Hacker News Reader

And I'd add that in the last 20 years, we have increased by orders of magnitude people's ability to capture photos and video. Billions of people now have smartphones on their persons all the time. Billions!

But the evidence we have is somehow the same quality as before. So it seems that either space aliens have coincidentally gotten orders of magnitude better at avoiding recordings, or the explanation is not about what's out there, but about how people deal with things.

If Aliens can seemingly break all known laws of the physical universe to get to Earth, somehow I think they could probably evade as many mobile phone cameras as they want

Sure, but that doesn't explain why they got better at the exact rate our technology did.

It's much easier to blame it on gods or angels or devils or whatever. Which is basically what "aliens" means when they're treated as having extra-magic technology.

Im not really sure what your point is, your measuring Aliens in relation to Humans and our understanding of the universe. If Aliens did get to Earth most theories would imply that they have broken physical laws that we haven’t, so for all intents and purposes, they do have extra-magic technology.

Maybe they also have threat models and can adapt to our rate of change?

I don’t know, but thinking that we are the only part of the equation doesnt seem complete to me

Sure, now substitute "angels" for "Aliens" and you could ring doorbells on Sunday.

Have all the fantasies you like, of course. But don't please don't mistake it for a serious argument about what we are compelled to believe from evidence.

What we have is a long history of humans taking liminal phenomena and using it to justify believe in quasi-anthropomorphic entities that are just out of sight. Fairies, angels, demons, ghosts, aliens, etc. The names change, the "evidence" changes, but the belief is a constant. But after literal centuries, somehow the evidence always melts away, and the angels/aliens always stay conveniently unproven but still somehow believed in despite the ever-expanding range of what we can now observe and prove.

If you were a godbotherer, the theological term for what you're doing is "god of the gaps". But that's both bad theology and bad science.

You made the assumption that our human technology could outpace aliens, you said it yourself. The context of this discussion is based on unidentified aerial phenomena in our sky's as disclosed by the US government and so we are naturally making assumptions based on this evidence. That is all this discussion is about, its not based on some mystical religious gap filler.

My argument is predicated on that if the evidence does hold up, and _if_ Aliens did get to Earth, and _if_ these events are otherworldly then by that token whats to say they couldn't evade our technologies or choose to be detected when they desired?

Ok? And if pigs had wings they'd be pigeons. If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle.

I agree you can imagine an alien that continues to neatly fit inside the evidentiary gaps despite the rapid pace which those gaps have evolved over the last couple hundred years. I can do that too. My imaginary aliens are just jerks who like taunting us. They always had the capacity to be unobserved, but have consistently maintained a level of liminal, unconfirmable hints because they are here to fuck with us. Please look for my book, "4chan of the Skies" which will come out in April 2024.

But I don't anybody should take either kind of aliens-of-the-gaps seriously, because I think the much simpler explanation is that it's the same kind of fill-the-gaps-with-boogeymen that humans have been doing since Zeus was dreamed up to explain thunder.

I think you are really missing the point here. I'm not debating with you if aliens exist or not, my original comment was simply a thought experiment about what state of technology aliens would have access to in the hypothetical scenario that they were here, an assumption, and this is based on the idea that they likely have technology that is superior to ours, because they likely traversed millions of light years to get here.

Is it really that hard?

No, I think you're missing the point here. Because one, that's an unevidenced hypothetical that is basically a fantasy. I am not obliged to give it any weight. And two, if I did, it does not explain why UFOs have remained always liminal despite our rapidly advancing technology to track and record things. If shy aliens were vastly superior, we'd never detect them at all. If they were at some lower but constant level of technology, we'd detect them more over time. But for some mysterious reason, they were just as detectable in 1953 as they are in 2023. Your "aliens r smart" theory does not explain that at all, and so it's not helpful. And it's especially not helpful as a reply to my original point, which you do not yet seem to have taken on board.

https://xkcd.com/2572/

Yes, exactly that!

I think if UAP's can evade active radars and somehow were caught doing crazy speeds by airforce equipment alone, its quite possible the 2$ phone camera won't capture a thing going at 5 mach.

It's amazing how many people believe that aliens are constantly flitting across our skies. I constantly wonder what the psyche is like of people who believe that kind of thing and what makes them so confident in it despite all the counter-veiling evidence.

It seems to fool some of the most intelligent people the most and I'm not quite sure why.

All of that falls flat when you assume the phenomenon itself is intelligent.

So it's no surprise in the age of smartphones we don't see increased footage.

The evidence is out there. Don't be surprised you don't get it when you don't look into it and evaluate the evidence for yourself.

If you're interested, see UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record by Leslie Kean.

I had and lost interest years and years ago. It's the same thing it's always been. A bunch of made-for-TV drama nonsense.

The people that believe this stuff are the same types that think 9/11 was an inside job, that we didn't land on the moon, that 5G or wifi cause mental problems, or believe in crystal power. No matter how much you show them they'll continue to believe in their myth. It's a replacement for religion.

Oh and there's a decent amount to be made on talk series sales and book sales if you can cough up an "I saw an alien" story that sounds good and make some good money by selling to the above audience.

If your only engagement with UFOs is that which is perpetuated by popular media, it should come no surprise to you that your understanding of the matter is surface level. For that reason I am entirely sympathetic to your point of view, which is shared by many, but I am here to say that there is evidence of the contrary, and that you should not be so certain this is all "nonsense".

> A bunch of made-for-TV drama nonsense.

When there is opportunity, there are opportunists. The important distinction is to realize the phenomena can be true, and also for grifters to leverage the phenomenon for personal gain.

At this point, I will say that if one endeavors to truly dive deep into the subject matter and arrive to lumping the UFO phenomenon with other conspiracy theories writ large, then it is a failure in epistemic ability.

As a rational, scientific, agnostic person, I am telling you that the UFO phenomenon is grounded, as incredulous it may be.

I’m also skeptical of these reports, but I think you’re being maybe a little smug here, and you’ve overextended yourself a bit as well in a few places. So I’m going to play devils advocate and nitpick a few points.

> The F-18 have boxes like the AN/ASQ-228. A multi-sensor, electro-optical targeting pod with thermographic camera, low-light television camera, target laser rangefinder/laser designator, and laser spot tracker with a range of 40 miles. But all images we get from these UFO look they were taken with a cheap grainy amateur camera...

Have you ever seen gun camera footage from a fighter jet? Or thermal camera footage in general? That’s what it all looks like, especially at high levels of zoom. Also, I don’t even know how the laser designator is supposed to improve the image quality.

This stuff isn’t designed to capture footage for a Top Gun movie, it’s designed to detect targets, primarily using parts of the spectrum that are invisible to the human eye.

> These UFO seem obsessed with the US military and the United States.

Setting aside the possibility that other countries might be keeping sightings secret….

The US Air Force is the biggest in the world. The second biggest air force in the world is the US Navy. And they are also two of the best trained air forces in the world, measured in flight hours per pilot. Which means the US is overwhelmingly in the lead when it comes to cumulative military flight hours.

As you pointed out, military aircraft tend to have sophisticated targeting sensors that aren’t installed aboard commercial airliners. Specifically, air superiority fighters have targeting sensors that are designed to detect and lock onto other targets that are in the air. Spy satellites are looking at the ground, while observatories and amateur astronomers are gazing into the stars, but fighter jets are uniquely positioned to look for flying objects in the air.

And when it comes to the ocean that covers about 2/3 of the earth’s surface, the US Navy is practically the only group of people flying fighter jets over that area. The US has eleven supercarriers; the most any other country has is one. Some countries have smaller aircraft carriers, but the US has some of those as well.

I don’t know what’s going on here, and I very much doubt that it’s aliens, but there are plenty of reasons that US Navy fighter pilots would notice this sort of thing and report it more than anyone else.

> Maybe the Chinese Balloon was an attempt to trigger them.

Now this is the game-behind-the-game “conspiracy” stuff I can get behind. Great idea/thread to pull on there. Much better than aliens. It seems “obvious” to me that the extraterrestrial thing is a coordinated effort. Likely the US is testing its capabilities against itself.

My theory is that the wealthy and secret fraternities who put their men in government and politics always need controversial subjects so that they can push hidden agendas behind them. Orchestration can be easy: just a handful of people know the truth, some execute knowingly, the rest are unknowingly part of the story. It could be useful to think why they need this UFO story to resurface. Better weapons and more funding? The aliens are the masters who ask for peace and a global government? The Overton Window has already widened. Once people accept the idea of UFOs/aliens, they will start accepting more crazy ideas. Not implying there is an evil plan. Maybe there is a good plan for a better world, and the only instruments are these kind of stories that keep us in a state of wonder. They've been cooking this UFO stuff for decades. Curios to see where it ends or what's born out of it.

But it seems there are evidence and trustworthy people talking about these UFO sightings. Maybe they're true. Let's not forget that the Covid story was also true, but way more convincing that it should've been. What did they gain? More money and control. Who benefited? Everybody who joined the dance silently but knowingly: from Pfizer, WHO, to local governments, businessmen, medical staff, politicians, etc, to name a few. The whole Covid story is riddled with corruption, from top to bottom, in every country of this world. But everybody's happy: the elite at the top ruled out their plan, those at the middle executed and made a profit, while those at the bottom paid the price and are glad to be alive. 3 years ago this sounded like a crazy conspiracy, but the reality of today is that they managed to pull it off in public! What's even more perverse is that even those people who feel there is something wrong, now they feel hopeless and will accept whatever life throws at them. Anyway they're always busy working to afford existence or that expensive and instagramable M6 BMW they want so much. Educated, domesticated, but sophisticated cattle.

Today we have deadly viruses, WW3, UFOs, draught and famine, climate change, economic crises. Too many things happening at once, no time to find the needle in the haystack, let's just trust the government and press when they start screaming at us again.

I'd love the truth that aliens are visiting us, that there is more to science than we know, but life taught me that humans are always behind any kind of story. Either fabricate, or use some real truths, but always leverage a backdoor to exploit the human mind. The backdoor is our reaction to fear and the exploit is the story. Fear is primal and many other feelings eventually boil down to fear, even love. Fear of loneliness, of hunger, of failure, of an unfulfilling life, of reject, of pain. Fear of the unknown.

Yep, because fear is the key to control and compliance. It's the oldest trick in the book. There has to be a kernel of truth in order to be effective.

Exactly. [redacted, i was wrong]

Dude. Loosen the tinfoil, it's affecting blood circulation to your brain.

If you spend three seconds looking at the URL, you'll figure out why the CIA hosts it. But here, I'll make it easy: https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/index.html

It’s unlikely a secret cabal runs the world. Too hard to keep such a thing airtight.

People often imagine secret societies with secret gatherings, doing bizarre rituals. This is why it's hard to imagine such cabals. But they do exist and might be pretty chill: people smoking cigars, drinking and discussing ways of making money from their position of power. We all do that. Happens that some are more rich and powerful

Yeah people can create “cartels” and leverage power cooperatively. But it’s unlikely there’s secret “top cartel” with no leaks and no challengers.

Rather than repeating antisemitic talking points, you can instead point at a weakness in human pattern recognition -- it's bad wrt to false positives. People see patterns that aren't there

What's antisemitic from my words? But you're correct: people see patterns, like me or you, and they're often wrong, but not always. The truth lurks in there somewhere. But that was just my theory based on personal experience and observation. I'm not interested in political, religious or racial discussions.

These are all tropes about (((JEWS)) historically, ((NEW WORLD ORDER) is ((JEWS)).

It's thinly veiled stuff to a lot of people.

Coincidental here I'm sure, but it can raise the hackles.

Especially 'secret fraternities', makes you think freemasons etc often used pejoratively by anti semites.

Just shedding some light here not making any accusations.

Strawman fallacy that happens all the time. You said globalist, you must be a racist anti-semite! So sad to see such drivel. You want to talk about the real "New World Order" and globalists it can be done, with plenty of citations and sources, but you don't want to hear that (to be fair, most don't) and would rather label any mention of this very real set of conspiracies as something horrible in order to justify ignorance of the subject matter while also attacking it.

Maybe HN is about ready for a more frank discussion on this topic, with the details layed out.

But he didn‘t use any of these words. It‘s you who reacts to a stereotype here, instantly connecting „secret worldwide control group“ with „of jewish faith“ or something - in your head. Not that I would follow the OPs opinion. Yes to smokescreens, corruption and instilling fear in people to control them. Only I think that we are not yet there, development-wise, for a group that could plan this deliberately. Ideology and power dynamics work by themselves, especially in the lawless secret services of this world (and I mean all of them, there are no good ones).

Some people seem to condemn these theories, while identifying with them and putting themselves at the center. It gives them power. People use this tactic often, but some become boring.

((Jews)) don't like when people say about them they rule the world, but the truth is they like it.

Same goes with Germans. ((Nazism)) is taboo and nobody talks about it, but the truth is they are proud of their history. Not about the killings, but proud of their might and power - they "almost succeeded".

Coming back, i had 0 antisemitic intentions

Huh. I did not think there was a ton of overlap between Freemasons and the Jewish community.

NWO is not quite as common as "Globalists", but you are correct.

Antisemitic?

And telescopes are awful at locating moving targets. Too narrow field of view

> At least 140 Countries in the World have sophisticated Air Forces with optical sensors. Hardly any noticed these anomalous phenomena..

Who says they don't? There's no conspiracy, but maybe national secrecy concerns

> But all images we get from these UFO look they were taken with a cheap grainy amateur camera...

You're getting the images they can declassifiy (and then again, for target tracking you don't need anything more fancy)

> The military have sensors capable to read a bus ticket on the floor of Moscow streets.

Again, the wrong thing to detect it

Some of these objections are so broad the exclude the possibility of a legit optical illusion.

Most of the stuff we see in space isn’t there. The day sky isn’t blue, the night sky isn’t black, stars don’t twinkle, etc.

Our military sensors are specifically trained to exclude most phenomena.

Is it so much to believe that optical illusion are common at high altitudes?

And that militaries don’t like their pilots “seeing things?”

Do what now? Those things you listed aren’t actually optical illusions, are they? Pretty sure the sky is actually blue.

Funny you should mention that one... https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankoberlein/2017/01/11/earth...

There’s nothing in the sky that’s actually blue. You won’t get blue stains on an aircraft.

It’s because of weird radiation thing that happens in many contexts. Including the irises of people with “blue” (transparent) eyes.

I think you have a very weird way of thinking about colour. Saying the sky is blue is no different than saying the ocean is blue. Water doesn't look blue when you get something wet either, and yet the ocean is blue.

A "weird radiation thing" is exactly how colour works.

I have a blue blanket that doesn’t leave blue stains on anything either. That’s not a robust definition of what it means for something to be a certain color.

Counterpoint: any civilization advanced enough for interplanetary travel is also smart enough to reveal itself when it WANTS to reveal itself. Cloaking and stealth are reasonably simpler technologies compared to traveling light years.

I mean, sure, but Occam's razor probably applies, no? Seems more likely that people occasionally misidentify something or hallucinate something or similar, than that there are interplanetary travelers who have both FTL travel and perfect cloaking abilities who come to earth, turn them off just long enough to fuck with a couple of people, then turn them back on and fly off.

Do people generally randomly hallucinate things? We don't get reports of flying spaghetti monsters. Only shiny craft in the sky. Perhaps people only hallucinate things that are on a certain level socially-acceptable to hallucinate?

Well, I don't think "lights in the sky" are a particular socially acceptable thing to hallucinate; I'm not sure seeing things that others don't believe were there is ever particularly socially acceptable. But it's still pretty common. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/hallucinations-wha...

As to "why shiny craft in the sky", we get patterns of light in the -vast- majority of situations. We have an optical system trained by millions of years to recognize patterns; throw in any sort of stimuli that doesn't fit the expected patterns, and our minds will still try and categorize it.

What you'll note we're not seeing are detailed craft with any sort of definition to them. As you say, no flying spaghetti monsters, but also not even something more complicated than an orb or a disk. Not even an orb with a decal on it. Not even as described, let alone the photo/videos. Just light and reflections. Even the Chinese surveillance balloon had more texture to it in its images and descriptions, and you'd at least think we'd have seen a spacecraft with some branding or customization, the equivalent of a Spitfire's Roundels or a shark's mouth decal or an identifier a la NCC-1701.

By this logic you can discredit anything people see. People commonly see cows. But, people also hallucinate orbs in the sky, so cows don't necessarily exist, do they?

So, back to my original point, if we focus on the relative number of sightings of two things, and exclude random other things, there's still a huge number of sightings of "shiny metal objects in the sky" compared (relatively) to "flying spaghetti-and-meatballs monster in the sky".

Three stars?

Most of this is out of a need by humans to feel like they're not alone in the universe.

Here is a recent paper by Ukrainian astronomers about UAP caught by their two major telescopes going Mach 15+ and doing an instantaneous u turn https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.17085

Most likely other astronomers have picked up events like this but discarded the data since it wasn’t matching what they were looking for, or the stigma pressured them to ignore it.

Discredited already: https://thedebrief.org/controversial-ukrainian-uap-study-sho...

That article is attempting to discredit the first paper the scientists put out by saying it’s most likely artillery from fighting.

The link I posted is the follow up paper by the same scientists rebuking the discredit. It contains more evidence from a longer timeline (dating back to 2018) and this new paper includes photos they captured of the flight path of the objects.

This paper still needs to be peer reviewed but it’s very interesting nonetheless

> But all images we get from these UFO look they were taken with a cheap grainy amateur camera...

And not only that. When they do pick up UFOs, they appear to be malfunctioning just for that specific recording, regardless of corroborating radar and visual confirmation.

I wonder if aliens supplied these sensor systems to make them malfunction whenever they're in the area.

I notice you keep saying "hardly any notice these phenomena", which is a tacit agreement that some do notice these phenomena and that therefore there's some phenomenon to explain. As long as we can all agree that there's something here that needs an explanation then that's fine.

Re: the astronomers not seeing anything

Well one of the storylines is that these things are coming out of the ocean, so in that sense, telescopes pointed at space aren't going to be of much help.

There are meteor detection cameras set up all over the country at various universities that record full sky images 24/7 365 days a year of anything that moves. They're even publicly available.

High-performance hobbyist drones are approaching UFO levels of performance.[1] Top speed of that one is well over 400MPH. One of those will cost you maybe US$8000. The triangular craft seen buzzing US Navy ships off the coast of California look a lot like those.

There's a huge range of remote controlled aerial vehicles you can buy now.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k

400 mph is way off from 40000mph, which is one of the speed estimates from an encounter.

My pet theory is that the UAP footage we've seen from the last few year is actually sensor warfare, i.e. spoofing

Speed is extremely easy to mistake if you have in your head that you're expecting objects of the size piloted by humans. Further if you're not triangulating the distance, any claims of speed are just pure nonsense.

Riiight, so the US military is unaware of the capabilities of drones, and also can't accurately say that UFOs appear to hit 40,000 MPH

UAPs have been seen since the 80s with the same unbelievable flight characteristics. They're not drones, at least not ours.

How do you discredit all the AATIP findings, Lt. Ryan Graves, Fravor... Etc.

Don't have to discredit they saw something to say it's not Aliens. And then, here is Fravor admitting on the record to pull off UFO pranks on camping sites:

(At correct time): https://youtu.be/Eco2s3-0zsQ?t=2942