Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder how much some of these unidentified phenomena might be checked for some similar effects.

come on, man. at some point, after enough of these reports, toeing the line you're toeing starts to look ludicrous. these are trained observers, pilots who know what to expect in the sky. and do not take lightly that there is still a certain amount of embarrassment (a social cost) to even coming forward, so to even make this claim is still a brave act at this point.

At least watch this 60 Minutes short piece (NOTE: literally only 13 minutes of your time, not "an hour", although admittedly, the show's name might suggest otherwise) about this phenomenon with interviews with real Navy pilots before you assert things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY

View on HN

Darn it, I hate predictability. Why is it always, always, always "just watch this 'short' hour-long video of random people talking with fake authority and undeserved confidence", and never "here just check out this Cochrane meta study and review data & evidence linked"

(I made the mistake of clicking and now YouTube thinks I want to see "this man shows evidence usa possesses exotic matter", "real photos of JFK killer" and "Chilling alien messages encoded in ancient tombs". That's not the bubble I want to be in!! :-D)

Go to your history and delete it. I assume this does little to nothing for ads, but it definitely does affect suggestions.

I like the occasional "cute animal" video, but if you leave one in your history, YouTube becomes a cute animal machine.

Hah this is so true. I always watch stuff like this in an incognito mode browser.

Fascinating! I assumed it wouldn't work - sure they'd take it away from history view, but keep it as a data point regardless of deletion

The name of the show is 60 Minutes, a popular and generally reputable* US news program.

The actual clip is 13 minutes.

*Because I know it's coming, yes, they aren't perfect; but considering they've been going 55 years they're far better than most. I found they were pretty balanced in this clip - skeptical but not dismissive.

> just watch this 'short' hour-long video

it's literally a 13 minute video, man. The SHOW is named "60 Minutes" and it's rather legendary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes and it usually features a number of stories in that timeframe, not just 1. I hate predictability too, such as assuming I'm one of "those people forcing you to watch a whole hour of BS" just because you like being a debunker.

It's also dealing with US Military folks, which are an honorable lot (I served 4 years in the USAF, so I take these people seriously... integrity is HIGHLY HIGHLY encouraged)

Also, when you're dealing with eyewitness testimony in particular, video evidence is natural because the delivery of this type of communication is best done with the entire presentation of the person doing it, because words on paper alone are distorting.

Well said. In another comment thread there are two people slinging links to YouTube videos and criticizing legitimacy of the others’ linked video. I’m looking at both of the videos and I don’t recognize any of the people talking as experts of anything.

Also 60 minutes has a lot of credibility issues. And is not generally looked upon as a rigorous journalism source.

People will downvote because they don’t have any leg to stand on and when someone doesn’t agree with them they feel personally attacked. So they result to downvoting as a way of winning.

Apparently it's extremely hard for most people to land somewhere between "completely accepting" something and "completely dismissing" something. No one's asking you to "completely accept" a claim based only on this 60 Minutes piece, but let's suppose it has pushed the needle a little further away from "completely dismissing" for a bunch of people.

How many experienced sailors once reported seeing mermaids? Until we understand the source of these sightings, it's entirely plausible pilots are all seeing something that doesn't actually exist for some reason or another. We won't know why until the phenomena is no longer mysterious, but there's always a high likelihood a given unknown is mundane, as opposed to fantastical or extraterrestrial.

The article is right we need to destigmatize reporting and collect data: Because whether the origin of the issue is earthly or not, we need to understand it.

How many were ridiculed for telling about their sights of giant squid until the day the first one was caught?

giant squid have a biological premise; they're just bigger squid. Their origin can be strongly guessed. You would be smart to guess that there are bigger copies of nearly any remote species in the ocean.

we have yet to find a plethora of ocean-dwelling smaller mermaids and 'tic-tacs'. In fact, we've yet to discover solid evidence of the existence of either phenomena, regardless of size.

Chances start to diminish in the guessing game when you're trying to forecast the completely novel/unknown/under-witnessed.

'human effects' start to cloud things a lot more when we start talking about religion/ghouls/goblins/time-travelers/bainshees/sirens/etc.

mermaids are just women swimming in the ocean

Giant squid was dismissed as tall tales for hundreds of years.

Would a mermaid creature be something improbable to an ancient mariner, who hadn't even heard of anything like a monkey before he saw them with his own eyes?

> You would be smart to guess that there are bigger copies of nearly any remote species in the ocean.

Would you then say it is probable that species of giant shark exist to this day?

When mariners tell tails of giant squid so huge they can devour ships, they are rightly dismissed as tall tales. When they tell a story about a squid that was "about as big as a person but with really long tentacles", I don't think that ever got nearly as much ridicule.

They are much larger than a man, both in size and weight. And that's using those who have been caught. They are large enough to attack whales and small ships. I think there's more mythical creatures to be found in the ocean, specifically giant sharks.

>You would be smart to guess that there are bigger copies of nearly any remote species in the ocean.

And there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. Is it so unreasonable to guess that intelligent life arose more than once?

> Is it so unreasonable to guess that intelligent life arose more than once?

This is absolutely ludicrous. It doesn't matter how many stars are in the sky or how likely life bearing planets are in the galaxy. There's a vast gulf between "life exists on multiple planets in the galaxy" and "that life is flying around Earth in little metal spaceships that defy all known physical laws".

>There's a vast gulf between "life exists on multiple planets in the galaxy" and "that life is flying around Earth in little metal spaceships that defy all known physical laws".

The universe is 13 billion years old. The Milky Way is about 100K lightyears across. Suppose another species could travel at 90% of light speed. Then we're looking at maybe 110,000 years necessary to colonize the galaxy -- only a tiny fraction of 13 billion years.

I've been following this UAP stuff for a while, and as far as I can tell no one is claiming that the UAPs defy all known physical laws (i.e. I've seen no claims of violation of conservation of energy, 2nd law of thermodynamics, FTL travel, etc. -- though, someone should do the math on those transit times to check the FTL travel one). Just that the propulsion & cloaking work in ways we can't explain. Show Aristotle a jet fighter and he'll have a similar reaction.

Supposing that the UAPs arise from a civ that arose when the universe was about 12 billion years old, i.e. 1 billion years ago. That's about 1 billion years of technological development. Can we really put confident bounds on what could be achieved in terms of propulsion and cloaking with 1 billion years of research?

Not to mention, "that life is appearing to deliberately be almost completely elusive for no clear reason, in a way that's eerily similar to other superstitions like mermaids, fairies, Santa Claus, and Big foot."

Do active duty jet pilots report seeing mermaids, fairies, Santa Claus, or Big foot on a regular basis?

> mermaids

Professional sailors do.

> big foot

Professional park rangers do.

They're all full of shit by the way. Self-deluding or purposely tricking the public for laughs.

We've got defense bigwigs backing the jet pilots up. Are there corresponding bigwigs backing up the sailors/rangers?

Were the sailor/ranger claims treated as credible by a source at least as good as 60 Minutes?

Well they are seeing something There is video evidence which makes the mermaid analogue a bad one.

What the huh? Have you never seen Splash? Or the little mermaid? We have all sorts of video evidence. /s

I believe the generally accepted theory is sailors may have seen manatees. Which is to say, they saw something, just not what they thought they saw.

How long did it take until we confrimed ball lightning and the weird things it does? And then how much longer until we have an explanation?

Weird shit exists. Shrug.

However, eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable. We know and have proved this over and over and over.

The "problem" with pilots is that getting marked as "mentally unstable" can get you grounded. So, do you report every strange thing you think you see or not?

> How long did it take until we confrimed ball lightning and the weird things it does?

We still don't have direct evidence of ball lightning, but it's taken seriously nonetheless. The comparison is apt here.

I thought we finally captured real pictures of lightning doing weird "ball lightning-like" things given how many scientific monitoring cameras there now are.

I could be wrong, though, as I don't follow it scientifically.

Perhaps I should have chosen "rogue waves" instead as something weird that we had lots of eyewitness testimony of yet took us ages to finally confirm.

Wikipedia page lists one possible direct detection a few years ago, but that's still being debated. We have lab generated plasma phenomena that are similar to ball lightning but those conditions seem unlikely to exist in our natural environment.

> At least watch this 60 Minutes short piece about this phenomenon with interviews with real Navy pilots before you assert things like this

https://youtu.be/VCH7BWGpl5s

You know what takes literally infinite more courage? Being able to walk it back when absolutely spot on explanations are given by outside sources after you spend years on the conspiracy circut making your experience the central point of your entire identity.

There is no explanation that could ever get this guy to admit he was wrong. He's trapped.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com