UFOs exist in the low information zone
metabunk.org
metabunk.org
However, I'll continue to argue that the main evidence against extra terrestrial explanations for UFOs is how the creditability of sightings always seem to depend on first accepting that extra terrestrials are intergalactic trolls.
"It was playing with us that's why we couldn't get a good shot". "They have been interfering with technology at military bases for years". "They show up on our radar then they disappeared". "They lit up the night sky then sped off".
If your day job is at the nail factory, then you may not be the best judge of those pointy things growing on hawthorn trees.
Them being able to travel here doesn't imply they have significantly better technology than we do - it just means they had more time, perhaps their civilization is older than ours. 100k years older would be enough to send out a probe from some nearby stars. 1M years older would be enough to travel from thousands of not-so-nearby stars around.
Calling it a Low Information Zone doesn't really satisfy anything, outside of a new designation for something we can't identify. We've solved nothing outside of adding a semantic qualifier.
That is, there are always going to be objects that are too fuzzy to positively identify, no matter how good your sensors are. So you can always find some weird readings at the edge of intelligibility that could be anything. That's why Bigfoot videos are always blurry: clear videos are always not Bigfoot.
It would also be very easy to see them coming, because there is no stealth in space and they would need to be burning fuel and giving off heat, and doing so for tens of thousands of years or more.
And maybe I don't have unlimited sensors - so I want to see as much detail as possible.
That UFOs always are outside the identifiable camera range even as that range expands suggests that they are nothing special. It’s actual good (indirect) evidence for UFOs being nothing special.
The weather balloon that would not be detected at all before can now be detected as a UFO. As the range of sensors expands the LIV probably gets bigger too just because the radius is larger. The more sensitive and numerous the sensors, the more false positives you get.
Please pull yourself out of this mirage and away from falling prey to disinformation.
But none of the videos are like that. They're all from the LIZ, and the most likely explanation for this 'coincidence' is: they're unidentifiable because they're in the LIZ.
Targeting systems also don't have "Low Information Zones" for known objects. They enter a "Low Information Zone" when the craft they're targeting starts doing things that are unexplainable. Is the craft creating the LIZ in that case?
> what they're doing when they do see them.
They aren't shown to be doing anything strange. All of the videos show mundane movement. You're being tricked by parallax.
> extremely reputable people
It all boils down to "navy pilots wouldn't lie to me". It's a complete joke.
Says who? Did I miss the memo?
>It's a complete joke.
The Pentagon seems to take it seriously enough, even creating the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office to track "anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects." Least they're having a laugh with it!
I want to believe, but I agree with the author of the post that we need to see some evidence that's outside of the "Low Information Zone"
did you not read the article? what is "concerning" about "relatively high object doing 50 knots in one direction like a bird or a balloon"?
Reading between the lines, his point is that it's unlikely that ET only flys in people's LIZ.
Let's suppose there are two competing theories to explain the cause of the seasons. To the ancient Greeks, spring and summer signified the six months when Persephone returned from the Underworld, and her mother Demeter made the Earth bloom and grow bountiful after her absence. When Persephone left the company of the gods and returned to the Underworld, Demeter’s loss was expressed in the barrenness of autumn and winter.
Another theory is that Earth's axial tilt causes the seasons.
Now try to come at this for a second pretending you don't know the answer. Each accounts for the observations in different ways.
But the former is a malleable theory. Not because it's wrong--but because it's very malleable. For instance, the Greeks may not have known that the seasons are reversed between northern and southern hemispheres. If they observed this though, they wouldn't need to discard the theory. They can simply modify it to suit the new observation (perhaps Demeter visits the Southern hemisphere for six months and the northern hemisphere the other six).
In contrast, the Earth's tilt theory is strong. It accounts for the reason the seasons are different in the hemispheres. It explains why the sun's angle changes each day. It explains why the days get short in the winter.
If any single one of those observations were different, the theory would have to be discarded. It's a very fragile theory not because it's correct--but because if any of those observations were different, the theory would have to be discarded.
Now I think you know where I am going with this. The problem with the alien theory is exactly the same problem with Persephone. Any observation can be explained away or even taken as further proof. The theory is malleable. If the UFOs appear on RADAR, then it's proof they exist. If they don't appear on RADAR, it just shows they must be using alien technology to conceal. If they are in photos it's because they exist. If there are lack of photos, it's because they have invisibility technology. If they are only in blurry photos, it's because they only go where cameras are blurry, etc. That is, there really isn't any observation which can disprove them.
Consider also that there is nothing alien about the theory. Why can't they be angels? Or ghosts? I could easily replace every instance of 'alien' with 'ghost' and nothing would change.
(I first heard this distinction between fragile and malleable theories from Michael Shermer, though I cannot find a reference right now.)
Basically next-next-next-next generation of current car camouflage patterns (but active, not passive) or anti-surveillance streetwear.
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/fords-new-car-camouflage-...
One obvious solution is to fly a two seater plane, and put in the back seat a highly skilled fast pen artist so he can sketch a pen and paper detailed drawing of the UFO.
Extraordinary disbelief calls for extraordinary evidence, and that likely means repeated observations by multiple credible observers -- credible to the person in question, that is. It is a tall order without systematic funding to collect that data a la Project Galileo.
I remain on the fence. On the one hand, the publicly-available data is entirely unconvincing, while on the other hand the testimonies from high ranking officials to pilots are intriguing.
* Aliens (which in fairness, is the easy thing to accept here)
* Aliens that have the technology and means to travel vast distances to our solar system, and then on to earth
* (Alternatively) Aliens that have the technology and means to hide their presence in nearby solar systems and also still pretty good technology for traveling long distances
* A desire in these aliens to regularly and specifically visit earth (otherwise we wouldn't have sightings over such a long period of time)
* A desire to avoid being spotted by humans (otherwise we should surely expect far more of these sightings)
* A consistent inability in these aliens to avoid being spotted despite the aforementioned desire and technological capability (otherwise we would have no sightings at all)
* A very heterogenous set of equipment, vehicles, creatures, and patterns to account for the wide range of different reported sightings
* A desire by the government to keep this information hushed up (in fairness, this might not be required, but it seems insisted upon by every UFO believer I've ever heard)
* An inability by the government to keep this information hushed up
* A conscious choice by experts and the media to be sceptical of this story even when evidence is leaked or released
In fairness, all of this stuff could be true. If the evidence points to it, we should be willing to accept crazy claims like "this particle is actually also a wave" and "black holes exist". But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and repeated, consistent evidence. And that's what the whole "UFOs are aliens" lacks. There is a handful of circumstantial, fuzzy evidence from photos and videos that show wild things but aren't consistent with each other, and at best support one or two of the claims made above.
For me, that's the biggest issue here. It's not just accepting that some shiny ball of light might be an extraterrestrial vessel, it's also building a full theory out of that assumption that actually makes sense. Every interpretation I've seen requires so many crazy assumptions that it's very difficult to take the whole thing seriously at the end.
- the vastness of space
- the abundance of habitable worlds
- the age of the universe
- the speed with which tools like von Neumann probes could proliferate the galaxy
- the likelihood that somebody somewhere over millions of years would create a von Neumann probe (computer viruses didn't take long to make)
- the observation that we are here so why is no one else?
If we look around and see that we are alone, are we to assume no one else is there, or is it more likely they are and are hiding? There are good reasons to assume the group that comes to survive longest in the galaxy is also the one that is good at hiding. I think all these considerations more or less answer your first 5 points.
For some of the remaining points, maybe there are very few real alien sightings in the UFO reports but they are very few. The vast majority are hoaxes / confused. Government is not involved but maybe covering up the fact that they have detected some things they can't explain.
> - the likelihood that somebody somewhere over millions of years would create a von Neumann probe (computer viruses didn't take long to make)
The problem with this is no one has demonstrated any technology that can be used to make a von Neumann probe, and if you look at it from an engineering perspective, it's not clear that it's feasible at all. We are nowhere close to building machines that can build machines, much less ones that can do so when the inputs are "mine this rock", much less ones that can identify the rocks to be so mined, much less ones that are capable of being launched onto another planet, much less ones that can land on exoplanets, much less ones that can identify said exoplanets, much less ones that can remain in good working order for the entire journey.
That's... a lot of steps that need to be met for a von Neumann probe to be possible in the first place, almost none of which are demonstrable anytime soon. Should any one of those things be impossible, or merely impracticable, then that means von Neumann probes themselves are so. Until it's demonstrated that there's a good reason to think that von Neumann probes should be possible to construct, I don't think it's reasonable to argue that we should assume they already exist.
But the problem is with each premise you're making more assumptions, and as you get further those assumptions start contradicting each other. The aliens aren't making their presence known so clearly they want to hide in some way. But these super advanced aliens keep on getting spotted, so maybe they don't want to hide, or they're not that good at hiding? So maybe they don't have all that good technology? But now how do we get them to fly between solar systems to make the start of the theory work?
And the further down the list you go, the more assumptions start to contradict each other, or become a step to far. But all of the assumptions are necessary because otherwise there's a gaping flaw in the whole idea.
But I addressed this by saying they're not getting spotted. This is an orthogonal discussion to the UFO discussion which started this thread. I think the vast majority of UFO sightings have a terrestrial explanation.
There's other factors that contribute to not seeing life in the universe. We have extremely limited ability to obverse exoplanets, my understanding is an exoplanet we're looking at could have life and we wouldn't know it. I think we're best suited to detecting life that outputs recognizable radio signals in our direction, which should be rare among all life.
This right here is a huge issue. You get UFO believers who can't talk about UFOs without mentioning aliens.
But then you get disbelievers with the same problem! It's ridiculous and automatically calls into question individuals' claims of rationality or scientific intentions.
It's not an interesting thing to discuss. In fact, it's the most obvious, mundane, simple, and unsurprising explanation for UFO videos. It's so banal, it's not even worth mentioning.
That's why skeptics talk about how the alien-ufo conspiracies are bunk, and why conspiracists talk about little green men at Roswell. It's way more interesting then 'The Air Force is testing weird air-frames at Area 51' or 'Some pilot somewhere saw some Russian aircraft but couldn't identify it.' Everyone already knows they are testing weird air-frames at Area 51, and that Russians occasionally fly around in airplanes.
I get the feeling you think "ET/alien" or "human-made" are the only two possible choices?
I'm not hugely interested in figuring out which one of a million different, mundane explanations is responsible for any particular UFO sighting. There's a never-ending stream of those sightings, all of them very low-quality, and they never amount to anything interesting. Maybe some spy wonk somewhere three stories underneath the Pentagon has looking at them as his OKR, but I don't get paid for it!
Damn, some of my favorites aren't even here!
I think the never-amount-to perspective is interesting. It's very outcome-focused. IMO this psychology is not normally a great fit for UFO research, which is rather income-focused and outcome-distracted. So you get a diffusing effect and the most promising work is to be found in pockets and almost never in the big-picture view.
Etc.
The UFO hoaxers should probably spend some more time learning how to use Blender well. The most compelling videos are the real videos of LIZ objects. The videos which show anything clearly are uniformly laughably bad. I challenge you to link some videos that depict an apparent alien craft clearly which aren't obviously fake.
https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/video/Middle...
disclosed during the AARO public hearing
https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/hearings/to-receive-te...
on April 19th, 2023. Obviously not definitive proof, but high res footage of an anomalous craft with no visible means of propulsion.
Raw footage is linked there, too.
I'd love to see a UFO, but I'm always disappointed by the footage.
Edit: comments in the thread suggest it might be camera distortion, which seems more reasonable to me, but doesn't account for it appearing to go behind clouds.
I've found him to be methodical and well-thought, though occasionally "reaching", like his claim that the four F-18 fighter pilots all mistook the "tic-tac" actually being a balloon, or something to that effect.
And of course, eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco2s3-0zsQ&t=5207s&pp=ygUWam9...
The first thing we teach pilots is that they have to get comfortable with the fact that their eyes play tricks on them in flight. Our visual perception wasn't tuned for high speeds, high altitudes, and truly three-dimensional relationship assessment, and they're as prone to misinterpretation of things they didn't train on as everyone else is. If they say "That blob is a fighter-jet near the horizon's edge," I believe them; but if they say "I think that blob is a space alien," I don't because nobody knows what a space alien looks like (and "That doesn't look like anything I know" still doesn't imply "space alien").
I don't think this is accurate - "navy pilots" are domain experts in operation of navy aircraft.
What you are maybe getting confused here is that the three examples in the article are actually part of several domains, each of which is very different from aviation expertise.
The domains we're talking about include topics such as optical physics, radar physics (transmitters & receivers), optical sensor technology (and attendant physics), and digital processing including chipset hardware and software stack (and implementation of specific physics). Each of these are their own 'domain', which is important here because faulty implementation in any one of them can lead to such anomalies.
In general, navy pilots do not have that expertise, though I would very much like to hear the opinions of a navy pilot that is indeed 'expert' with all of these 'domains'.
getting a degree in aeronautics is not like passing a driving exam or heavy machinery license.
though I reject analyses that lean towards LGM, i recognise that people flying these aircraft have necessarily demonstrated enough advanced math and physics competency to understand well the boundary between known vs inexplicable physical phenomena. they are either deliberately ignoring their own training or else have some undiagnosed amnesia, instigated by sudden exposure to celebrity status.
They are domain experts in what they saw with their own eyes in their domain (the sky). The videos are just corroborating evidence.
I'm not a true believer by any means, but the claims are much more compelling than this post gives them credit for.
I've seen pilots with their head down in the targeting system saying some really really silly things that were obviously wrong when they got their eyes up and got some SA.
People tend to fall back on these videos as "expert proof" as if military witnesses are more reliable in some way... but they're not at all experts on atmospheric phenomenon, optics, UFOs, or a multitude of other things that could potentially explain these. When it comes to what they're seeing here the expertise ends at "not a plane"
By definition there’s low information. Where I grew up there was a ton of 1980s UFO sightings, generating lots of speculation. Later, we learned they were test Tomahawk cruise missiles that used to develop their terrain navigation system.
They are indeed real, UFOs, but that’s where it ends. We know of several different kinds, but we know not of their origin or how they work. Or at least that information is still sealed. The pentagon knows. Maybe not their communications department but the top brass knows, or at least has access to, the blue book files.
The Joe Rogan Experience video is such speculation that I cannot take any of it as fact. He jumps around in speculative ideas, descriptions and theories. Using titles or rank as a means of factual integrity is thin. It's still hearsay.
People want to believe, but the fact remains there is zero undisputed evidence for off-world UFOs.
Speculation is speculation, but he also methodically goes through exactly what he and others saw on the day the video was recorded.
> People want to believe, but the fact remains there is zero undisputed evidence for off-world UFOs.
I agree, but this is a compelling case of something, that according to multiple witnesses, seems to defy the laws of physics as we understand them. Saying it is aliens is speculation, saying it is something we do not understand is not.
People are paychologically inclined to dispute, dismiss and deride things conflicting with their convictions.
The crucial point is, few are distinguishing between "sombeody is against this" and "somebody has a rational argument against it". Arguments do not count more just by many repeating them. That is, they shouldn't.
Why would this ever be a useful qualification for any kind of evidence?
Seems like a simple troll with questionable intentions could in such a case easily undermine useful evidence of any quality.
I doubt it :)
But despite this, there’s budget planning, whistle blowers, leaks to the press, corruption, and political struggle. I’m completely positive that no human organisation can keep something so far reaching secret for a prolonged amount of time.
It'd be interesting to see a "time to disclosure" metric, of average times from classification to leak, to get a lower bound on secrecy, but it could only be reasonably considered a lower bound, the upper could be anywhere.
It's also possible agencies responsible for secrets may have worked hard to maintain an aura of being incompetent at keeping them, in order to hold an advantage over their adversaries by misdirecting efforts to the wrong areas.
Such potholes are sometimes more like utility trenches, however. And, well-meaning folks occasionally attempt to fill them in, more out of personal frustration than accurate perception of the circumstances, and are later discovered to be kind of dumb for doing so.
I like this response:
> The military complex is only going to release information to the public on a “need to know” basis. Does the public need to know? No. The reason. Because these objects posed no threat to the public, or to the military. [...] The military isn’t going to admit that their pilots pranked the media.
> The gross inaction and the stigma surrounding unexplained aerial phenomena as a whole has led to what appears to be the paralyzation of the systems designed to protect us and our most critical military technologies, pointing to a massive failure in U.S. military intelligence. This is a blind spot we ourselves literally created out of cultural taboos and a military-industrial complex that is ill-suited to foresee and counter a lower-end threat that is very hard to defend against.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones...