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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

Also people who don't understand what is or is not possible easily get confused about what is impossible / difficult versus possible / easy.

My guess is that a substantial fraction of otherwise competent American adults don't realise VTOL jet aircraft are a thing we can and have built for example, and that if one of them saw a prototype like the Flying Bedstead (Rolls Royce experimental platform, which doesn't look at all like an aeroplane since it doesn't need to) and was told (in jest) that's an alien spacecraft, they absolutely might believe that.

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I say this from an angle of religious tolerance but some people actually “believe in angels” etc, people will believe whatever they want

Angels, ghosts, UFOs, miracles all have the same characteristics. A person who seems very reasonable says they are sure that saw the thing, and they provide SOME circumstantial or grainy photographic evidence, but no one actually got a full resolution picture of the angel or ghost or UFO.

I doubt these people are lying. They actually saw something. Miracles are the easiest example to explain. Someone couldn't walk and then a saint said a prayer for them and they could walk again. It is pretty easy guess that it was a placebo effect or coincidence that the medical issue got better at the same time.

We have never seen someone with a X-Ray of a severed spine regain full walking ability after a prayer from a saint.

UFO's may exist, but it seems more likely that a combination of reflections, radar issues, tiredness/stress, "wanting to believe" caused them to see "something"

It seems likely to me that “seeing things” is consistent with the predictive processing model from cognitive neuroscience. To summarize: the retina error-corrects a simulation provided from the cortex.

Let’s say some visual details are fuzzy. With a strong enough Bayesian prior (e.g. belief in UFOs), the human perceptual apparatus could subjectively see things that look like UFOs.

Mind bending, but this seems to me a credible and popular theory of brain functioning. I’m no expert and new to the theory. Please correct me if I’m butchering it.

P.S. Like anyone, I often detect motion in my peripheral vision without much detail. Maybe once a year (or less), I see weird things that seem implausible, but only for brief instant. When I look, there is nothing unusual. Yes, bring on the “what are you smoking?” comments… but I assure you the answer is “nothing”.

> Recent empirical work from independent laboratories shows strong, overly precise priors can engender hallucinations in healthy subjects and that individuals who hallucinate in the real world are more susceptible to these laboratory phenomena.

https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S136...

Trends in Cognitive Science

OPINION | VOLUME 23, ISSUE 2, P114-127, FEBRUARY 2019

Hallucinations and Strong Priors

Philip R. Corlett, Guillermo Horga, Paul C. Fletcher, Ben Alderson-Day, Katharina Schmack, Albert R. Powers III

Open Access

Published: December 21, 2018

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.12.001

First of, this is completely off-topic, since the whistleblower reports being briefed on non-human technology in possession of the US, which is being intensively studied. Further, their related "sightings" are corroborated by multiple sensor systems simultaneously. And multiple pilots as well.

Now, your idea of hallucinations being an explanation for such sightings, obviously impossible due to said sensors systems in the first place, is utter bogus since not only do you not have "strong priors" in such a situation, you also do not employ people suffering from hallucinations as pilots for mulit-million dollar fighter jets to begin with.

Your article finally describes an entirely different phenomenon than "seeing an object consistently for an extended period of time". Which is what is relevant here.

You are not the final arbiter of what is on topic. Topics are subjective and connected cognitively differently by different people.

Also, in my view, my comment is directly on topic to the message it replies to. [1]

I’m curious about your user experience with Hacker News. Do you use the normal web interface or some other UI? I’m sorry to ask the obvious question, but I do want to rule it out: do you realize that comments are situated relative to the parent comment, right? Now, after factoring this in, do you see how my comment is a response to its parent?

If you’d like to think about it mathematically, try this. The original post could be characterized as having a topic vector in a many dimensional space. Each subsequent reply can be characterized similarly. As you get deeper in the conversation tree, the topic vectors diverge significantly. This does not mean a somewhat distant (in topic vector space) comment is “off-topic”. Quite to the contrary, it means the original post has generated a rich variety of discussion.

This said, I take your point that transitory perceptual errors do not explain all UFO sightings, nor do they directly bear on the whistleblower’s main claims.

One can make such a point without being prickly about it. I’m sorry that you seem upset here and in your comments generally across the threads here. I can relate to some degree; there is is a lot to be concerned about when it comes to the topics of evidence and people’s ability to evaluate truth claims.

I can also relate to prioritizing factual assessments at the expense of tact and empathy towards others. For many years of my life I did this, and it did not serve me well.

It is your responsibility to not take out on your frustrations on me or anyone else. Treat us with respect or your reputation may suffer.

If you manage a civil tone, I will engage with you further. Otherwise, I don’t see it being productive enough to warrant the effort.

To be specific, I suggest reviewing the HN Guideliness. In particular, strive to ask charitable clarification questions and avoid emotionally charged claims; e.g. that what I’m saying is bogus.

Lastly, you are making many assumptions which you then use to knock down straw men arguments.

Notes

[1] I say this based on a larger number of upvotes than I would expect on a comment this deep in the tree. This information is asymmetric; I recognize that you do not have access to it. I wonder what your assessment of this will be.

- If you think I’m lying, this would confirm what you want to believe about my comment being off topic and bogus.

- If you think I’m telling the truth, it would challenge your claims.

Sorry for digressing but having a formal tone comes off as predictable and like you've used AI to help you type. The best manipulation tactic when "responding to someone being dumb" is making the response sound like it came from an actual human and not from a professor or robot. And most UFO sightings are classified because other countries will assume that we are lunatics. America must keep the image of "we are strong and intelligent" to the public. Even hallucinating a weird tiktac in the sky without documentation is a UFO due to the acronym meaning Unidentified Flying Object. It's Unidentified. Doesn't mean it's an angel or alien, one could obviously be sleep deprived yet write about it like crazy, it's a flaw of entitlement. People assume they'll be the first to see it, so they start seeing things.

While this is not a well studied phenomenon, as in to the extent of having well formed theory, we do know that eyes constantly perform micromovements.

One of the prevailing hypotheses states that due to low inherent resolution of the retina these micromovements are used to create sort of sub-pixel resolution. Hence, visual cortex inherently works in predictive/generative mode with constant feedback correction. This hypothesis is sometimes used to explain phenomena like pareidolia and might as well be used to explain perception of UFOs.

> I often detect motion in my peripheral vision without much detail. Maybe once a year (or less), I see weird things that seem implausible, but only for brief instant. When I look, there is nothing unusual.

I want to elaborate on one personal experience I alluded to above. I am curious if others have experienced anything similar.

While driving at about 20 mph across some train tracks, I noticed in my left peripheral vision a parked vehicle with its rear door open. For a tiny instant, I perceived it roughly like dirt was “flowing out” of the car. When I looked more closely — and again, this happened in a fraction of a second — it was clear that a dog, probably a golden retriever, was jumping out.

So my first fleeting perceptual experience got the motion roughly correct (movement out of a back seat onto the ground) and color (light brown) correct. It got the object wrong.

From what I can tell, this is a consistent subjective experience with the predictive processing model. It seems to me if one did not subscribe to the predictive processing model, one would expect the brain to only register a vague blur.

I think it is also worth mentioning that in the days leading up to that experience I had a DIY project where I dug a deep hole, and I put a bucket in the bottom which I filled before lifting it out and dumping it. (This was more efficient than doing one shovel load at a time.) This digging was not an expedient process which could have led my brain to spend energy processing better ways to do it.

Yes, that seems right. Humans fill in the gaps. AI is similar, where it "hallucinates", but are humans that much different?

You are hallucinating complete nonsense here.

Just think for a second, if such a thing was possible, why would it be restricted to "UFOs"?

Obviously, such an illness would be well known.

First, your tone comes across as unnecessarily uncivil. Your comments could be rephrased to better promote curious discussion.

Second, I will respond in terms of the charitable substance of your comment. I think there is some useful back-and-forth to be had.

Please be specific: part is “complete nonsense” to you; which of the following applies?

1. You reject the predictive processing theory? Why?

2. You reject my characterization of the theory?

3. You reject my application of the theory to the example of seeing UFOs? For the reason you gave? Is there more?

4. What research have you done to support your knowledge and claims?

5. Have you read “Hallucinations and Strong Priors” in Trends in Cognitive Science [1]? I referenced it in nearby comment as well.

Penultimate point: correctly or incorrectly, I am using facts and reasoning in my above comment; I don’t see how this qualifies as “hallucination” in terms of an AI or human phenomenon.

Final point: there is considerable nuance and skill required to criticize effectively. In asking questions 1 through 3, I’m offering an example of a better way.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.12.001

Curious discussion is engaging on the topic at hand, not on completely unrelated nonsense, that you are no expert on anyway (as you professed yourself).

As already stated, the whistleblower does not fall at all in the context you are discussing here, as he reports having been briefed on research programs that study non-human technology.

Now, in the case of those sightings by military pilots, you have multiple sensor systems and multiple pilots involved simultaneously. Clearly impossible to be explained by your idea here.

But even in cases of single eye-witnesses, their sightings are often over extended periods of time, entirely incompatible with your paper.

> Curious discussion is engaging on the topic at hand, not on completely unrelated nonsense…

1. No. This interpretation of one HN Guideline is not accurate. Such a view would justify being non-charitable, which is incompatible with the guidelines more broadly.

Curious and charitable conversation should not stop because you think my comment is off-topic.

2. Regarding topicality; as I explained at length in another comment, as conversations evolve in a tree of comments, there may be considerable distance (in terms of a topic vector space) from the root. This is a normal and useful.

I’m certainly open and appreciative of someone adding to the conversation. You made a connection from my points to what you see is the central point. Your connection was ‘negative’ in the sense that you suggested my points about perceptions and priors does not apply to the original post. This sense of negative is not a problem, even though I disagree with some of your logic. But the way you did it — quite harshly — was unnecessary.

3. Each time you say “utter nonsense” or “bogus” (and the like) it comes across as insulting. Are you aware of this?

There are clearer phrases and terms to use that are not insulting. Depending on what you are trying to say, you might try:

- you could say you disagree (in the sense of a value judgment or a subjective matter)

- you could say that I’m making a logical or rational error

- you could say that something is not true, factually

- you could say that particular claim of mine is inconsistent with another claim

- you could say that I am not providing evidence or support for a claim

Onto a different point. You wrote:

> not on completely unrelated nonsense, that you are no expert on anyway (as you professed yourself).

4. Stating that I am not an expert in a particular cognitive science theory does not inherently disqualify the logic of my argument. It merely suggests an openness to learning if there are mistakes. Such an openness is indicative of humility and a tendency to not overreach.

As you can see in my other comments, I have recognized and agreed with some of your points. But these points have not contradicted or disproved what I wrote.

> if such a thing was possible, why would it be restricted to "UFOs"?

Who said it is? Tons of people report seeing all manner of nonsense.

The prevalence of mental illnesses leading to visual hallucination is very low actually.

The idea of whole departments in the US government being staffed with them is absurdist nonsense.

"normally functioning" brains see things that are not actually there ALL the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion

Most UFO reports fall into the Optical Illusion category rather than extreme schizophrenia.

> Most UFO reports fall into the Optical Illusion category

Indeed. Here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident you can listen to the audio recording of some soldiers investigating what happened at the site of a proposed UFO landing, where they observe weird lights and scorch marks on trees.

There's another page some guy set up where he posts photos he took himself at the site and even used screenshots from a TV interview of one of the witnesses of the event to clearly show that those lights were easily explain by surrounding structures (light house etc) and the marks on trees were probably left by lumberjacks.

I'm baffled how a bunch of trained soldiers investigating over several days can just "conclude" that it was all very mysterious stuff going on and that, despite it being clearly debunked, this event is still seen as THE UFO event in the UK.

Then again I have no idea how these latest videos of flying objects can be explained. To a lay person like myself it just seems completely crazy. How can a pilot claiming to see things fly at supersonic speeds doing impossible maneuvers be explained by a problem with the lens and / or "it's just a weather balloon". The "explanations" of it being ufos seem completely believable to me.

Optical illusions are not at all the same thing as visual hallucinations.

Your allegation about UFO reports is accordingly simply incorrect.

Right, so your point about people not having hallucinations frequently is valid. But most people do see optical illusions.

So it seems strange that you have jumped to the conclusion that these must be real UFOs since most people do not hallucinate.

I did not jump to that conclusion, you are putting words in my mouth.

The whistleblower reports of the existence of a research program that he was briefed about. He testifies this program was stuying non-human technology, among that functioning craft, aka "flying saucers".

The determination of it being non-human in orgin was due to extensive material analysis, evident morphology and working characteistics of those devices.

"Someone claims that someone else told him material exists that is from aliens."

> "Someone claims that someone else told him material exists that is from aliens."

I think I take your point: he doesn't have firsthand experience seeing the evidence.

That said, the quote "Someone claims that someone else told him material exists that is from aliens." doesn't by itself convey the significance of these other people being high ranking intelligence officials. A trained intelligence professional has much more analytical skill and credibility than a person randomly sampled from the U.S. population.

> The Debrief reported that Grusch’s knowledge of non-human materials and vehicles was based on “extensive interviews with high-level intelligence officials”. He said he had reported the existence of a UFO material “recovery program” to Congress.

> “Grusch said that the craft recovery operations are ongoing at various levels of activity and that he knows the specific individuals, current and former, who are involved,” the Debrief reported.

> In the Debrief article, Grusch does not say he has personally seen alien vehicles, nor does he say where they may be being stored. He asked the Debrief to withhold details of retaliation by government officials due to an ongoing investigation.

Maybe so, but presuming such a visual hallucination phenomena exists, who said it's limited to aliens? xpe didn't say it only manifests as UFO sightings. Besides UFOs, you've got tons of people claiming to see big foot, ghosts, monster fish, angels, ball lightning, etc...

Really low chances that the cameras and other 70 sensor arrays located across an entire fleet of the US Navy are hallucinating simultaneously that they seeing, detecting an UAP.

Or 20 UAPs zooming around, in and out from water, up and down from low Earth orbit in seconds.

You have the math backwards. It would be like saying that someone who guesses your 4 letter pin code is a mind reader because the likelihood of that is low.

You are not factoring in how many times he has tried to guess other people's pins. Or if some pins are more common than others.

Similarly here you are not factoring in how often an entire group of sensors has the same big and repots incorrect data at the same time in the same way. You are Cherry picking the one time the data looked like it might be a UFO. This is also a form of confirmation bias.

It's less of a hallucination and more like a mirage - there's some real stimulus but the mind grossly misinterprets it. Most people don't see mirages regularly, but anyone could see a mirage under the right circumstances.

> The idea of whole departments in the US government being staffed with them is absurdist nonsense.

Someone who works in astrophysics for a govt entity in the US told me they have such massive budgets that it's not uncommon to throw some of it to some weird department just as a favor or to keep up the public's interest in "space stuff". Another person (working at ESA) confirmed it, they both rolled their eyes and claimed it was all BS.

NOT saying this is definitive truth.

UFO sightings are much less interesting then abductions. Sightings require almost no effort and ultimately can be explained away. But people who claim to be abducted basically are giving up the assumption they will ever be taken seriously again. So why tell others? Are there some subset of abductees who were actually taken? We certainly do the same to other animals so there's no reason why it wouldn't be done to us.

> So why tell others?

Some people just like having the attention of other people, so it could still be an invented story just to have a great story to tell to the few that believe it.

While being ridculed by all the rest? You have a weird idea of "wanted attention".

Ask George Santos.

Maybe he so desperately wants his $500,000 bail guarantors to remain anonymous because they're aliens!

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/nyregion/george-santos-ba...

I mean, there sure are a lot of mentally unstable people who actively choose to detach from reality. To some, living in a fantasy land is as simple as ignoring the truth around you.

There’s also perverse monetary incentives.

“We need to increase tourism on the Town. Cowille business is booming since they had that Virgin Mary apparition. Anne-Marie, could that shape that you saw while tending the sheep be the Spirit of Saint Peter?”

Tangential, but we tend to bring up the placebo effect pretty quickly in medical discussions about what works and doesn't but actually a lot of what people say is the result of placebo is just not even placebo but "natural" resorption, that is your body doing the work. Placebo is measurable, it's whether taking a "fake" cure is better than "natural" resorption. For some affections, the effect is surprisingly important for others quite negligible.

> people will believe whatever they want

Yes. I was discussing something related to this with one of my young-adult children and I said something along the lines of "Some people don't actually like abstract or self-reflective thought. They prefer to just believe what they want to, or what's comforting to them, and not to think about it." I believe it hadn't really occurred to them so starkly before, and I felt kind of bad for that.

I am usually one to treat EVERYTHING with a very healthy dose of skepticism, but who are any of us to say what is possible or what is not? I'm sure that a century ago, space was just something we would never reach.

The US Military released rather intriguing, yet unexplained videos of objects outmaneuvering our top jets. You should go check those out. I've yet to see an explanation that covers all the data those jets collected.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, but instantly writing things off as 'tin foil hat' while the guy has an actual legit legal retaliation case going on seems a bit premature.

>but who are any of us to say what is possible or what is not?

This is the tragic sentence which is letting the parade of carnival animals in through the back door. In some sense it's true that intellectual humility is necessary as we allow ourselves to be challenged by ideas we thought not possible. But it's true the way hallmark card quotes are true, as vague generalities.

It does no work as a specific response to a specific set of facts, which should be determined by all kinds of specific contextual examinations. In that setting, it's an open-ended, unrestricted invitation to completely suspend all disbelief without any restraint or distinctions.

If the problem is not outside the bounds of known physics, then it should be considered plausible.

Otherwise, it is certainly not impossible, but pointless to speculate. If you enjoy speculating about such things, fill your boots, but realize that you are only doing it for your own amusement.

I think you mean possible rather than plausible? But otherwise I would say you're right, it's an exercise for personal amusement. But I think as you can see from elsewhere even in this thread, people slip into this mode of half-joking where they might as well be describing their ideas for Deus Ex fan missions, and the dividing line between serious engagement with evidence and make believe is breaking down.

I would argue that play is a highly valuable intellectual activity. Speculating for one’s amusement falls into that category and is therefore not worthless. A lot of great ideas come from playing around with strange ideas that aren’t obviously useful.

A thought experiment. The universe is extremely large and billions of years old. Let's imagine life has developed within a few of those billions of galaxies out there, then imagine this started 1 billion years before us. How advanced to you think we could get in another billion years (assuming we don't annihilate ourselves)? What's really impossible?

We have a pretty good idea about physics and can say with very high confidence that interstellar travel needs a lot of energy. That makes aliens visiting us with small crafts for fun an unlikely theory.

We think we have a pretty good idea about physics - just as cats have a pretty good idea about scratching posts and ants have a pretty good idea about scent trails.

Cats literally can't understand what the Internet is, and ants can't understand what a cat is.

It's astoundingly naive to assume we don't have equivalent cognitive limitations.

That is a classic argument that was already addressed "The Relativity of Wrong" by Asimov much more eloquently that what I could attempt. Google finds this copy: https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html

I don't think that article is really addressing the same argument. The argument Asimov is addressing seems to be whether human scientists will always disprove the previous century's human scientists.

The argument the poster above is making is that human scientists may be cognitively limited, and our species objectively stupid. You can't really definitively argue against this in an essay, because if you are a stupid person who is a member of a stupid species, your reasoning skills can't be trusted. You might argue it pragmatically makes sense to assume your species is smart enough to understand the universe, but that's a different argument than Asimov is making.

Asimov seems to assume humans are objectively an intelligent species so his reasoning skills can be trusted, which of course may not be wrong, but is pretty hard to prove.

If there were cognitive limitations you'd expect big holes in the theories we come up with unless you believe that for some reason we happen to be limited in a way that we observe a subset of the universe which is strangely internally consistent and shows essentially no signs of interaction with an bigger universe, yet alien species can somehow use the bigger universe to interact with our subset of the universe in a way that appears to be magic. I find that pretty far fetched.

There are big holes in the theories we come up with. The inability to reconcile QM and relativity is the most famous one. M-theory requires 11-dimensional spacetime, but no one has ever observed most of those dimensions. Recent astronomical measurements, if confirmed, may falsify parts of the standard model. The list is pretty long.

Well it pretty much goes without saying that we don't know what we don't know. But we could actually be getting close to learning everything there is to know about the laws of physics. Finishing them up in the next century or two doesn't seem like a big stretch.

I'm not a scientist, just a dumb dude watching Youtube. But there is a problem in physics with tests not being avaialble for stuff they're theorizing about. From my limited understanding, string theory currently has zero path to empirical research to prove or disprove. So it might take a bit longer than a century or two for that reason.

"pretty good idea" does leave some room though...

Maybe all you need to travel from one star to another is just a pair AA batteries, and a 5 min. journey. Hence, very small UFOs would be essentially drones managed from another star.

How could it be possible, well, you have to take a closer look to the probably underlying physics you can infer from the UFOs behavior. Probably the still secret videos from DoD have a lot more to offer than most of the currently available videos.

But for now we have these phenomena reported: - UFOs can go to full stop instantaneously, even if they are travelling at several times the speed of the sound - UFOs can go from fully static to several times the speed of the sound, instantaneously. - UFOs can remain fully stopped, seemingly unamovable, even under a hurricane. - UFOs can submerge almost instantaneously, almost with no "splash", even if they do at extraordinary velocities. - UFOs can travel underwater at the speed of the sound, or even more faster. - UFOs have been reported to go "into mountain bases", decades ago. - and the most important, UFOs have no apparent source of energy nor thrust, nor anything seeming usable as wings to remain in the air, or some rotors to move underwater.

Then, the physics? The UFOs are probably superdimensional entities / vehicles / vessels.

What we are seeing is maybe a fraction of the actual vessels, most of it located out of our three dimensional space, and you can see "here" is a small sphere of "metal". Maybe this spheres are just small arrays of sensors, from a way bigger unobservable vessel.

The evidence is empirical at most yet, maybe the still secret videos from DoD actually show clearly stuff or moves that reveal the superdimensional features, like a UFO "crashing" into solid rock, just to "re-emerge" from solid ground a couple of miles farther. Or maybe some time-related movements, like appearing / disappearing "from nothing".

If the UFOs are superdimensional capable vehicles, and our three dimensional universe actually has upper dimensions, maybe time itself is a physically traversable dimension, from a hypothetical 5th dimension. Hence, you could actually have FTL - Faster Than Light - travel, but without breaking any physics rules from the three dimensional space. You could be just "fastly walking" a couple of kilometers in maybe 15 minutes in the 5th dimensional space, and you could be displacing yourself several light years in the three dimensional space.

Then the energy required to do a multiple light year travel would be trivial, and the time required to displace yourself in the three dimensional space, too.

You could "jump" from star to star in maybe 5 minutes, using the energy from two AA batteries.

The consequences go far beyond that if the time is a physical dimension: you could go back and forward in time, just like you displace yourself in the three dimensional space. Hence the "time travel" thing remains impossible in three dimensions, but it is easily doable in 5 - or more - dimensions. Even closed loops are possible, because time as physical dimension would imply that "everything is happening at the same time", hence you could travel "backwards" in time and change something, and going back "forward" you'd find some things have changed.

What happens if you can also "travel" in time just as fastly, years in minutes, using just a pair of AA batteries? What if you can go back and change history? You could be changing stuff continously, improving at exponential pace. Maybe the aliens have done so, and they don't have "billions" of years of evolution, but have found a way to make the process faster.

Similarly, the implications of the existence of upper dimensions for the humans in its current level of technological evolution would be amazing. If you can displace solid matter like a plane, using an upper dimension, you could make traverse solid matter in the three dimensional space, maybe even not interacting at all with the solid matter: you could make vehicles capable of travelling throug solid rock mountains, or even traverse across the planet.

Some implications are just wow, if you can travel through solid matter in the three dimensional space or you can build vehicles capable of not interacting with mass in the three dimensional space, automagically most of the weapons and defense systems in the world became meaningless overnight. You could go inside any bank, any militar base, not worrying about missiles, bullets. You can't defend yourself by staying in three dimensional space, but in the upper dimensions you'd can't either: the enemy could travel in time and change its strategy to win this time, they'd just need some observer far away from the theather, assessing if the actions have had success or not, if not, go back, advise and repeat.

So, maybe the "first contact" isn't really the problem, but what happens if humanity suddenly realizes about new, radical advances in physics, available not only to super-powers and super-rich entities, but to anyone with a pair of AA batteries?

Almost no upper echelons of power in anywhere in the world would likely want the entire population know about as radically prone to sudden and profound changes in societies, as a discovery of the existence - and cheap accesibility - of upper dimensions, beyond the three dimensional space.

So you - maybe any super-power, nation states and private groups of powerful people - keep aliens out of sight from the general population, UFOs are psychological operations, not a thing like UFOs actually exist, whatever.

For that reason. You want nothing to change from what it is right now.

So it's probably just alien kids tooling around after school.

So Douglas Adams was right all along:

“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.” “Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

haha, could be, after all our kids play with ants,

and the ants most probably think that we are highly advanced entities.

and it doesn't take the kids too much energy nor technological resources - for the human technological level - to play with ants, but ants probably would see the kid's resources as incredible advanced, well beyond its current technological capabilities.

So yeah it could be 5th dimensional kids playing with us (ants from their perspective).

You can always have a louder laughter...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089114/

As far as we know there is no extradimensional space where you can hide matter/energy. So I find it unlikely that UFOs are "superdimensional entities". How would these dimensions interact with the dimensions we know?

I'm suggesting the UFOs could be the first widely public evidence of upper dimensions beyond our three dimensional space.

I'm thrilled about UFOs happily breaking several laws of physics in front of us, and we should be thinking about what are we missing, what's out of sight, beyond our current understanding of physics that the UFOs obviously manage and exploit.

The upper dimensions is just a - pretty obvious - hypothesis.

"How would these dimensions interact with the dimensions we know?"

I don't know, but whoever has built the UFOs, certainly knows.

Some ideas: because you should not be able to impact the ocean surface at mach 4 without obvious physical consequences, and not submerging almost with minimal to absent "splash", maybe those UFOs are just leaking some photons into our three dimensional space,

hence "submerging" could not be precisely what they are doing, maybe they are just re-locating the "output" of the vessel out of sight of the humans.

Also those "metallic orbes" look amazingly similar to some kind of "black hole" or singularity, maybe those things are not vessels at all, but just a hole opened to our three dimensional space, to watch us, study us. That would make sense about the "orbes" doing nothing but keep running from us, appearing aparently everywhere with some interesting stuff to look at.

Yeah, it's very plausible that if another civilization exists some 10 light years away, the vehicle they use to travel 90,460,730,472,580 Km in order to get to Earth has the size of a compact car and copies the design of a 1950s experimental aircraft.

> I've yet to see an explanation that covers all the data those jets collected.

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/c/mickwest. Mick has thoroughly investigated the most cited videos and shows them to be of entirely terrestrial origin - often atmospheric effects combined with optical lens, digital stabilization and thermal imaging artifacts. He even cites the technical documentation for the military camera equipment and often provides convincing demonstrations of the artifacts through recreations.

So you're telling me, some random game developer was more competent than the US military guys who literally are hired for such analysis?

I suppose, having coded some "parallax effect" is sufficient in your book?

Yes he is. Have you ever interacted with the military or other public org in a technical capacity?

The US military made no claims that these videos showed unexplainable phenomena. They just sort of put them out there.

The video they called "Gimbal" shows an artifact caused by a gimbal mechanism, for example

> So you're telling me, some random game developer was more competent than the US military guys who literally are hired for such analysis?

In the case of the most-cited "Gimbal" video, all the military has officially said is they can't determine for sure what the object the glare shown in the video is from. But everyone already agrees on that point. No one can tell from the video whether the glare shown is caused by an airplane many miles distant or some other object. No one representing the U.S. government has ever said the video could NOT be a magnified thermal glare from a distant airplane. Remember, the pilot never saw the object with his own eyes, it was far too distant to see visually even as a spec on the horizon. All the pilot ever saw was the same auto-tracking thermal video we've all seen.

> I suppose, having coded some "parallax effect" is sufficient in your book?

I don't know what you're referring to but it doesn't sound like Mick West's analysis video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs. Also, Mick only assembled the video. He acknowledges the evidence shown in the video is the work of many independent researchers working collaboratively over many months while iteratively sharing their data for peer review. There are links to all the source data shown as well as the entire open analysis discussion and review. The summary video is concise and only 20 minutes long. I challenge you to watch all of it and respond specifically. Which of the four points evidenced from the on-screen camera do you think is incorrect and why?

IMHO, it's inarguable the detailed analysis provides conclusive and verifiable evidence the object is precisely consistent with a glare from an extremely distant object with a thermal imaging 'halo' artifact around it. The apparent rotation and erratic movement of the thermal glare observed in the highly-magnified video is a combined artifact of a) the Raytheon multi-axis camera tracking gimbal system used on that jet, b) the optical stabilization system, and c) the digital de-rotation system.

If you respond, please at least give a clear "yes" or "no" as to whether you agree the apparent rotation is created by the rotating camera gimbal (which was then automatically digitally de-rotated) vs actual rotation of the distant object. If not, how do you explain all the obvious signs of gimbal rotation in the on-screen numeric data and the rest of the video frame around the center glare (eg the background clouds and sky)?

"but who are any of us to say what is possible or what is not"

It's usually not a 50/50 percent probability on whether something is possible or exists.

ECREE is a good rule to follow when trying to come up with probabilities lacking direct evidence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard

For example imagine I told you I own a pencil. Would you ask me to prove it or doubt me? Even you don't know or trust me, probably not. Why? Because pencils exist, it's easy to get one, and I have no reason to lie (in this scenario).

Now what if I told you I have an invisibility cloak. You'd call me a liar and want proof, hell probably an in person demonstration. Think about why.

-------------- "I'm sure that a century ago, space was just something we would never reach."

Whether or not aliens exist is not the same as not reaching space. Say it's the year 1876- 1. Aliens may or may not exist, it's unknown 2. it's a true fact that humans haven't gone to space.

I get that you mean the amount of technological advancment in the last 300 years has been crazy.

The reason the burden of proof is on whether something occurred or exists is because the number of events that haven't occured and what doesn't exist is infinite.

Finally you also ask about who is to say and I assume you also mean "why not". There's always a downside to believing false things, maybe it's small for some people or maybe a crazy person adds aliens to the pile of "government lies" then decides to shoot up some government agency.

> I'm sure that a century ago, space was just something we would never reach.

Tsiolkovsky developed his rocket equation in 1903 and in 1928 he published The Will of Universe dedicated to space colonisation. He clearly new it’s within reach of human mind.

Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon and given that his works are some early examples of science fiction and not a pure fantasy, one could say even Verne envisioned space travels as possible.

> The US Military released rather intriguing, yet unexplained videos of objects outmaneuvering our top jets.

Those videos show no such thing. All the stuff about outmanoeuvring is a fantastic narration.

Videos show only dots which can be (and were) explained as a bird from above, plane from behind and glitchy camera mount with a bit of optical artifacts on top. Which is infinitely more plausible than aliens from another star or another dimension.

> but who are any of us to say what is possible or what is not?

I feel like learning physics increased my ability to tell possible from impossible things tremendously. Second factor is learning as much as you can about scams and liers.

With those two foundations you should have a solid capacity to appreciate reality

To me, if you watch videos of what amateurs can do with the maneuverability of a $300 racing FPV drone it is most likely those are military drones of some sort.

Even a $300 racing drone looks pretty alien if you have never seen one. A $3 million dollar one would absolutely look like it is from another planet.

The USAF and the Pentagon themselves released those videos, labeling those recording as "unexplainable".

Let me point them, and the fighter jet pilots, to "Scotty79-from-the-internet", so that they can all understand that what they all saw or recorded were in fact birds. :p

> "unexplainable"

Just unexplained, which means noone there bothered to explain them seriously enough to create an official document. Which was correct (lack of) action to take because those observations were irrelevant for anyone except the most keen ufologists.

> Let me point them, and the fighter jet pilots

Jet pilots are good at flying jets. It's kinda hard so they don't have much capacity left to be good at anything else. Like explaining visual glitches and unusual outputs of highly complicated machinery.

> to "Scotty79-from-the-internet"

That weren't my explanations. I was merely citing the ones given by a guy with doctorate in physics and expeirience with IR cameras. There are others. All infinitely more plausible than "it's aliens".

Of course, it's possible. Almost anything is possible on some abstract level if we allow our imagination to roam freely. I'm all for asking the US government: "Do you hide alien UFOs?"

The question is how you react when the answer is "No." If you keep insisting the government is lying, then you're more and more getting into 'tin foil hat' territory, especially if you're a government employee and have no evidence other than alleged hearsay. It depends on your strength of belief in the contrarian opinion. Saying that it's possible is one thing, saying "they're doing it but I don't have proof" is another.

For almost hundreds of reasons, if any government, but specially super-power government would have UFO's tech hidden, and everybody else is almost certain UFOs are a myth, some wacko-level talk for internet forums

They would be strategically obligued to deny everything, so the answer would "No, no such a thing like UFOs here".

i.e. what happened with the NSA programs, most were almost fully known for the "conspiracy wackos" except by the name of the program, even decades before Snowden. But just were confirmed to be real maybe 30 years after the first mentions in the 70s,80s,90s.

Alternatively, if you had access to an immense and unassailable technological advantage over everyone, wouldn't you want to leverage that? Wouldn't it be nice to tell our enemies "we don't care how many nukes you have, we can do whatever we want with impunity or else we'll use our alien tech to protect ourselves and destroy our enemies" or to tell our allies "stick with us we're gonna be rolling out a stream of inventions that will each dramatically increase our prosperity for decades to come"? You only keep your strength hidden if it could potentially be negated - i.e. that they could develop the same technology or an effective counter without having access to alien spacecraft.

You're right mostly, there are also some special cases where it makes sense to hide the UFOs (or any radically new, advanced tech), some examples:

- the alien tech isn't really and/or fully available, they are half way in the reverse engineering efforts, and maybe other powers are in the race too

- the alien tech intrinsically reveals some currently hidden aspect of the universe/reality, if you present the technology publicly, it will be obvious that there's something new, and everybody will pursuit advances related to these new physics.

i.e. imagine discovering the eletricity in the XV century, it would have changed everything.

Given the article, the more interesting question is how we react if the answer is "Yes".

You're sure that in 1923, space was "something we would never reach"? That's about ten years before a German guy starts his work on liquid rocket fuel technology, work that will (via a Nazi terror weapon) go on to result in the US manned space programme.

If you said 1823 maybe I could sympathise, in 1823 they don't have everything together, they don't know about the Noble gases or dozens of other elements, they thought atoms were indivisible (hence the name), they don't have the First Network (the Universal Postal Union, yes, in 1823 you could not write a letter in say, Edinburgh, write an address in Berlin, and just post it, that idea hadn't been invented yet).

But by 1923 they're in a much better place. Their atomic model is still wrong but it's like the model you're probably picturing in your head, the one where electrons are little whizzy balls orbiting a nucleus. Wrong, but not wrong enough to cause big problems for everyday purposes. Kurt Gödel hasn't come up with his clever trick yet, but the problem is right there and people are thinking about it.

You say the videos are objects but I don't see evidence of objects. Just because you see a shape doesn't mean you saw an object. Did you know shadows can move faster than the speed of light? Because you see a shadow isn't a thing, it's just our mental model of events, and there are no limits on that model. We have plenty of ways to make a shape seem to move much faster than we can make an object move.

In 1783 the Montgolfier brothers flew through the skies for the first time ever in a hot air balloon. It wasn't even sure if humans could survive being in the air so the King wouldn't let them send humans aloft until test animals survived first.

Later that same year, the hydrogen balloon was invented and that one was flown to an altitude of 3 km high.

And yes, the idea that you could write in Edinburgh and have it delivered to Berlin had already been invented much further back than after 1823. The Roman Empire had the Cursus Publicus which handled mail delivery between the Provinces and Italy.

Do you mean someone of a high enough rank could have official communications and military dispatches delivered, or do you mean any person could have any letter delivered to any home? I think tialaramex was writing more about universal civilian letter delivery, and particularly about universal (well, global or near-global) addressing, rather than letter delivery between officials within an empire.

There would only be a need for that with ubiquitous literacy. The Roman system may well have been close enough to universally accessible and offer delivery throughout their territory for Roman citizens who were literate.

I don't think it realistically did - it included a system of authorisation that implied a demand that was intentionally denied, however there are multiple other old postal systems which definitely did (e.g. the Imperial Mail of the Holy Roman Empire [1] being one of the significant ones, but that itself built on older systems). A more defensible claim would be the strictly limited claim that the idea of attempting to create a global postal system with global addressability is a new idea. But even long before the UPU, a lot of countries had treaties to allow for forwarding of post, so I think it's unlikely that this idea was new as well, just previously impractical.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiserliche_Reichspost

If something has been invented, the idea "the exact same thing but cheaper" has definitely already entered peoples' minds. They may not know a good method to do it, but they can imagine a world in which it exists.

There are unexplained bugs in my software, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t the work of aliens.

For sure. Even if we can't explain how or why some phenomenon occurred, the conclusion "we don't know of anything on Earth that does this, so it must be aliens" is so much less likely than "it is something on Earth we haven't figured out yet".

I'm pretty convinced space aliens send the cosmic rays down that cause the bizarre runtime bugs in my software. I have never found a more amenable or rational explanation.

“but who are any of us to say what is possible or what is not?”

Those people are called experts.

>I'm sure that a century ago, space was just something we would never reach.

Far from it! From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne was written in 1865, and was a reasonable attempt at hard sci-fi. More scientifically, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published "Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices" in 1903, some 6 years after deriving his famous rocket equation; it advanced the basic concept of the space rocket, that we all take for granted today. In 1923, exactly a century ago, Hermann Julius Oberth published his book "The Rocket in Interplanetary Space", a thoroughly practical treatment in which he argues that human-rated rocket-powered space flight was not just theoretically possible but feasible and maybe even profitable.[0]

So century ago, not only was space firmly established as a place we could go, but also enough groundwork had been done that it was known how we would get there.

[0] https://ia800304.us.archive.org/24/items/nasa_techdoc_197200...

I don't know what you've seen, but the 3 video released a few years are mostly parallax, optical phenomenon (the "tic tac") and sensors trying and failing to track tiny objects (birds, balloons and similar) at distances of a few kilometres.

It’s incredibly hard for people to say “we dont have an explanation.” Either it’s unexplained therefore aliens or an equally speculative yet mundane dismissal.

What about Occam's razor? Think about the reports as well. It's not like some alien was seen walking around by hundreds then disappeared we are talking about unexplained visuals and mass moving in an unexplained way. Why even go right to aliens? Because people already believe it's true and are looking for anything that can be attributed to it.

I think you’re noticing the big five trait called “openness.”

Some people are very open, some not at all.

I’m happy I’m open to things. God, Love, Art. Some people tell you it’s all make believe, there’s no free will, just machines acting out biological imperatives in a world that’s so well understood by science that we’ve reached the end of history. No way!

The vast majority of Americans have seen TV news videos of VTOL jet aircraft (AV-8 Harrier or F-35B Lightning II). A large fraction have even seen them in person at air shows where they have been top attractions for decades.

https://airshows.aero/Page/AboutAS-Facts

If people in the DoD at that level exhibited such a degree of incompetence, wouldn't you want to find out before it's too late?

> If people in the DoD at that level exhibited such a degree of incompetence

It is not incompetence - it is orthogonal. I worked with an excellent software engineer who was rather smart - way above average. However, he believed in "Overunity energy" and paid actual money to attend conferences and buy the books. Some folks are predeposed to believing conspiracies and seeing order where there's chaos.

Not to mention:

(1) the Google engineer who "knows" what sentience looks like when chatting with a low-grade AI chatbot (2) the articles by Kevin Roose and other professional reporters about AI chatbots, believing they witnessed authentic confessions from ChatGPT that it wanted to become skynet, evincing a stunning lack of understanding of the function of large language models. (3) NASA Astronaut Edgar Mitchell who came to believe in UFOs and became cited by conspiracy theorists for decades.

People at the centers of professional, institutional respectability who didn't have the wherewithal to step back and put thier impulses under the light of rational examination.

It's not without precedent, and we don't have anything other than second order interpertation of information that hasn't been revealed, but we do have a blizzard of breathless reporting enteratining presumptions that are way ahead of any actual established facts.

You can’t say that Bard isn’t sentient until you define sentience. UK just declared that lobsters are sentient. Why not Bard. I think Lemoine did the world a favor by giving it a good few months head start.

From his podcast, it is obvious that Roose knows exactly what he dealt with in the Sydney affair. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t unnerving.

Conspiracy theorists (important: multiple) often have one or more of the following attributes which is why you see a wide range of intelligence in the group.

1. People with mental illness.

2. People with low intelligence who are unable/don't understand logic, the scientific method, and concepts like ecree, They are easily fooled by others. They may also have a bias like hating or mistrusting the government.

3. People who are insecure. Being a conspiracy theorist makes you feel smarter than other people as you are part of a select group of who know the truth. The masses are stupid or as they say now "asleep" but you've figured it all out via Google.

This is why much of their talk is less about how they can prove their claims and more about the people who don't believe. They refer to them as "sheep" or "not awake. The focus for them is that they are right which may help with their insecurities.

4. People who don't feel they have a purpose in life and are looking for a meaning. Want to be a part of a group that is bound by something important and there's almost no effort to join? Bam, now your job is to get that information out there and covert the masses, a goal that will never be finished and thankfully take up your entire life.

5. People who were originally lured in because of the other reasons and no longer believe. Because they made it their life, maybe spent excess money, wrote books or made absolute claims they don't want to look stupid so they never admit their change. This is especially an issue on the internet where the whole world can fest on your failure.

Interesting that you could s/conspiracy theorists/religious group and your argument sounds as convincing. "People who are insecure" might expand differently. "One or more" of your list items are probably truisms for any group you can think of. Train enthusiasts?

Actually it's s//cult leaders, the established religions are quite open about the ideas and texts underlying their beliefs (then some of them insist you need a cleric for interpretation). In cults that information is hidden and only accessible once someone has risen to the inner circle of the cult.

Besides (4) people looking for a meaning what other attributes would be common with enthusiasts of a hobby. I also don't see an issue with people finding meaning in hobbies because the effect is often isolated to themselves

One of the brightest guys I ever worked with believed the earth had enough food and resources to support ONE TRILLION people. Just because you're one of 1000 people in the world that understand how to make a qubit doesn't mean that domain knowledge transfers. Feynman knew this (Degrasse Tyson kinda doesn't).

What makes you believe that Earth cannot support one billion people, given another 1000 years or so of technological development at our current pace?

Assuming of course: - We've "solved" fusion, and can produce near-unlimited amounts of electricity - Per person energy/resource consumption is cut to an absolute minimum. Most tools, machines etc are designed to last virtually forever, instead of having planned obsolescence - We build farming buildings that are 100 stories tall, and produce light from electricity instead of relying on sunlight to grow plants. - Recycling processes and other activities that are labor intensive today can be made 1-3 orders of magnitude more efficient by AI and better access to cheap energy. - We are able to handle the sociological aspects of such population density

Earth's population density is currently at 16/km^2, or 62500m^2/person. If we multiply the population by 100, that's still 625m^2/person.

We clearly have enough space, and probably enough atoms (of each type) to support one billion. So I think if we have enough energy, technology and organize it perfectly, it should be technically possible.

In fact, given the fact that each American already spends almost 100x more energy than most people did 500 years ago, it may be even easier than is assumed above, if we assume that resource consumption is cut to near subsistence levels.

Obviously, such a world would be quite dystopian, making the USSR seem positively cheerful. But impossible?

I guess the real question is, when do we stop, when everyone has 2 cubic meters of space to live in? Is that where we draw the line? Because then we could build a borg cube the size of the solar system and fit a 1 nonillion people.

I mean anything is possible (for additional nightmares: look at factory farming of chickens).

Just not livable.

He was making the argument as a response to being triggered by "liberal" policies about climate change and human footprint.

For certain values of "food and resources". Incoming solar energy is 7000x humanity's energy consumption, while one trillion is merely 125x the current population, so it's physically possible. Probably the biosphere would have to be converted into a food-producing chemical factory, along with substitutes for oxygen generation, waste recycling, etc.

Add that people today on average consume 10x-100x more energy than strictly needed for survival, and energy consumption may only need to go up about 10x.

Now, if on top of the solar energy, we assuem that we will have fusion energy available within a few 100 years, energy available may easily grow way more than 100x of today's production.

Also, if efficiency continues to increase, for instance due to AI development, nanotech, biotech, etc, we may be able to build almost any amount of infrastructure given the atoms we have available in the Earth's crust. Including multi-story farms, feeding electric lighting to power photosynthesis.

In fact, I'm not aware of any hard limits anywhere near this side of 1 billion people. As far as I know, there are billions of billions of kg of most critical elements available on earth, or in the order of 1+ billion kg per person, even if we're 1 billion people. Our ability to organize these atoms into whatever combination we want (including human bodies) is primarily limited by energy.

And even with 1 billion people, it will take a while before we run out of hydrogen for fusion power.

You keep saying 1 billion, but the world population is already around 8 billion.

Yeah, my bad. I used it in the British/European sense, but the American word is trillion.

Pretty sure we'll stop wanting to reproduce at the required rate long before food/resources becomes the real issue (which isn't to say starvation etc. isn't likely to be a major problem for much of the world's population in coming decades, but it'll make less of an impact on population growth than the rate we choose to reproduce at).

Beyond the clouds, the sky is always blue. But look further, and space is black as night.

Humans are a species of animals. Recent environmental changes has caused a sharp decline in evolutionary fitness (=reproduction rate) for this population. This has happened to millions of species in the past, and in many (if not most) cases, the population adapted to the new environment, and the fitness grew back to or beyond replacement rate.

Also, this can happen quite a lot faster than some seem to imagine. While it takes a long time for completely new mutations to make it into the gene pool, the gene pool already contains a huge diversity of genes coding for different types of traits, including mental traits. Often, all that is needed to adapt to a new environment, is for the relative frequency of these genes to change.

For instance, many people seem to have a built-in oxytocin response when around young children. A boost in frequency to all genes promoting/strenghtening this mechanism may eventually make the need-to-have-baby emotion in most women stronger than the need-to-have-orgasm drive in the horniest of 18-year-olds.

And if these genes are already in the gene pool, just with a low frequency, they could easily become dominant over 10-40 generations.

In other words, if at some point the kinds of environmental change that cause population decline slows down, I don't think it's likely that the birth rate stays below replacement forever. (If it does, we'll go extinct, of course).

Forever is far too long a time to make useful predictions about. But in the meantime... https://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/abso...

Sperm count has to fall quite a bit further before it becomes a bigger limiting factor than women actively chosing to not make babies.

Also, I'm not making predictions about "forever". Rather, my prediction is that the reproduction rate is likely to come back above the replacement rate very quickly, compared to evolutionary time.

My guess is somewhere between 100 to 1000 years, if human societies go on approximately like today, and we don't have some kind of apocalypse, AI takeover or totalitarian world government.

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