Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
historylink.org
historylink.org
There is no objective test for Havana syndrome, but being diagnosed with it grants significant financial and non-financial benefits.
(coincidentally, the "Mad Gasser" was also in Illinois).
I only know about this because of Frank Zappa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=352dVmsn7y4
Always has been.
This happens all the time in our current media landscape. "Yeah health insurance denies claims sometimes, that's normal" to "wait actually health insurance denies claims routinely to increase its profits!?"
There are tons of things that we decide to ignore to go on with our lives. It's exhausting to freak out about all the things that deserve to be freaked out about.
I'm not talking about editorial bias. I'm talking about deliberately manipulating audience attention in order to control the perception of reality. Another way of putting it is to create a framework for rejecting or distracting from 'disagreeable' ideas.
For example, a partisan news organization might highlight the purported cultural and economic threat posed by immigration. Since people have a limited budget for their attention, having their attention and outrage focused on immigration might distract from other issues such as rising inequality.
Absolutely, we all need to filter the overwhelming amount of information we're faced with. The part that seems terrifying is that occasionally our filters can line up in such a way as to pick up what's just pure noise and escalate it into an enormous positive feedback loop.
And of course there's a whole discussion about how those filters are shaped (by the media we consume, authorities we decide to trust, direct experience) and how that's changed over time.
And this is why "conspiracy" theories exist. I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories, as I fee that is a more accurate name.
I am do not intend to pass judgement on this commentor or on people who believe in these theories; in fact, I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE likely to fall into one.
We are truly living in an age of narrative; it's not the first and it won't be the last.
Book recommendation: High Conflict by Amanda Ripley
If you called them Low Information Excessive Satisfaction theories instead you'd end up with a much more satisfying acronym! :)
However, I think the original thinking behind the term "meme" is probably still the definitive discourse on the subject: in analogy to genes, ideas undergo natural selection for survival/reproduction and the attributes that promote this specific kind of fitness (ease of spread, satisfaction, advantage obtained by spreading) will be selected for in the course of social interaction. Qualities we might like to encourage (accuracy, completeness) will not be selected for except insofar as we can connect them back to the actual selection mechanism.
That said, "meme" really doesn't quite put as sharp of a point on the problem as "LIES."
Another tweak: Low Information Extra Satisfying
But now I think he was vastly over-optimistic.
I guess that proves their point, whoever they were.
Great phrase btw
That's what they want you to think.
I don't think it works that way.
I wouldn't use the word smart to describe the people (that I know) that fall for scams/conspiracy theories.
Now, you could say that they incorrectly think they're to smart, but then that means how smart you consider yourself isn't relevant, i.e. a not-smart person and a smart person both consider themselves smart.
Assurance makes you a sucker.
Scams rely on two things:
1. Over-confidence. The often (but not always) target the elderly because the elderly have pride that comes with long living. When you think you've seen it all, you think you know it all.
2. Emotional irrationality. The scammer is expert at quickly putting a person in an emotionally agitated state, negating good rational thinking. This is easier to do when pride creates a blind spot to catch someone off guard.
People fall for scams not because they are stupid, but because they are humans which tend to be easy to manipulate by playing our cognitive biased and emotions against us. Scamming is both an art and an industry as a result.
Like, I'm too stupid to understand the flat earth science.
Each of us makes that choice for ourselves.
But this is a philosophical subject, which I'm not educated in.
For people interested, I can highly recommend Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal. It tells many interesting stories about social interactions between apes that look surprisingly human. By the way, did you know that apes pick their nose, just like humans?
> Despite the repeated claims of METH being more addictive or preferred than AMPH, proven differences between METH and AMPH in addiction liability and in reward efficacy have evaded researchers. Animals self-administer METH and AMPH at comparable rates (Balster and Schuster 1973) and humans prefer similar doses (Martin et al. 1971). Also, neither humans nor animals discriminate between equal doses of METH and AMPH (Huang and Ho 1974; Kuhn et al. 1974; Lamb and Henningfield 1994). Furthermore, while METH is commonly believed to be a more potent central psychostimulant than AMPH, no direct comparison on the potency of the two drugs to stimulate central processes have been verified. In addition, no previous study has directly compared the acute effects of the two drugs on locomotor activity, an important central process that contributes tothe definition of psychostimulant. Moreover, there are no known neurobiological differences in action between METH and AMPH that would account for the putatively greater addictive, rewarding, or psychomotor properties of METH.
Do you intentionally cite way out of date scientific research? What is your background in pharmacology? The simple addition of the methyl group is known to effect absorption and potency.
2. None of that is relevant. I'm talking about people taking >30x the dose, not 5x lol. Do you have a background in pharmacology and not understand how that would make a difference?
Of course a higher dosage of a more potent drug will lead to wildly different and markedly increased effects... I think you have your argument wrapped in semantic reasoning rather than pharmacology.
Beyond this, do you admit your premise is flawed?
I believe this extends to all kinds of species besides apes (especially mammals, but others as well), and there’s certainly compelling evidence of sentience in places we wouldn’t have thought to find it, but there’s still plenty of research to be done before we can draw conclusions.
This applies to you too, reader. Many would read the above and fully agree with it, but fail to apply it to themselves and the groups they identify with. It is even more important to critically consider your own beliefs than the beliefs of others.
It is the tendency to think that people in the past were dumb, and we aren't. Like, there always has to be some explanation involved when we learn that people did something unintuitive in the past -- people learned how to make beer by accidentally leaving leftover bread in liquid and then drank it when they were starving. Maybe? Or maybe they figured out that things ferment and played with it until it worked, like we would have done it? Why does it always have to be an accident?
People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now.
There's probably an aspect to people confusing "knowledge" with "brainpower". People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today.
We have the advantage of Millenia of stuff figured out and documented. So we know on average more about how the universe works than people in the distant past.
I seriously doubt that. My experience in college was not to learn facts and formulae, but to learn how to learn. I.e. training the mind.
It's similar to athletes. The worst Olympic athlete today would blow away the best from a century ago. That's not because people are inherently stronger today, but because we know how to train much better.
If you took the athletes today without their support team and sent them back in time two years before an Olympics event to compete on their own, I don't think it would be as big of a blowout as you suggest.
But take distance running - prior to 1954, nobody had done a sub 4 minute mile. After that was known to be possible multiple people sub 4 minute miled in the following decade. If you sent a top runner back a hundred years they would be able to run a sub 4 minute mile, even with 1920s equipment - and the world record in 1923 was 4:10
Are you sure about that? Can you post a result where someone ran with leather shoes on asphalt?
The men's mile WR is about 24 seconds faster than the women's. Presumably plenty of barefoot African dudes could run a mile a lot faster than Budd did.
With the exception of the new "energy return" shoes, there's no evidence that shoes help runners run faster - probably the opposite.
The story of a sudden breach is perhaps more attractive though.
> The four-minute barrier was first broken on 6 May 1954 at Oxford University's Iffley Road Track, by British athlete Roger Bannister
> On 21 June 1954, at an international meet at Turku, Finland, Australia's John Landy became the second man, after Bannister, to achieve a sub-four-minute mile.
In 1955 Laszlo Tabori was the third person to break the 4 minute barrier. Then, in 1956, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race.
This matches what I described, multiple people attained it once it was understood to be possible. It was linear up to the 4 minute mark, but the point is that records that used to be impossible are now humdrum once achieved.
With for example: "What this shows us is that the issue wasn’t massively psychological. If it was, we would have seen athletes running 1,500m races much faster than their corresponding mile time. Instead, we see that the progression matches up nicely. People were stuck on 4 minutes at the same time they were stuck on 3:43. Do we really think that runners were stuck on a mythical 3:43.0 barrier?"
In case you don't want to read it, it says that other distances had similar "breakthroughs" but they were not associated with a mental barrier like "4 minute mile". Rather, the article argues, the development may have been related to WW2.
Edit: it just so happened that for mile running, the stagnation after WW2 occured just around the four minute mark. You need to look at other distances and perhaps even other sports to see the pattern.
Indeed, my country Sweden won the olympic football/soccer in 1948 - a result widely regarded as being due to other countries have sent all their young men to the war while Sweden stayed neutral/did not fight the germans.
BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.
So you went through classes with no written material? You listened to lecture, took notes, and then did assignments and passed tests with no documents to study?
> BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.
The scientific method is a set of protocols that are followed in order to formalize evidence and prediction. Putting it into a set of words is important, but not required. Humans managed to sail across oceans and build wonders just fine without it.
When was 'before the scientific method' exactly?
> it was slow and kind of random.
I would argue it wasn't random at all -- it was directed towards human needs and desires as appropriate to the times. There was never a period where humans stopped using their intelligence and problem solving skills to improve their lives in whatever ways were available.
> If you look at the historical pace of innovation it tremendously accelerated after the scientific method became widespread.
When did it become widespread? Where did it spread to? Did those places all show a similar increase in innovation in the years after?
"While elements of the scientific method existed in ancient times, the modern scientific method is generally attributed to Sir Francis Bacon who outlined it in his 1620 treatise "Novum Organum," placing the invention of the scientific method during the early 17th century during the Scientific Revolution;"
which sounds about right.
It was much more prevalent in free market countries. Authoritarian economies tend to be too rigid to experiment and develop new things.
Which specific aspect of that work was responsible for humans being better able to solve complex problems after its development which could not have been solved before it, if the same access to materials and resources were available?
> Authoritarian economies tend to be too rigid to experiment and develop new things.
The German regime during the years between 1930 and 1945 is generally understood to have been highly authoritarian and was responsible for some very famous technological breakthroughs in fields such as rocketry and aviation.
It sounds like you don't know what the scientific method is?
> The German regime
Yes, it was. And I wrote "tend to be" not "absolutely 100%".
I take from that response that you just assume that the scientific method was important but don't know why. I will posit that is because it wasn't as important as you assume.
> tend to be
What number of exceptions would there need to be before you accepted that the entire premise was wrong?
That's right.
I learned to never miss a lecture, and take copious notes. I also never missed a retch session. And still sometimes I needed help from a patient classmate.
The fun thing about the notes was when reviewing them, I'd recall the verbal part of the lecture. This helped a great deal.
Sadly, the passage of decades has silenced that voice, and I have a hard time understanding the notes today. I've wished many times I'd have had the foresight to bring a cassette recorder to lecture and record them. Too bad all those lectures are lost to time. But nobody recorded lectures in those days, and it never occurred to me.
I also don’t think that brainpower/learning ability correspond as directly to training regimen as physical ability. We also don’t have as clear of an idea for what the “best” ways to increase learning ability are as for fitness. And of course our methods to quantify intelligence are much less objective than for fitness - partly because we separate fitness ability into different domains in a way that we tend not to for intelligence.
I suspect it is because the thought of what might be possible just never entered their minds.
For example, Edison invented the idea of the invention development laboratory. Very, very recently. The Wright Bros were the first to come up with the idea of a research and development laboratory - just over a century ago.
The scientists that existed before the industrial age in the West were upper class, bored and educated men who did it for their own amusement.
It wasn't until the abandonment of the economic system which worked on the assumption that international economics was zero sum and capitalism (and imperialism) took hold that the incentive structure for creating novel technologies could exist.
This is all recollection based on various histories I have consumed and may not be entirely correct, but I'm pretty sure the idea is solid.
That is partially true. There is no incentive, for example, for slaves to make any improvements. I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves. That meant the few people in power were not enough to think of much new stuff.
You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator.
The evolution of guns is an interesting topic. So is the evolution of sailing ships. The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow!
You might want to investigate James Burke's "Connections" book and series. It's an entertaining overview of the history of invention.
You can't think of any technology developed by slaves because they wouldn't get credit for it. I am sure all sorts of useful things have been invented by slaves, but if you yourself are property I don't know how you expect credit for your intellectual property.
> You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator.
The free markets are about efficient allocation and exploitation of resources. People are incentivized to create things that help with that. The byproduct of such efficiency is free time and access to those resources.
> The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow!
Well, it isn't exactly easy to invent a lightbulb when you don't have access to vacuum pumps, transparent glass, filaments, and electric generators. I'm sure if you had a hunk of ore and a hearth you would be making machined parts within a fortnight but our ancestors had to wait for crucial inventions and materials science advances before they move from sails to steam.
Can you think of any in the US Confederacy? Any at all? The cotton gin comes to mind, but that was invented by Eli Whitney in the north.
Can you imagine this?
slave: "Boss, how about if we do it this way, we can be more productive?"
boss: "shut up and do what I told you to."
Slaves had every incentive to do as little as possible, not improve production.
* You have not taken into account factors such as portions of population, different types of slavery or really anything at all
* Your original logic has been shown to be inherently flawed and you are still trying to argue by using evidence that turns out to be an assumption when examined
No thinking needed. A quick search turns this up:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/with-patents-or-wi...
https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/h_counts.h...
Going back further, the Islamic world had a lot of science going on which is often ignored or omitted by the western world when it comes to discussing the origins of science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islami...
Because that's a surprisingly common way for things to be discovered.
Saccharine? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet.
Aspartame? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet.
I think this is true of basically every major artificial sweetener except invert sugar.
...but now I'm starting to wonder how many people working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and died, because they had accidentally discovered a toxin?
They figured it out through reasoning and trial and error and raw experience, while for us it's apparently impossible to learn anything we don't already know the answer for.
... explained by(?)
> History makes it abundantly clear that it is a regular occurrence for large groups of people to collectively believe things for which there is little evidence, and furthermore, to take extreme actions based on such beliefs.
Each and every one of us knows very well by now how we reacted to mass psychological movements and how we will react to the next one, which is of course the next great war.
Both are possible, so I need some clarification.
I don't see any basis for this view. There are indications that the two sides may be sleepwalking towards a great conflict. But neither side is specifically intending to start or escalate towards such a conflict.
Every media outlet in Nordic countries talk about a Russia-NATO war within the near future or whether Russia and NATO already are at war. NATO leaders are publicly asking for more defense spending to combat Russia. If you read Nordic message boards, most users are cheerfully looking forward to "winning a war against Ruzzia", and I don't doubt that the same idiotic attitudes are found among the Russians as well.
But that is not the same as saying that "war is being planned". The latter implies an actual intent/desire to start a war, the former does not.
Today from Russian media: "Bandera Ukraine, blah, blah"
That phrase on its own should indicate that what you are reading is pure verbal flatulence. The speaker in this case (Medvedev) should be another strong indication.
If you read Nordic message boards, most users are ...
I was referring to actual reality (i.e. what decision makers at the state level are planning). Not what randos on the message boardz are saying.
I have heard the spin that Russia made a move on Ukraine because if they became a NATO country there'd be more NATO at Russia's border, but... they still started it. They can't finish it because they vastly underestimated their own abilities though.
As a child I was obsessed with math. I had a pseudo-religious obsession with Platonism, connected with my childhood fear of mortality. A bizarre belief system.
While trying to make new friends in a new city, I was shunned from a new group for unknown reasons. I was going through a breakup from an abuser. I was depressed and grasping for explanations, thinking I was being conspired against. A persecution complex.
Lack of information and strong emotion are enough.
Even more broadly, rationality and empiricism are extremely powerful tools for understanding the world, but they are also extremely difficult and costly to use, to say nothing of their known limitations at tackling complex systems. People have to and do believe stuff just to get through their day. I think this only becomes disturbing when its just one part of the culture which decides to believe some other complex of ideas than the mainstream one.
I find it pretty hard to get on the same wavelength as most people about it. A lot of us feel distinctly human as opposed to, I don’t know, like a smooth ape that is neurotic enough to develop space travel.
I’m half joking. I’ve found the revelation made me love animals a lot more than I had. It brings a sense of unity to my life. Dogs really are family, birds are not nearly as different from us as they seem, and even creatures like fish or squid share remarkable traits with us. These fundamental aspects of being animals.
I really enjoy it. I think it’s a great thing to contemplate and embrace.
My sense of kinship is weak with arthropods. Vertebrates are clearly kin. Birds and mammals are so clearly fellow beings, that I simply can't imagine caring about people if the concept of people must be narrowed to exclude them.
It goes the other way too. I find it easier to love my fellow human animals when I remember they are neurotic hairless apes wearing hats. Our intelligence is so new (in an evolutionary sense), we are just barely smart enough to pull this all off.
Your latter point is a very important one. I think of intelligence as a very tenuous, fragile thing. We can barely utilize it the ways we intend to, and it isn't a guard-rail against all kinds of bad behaviour. It's almost useless to us in all kinds of common scenarios, or barely accessible. We get enraged, drunk, turned on, depressed, etc. and suddenly these faculties are barely function in the ways we need them to be.
So, it becomes much easier to forgive people for making mistakes. You begin to realize we're holding onto this potential by a thread most of the time, not wielding it like a trusted tool. The more you observe this, the more it's a wonder anything works at all.
"The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of syncretism), and traditional folk religions."
"The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of syncretism), and traditional folk religions."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion#Demographic_classific...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declin...
I'm gratified to see that the lizardman coefficient is consistent. In the chart, 2% of "None/Atheist/Agnostic" apparently attends religious services every week.
The people who have looked behind the curtain and come to this realization about people and their behavior tend to be the ones who make the skeptic community, so we have that going for us at least.
Combined with the inherent anti intellectual bias of most of America inherited from the nerd hatred of us high schools, reality has no chance against fantasy.
Look at how newspapers treat science. Findings are held up like a freak zoo of "look at what the weirdo science nerds are saying now" as they sensationalize and warp things in the desperate need for clickbait.
So combine pseudoreality rules of media with pseudoreality of finance and economics, and the pseudoreality of politics, and reality simple doesn't have a chance.
No amount of intelligence will protect you from confirmation bias, authority bias, social proof, and the numerous other vulnerabilities we all have built in. Actually intellectuals are more vulnerable, since intelligent people tend to have a cognitive bias where they over-estimate their expertise in unrelated fields to their own.
Speaking of blind spots.
To be honest I am kind of surprised that the current hysteria revolves around something plausible (foreign drones) given that past hysteria has been about the totally implausible (alien UFOs… or angels… or whatever).
Hey, let's not go making something out of nothing.
But since then we've also had airport shutdowns, incursions over airforce bases, drones in no-fly zones. These are easy to Google:
https://www.recordonline.com/story/news/2024/12/16/stewart-a...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/16/us/us-air-force-base-closes-a...
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/article297295919.ht...
Also NJ police report the anomalous drones give off no heat signature like normal drones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K98A4CLMwf4&t=209s
There's a lot more I could post about, but most importantly Chuck Schumer is trying to get Robin drone radar detectors deployed, and I'm predicting that he's the smart guy in the room who will get us answers.
I think they played this exactly right: Most people will never accept a null result (or something close to it, like "there were a couple of weird drones, but mostly it was people newly looking up at the night sky") or even follow this news story long enough for the actual resolution to matter. The only thing they'll remember was their mayor or governor staying silent when they were scared/angry vs. shouting at the feds to let them shoot down some drones.
> Also NJ police report the anomalous drones give off no heat signature like normal drones:
The only thing we can conclude from this is that the NJ police wasn't able to detect a heat signature, but not whether there really wasn't one.
https://www.newsweek.com/drone-new-jersey-911-sighting-20002...
But I haven't seen a follow up from anyone on it yet.
The case referenced by Newsweek was a commercially available drone of the DJI variety.
Your last link has the officer claiming it doesn't give off heat like regular drones, but just like the OP story where a police officer claimed the "mystery residue" reacted "violently" to a lead pencil, what does that even mean? Can we get an A/B test of what this officer calls a "regular" drone on heat vision versus one of these mystery drones?
And oh yeah, at about 4:30 into that link, the reporter puts up his own "authentic drone footage" that I am absolutely certain is a perfectly normal airplane.
The airport shutdown was real, sure, but that was dumb wannabe sleuths who were going to "solve the problem" using their own drones, thereby becoming the problem, or smart trolls who knew exactly how best to get a laugh out of the gullible public.
These are the same people who have panic attacks when they think they've been exposed to fentanyl (which usually involves them describing symptoms not consistent with opiate exposure, and mysteriously the officers never seem to test positive for it in the hospital). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8810663/
In reality, someone exposed to a large volume of pure, liquid, lab-grade fentanyl... just washes their hands. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35722948/
(See also: “poisoned” milkshakes: https://ny.eater.com/2020/6/23/21299721/nypd-officers-report...)
Your description is a little hyperbolic! That pubmed paper referenced "10 microgram fentanyl citrate base per ml" approx 0.00001% fentanyl "over a large skin surface area".
Pharmaceutical form for injection is fentanyl 50µg/mL (as citrate). https://www.medsafe.govt.nz/profs/Datasheet/f/Fentanylinj.pd...
Completely incompatible hand-wave theories living side by side, rarely bothering to debate each other or provide anything beyond opinions.
It was the constellation Orion and some other stars. He literally saw some stars and thought they were drones hovering near his house.
Why shouldn’t I believe that they’re really this dumb?
You could have fact-checked that in less time than it took to write your post.
My point stands. If this guy is that dumb then why should we think any of the rest are better?
Physical evidence or GTFO (the video with the NJ police is physical evidence that they have a drone with thermal imagery and of nothing else).
Here's a gift link to yesterday's New York Times story: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/video/new-jersey-drones-p...
The vast majority of the videos appeared to show planes or helicopters,
moving across a part of the state that brims with airports. None of the
videos analyzed by The Times conclusively showed drones, though in some
cases that remains a plausible explanation.
Was windshield glass not laminated in that era?
There actually is a problem some Washington residents occasionally have from powerful navy transmitters.
Every so often in Bremerton many garage door opener remotes and car keyless entry systems become very unreliable for a few days to a week or two. This generally corresponds to when aircraft carriers visit the Bremerton naval shipyard.
There are often multiple kinds of use allowed on a given radio frequency band. The different allowed uses will be grouped into different priority classes and the general rule is that (1) lower priority uses are not allowed to interfere with higher priority uses, and (2) if a higher priority use interferes with a lower priority use it is up to the later to deal with it (move to another frequency, use better shielding to keep the interference out, etc).
Many garage door remotes and keyless entry systems use frequency bands that overlap with bands used for Navy radar and communications and as you can probably guess the Navy's uses are the higher priority.
So a carrier comes in to the shipyard for maintenance or upgrades, and as part of that they test the radar and communication systems and so for however long that takes you've got ridiculously powerful transmitters blasting out on the frequencies your stuff wants to use.
Lawsuits were filed, and a standard that didn’t have that problem took over.
(Calling the replacement standard “secure” would be overselling it, but I guess it was good enough to make the courts happy.)
I really did not understand what this was all about. Even worse, the pictures were not clear.
AFAICT, there were some minor dents in windshields that caused some hysteria in the Seattle area but no further explanation was given.
The article was confusing indeed.
The damage appeared to spread as more people talked about it
The pictures weren't clear to me either, probably because they're pictures of ordinary windshields lol
This stuff has been well understood for millennia.
What happens to a society that has been desensitized to mass-hysteria, where no single event can evoke a reaction? Is it a horseshoe, where we're so vigilant that nothing fazes us anymore? Do we lose our humanity in the process?
Daily news is merely a first rough draft of history and I'd argue most people would be better off instead reading later drafts - after much of the confusion/gossip/rumor/panic that plagues daily news clears.
Sadly there's not a lot of news sources that limit themselves to writing articles about month+ old well-covered news.
Love this.
In reality almost nothing truly deserves that kind of attention. But since humans are bad at separating important from urgent, news broadcasts will continue to exploit with "24/7 Breaking News".
The only possibly deluded people, as the story is told, are reporters, policemen and politicians - but as the adage goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.
I'd say that is more probable than collective delusion.
But. And I think its a very very important but, these sightings of phenomena go back decades, and just because the public at large is not a reliable reporter, does mean there are not many, many kernels of truth of an unexplained, repeated phenomena.
And otherwise you can always, always be skeptical, but at what point does skepticism stretch into denial?
IR cameras recording rocket impacts aren't mass hysteria. 2011 https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1gsdwl6/full_10_minut...
^ maybe those are targeting drones and the rocket missed. but then why are they dripping?
2 days ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/InterdimensionalNHI/comments/1hfkcg...
^ maybe those are targeting flares, and thats why they're dripping, but if they're flares why does the second one seem to fly away when the first is struck?
meanwhile 7 days ago https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1hcfaqw/glowing_orb_f...
^ maybe thats just a commercial drone modified to be super bright. But why fly it there, as a hoax? (so, so many orb videos to repeat this logic with, you get the idea.)
If you're interested in finding more, you need to get very used to seeing lots of balloons, planes, commercial drones, planets, stars, satellites, flares, skydivers, lens flare, insects and birds and there's common examples of all of them. The ones we should be interested in are usually uniformly luminous, follow non linear flight paths, exhibit extraordinary acceleration (for which you need size to estimate distance which is tough with only one camera), and/or exhibit extraordinary altitude. Whether they're controlled by a non-human intelligence or some government, they do exist and are super interesting to watch. You're just gonna have to wade through an absolute mountain of bullshit.
They're balloons carrying flares for target practice. You can see lots of falling embers in https://youtu.be/XHDXk9THJZM?si=CKSBB3AuslBizXxh&t=179 from a military flare.
> if they're flares why does the second one seem to fly away when the first is struck?
Because that's the maneuvering target drone (something like a QF-16, probably; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting...) that's dropping the flares.
> maybe thats just a commercial drone modified to be super bright. But why fly it there, as a hoax?
Asked and answered. We live in a world where "flashlight enthusiast" is a real niche thing; "bright drone" is not an implausible thing. https://www.reddit.com/r/flashlight/
But that doesn't match my experience, of pilots, of lifetime military officers, of people as a whole, that they're all incompetent or crazy or hoaxers. At some point I think that level of myopic-skepticism moves towards the absurd and cannot be maintained any longer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
Each of the videos you linked to have extremely plausible, fairly mundane explanations other than "aliens". That fits the pattern. That you find them compelling as evidence of extraterrestrials is not a great sign.
> When the video gets too good you can blame it on computer generated graphics.
The corollary here is the unfortunate fact that as soon as everyone got a camera in their pocket, aliens stopped landing in random cornfields to say hi to lonely farmers.
That I post here a few easily accessible videos of interest on what is an enormous history that I have spent the past few years reading about tells me more about the lack of respect you immediately have for anyone on the topic.
> to lonely farmers.
That the public's UFO hysteria of the 1940s and 50s was originated entirely within the US military is similarly a fact of history I wouldn't expect you to know.
I think the thing watching the UFO topic has taught more more than any other is how aggressively and reflexively people of all levels of intelligence will hug their worldview.
> That the public's UFO hysteria of the 1940s and 50s was originated entirely within the US military is similarly a fact of history I wouldn't expect you to know.
The 1940s military had a hell of a lot of former farmers in it. The days of fighter pilots needing college degrees came in the 70s/80s; Chuck Yeager was a farm (!) kid who became a mechanic with the war.
That the UFO hysteria coincides with the rise of commercial air travel is both known to me and entirely unsurprising, and no more compelling to me than witch hysteria in the 1600s, which often came with similarly compelling witness testimony.
You don't have to be incompetent, crazy or a hoaxer to be confused, fooled or mistaken.
1. Most people will never believe in UFOs until they see one for themselves in an unambiguous way or hear a report from someone in person that they believe is credible. There is too much stigma around this topic.
2. There is a very large amount, probably 1000s records, of credible and consistent evidence out there. However 99% of it is circumstantial and will never be viewed by the public at large.
3. The military, after years of reporting and chasing, can’t be bothered investigating anymore. This seems to be cyclical.
4. A culture/civilization/whatever that has these kind of technologies would have immense power if they wanted it. It’s just too terrifying to believe in, especially if we don’t know what they want.
I make my posts about the subject on the idea that its important for people to have some warning, that its not something to dismiss, so they aren't surprised if/when something happens in our life time. For those who don't have the hobby of reading through those thousands of credible reports.
Not that I have any idea what I'm looking at, I don't think anymore than any ape on this planet. But those orbs exist and do very weird things, and probably have for a very long time, and isn't that neat.
But how do we know they aren’t doing harm in subtle ways? Thus I’m embracing cognitive dissonance. I think the evidence points to something but I refuse to decide it’s real.
https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/
The devil of the trees and terror of all loggers, forest rangers and apparently windshields.
wisteria on pine --
a tree octopus climbs
there's a spectacle!
[0] https://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=201104210388.a_tree_octopus_...
I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.
It gets easier to believe when supposed trustworthy sources: news outlets, the government as a whole and even specific senators/ex governors, fan the flames of conspiracy instead of common sense.
pennies are useless junk, straight to the recycling bin for me. really epitomizes our dysfunction that we are unable to stop making them
I put mine in baggies and use them as weights
It's not any one individual thing. You can even reframe some (one?) of the factors as Great Democracy Saving.
But they add up to: it is rational to not really trust anything, and people don't mind if you were wrong if you just didn't trust The Man/They, so there's more incentive to not trust, than trust.
Hyperbole from people who should know better doesn't help. Ex. a quite intelligent AI commentator tweeted yesterday, asking why there hasn't been a reckoning for anyone who publicly worried about effects of AI imagery on truth.
Because they were stars. Naturally, this dimwit took the opportunity to blame the feds for failing to act.
Apparently there are a lot of people out there who ordinarily just never look up in their daily lives. And instead of thinking “I’m not familiar with this stuff so I don’t know what I’m seeing,” they manage to conclude “I’m seeing something strange and nobody knows what it is.”
And of course there have always been plenty of airplane lights.
Not to mention Venus, which more than one fighter pilot has tried to shoot down.
I myself saw a drone, and tried to paint it as a plane or helicopter at first, but it was too close to the ground (seemed a few hundred feet up at most), had the mismatched light pattern characteristic of trans-wing drones, and moved too slowly for other types of aircraft. And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish. Honestly, it kind of freaked me out having some previously abstract news-cycle object just floating ominously down the road across from me.
EDIT: I thought that HN of all places would be able to pick what’s actually happening from what’s not; Mass hysteria occurring and drones being everywhere are not mutually exclusive, and a critical analysis of the info available makes it very clear that there are mysterious drones out at night. Seeing one article about people misidentifying things only tells you that people are misidentifying things, it says nothing about the countless videos showing positively identified drones, and certainly not about the fact that the government has repeatedly stated that there are drones doing this. And given all of that, downvoting someone giving their personal account with reasonable criticality is at best ignorant.
What? How do you get from a specific kind of lighting to „trans-wing drone“? What prevents me from lighting a regular-wing RC plane with the same lighting configuration?
If I’m not mistaken, the FAA does (unless RC planes aren’t covered?). Are you really positing that I saw an intentionally misconfigured RC plane flying in the middle of nowhere at 2 AM?
You’re right that I’m making a leap with the trans-wing part. I said that because it’s my understanding that some of the sightings have included airfoil and transforming drones, that a trans-wing drone would exhibit the light pattern I saw, and that the military (Navy I believe) does own trans-wing drones that match other the descriptions of other sightings. So to me the lights were the final nail that this wasn’t a plane, but I held on to it being a plane for a while.
So the FAA prevents me from using the scheme you described, but the drones you think you observed are exempt?
I still don’t see how you can draw any conclusion from the lighting, unless the lighting you saw is only permitted for a specific class of object.
The conclusion I draw from that is it’s not a plane. And I didn’t hear a helicopter, so only a few possibilities remain.
100% of the ones I looked into have been debunked, helicopters, planes, out of focus stars, fireworks, &c.
> (seemed a few hundred feet up at most)
At night you have absolutely no way to tell
> And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish.
My $300 dji can accomplish that, it's not a chinese super weapon nor an alien craft
> Honestly, it kind of freaked me out having some previously abstract news-cycle object just floating ominously down the road across from me.
That's the definition of media induced mass hysteria, you notice a lot of weird things when you look at things you usually don't bother looking at. People in Los Angeles freaked the fuck out when they saw the milky way during an electricity outage in 1994
A lot of videos are bunk, I have seen at least one video that is certainly drones.
> At night you have absolutely no way to tell
I agree, but I’ve seen plenty of other aircraft at night and it appeared to be much closer than any of those. And you can get a rough guess based on apparent size of the lights, though of course that’s extremely rough unless you know the size of the aircraft.
> My $300 dji can accomplish that, it's not a chinese super weapon nor an alien craft
I know, I never claimed it was aliens or a Chinese super weapon, I claimed they were drones. It’s almost certain that they are military drones, and if I had to guess they’re searching for something that would cause real mass hysteria if told to the public.
> That's the definition of media induced mass hysteria, you notice a lot of weird things when you look at things you usually don't bother looking at. People in Los Angeles freaked the fuck out when they saw the milky way during an electricity outage in 1994
That certainly occurs, what I meant is more that I felt an odd sensation having the news cycle and what I observed collide, in the sense that it didn’t feel quite real. I would normally notice at an aircraft that appeared to be as close as it was, and I would definitely pay more attention to it when I noticed the lights and movement pattern, regardless of the news cycle. It actually took me a second to connect the two.
People in LA freaking out because they saw the Milky Way is normal, people noticed something new and reacted to it. I would wager that more people responded with awe than with freaking out, but they weren’t as interesting to the media. Regardless of whether they were freaked out or not (and I wasn’t freaked out so much as it was freaky), they still saw something real.
Why is that almost certain?
If they were an enemy’s, one would expect them to be shot down. If they were an ally’s, they would need a damn good reason to be here and an even better reason why people can’t know. Maybe they’re a private citizen’s, but I struggle to imagine why a private entity would have a fleet of large drones that they covertly deploy along the coasts, and why our government would abide that. So as I see it, the two options that make sense are that they’re an enemy’s that we can’t shoot down for some terrifying reason, or they’re ours.
If you saw an unknown object and it seemed closer to you than normal aircraft, that’s your brain suffering from an illusion. It’s not real information.
> If you saw an unknown object and it seemed closer to you than normal aircraft, that’s your brain suffering from an illusion. It’s not real information.
Ohhh, thanks for letting me know.
Given all the rest, I have to say I’m not super confident in your estimate of angular size.
Neither am I, but I am confident it was a drone. Does “given all the rest” mean I wrote so much I have to be crazy, or do you actually have an explanation that better fits what I saw? Given the light configuration I don’t see how it could be a plane. And helicopters make a very distinctive noise. Maybe I saw a military helicopter, but at that point drones seem more likely.
I am interested in alternative proposals that take into account everything I observed. Less so in single-point criticisms coming from the assumption that there’s nothing to see so I must be deluded if I think I saw something.
I am not discounting what you saw and have no particular reason to doubt you, but human psychology operates in a way that is not conducive to being proven wrong about such things. Take that as you will.
You’re right that my interpretation in the end will be heavily influenced by my expectations, but unless I completely hallucinated the light pattern or gained temporary telescopic vision such that I saw each nav light separated by multiple visual-field-feet (if that makes any sense) on a plane at cruising altitude, I just can’t think of any explanation that fits better than drone.
It's a natural approximation to a Total Perspective Vortex. Knowing what it represents probably makes the likelihood of an existential crisis more likely.
That’s exactly what you would expect from a regular airplane though. You can’t accurately differentiate „low and slow“ vs „high and fast“ at night. And quiet operation is what high flying planes seem to do regularly.
Do people think there are 0 drones out at night? Is it that hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that someone actually saw one?
I understand that many are misinterpreting. Official statements make it clear that at some are not. The criticism of my account boils down to “you can’t tell how far something is at night” tata-isms, but you can to a very limited extent - whether it is at an altitude where it would be audible, or not. Similarly, you can observe how quickly it moves from overhead to the horizon. It’s difficult to tell close from far, but it’s trivial to tell far from really far.
Regardless, I was able to see it from both the side and behind, and the latter view showed an aircraft with two red lights on the outside, and two green ones on the inside. It was not an FAA-approved plane, and it was not a civilian helicopter (no noise). At this point, the other possible explanations are less likely than it being a drone.
Of course, not all "Lights in the Sky" are airplanes, helicopters, drones, stars, satellites or reflections of ground-based lights. There was an interesting sighting in Arizona two weeks ago analyzed and explained by the indefatigable Mick West (2 min video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V00KT4PCd-0.
The additives added to tap water to make them generate rainbows is a good example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIYZvr3ueGw
There is a BBC Radio program called More or Less, which covers analysis of statistics in the media. They have a motto "Is that a big number?" which is a great starting point for any investigation, essentially asking if the observation is what you would expect if nothing newsworthy were occurring. It's worth keeping that idea floating in your head.
I worry more about things I can’t see…
The windshield pitting epidemic was a case of collective delusion, where heightened awareness, media influence, and misattributed environmental factors led people to notice and misinterpret existing, ordinary damage as a mysterious phenomenon.
A delusion would imply that people were claiming their windshields were pitted and they weren't... but I'm sure they were.
Similarily, these days people hear about drones in the sky. They look up, see lights, and think the lights they see are drones. Their interpretation of the lights is coloured by media reports. Even if the lights were there last year! And some lights may absolutely be of drones too! Much like pitting was a real occurrence.
The pitting story reminds us that just because there are more reports, doesn't mean there is more of the thing. Because people's perception is selective. And that can lead into delusion.