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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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?

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