that's also true of Lord of the Rings :)

But being serious, the scientific mindedness of army personnel and politicians is not widely reputed. I find it still far more likely that they are overblowing simple flukes for fear of dismissing a legitimate threat, than I find it that we are occasionally stumbling into high-technology that contradicts our understanding of physics.

The fact that these sightings are almost always happening at high altitudes and in stressful situations makes it even more likely that they are instrument or human blips, or rare weather-related phenomena.

Eh? That’s a really weird way of looking at intelligence.

By all accounts of you pluck baby from 10,000 BCE and raise it today it wouldn’t be any different than an average person today.

Now one can argue that aliens might be much more physiologically intelligent than humans on a biological level but that’s not necessarily a given or a requirement.

“Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is true but it doesn’t mean that you can’t understand if it’s explained to you.

An alien civilization that simply has a time lead on humanity might be much more advanced but it doesn’t mean that we won’t be able to understand the physics of how they got here once we learn about it.

An ant is severely limited by biology, for the most part it can not really learn or understand things on an abstract level. Humans on the other hand very much can, if aliens can travel faster than light by exploiting some new physics we just need access to their Wikipedia.

That seems incredibly ungenerous, and low empathy. Even for regular human behavior. So, why, in this case?

There's even more respect, in the main, between people of different religious faiths.

So why? Because some big "Authority Agency with Capital A" has not come out and told everyone, "It's OK, it's OK for you to think this is true now, because we can tell you, we checked, and it's True." Is it really driven by fear of stigma and lack of endorsement by authority? Are we really all living in the Earth-centric, pre-Galileo, dark ages?

The sad, and I think the crazy, thing is, yes, to some extent we are still living in that time, with regard to human mindset and the manipulability of people in large groups via narratives and authority. Even in this age, with all our progress, all our tech, all our ideas and discussions and connectedness.

Like why are we trusting all these theorists and commentators over the people who say they have experience?

A striking parallel I think is with the Time's Up / Me Too movement. It strikes me that we as a society, used to, and in many ways still do, treat survivor's of abuse, domestic and sexual violence as "crazy UFO nuts", who no matter how many come forward, often at great personal cost, to share their stories, and to try to establish some equality, healing and justice. Despite this, and despite the obvious reality that (Ca) there must be some reality behind all these stories and (Cb) not all of these people are simply delusional or making things up, people are so ready and willing to just discount them, and to listen to all the theorists and commentators discounting their experiences.

What I wonder is, how can we as a society do that, and how can the people who judge them do that, when we, and those people judging them, have no idea either way, but are ready to do so, to these other human beings who may be at one of their most vulnerable times. Even when multiple people corroborate their stories.

So while it's a different set of stories, our reaction, and lack of consideration for these brave people, is strikingly similar. To me at least. Maybe now's ripe for a Time's Up or Me Too movement for people who's stories of UFO encounters and ET contact have been dismissed, minimized, discounted and ridiculed for too long. No?

The other thing I think is crazy, is how so many of us are prepared to dig in a position on this topic where none of has really has any idea what's going on. Stake out a tiny circle of our own certainty and say, "Now, here is the truth. All those who doubt me, are clearly nuts." Why does this topic trigger such idiotic, low-empathy and crazy behavior from otherwise extremely logical, balanced and productive individuals?

Most sightings can be easily explained with misinterpretations and mistakes just like Mick West shows.

Recent number of videos (gimbal, tic tac, ...) are probably released to muddy the waters and the Navy knows what they are showing.

The comments of course will be how it was obvious, documented for decades, and how they knew all along.

The Nimitz 2004 incident taken as a whole seems to be in a category by itself in terms of how difficult it is to explain.

Btw my father has a similar story to tell (but with a small ball of light that moved around the home and garden) so IMO there are some natural phenomena that we do not understand well and manifest as spherical lights,

If it is just a silent incandescent circle it is possible that you saw light from a car or other similar object reflecting on a fog/cloud or maybe temperature difference in the air.

A friend and I saw one when we were kids. I only came to find out what it was many years later. From the distance it looked no different than an airplane light until it got really close, around 30ft from us. It looked like a ball of white light, a bit larger than a basketball. There was no clear contour, like when you look at a very bright lamp. It made no noise whatsoever. We lost it from sight for a moment and it was gone.

I'm not totally sure but I think the sky was clear that night.