No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal
thetimes.co.uk
thetimes.co.uk
> U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either
Sub header:
> A new report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge.
Those descriptions are a tectonic shift on the topic from the US government.
I haven't been following this closely. Why?
> In an unprecedented move, the US government is preparing to issue an unclassified report detailing what it knows about a series mysterious encounters with unidentified flying objects.
Um, why?
Just the "Motivation and Planning" category will reveal several reasons. My favorite is that there is almost no reason to go through the trouble of colonizing our planet, if you need any of our resources you can mine asteroids and no one will fight back. Unless of course the aliens are Evil.
If the aliens are millions of years ahead of us, it's pretty optimistic to think they'll take us into account at all, unless maybe as a mildly interesting subject of nature documentaries.
(1) The number of filters they've passed through without destroying themselves suggests that they've overcome tribalism. The late-stage species most prone to violence are also the ones most prone to self destruction before they developed the tech to traverse space and get to Earth.
We don't have good predictions on the destructive potential of future tech, but suppose that tech advances in 1000 years means that every individual can easily make a weapon as destructive as a nuke. If such advances are possible, only the species predisposed to peace will survive.
(2) Resource abundance from technology removes the selective pressure towards tribal conflict, in the same way that it achieved that for the evolution of bonobos. They are genetic bonobos, not chimps, and violence is anathema to their genetic predisposition (assuming they're biological). Aliens may not have been that way in their ancestral past, but they would evolve in that direction post abundance.
We can't know that - once you can spread to multiple planets, even planet-killer tech isn't an extinction-level event.
> selective pressure towards tribal conflict
Over thousands, or millions of years; not only that, but you have to have selective pressure against tribalism to actually remove the instinct. Otherwise there's no pressure, and it can remain, just like any other vestigial organ.
"even planet-killer tech isn't an extinction-level event."
You're right that a civilization that has violent tendencies may not self-destruct since it may turn out that the destructive potential of future technology is confined to the capacity of city-scale destruction instead of solar-system-scale destruction. Or they may escape their host planet quickly and diversify before nukes or whatever comes after nukes wipes them out.
But it seems to me that the probability of extinction is non-trivially positively correlated with violent and tribal tendencies once that civilization reaches our stage of development. And so that nudges the odds towards an advanced alien civilization being peaceful.
"Over thousands, or millions of years"
I believe it won't end up as a vestigial organ and will be actively selected against. Tribal conflict has a positive reward to the victor in a resource constrained environment but is negative sum over both parties. Without the payoff to the victor then all we are left with is a negative sum outcome which should be selected against. The only thing I'm not sure of is tribal conflict over reproductive capital, although I can imagine that technology could make that abundant as well.
From the genetic perspective of a male, a female's ability to reproduce is a scarce, excludable resource that they need for their genetic fitness and other men stand as roadblocks to obtaining that resource. That makes violence and conflict a valid way to improve the competitive odds of male A over male B.
In a future where gestation occurs outside of the womb in some bioengineered setup, that genetic pressure to compete between men will be lessened, which will be a force for peace.
I don't mean to talk about groups of people as resources, but for this topic in particular, since we're talking from the perspective of unconscious genes, I think it offers the most clarity.
It's all in the realm of speculation of course, with any proposal having quite a risk of anthropocentric (terracentric?) biases.
An organism (biological or otherwise) could have competing internal parts/models, and not be constrained by the mechanism by which natural selection operates now, i.e. biological reproduction.
So multiple subagents could compete within it, without posing an existential threat to the physical manifestation of the organism itself; somewhat analogous to redundant computers making decisions by consensus in e.g. spacecraft.
How so? Humans are capable of basic space travel already.
If they still wanted the biosphere intact afterwards, then they could alternatively deploy a targeted anti-human bioweapon.
https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2017/05/08/flying-saucers-th...
Heh. Are you really suggesting that after decades of disinterest, the US government is releasing this in order to...make people afraid of aliens? In order to increase taxse?
Or do I misunderstand what you mean?
I'm disputing that lying about aliens would be an effective or preferred strategy for doing so.
Like, a war against...whom? Is the voting public going to buy it? Cut me a break!
I had a Political Science professor in college who came from that school of IR thought who evangelized it, and then a couple of others who explicitly called it out and attacked it, which was shocking to me as a student. It feels like par for the course as a more jaded adult.
I've seen this sentiment expressed before, but it's never seemed persuasive. Seems to me that the only inherently peaceful alien race would be the one that never had the evolutionary pressure to compete for resources - and that seems like an impossible occurrence.
Not only that, but the moment that peaceful species encounters a non-peaceful species it would be wiped out, as evidenced by numerous extinct, or in the verge of being extinct, species on planet Earth. So peaceful species are going to be short lived and may not last much, in Universe times, to have too much contact with other species.
If you've mastered enough energy to arrive at another solar system in force, you already had to figure out how to live peacefully with many billions of individuals.
There's no reason to assume they would feel empathy towards other intelligent species. We coexist with intelligent animal species on Earth, and at best we consider their intelligence a novelty. If other apes began to speak and reason as we do, do you think we'd grant them property rights and a vote? No, we'd probably just slaughter them.
It seems more likely to me that an advanced alien species would see us the way we see animals, rather than as like themselves.
Not even advanced aliens can get around the laws of thermodynamics - that would take far more energy than any resource it creates could possibly be worth.
But, they wouldn't even need to, because they can find abundant supplies of whatever resources they wanted anywhere. Even in our own solar system, they would be far better off mining our asteroid belt and Jovian planets and not even acknowledging our existence.
Actually aliens being peaceful fails the logic test as evidenced by our experience with the only intelligent species we have encountered so far, humans.
- The US government has been studying this phenomenon for years and has recently managed to reverse engineer the technology to the degree it has real-world applications. To actually explain how we achieved those feats, it will be necessary for the public to understand where it originated from, since a lie would be obvious.
- There's some really (REALLY) bad news to share, and this is part of a rollout plan needed to be able to deliver that news in the way that would minimize it's net effect on our society. (For example, we're in a zoo. And we've hit some tripwires and are now no longer allowed to develop technology X, Y, or Z.)
This may be more of a reaction to Qanon and troll farms.
(Or I guess conversely they might be trying to distract people)
1. Up until sometime in the last decade or so, the UFO sightings that were not successfully explained as natural phenomenon or optical effects that made something ordinary like an airliner appear as something else were all accidental sightings of government projects.
2. Then sightings started that the government recognized as the same technology, except not from the government. Whatever it is the government was experimenting with that occasionally led to an accidental sighting is now being experimented with by someone else, and the government does not know who that is.
When it was just the government projects getting accidentally sighted, they wanted to discourage reports and discussion to try maintain secrecy. Now that someone else is doing similar work, they want to know who and how they got the technology. They need people to report and discuss sightings so they can try to get past the secrecy of whoever is doing these new experiments.
That or it really IS aliens, and we're just used to not believing the Pentagon, or U.S. govt... cause they haven't always looked out for our best interests (NSA / Snowden ring's a bell).
Can't prove a negative.
It would be trivially rejectable if we had any intel it was another country, for example.
If we could disprove Joe Biden was a human, and couldn't disprove he was a pod person, alien, ghost, or leprechaun, that indeed would be an interesting set of conditions.
I feel like you're purposefully conflating terms here.
Not at all. But go ahead and believe those fuzzy blobs (pictures of UFOs are somehow always fuzzy blobs) are aliens if you like.
Do you know why the UFO pictures are always fuzzy blobs? Because if they were clear pictures, we'd recognize they are birds/balloons/drones/Venus/whatever.
I think you might have gotten your usernames mixed up. I said I don't think they're aliens.
I don't disagree with you, I think every case of "alien" sightings are probably either camera artifacts or experimental aircrafts or people not knowing about how plane lights work.
It can (and has) actually. Whenever astrology has been tested, it has failed to hold any predictive properties. As such, it can be ruled out. You know this, because if you didn't then you wouldn't have used astrology as an example.
> Do you think this merits credulous attention from "serious" news media?
"Merits" is a loaded term and I don't think either of us are qualified to know what that means, but I'll take a shot at it.
This was an officially requested report by government officials that was requested by congress and a sizable chunk of the public. The report was released. People are interested in what the report has to say. If the news is there to report on what people find interesting, it certainly has met that criteria.
Now, what differentiates this from something like "The Weekly World News"? I think mostly who requested and released the report. This wasn't just some quack on Joe Rogan or Twitter or something, this was the United States Military: the most powerful and most-funded military on the planet.
I really do not think this is hard to parse, but just to be clear, here's an example: If I broke my leg tomorrow, and CNN reported on it, I would think "jeez, must be a slow news day". If Joe Biden broke his leg tomorrow, it would not be weird at all for CNN to report on it.
And so has the UFOs are aliens theory.
CNN isn't just reporting it, they're reporting it as credible. In fact, a "sizable chunk of the public" being interested in this is precisely because CNN (and some others) are reporting it as credible.
Welcome to CNN creating news, not just reporting it.
Is CNN irresponsible for presenting it as credible? I mean, I don't know, maybe, but the source isn't a quack from Twitter, it's congress and the military. What is CNN supposed to do, title their headline as "A bunch of bozos in the military think aliens are real LOLOLOL!!!!"?
Yes. Does CNN brag about following the science? Yes. Is CNN following the science here? Nope.
> What is CNN supposed to do, title their headline as "A bunch of bozos in the military think aliens are real LOLOLOL!!!!"?
For news that's not credible, yes. That is, if CNN itself wants to have any credibility.
For some perspective, CNN pretty much labeled everything the President of the United States said in the last 5 years as a lie. They're hardly afraid of doing that.
> I don't mean to be patronizing
You shouldn't believe everything authority figures tell you. UFOs are aliens should be pegging your bullshit detector.
I'm sorry but I really do not know how many times I need to repeat this, but as I have already said twice to you now: I do not think they are aliens. It does trigger my "bullshit detector." I never once claimed I believed in in extraterrestrials visiting earth, I never claimed that the videos congress is talking about are aliens. I feel like you're trying to group me in with morons like Alex Jones or Art Bell or something, and that's extremely dishonest, and since this is the second time you've done this in this thread, I have to think you're doing it on purpose.
Again, and I really want to make this clear, unambiguous, and easy to parse: I DO NOT THINK THE UFOS ARE ALIENS. It's probably a compression artifact or a drone or something. Please, please, please stop trying to put words into my mouth.
> Yes. Does CNN brag about following the science? Yes. Is CNN following the science here? Nope.
I'm hardly a fan of CNN but after about two decades of watching them on/off, I cannot recall a single instance of them "bragging" about "following the science". Admittedly I haven't watched it every day so it's possible I missed something.
The statement "Joe Biden is a pod person" is logically equivalent to the statement "All things that are not pod persons are not Joe Biden".
I've examined tens of thousands of things that were not pod persons and none of them were Joe Biden, thus providing evidence for the second statement, and hence for the first statement.
(For those curious about this kind of evidence, it is called the Raven paradox [1]).
You might not be able to "prove a negative" in the purely scientific sense, but you can rule out most options to effectively "prove a negative".
If, for example, Russia came out and took credit for these things, and showed working prototypes of these crafts, would that "prove" (in the truest, mathematical sense of the word) that they aren't aliens? No, I suppose Russia could have intercepted alien technology and pass it off as their own, but for any kind of practical purpose that would "prove" they aren't aliens to most rational people, and thus "prove" a negative.
a) You look like a human b) You write human language c) We have not seen any direct evidence for any kind of humanoid alien life, but we have seen lots of evidence for humans existing. d) If you were an alien spying on human culture, you wouldn't waste your time on Hacker News :).
Does this fully "rule out" the possibility of you being an alien? No, I suppose you could be an alien in a human skin suit who learned English, and maybe aliens are really interested in software engineering forums, but I can practically rule it out just playing the odds.
I just feel like it's extremely reductive to say "can't prove a negative," for which I provided a counter example.
We already have the navy on record validating the authenticity of some of the footage, combined with multi-sensor data and eye witness reports indicating something very strange is going on. We also have several government officials who are on record that they are genuinely concerned. What we need now is transparency so that a multiple discipline, open investigation can be carried out publicly without stonewalling and obfuscation.
There's no evidence they were made by aliens, leprechauns, or ghosts. But there's evidence they were made. Not that they are swamp gas or funny clouds. So lets get past that, and realize there's something seriously insane going on, and it implies there is, or was, a capacity for non-natural creation + engineering by non-humans.
My 2c is extra-terrestrial civ is less likely than co-terrestrial civ (subterrainean/ocean) - but lets stop talking about this like they are hallucinations or possible atmospheric phenomenon.
Why?
This whole thing reminds me a bit of the "Havana Syndrome", in that:
- It's an extraordinary claim, presented with limited evidence.
- It defies obvious logical explanation (i.e., a motive).
- The phenomenon lacks a clear definition, leaving the door open for multiple disparate phenomena with different causes to be lumped together.
I believe the third aspect is really underemphasized as a causal factor in "hard to explain" phenomena: because this may in fact be multiple different phenomena, with different causes, it's likely that any single mundane explanation does not explain all observations, and thus appears to be a weaker explanation than it is.
This is sort of a "defender's dilemma" of strange phenomena: if you can't explain all of them, you appear to be unable to explain them. But because of the aforementioned definitional problem, that's not necessarily a surprising or meaningful thing.
To your specific point: the idea of a co-terrestrial civilization is extraordinary. I struggle to imagine the only evidence would be a few spurious radar signatures and odd videos.
- Multiple expert witnesses, usually pilots or radar operators, getting visual and sensor confirmation from multiple vantage points
- Air and ground tracking
- High cohesion and consistency (in terms of object size, cardinality, dynamics, and timing) between the witness reports
Taken together, these reports form a closure over the set of plausible explanations that should approximately explain all or none of them. My 2c is that any plausible explanations are by and large "big" and non-trivial ones like shared delusions.
But of course alien civilizations—or (non-human?) co-terrestrial civilizations—are such an extraordinary hypothesis that I do not see why they should be treated as more plausible than (as you note) something like shared delusions.
Let me expand upon that a bit. My (tongue in cheek) explanation is this:
Humans have an undiscovered facility for shared perceptual delusions and (seemingly deliberate) confabulation. That is to say, individuals with shared cultural contexts may respond to the same environmental triggers (weird reflections, social stressors, I don't know!) by hallucinating the same things. Moreover, upon experiencing such a hallucination, some subjects will confabulate corroboratory evidence, perhaps even (unconsciously) going so far as to tamper with radar recordings or (unconsciously) colluding with other "witnesses"—and individuals who engage in this confabulation have no memory or recollection of it later.
This is a totally wild explanation, and I don't actually believe it. But is it as plausible as alien civilizations? I sorta think so!
Given the amount of evidence released so far, which seems more likely?
- Alien civilization
- Some other form of hyper-advanced technology
- The U.S. Military and/or various U.S. intelligence agencies are perpetrating a hoax in order to further some kind of strategic goal
I know which one I'm picking, barring much more widely acknowledged and damning evidence.
To be clear, I'm fairly conspiracy-friendly. I am just very skeptical of this new tech angle.
More reports from states that have obviously opposed the US would definitely make me think more about the veracity of the leaked "evidence".
(No pain no gain)
can't speak to a), but as for b), it is possible that what they are and what they appear to be are very different things. Imagine, say, a drone swarm with a very flat profile that could turn their surfaces towards a target and tighten up to present a radar cross section and become highly visible, but could flip to an edge-on position and disperse to disappear to both eyes and instruments. Two such swarms could easily mimic an instantaneous movement over a large distance, among other effects.
In other words, they might be moderately more advanced technology masquerading as ludicrously more advanced technology, presenting the appearance of a threat far greater than their inventors can actually produce.
Could also be a novel stealth mechanism screwing with our sensors.
The possibility of these things being extraterrestrial in origin does not seem that farfetched, honestly. If you assume something like a Von Neumann probe [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Vo...] to be possible (and I totally think one day we would make those), then the idea that someone else has already made one an that they are sitting around watching us, is not something that should be so easily dismissed.
No telling what these are, but I think the people assuming that some how human visual confirmation, video confirmation, multiple radar confirmation (on ship and in air), as well as Infrared confirmation of the same should shut up the "it's a camera artifact" or "sailor spinning tales" folks. Anyone care to do the math on how such a byzantine fault tolerant system could fail in so many different distinct cases over the last decade?
The ocean would be most likely (subterranean would be much more visible for any access points, by satellite and land-mapping LIDAR, or seismographs detecting underground industrial activity). But we get detritus washing up all the time on shores; for example, Japanese debris from the earthquake landed on western North American shores.
How does an aquatic super-civilization exist for hundreds (presumably thousands) of years with absolutely zero debris arriving on shores, or any evidence of mining or other industrial activity that would be required?
Interstellar seems more likely but of course we have the challenges of time and distance to explain.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-e...
Maybe they're happy with the status quo. Or maybe it's a benevolant group (not anyone's adversary).
Or maybe it's ours (the U.S.) and it's being released this way as to pretend it's not ours.
Is there? Everyone is overlooking the possibility that these 'crafts' are the aliens. They need not even be intelligent. If something evolved to overcome gravitation it would make sense that it did so in an environment where this was necessary for survival. What we think of as advanced technology might, in the context of living near a black hole, simply be the equivalent of evolving a first primitive method of propulsion, like a fin.
Strong words for what’s essentially a blurry black dot on a grainy black and white video.
It’s 2021, until we see a clear video of an actual vehicle that looks like something other than a blurry smudge I’m not believing anything.
So they have no evidence that it's aliens, no evidence that it's US military technology, and no evidence that it's foreign technology. In other words nothing new has been discovered and we're still at square 1. Not really news, but I guess it's good to keep us updated.
If there is even a shred of evidence these are not sensor artefacts, that's square 2. It means we are contending with real objects. Maybe not flying ones, but objects nonetheless. That merits attention. (And funding, which I imagine is the point of all this.)
Visual confirmation is helpful. It doesn't rule out atmospheric effects. Radar is the missing piece. If we have a radar hit, something interesting is going on.
That’s extremely interesting and frankly I cannot think of anything except for maybe sophon-level technology (fictional concept from the Three Body Problem trilogy) that could spoof both visual human sight while concurrently spoofing multiple sensors.
I’m skeptical as hell about stuff like this, but I’m really struggling to see how this could be anything that could have been produced/faked by human-level technology.
> In one encounter, strange objects — one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind — appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast.
I don't place a lot of trust into reports from a single pilot out at sea because of how widespread and wacky some visual phenomenon can look to the naked eye (and even to some sensory systems). Even two pilots in separate crafts might see the same illusion. In many ways these are similar to the old fuzzy images of UFOs from fifty years ago - irreproducible results inhibit real science.
But with something this consistently observable, this close to a major metropolitan area, I'm genuinely surprised that more military or research crafts weren't sent to observe. With the full weight of the intelligence and scientific community on this - we could at least rule out some of the hypotheses.
This would explain: FLIR footage and close range radar, but no contact on long range radar. Would also explain why primarily Navy pilots have observed these objects while commercial pilots don't, and why they seem to be seldom seen over land. Also explains why all the sightings seem to be around the continental US. Also explains the lack of exhaust plumes. Also explains the lack of sonic booms (I know of no way a solid object could cross the sound barrier without a boom). Multiple such drones might also explain why they appear to travel faster than the fighters -- perhaps they are observing two identical craft.
All one has to do is discount the high-g claims as embellishment by pilots. I could be wrong, but I know of no way to account for all the observations.
Is it possible that there's some form of life that originates in the ocean, has evolved intelligence that is in a totally different paradigm than us, and this is their equivalent of going to "space"?
It makes sense in the macro-sense as well as we're very lucky to not be a water world in the habitable zone. Life evolved in the oceans far earlier than on land and we know very little about the ocean due to it's large size.
Does the U.S. report take a view on this? I'm not particularly swung by the extraterrestrial hypothesis. But I am curious if this is a classified project, domestic or foreign, or just a series of similar artefacts.
So the U.S. government is going through the trouble of declassification to reveal the limits of its sensors to adversaries?
From what we can tell, the reports categorise them as UFOs. That implies a non-artefact theory.
Amazing what camera artifacts can do, isn’t it?
Just amazing that camera artifacts can mess with human vision that much.
Oh wait, our eyes (and radar systems) aren’t cameras? Darn. There goes that idea.
Like imagine beings that can live at the very bottom of the ocean where the pressure is so high that it would just be too difficult for our devices to reach, but are themselves evolved enough to handle it :| IDK it's at least an interesting thought.
[EDIT]: We've only reached the "Challenger Depth" (bottom) a few times throughout history and they weren't huge mapping-type missions. It could also stand to reason they would build under the surface to avoid predators and such. It's a fun thought nevertheless. Much more fun to think about than just artifacts on a lens.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-pollution-idU...
Electricity generation, vehicle transport, dwellings, etc.
Probably completely ridiculous but would make a good movie.
Imagine the latest US military drone tech testing their drones by sending them over other US bases and doing weird stuff, flashing lights, making crazy patterns, etc, hoping for a funny report. But then: The base never reports anything. So the drone team has to go "oh crap, what else don't they notice?"
So to save face the gov launches a huge PR campaign saying "GUYS UFOS ARE REAL AND WE TAKE THEM VERY SERIOUSLY [so if you're in the air force please report when you see a weird light, thanks]"
(I have absolutely no evidence that this is remotely true)
Why? There are plenty of stars within a sub-light-speed radius since events that could've announced us to the galaxy: advent of radio, first nuclear tests, etc.
The odds someone is interested enough to spend truly mind boggling amounts of energy (literally moving hundreds of mountains worth) and hundred of years to check us out after one of those events - and not even say hi - is low. That they are also so close - also low. If they have some sort of magic drive tech (implied by the behavior of these drive sightings), then that changes the math a lot.
Most people mean ‘magic drive tech’ when they say FTL.
How could one even begin to make that kind of reasoning? Then the conclusion estimating the low probability is based on what? If I'd have to guess, I'd say otherwise - once a reasonably developed civilization (Kardashev type II and above) gets access to colossal amount of energy, there aren't that many things worth spending it (and attention in general) for. Life may or may not be plentiful around in the universe (it occured relatively shortly after Earth formation), but I'd bet sentient life is orders of magnitude more scarce, considering that it took billions for it to develop on Earth. That alone would make potential cradles for sentient life to be very interesting destinations to check once in a while. To provide here a relatable example, let's imagine a mostly desert continent, with a community living somewhere on its coast. At one point they develop enough capabilities to safely venture out in the desert and to make long journeys. How interested would they be in revisiting some oasis where they encountered some earthworms and small plants, and how interested would they be in revisiting a place (even across the continent, if that is what takes) with apes which happened to also exhibit some signs of primitive engineering?
P.S.: With all that, I still hope we're alone within a large enough vicinity, so we won't have to deal with anyone else for as long as our species exists.
There are roughly 1400 star systems within 50 light years of us [http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/50lys.html]
Which sounds like a lot. But there is estimated to be about 10 to 100 billion star systems in the Milky Way alone. So the odds that any of those stars are occupied by any excitijg neighbors is pretty low, unless the number of alien species+occupied star systems is mind bogglingly large. If there are 100 occupied star systems randomly dispersed in the galaxy meeting all these requirements, it would be one in 70,000 to 1 in 700,000 odds for instance.
Not great. And that is assuming a lot about how much energy they would be willing to expend. We’ve seen no evidence of anything resembling a Kardashev type civilization in the neighborhood.
If there is magic FTL tech, obviously everything is different. Also, who knows maybe we grew up next door to an equivalent to a intergalactic bus depot. That would also change things.
At least based on what we know now though, the tyranny of the rocket equation is rather complete, the distances involved in traveling between star systems so vast, and the energy requirements of even approaching C are so high that it is not a realistic thing to consider for life that works the way we do any time soon.
As for "we’ve seen no evidence of anything resembling a Kardashev type civilization in the neighborhood", although you're right, it's hardly useful to think in this frame. The available means that we had so far for observing anything in far away space were and still are pretty limited, for even inert phenomena. I'd say that counting on that to spot something sentient, where things are actively engineered, which may as well include engineering for the appearance itself, is overly optimistic.
If we’re trying to get something even somewhat defensible, there has to be some grounding on SOMETHING, or it’s all just fantasy.
If they spent 10k ly getting here, and the ungodly amount of energy and time it would take to do 20% of light speed over that distance, and they had since the great oxygenation event to notice us and get here (and have such a technological and energy advantage over us they were able to do it) - then why are they being seen randomly checking out military aircraft (not very smart or subtle it seems?) but never talk to anyone else? And show no other signs of existing?
Not impossible, but seems like a truly massive amount of energy and commitment of time over what far exceeds the timescales life as we know it works on to check out what could just be a puddle full of gooey algae for all they knew. And then potentially just sitting and watching for 100 million or a billion years.
At least seeing radio signals or a double flash from a nuke test means there is something like intelligent life?
Not really. Both of us were counting on current human knowledge, that our galaxy is this (light years) large, that the maximum speed is that of light and that an exponential amounts of energy is needed for each logarithmic increment of relativistic speed, that there is a working model for life based on what we call organic chemistry, that an atmosphere rich in a highly reactant element that is oxygen can not exist without something continuously producing it and what that could mean for an alien observer, all because, in the slim chance that we are the ones with technological head-start, that should serve as base ingredients for thinking about our long-term future external policy. I'm thinking if we are to become Kardashev type II (and above) civilization, what ought to be the best approach in dealing with an evolving galaxy? But yes, there are also aspects which are hard to think of now in more than hypothetical terms, like what would mean in practical terms to have access to (at least) a star's amount of energy and what it would be worth spending it on. To me, "to check out what could just be a puddle full of gooey algae" looks like a very important objective, and finding something underwhelming should be the desired result, safety wise.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_hig...
No, aliens (or alien-made un-aliened probes) being here wouldn't mean FTL is possible. It would imply very advanced societies are capable of diverting energy into projects with very long payoff windows, but not the existence of FTL travel.
"Huge discovery" is understanding that - FTL would imply that either causality doesn't hold, or that we've fundamentally misunderstood relativity.
In essence, the claim of “aliens” (particularly intelligent ones) is outlandish given our current understanding of the universe. Of course that could change in the future but speculating wildly about it now & reporting on it similarly is irresponsible.
And as for the lab virus theory, that’s a bad analogy. The zoonotic origin is more plausible but it’s probably like 2:1 or 10:1 odds against it being a lab escape. For aliens you’re looking at like 1000000:1 odds against.
Heck, humans from parallel dimensions seem more likely at the point where we’re wildly speculating without any evidence. Why is aliens the dominant theory?
I happen to know, of course.
Maybe this is just so unavoidable as a marketing/PR strategy these days that even the military feels compelled to participate?
Someone on earth made these.
I can't think of anything.
Fission bombs were widely believed to be physically possible, were developed in secret but used publicly within several years.
I do not beleive the military has some secret antigravity, inertia modifying technology or warp drive of whatever.
These things always start with basic physics. There is no known basic physics to support such things. Therefore it is extremely unlikely that the military simply developed them from theory to implementation in secret.
I really don't know enough about military history to answer the question but if a research lab had some kind of groundbreaking tech like this it would make sense to me for them to try to keep it under wraps.
It does seem unlikely that they'd be able to keep the secret this well though. I'll give you that.
Someone on reddit a while back asked how come UFO pics and video are always so shaky and blurry. The answer of course is that if it was high res and steady cam we'd quickly be able to identify what it was so it stops being a UFO.
It's kinda like asking how come all the cars in the scrap yard have been in accidents.
As others have stated, what makes this particular case so compelling isn't the video, it's the testimony of the people who were there, people who have a lot of credibility.
It's just bokeh:
Some of this stuff suggests someone fooling around with drones. But whose drones?
Skymagic [1], the drone show company, could create many of the effects seen.
1) Advanced and highly secretive technology developed by some government. 2) The same, but by a group within our own government, but off-budget and highly secret (think NSA in the bad old days when it didn't officially exist). 3) The same, but by a non-governmental group of industrialists or similar, but still terrestrial. 4) Aliens
Given the occurrence of these phenomena around military deployments, bases, and nuclear facilities, my money's on #1.
Defaulting to aliens seems attractive to those who presume the technology is too advanced, seemingly violating the laws of physics, and thus an exotic explanation is required. This is illogical.
If the objects are real, and (big) if they are violating the laws of physics as we know them, that means that our understanding of physics needs to be revised. Physics is physics. Explaining it as "aliens" doesn't explain anything. If the physics is wrong (or rather, incomplete, which we already know is the case), then there is no reason to presume that some terrestrial group would be incapable of making and leveraging discoveries that would enable it to create these craft/drones.
We are not lacking in historical examples of tremendous technical advances far outpacing the current understanding. Germany, during WWII, made tremendous advances with the jet engine and in rocketry, even in robotic analog guidance systems, that shocked the scientists in the US. To this day, much of what we acquired with Operation Paperclip is still classified. Why? I'm not going to speculate, but there must be a reason we still don't know what all was acquired from the Germans by the US and Russia.
The same thing could happen again. If new physical principles were, at some point, discovered, leveraged, and developed by some group (governmental or otherwise), they have had quite a few decades to improve on it. Think about how far technology and materials science has come in the public arena in the last 50 years. Add in some exotic discoveries, and some group with the resources to leverage them, and a terrestrial explanation becomes quite plausible. No aliens required.
One little issue here though. The current understanding of physics is the result of study performed on inert systems, under total (or big enough degree of) scientists' control. Areas which aren't easy to be subjected to experiments are avoided. (Among other things, choosing something like that would pose a high risk of loose speculation on the limited data sets at hand, and an even higher risk of results staying unverifiable by independent parties, both reflecting badly on the scientists involved.) When confronted with something hardly explainable like UFO reports, the easy way out is denial or questioning the source and information veracity.
The fact that it says that (at least some) encounters did actually occur and that they cannot be explained is already some news.
Let's ignore the alien-origin hypothesis and assume the report says that these were not camera artefacts. If that were the case, if these are, in fact, objects, then yes--it makes sense that they are observed most frequently (and credibly) by the military.
The constraints on something built to operate in the Earth’s atmosphere are much different than a ship that can actually cross interstellar distances.
So if we are seeing the equivalent of alien fighters (small, fast, highly maneuverable) there should also be the equivalent of an aircraft carrier which provides the long distance transport and logistics for these fighters.
If so, what the heck are they seeing out there?
Have other country’s militaries reported seeing anything?
(I would like to know the placement of the camera on the jet. Is it exposed to the elements, or protected inside the skin of the craft?)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/us/p...
The people, being free citizens of the universe, shall never be denied access to any information that may pertain to the existence of alien life.
https://www.livescience.com/58928-spherical-drone-display.ht...
I imagine the tech has improved some since
Uh oh. Vulcans incoming.
I remember when UFO sightings were relegated to the tabloids like The National Enquire. CNN has sunk to tabloid level.
Yesterday, CNN was flogging the UFO tabloid crap. What do you think that says about CNN's credibility about other topics? Don't you want to laugh when they unctuously say "follow the science"?
Note that personally I believe we should follow the science. But I laugh when CNN says it. Their pundits have no idea what science actually is.