UFOs: What we learned from NASA's public meeting | Hacker News Reader

UFOs: What we learned from NASA's public meeting

bbc.com

25 pointsbeefman31 comments

I dislike that the article is filled with the false positive (FP) anecdotes. It’s important to state that there are many false positives, there must be. However, the focus should be on minimizing these FPs while maximizing true signal, and investigating these in depth. Everything that is potentially true signal, is what I want to read about, not something something microwaves during lunchtime.

True signal meaning aliens?

True signal meaning something that invites further research I guess

> "We have 50 to 100-ish new reports each month," said Sean Kirkpatrick, director of Nasa's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

> But he said the number of those sightings which are "possibly really anomalous" are 2% to 5% of the total database.

So... 1-2 per month that are even in the "possible" category, and given the anecdotes around lunch microwaves and "turns out it was a commercial aircraft" this is not going to be the all-revealing report some folks are looking for.

Kirkpatrick's slide notes of those UAP's typical characteristics: round, 1-4 meters diameter, white/silver/translucent, at 10K-30K feet altitude, up to Mach 2, no thermal exhaust

That is quite revealing in my book. Those are no conventionally powered "drones".

That's reported, not verified. It would say "tentacled oblong rectangle" if that's what got submitted.

Not quite true: it's what is reported typically.

You have to explain why so many people err in the same way, if you want to claim those reports to be counter-factual.

He shows a video of one of those "round" (rather spherical) objects. While not going at Mach 2 in that instance, it's clearly real and air-borne.

"So many"? I just quoted the part of the article that says it's 1-5 people per month with "possibly really anomalous" reports.

And no, it's neither clearly "real" nor "air-borne". What gets recorded on instruments, including video, is an imperfect reflection of what's happening, and to think that because something has been recorded means it's real is not accurate.

Kirkpatrick doesn't count those flying spheres as "really anomalous". I don't know why...

Your "It's not clearly real or airborne" is interesting. Technically, you are correct, but it's a remarkably absurd stretch here.

The level-headed approach would clearly be, to assume it was real and attain better data.

You never assume a claim as just real. You take the approach of a skeptic and attain all information before coming to a factual conclusion. If no conclusion is reached it is put in the pile of I don’t know.

You are describing ignorance, not skepticism. A scientist's occupation is examining that very pile of "I don't know".

I said, you assume the observation to be real. That does not say you already knew what it was.

The level headed approach is to handle an extraordinary claim with skepticism until an extraordinary level of evidence is presented.

Why are these videos always so grainy, out of focus, and otherwise unclear? Perhaps when clear and unambiguous video is captured there is no mystery…

"Extraordinary" is no scientific category, it's purely subjective bias based on limited knowledge, aka "ignorance". Basing (in)actions on ignorance and faulty logic is never advisible.

These objects exist in a domain of low observability due to common limitations of our sensor technology. Additionally, you assume them to be entirely passive and observed by uniform chance alone. Which presumably should lead to them turning up in somebody's living room. That is nonsense of course.

"Extraordinary" is absolutely a scientific "category", used to describe ideas that not only lack explanation given current understanding, but also substantially upend that current understanding.

These "objects" do not exist simply because recorded measurements could be explained by their existence. Without also providing a way to fit the existence of these objects into reproducible, falsifiable explanations that globally conform to all other theories of physics, biology, astronomy, chemistry, etc., what you have is nothing more than a wild claim.

In other words, "extraordinary" is a euphemism for lazy pseudoscience. Do the work before making the claim.

So there are sizable objects in Earth's atmosphere that do not belong to any known actor and display superior technological capability.

DoD, NASA & Co react with pointedly blasé attitude, pretending there was nothing remarkable about that.

Does HN buy into that?

I imagine they're blasé about it precisely because they know these belong to no known actor, so far, they haven't shown any kind of signs of aggression towards anyone.

So, I think, these are viewed more like animals than anything else. Is that the right approach? Maybe? But maybe if anyone tried to touch them, shoot them down or whatever, we don't know what kind of reaction we'd get from them.

Idle comment: the popular UFO/UAP discourse, has a major new strand predicated on the hypothesis that the phenomena are associated not with ETs in the "these are the ships they flew here in, or away craft from their mothership parked elsewhere in the solar system,"

but rather with some civilization whose presence in the solar system and indeed on earth predates our own,

which shades over in one subset, into a set of hypotheses about panspermia or humanity being engineered.

Some with these views parse official statements from a different direction than most, believing they discern carefully chosen language which plays to consensus ideas about what might be being investigated and what might be known.

Idle response: physics as we know it make using metal bricks to travel between star systems vanishingly unlikely. It's way too costly in terms of both energy/materials and time.

What I believe "wrap speed" technology will turn out to be, as well as the truth about the nature of life and ultimately our civilization, is that ancestral intelligence forms have learned to use much more ephemeral expressions capable of harnessing quantum entaglement-like interaction to travel and manipulate reality. Getting even more outlandish: I think this solves Fermi paradox as well as the enigma of how fast hunter-gatherer apes suddenly went from farming villages to orbital stations. We are a colony of such beings into more hoarse matter. They found an ecosystem, and figured out a way to inject people into it as a way to maybe imprison and/or re-educate unruly types.

And now our material techniques have advanced far enough that we can actually begin to detect some of their activities.

What I find frustrating is that the committee members state that out 800 cases in their database, only 2%~5% of them show "truly anomalous" properties, that they only have a limited number of sightings with high-quality data, and yet instead of showing that, they only show examples of low-quality data with no "anomalous properties".

We all understand that the vast amount of the examples they have will be misidentified jets or balloons, it is only to be expected, but that is of no interest to the audience. If there are high-quality observations of anomalous objects, that is what should be showcased, even if they remain unidentified.

I’m taking a different approach to disclosing UFOs If they did come out and say “ yeah we’ve known for a while” you have to realize that the world economy would crash.

Eventually there would be Instant transportation for everyone and Free energy for everyone

That is why disclosure will never happen until the powers that be all die off or something unimaginable happens.

My two cents.

Project blue beam

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