In a 1994 blackout, L.A. residents called 911 when they saw the Milky Way | Hacker News Reader

In a 1994 blackout, L.A. residents called 911 when they saw the Milky Way

timeline.com

24 pointsbriandear9 comments

That wasn't a 1994 "blackout", that was the 1994 6.7 earthquake which happened to black out the city. You're woken up at 4:30 by huge shaking to find the whole city blacked out, and see a glowing cloud of smoke (smog haze backlit by the stars and maybe moon [edit: there was a small sliver of moon]). Gonna call 911? You bet.

The linked article doesn't actually talk about the 911 calls. It links to a NYT article [1], then adds a bit of fluff.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/business/31essay.html

One could obviously make all sorts of jokes about the poor, de-nighted city slickers...

But my first serious thought is "given this data about deep and widespread human ignorance of the sky, how seriously should any report of a UFO be taken?"

(Using the word "seriously" to imply a "could be aliens spaceships!" sort of interpretation.)

Look into UFO/UAP forums/subreddits and watch any videos of their "sightings". They're all conventional aircraft, birds, bats, balloons, the ISS, StarLink trains, planets, stars, spotlights on low clouds, etc. With Chinese New Year coming up, the sky lantern sightings have been driving them nuts.

Nothing has intensified my skepticism more than looking at these sightings.

The biggest lol for me is when there's something that can't immediately be dismissed as an active duty aircraft, a lot of people INSIST it must be aliens. Any mention of weather balloon, lantern, drone, chromatic aberration from camera, etc is downvoted for trying to "hide the truth". Most on the UFO forums don't want answers they want validation.

> But my first serious thought is "given this data about deep and widespread human ignorance of the sky, how seriously should any report of a UFO be taken?"

Along with the deep and widespread human ignorance about our own senses, our own brains, camera technology and faults, military and scientific tech and compression artifacts: these reports should be taken extremely unseriously.

I agree, but it also interestingly at the same time gives me a conflicting thought - how can we be so confident that we know what's going on in/around our planet if such a huge percentage of the population doesn't have even the most basic knowledge about the topic?

I believe it.

I once had a temporary contract job working at an industrial facility in BackWater Alabama alongside a bunch of other contractors.

A frequent topic of discussion at work among those from big cities were all the amazing stars in the night sky that they had never seen before due to the ever present artificial light. We were able to reassure them it was all perfectly normal, no need to call 911.

It's a shame. I thought that my new early morning commute from a metro area to rather a small town a half hour away would offer me a chance to enjoy the stars. Nope, there's maybe a 5-minute stretch where the metro lights fade a bit before the lights of the plant blind you again.

I miss nowhere NM where I could head just a bit out of town and see the milky way. Even saw a green shooting star on the way to work one morning. During meteor showers, I'd see at least a couple every morning on the way to work. The green one just sticks out in my memory as an extra special memory.

That bears resemblance to the story of Asimov’s “Nightfall” from 1941. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_an...:

“Campbell asked Asimov to write the story after discussing with him a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!

Campbell's opinion was to the contrary: "I think men would go mad". He and Asimov chose the title together.”

The first photo in this article also makes me think “Close encounters of the third kind”, but I’m not sure it had such images. Maybe an earlier SF movie?

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