Decide Now; We Won't Know More Later Re UFOs | Hacker News Reader

Decide Now; We Won't Know More Later Re UFOs

overcomingbias.com

22 pointspaulpauper23 comments

The data quality is improving. But there are also a lot more drones.

This applies especially to triangular-shaped objects. Reports in the last few years show a lot of those.[1] There are also now large numbers of triangular drones. Here's a really fast jet one from 2017.[2] There are cheaper ones with pusher props. Iran builds a lot of these, in various sizes. So do Ukraine and Russia. You can buy them on Amazon or Alibaba.

There's a group trying to get people to install automated UFO detection cameras.[3] They're pan-tilt-zoom dome surveillance cameras aimed upward, with software to detect objects of interest. They claim 90 sites in the US, but haven't updated that info since 2024. They get good pictures of airplanes, birds, drones, the International Space Station, etc. Not much unexplained. There's another group with the same concept.[4] The standard of detection is that the device should routinely detect and track the ISS when it passes over.

More of those would help. Enough that the same objects are captured from multiple cameras. Then you can triangulate and get range. Also, few optical illusions hold up when seen from three cameras.

Without data, speculation is useless.

China will probably have good sky surveillance soon. There's now a Ministry of Low-Altitude Aviation.[5] Somebody has to do traffic control for all the drones and flying cars in China.

[1] https://fixthisnation.com/mystery-drones-over-new-jersey-wha...

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

[3] https://ufodap.com/

[4] https://www.sky360.org/

[5] https://businessaviation.aero/evtol-news-and-electric-aircra...

I am with the commenter who pasted a link to https://xkcd.com/1235/

With almost every one carrying smartphones we should be seeing a lot more high resolution videos of these objects. Especially we would be having recordings the same event from different angles.

Now I am not saying there are not a good amount of UFOs there, there are, but that still doesn't mean they are aliens. They are just unidentified, and maybe some are not even objects but illusions, or optical effects, or natural phenomena.

The majority of mobile phones don’t have a telephoto lens good enough to take a useful picture of something ordinary sized high up in the sky. Just ask anyone that’s tried to take a decent picture of the Moon! Samsung famously inserts a picture of the Moon into photos to avoid user disappointment.

I do agree with you, by now I would have expected a lot more footage if UFOs were really visiting us. However that amount — if they were here — would still be a lot less than you might expect!

For folks unaware of the Samsung moon issue: https://universemagazine.com/en/space-zoom-of-samsung-smartp...

That's scary.

Imagine video of police violence being automatically edited in the camera to make the cops look good.

Well, we only need phone manufacturers to add UFOs into photos then!

> With almost every one carrying smartphones we should be seeing a lot more high resolution videos of these objects.

This is a well meaning take but it’s not a good scientific argument. It’s correlation, but doesn’t say which way the arrow of causation is pointing.

Suppose the phenomenon being observed is cloaking tech. By definition, it’s something that is forever on the edge of what photon-based digital recording devices can observe, remaining consistently “blurry” despite massive increase in quantity and quality of recording devices.

I'm a pilot, i know what things look like in the air from varying distances, balloons, other planes, helicopters, stray plastic sheet, lasers, whatever. I'm also not a believer in supernatural things and i hope aliens are not visiting our planet without our knowledge and/or permission. However, (here we go): I have seen an object in the sky seemingly being intelligently controlled & doing things that we have no current ability to do or understand (as far as we know) and these maneuvers would absolutely turn the occupant (if there was one) into a warm liquid. it had a single kind of unnaturally bright (but not blinding for some reason) blueish light and it just danced in the sky like physics just didn't matter at all. I and 4 other friends of mine watched it for about 3-5 mins until it turned toward space and zipped away like it was nothing. This was clearly a large object, about the size of a fighter jet.

Based on that experience and my interpretation of my senses, I feel like i personally know for a fact that SOMETHING is flying around in our skies that we currently have no inventory for (that is publicly known at least) and to be absolutely prudent i would want to investigate that object and understand what it is, where it came from and who made it (i also want to fly it) and that would be an absolute priority. It's not that there's nothing in the skies of interest. There is something up there that people are seeing that's not being misidentified (it's not being identified at all!), but it's a real object. My guess: advanced american drone with a new power source and propulsion system that the general public (including research scientists) didn't know was possible. Other than that, sure maybe aliens, if our understanding of the universe is just completely flawed and FTL is actually possible.

I'm not here to try to convince anyone (maybe i am subconsciously, but whatever). It's just incredibly frustrating because i absolutely hate religion and any other belief systems that might promote a lack of critical thinking, and it looks like i'm presenting a lack of critical thinking here. Yes, i do not know what it was, but I'm also an educated engineer who happens to be a pilot. I completely understand that humans have faulty perception and probably even more faulty brains, but I also understand when something is an object versus when it's of some other quality (gas, solid, etc.). I'm increasingly annoyed when i see the entire subject seem to get dismissed simply because there are so many bad reports and bad information.

I agree somewhat with the premise here but also, if there are aliens visiting our planet from another solar system and they just got here today, then what kind of action could humans take anyway? These things would probably be able to reshape reality at that point, idk.

I like the idea that accounts like yours are due to a deception system to create false radar echoes for confusing incoming ballistic missiles, with these being tested now and then so that they are confirmed to work.

I don't think this is true though. It doesn't fit all the details and I don't think the lasers to do it have existed long enough, if they even exist now.

I don't think we will ever understand what you saw if we continue to cling to our view of what reality actually is. I think it's unlikely whatever it is originated in some distant galaxy far far away (aliens, little-green men, spacecraft, etc). I think it's something fundamental and it's here on this planet and I don't think that sits well with people. Like many things, we have to look within rather than what's out there.

> Other than that, sure maybe aliens, if our understanding of the universe is just completely flawed and FTL is actually possible.

It could be unmanned probes sent at lower speeds. There could be alien civilizations that thinks more long term than what we do. Perhaps they even learned to extend their lives indefinitely or can hibernate for centuries

The description sounds like ball lightning. Were there features you observed that would eliminate that possibility?

Attributing such things to another solar system is a fallacy that everything that's out there can be explained by the little that we already know. It's no different than when people of past ages explained stars as little holes in the sky dome: it was simply the limit of their understanding. It's a comfortable self-delusion. Their origin can be as well under ground in our planet in some unimaginable to us way. Even appealing to the logic: if they built a flying thing to which laws of physics don't seem to matter, why would they live like us, on a surface of some rock in deep space?

Completely agreed. The null hypothesis on that has always fallen on extraterrestrials, assuming we know everything about every single cubic meter on earth, which is anthropomorphically flawed. I never really speculate on what it was, exactly, because i don't have enough data. My first assumption is man-made, not extra-terrestrial or otherwise. It could have been ball lightning or some deception system for false radar return as someone mentioned earlier, but this thing had size to it. it wasn't a reflection. I've seen (vary rare video) examples of ball lightning also, but they don't move like what i saw.

> My guess: advanced american drone with a new power source and propulsion system that the general public (including research scientists) didn't know was possible.

This to me is the most likely explanation and no doubt the military and government certainly benefits from people attributing advanced terrestrial technology to extraterrestrial sources.

That's why we need enough cameras looking upward to get aerial phenomena like that imaged from multiple viewpoints. Then most of the ambiguity goes away.

Article that likely applies to majority of 'sightings/reports' in recent decades: https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/ufo-us-disinf...

I am tired of people mocking me for my interest in this topic so I won't bother to back this up too much, but this article doesn't really do what you say. It is itself disinfo designed to provide a simple, easily digested explanation for people that don't wish to think too deeply on this topic.

Anyone taking a cursory interest knows that the US government routinely sends out disinfo on the subject and uses it to cover up their own secret aerospace development. That was never contentious.

However, sightings and reports of strange phenomenon go back very far in recorded and oral history and they are not limited to the United States.

My personal feeling is people are terrible eye witnesses and historical sources are prone to be misinterpreted through a biased, modern lens. But I also know that if you read the Wikipedia article on von Neumann probes, it doesn't seem that far fetched to think one might have found its way here especially considering we are not that far away from being able to build them ourselves.

Well, one possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that there isn’t one.

OK. Whatever it is, it isn't aliens.

The ceramic shard (linked in first comment) had holes appearing in SEM because you need to make samples conductive and grounded (gold or carbon), otherwise electrons accumulate on the surface and make it invisible/cloudy in SEM.

But on topic of the article, I haven't seen single convincing photo or video of UFO. So despite collecting for 80 years, we have 0 good evidence. No need to bother with additional steps.

For me the moment when I gave up on UFO was when in comments under the "gimbal" video nobody realized that the "rotation" of the object comes from the rotation of the camera. It's like showing matches to uncontacted tribes, people are just dumb.

There are so many good books and thought about scientific skepticism and epistemology. It is by far the most important skill we need as a society to progress, but for some reason we're regressing horribly.

What?

The U in "UFO" stands for "unidentified". It has nothing to do with aliens. Were there intelligent enough species out there to have solved space flight and found us and visited us, we would know.

Having just (finally) read "The Three Body Problem" though, I think I agree with that premise that even just knowing that other species exist would probably be a net negative to current human society.

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