130,000 pages of declassified US Air Force files related to UFO sightings

Carl Sagan makes that comparison in his book "the demon haunted world".

This would be very interesting to read about. Slight tangent: I also remember seeing some stuff about how the brain is influenced by sociocultural things - like how people from christian-majority nations see heaven / hell / god imagery during psychosis but people from other, dissimilar cultures see different things. Or: how come people ingesting hallucinogens consistently report being one with god or being god? What's so special about the concept of god that triggers that kind of hallucination? Why isn't it as common to think that you're any other object, like a toaster?

Carl Jung's flying saucers is a good read.

He discusses the idea that of technological society automatically assuming that visitors have a "far more advanced technology", and the idea of the saucer being a completion the incomplete mandala of the industrial age. Very interesting stuff.

Chariots has some interesting points in it, but there are heaps and heaps of parts that are either simply untrue or have been disproved. I do love his stance on pharmaceutical drugs.

Jacques Valee has a number of books on this subject. He's a bit on the spooky rather than skeptic side of the fence though, and argues for some sort of common underlying phenomenon.

I think he might be right to some extent -- even if it's a psychological phenomenon, that fits the bill for a common underling cause.

Joe Nickell is an author who's written extensively on this subject. He's a paranormal investigator who happens to also be a Ph.D. folklorist, and his folkloric interpretations of many modern phenomena can be extremely compelling.

I think Terry Bisson (or perhaps another author, can't quite remember who) wrote a story with this premise - that UFOs do exist, but they are actual factual faeries.

Chariots of the Gods is a load of bull. It has been extensively debunked but it still sells (for what reason I have no idea).

Don't forget the non-verbal (Telepathic) communications and sleep paralysis.

I have heard it theorized by, let's call them enthusiastic evangelicals, that this indicates that what people now experience as UFOs are the same phenomena, caused by the same entities and done for the same purposes as the phenomena that people used to experience as Demonic visitations.

Me, I'm an open-minded skeptic. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence and a lot of unanswered questions doesn't imply a particular answer.

Look at the corridors that had lots of sightings. In my area of upstate NY, there were a ton of sightings later revealed to be due to testing the terrain following radars in cruise missiles. I guess the topography looked like whatever area of the former Soviet Union the missiles would target.

I'm sure Boeing has something to do with Washington's rate.

Observations are typically lights seen by pilots or from the ground.

Conclusions range from meteors, astronomical bodies, other planes etc...

Honestly the thing that surprises me is how each report was completed in detail. There is usually insufficient data for a definitive analysis, yet each report must have days to complete.

With higher resolution, blobs and smears suddenly become ordinary terrestrial objects.

obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1235/

I see UFOs all the time. I'm just don't know that much about aircraft and am not good at identifying them. Doesn't mean we've made contact with extraterrestrial life or that it would be worth my time to videorecord anything.

But when someone does film something interesting and weird are we going to give it more credence or less because of this?

that old quote about magic comes to mind... so many mysteries about to get real boring.

They're camera shy, so they've stopped coming around.

I can't speak to their veracity but there are new sighting that happen all the time that are largely ignored. Check out reddit.com/r/ufos.

The night time quality of my phone camera is awful. I could record a full moon and you couldn't tell what it was.

Maybe in a few years.

Try taking a photo of a plane in the sky with your phone sometime. You'll find that the angle of the lens is too wide to capture things far away.

Now, I agree with your basic premise that UFO sightings are probably mostly BS since the number of sightings has plummeted since people started carrying cellphones, but notice how people aren't reporting that they took a picture and now it too small for them to see. They just stopped altogether.

I tried to take a picture of a deer once in a park with my phone. I knew where the deer had run to, so I had everything on my side. Alas, the deer run when it saw me, and given how slow the auto-focus of my phone was, all I got was a small blur. Not even I would believe me.

I gained some respect that day for anyone who claims to have seen something, and yet has no decent evidence.

I don't know if sightings have increased, per se.

But there are a lot of sightings captured on cell phones these days.

Many are obvious fakery. Some seem more interesting.

My pet theory is that UFOs are an intrinsically 20th century phenomenon. TV no longer has that iconography on all the time, so we're not getting poked and prodded with the images anymore, and for anyone paying attention to our ever-improving 21st century understandings of the limits of technology, the idea that advanced races would be visiting us in huge spacecraft that sometimes get accidentally seen is absurd. If they wish to observe us without being seen, then it is very easy to imagine that they have long since modified our brains in such a way that they can simply edit themselves out, and also ensured that nobody is capable of witnessing the modifications, either. The idea of a War of the Worlds scenario where perhaps we could fight off an invasion is a very 20th century idea... in the 21st century it's pretty clear that if a starfaring culture wanted us out of the way, we'd be dead before we even realized a conflict had started. And I mean that literally; if they so chose, every human on the planet simultaneously dropping dead with no human-detectable advance warning wouldn't be all that challenging. Alternatively, at an unknown time in our past our entire planet's information content was hoovered up, we're running in a simulation, and the real solar system has long since been converted to computronium in the real world.

Personally I still favor life being more rare than we credit it with, and that we are fundamentally alone. But regardless, the idea that we're being visited in sometimes-observed spacecraft by apparently only quasi-competent aliens is absurd in light of what we know now. If "they" are among us, they are not quasi-competent, they are competent to a level that we can barely imagine.

Try filming a distant moving object with a commodity phone camera, especially in lower light. Everyone has a camera, yes, but it's the wrong kind of camera for capturing anything useful in this area.

If you wanted to get a good UFO photo or video what you'd really want is a high-resolution infrared camera. Unless our UFOnauts (whatever/whoever they are) are exempt from physics, anything using energy for any kind of powered flight must emit infrared whether it wants to or not.

Search youtube for UFO and you'll find thousands of videos with sightings. I personally think that they are all fakes or explainable objects, but who knows, maybe there are real UFOs in those videos ?

What kind of video would it take for us to believe ?

I want to believe

> he interesting question is how much of it was serious investigation of space aliens

0%

.. and how much was people calling their congressman saying, "You need to investigate these unidenitfied thingies." Because I think that's 100%.

One of the most compelling things to me is the astronauts testimonies. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Gene Cernan, and Gordon Cooper all have reported either first hand experience or second hand knowledge.

Also presidents of the USA. Reagan and Carter both have UFO stories they have talked about openly.

The fact that there are literally millions, if not billions, of people walking, driving, riding in trains, and flying every single day with quality cameras on them and not a single one of them has captured a single shred of credible evidence. To quote Tim Minchin, every extraordinary claim that has ever been presented by humans has turned out to be "not magic".

What i find quite surprising is that by some magical coincidence just as us puny humans mastered digital photography and managed to miniaturize electro optical sensors to a point where they can be emended into virtually any device and then sent out 100's of millions of people armed with these sophisticated cameras the UFO phenomenon pretty much died out...

For the most part the "latest" UFO shots you can find out there are grainy film cameras shots from the early 90's just about when the X-Files was fresh and cool. As we get closer to the 2000's for some reason all of those photos dry out, i guess ET's are just camera shy.

No one thing discredits all of them, and personally I think that Occam's razor compels us to agree that in the vast majority of reports people are describing an actual phenomenon they saw.

However, the sheer variability of these reports does discredit the idea that there is a common explanation for all of these sightings. And that's where things like the alien visitation hypothesis begin to unravel. For the most part UFOlogists fail to see the forest for the trees - they look at each story individually, and never really spend any time trying to figure out how they could all possibly fit together into a single coherent story. Occam's razor also compels us to seek different explanations for different phenomena in the absence of any compelling evidence to show that they are, in fact, related.

The problem is, it's nearly impossible to come up with explanations for every single isolated anecdote by virtue of that very isolation. Skeptics understand this truism so implicitly that they oftentimes even fail to realize it's worth mentioning.

I´m airline pilot with 16 years of professional experience, I spent my first 3 to 4 years as a pilot looking outside to see if I could see a UFO. Of course I didn't see anything strange. But I am routinely fouled by Venus. I've observed Venus at dawn thousands of times, but now and then it seems that there is a light following us. I look at it thinking it's another airplane, then when I can't identify it as such, I remember that I´m looking at Venus. It's fun it happens after so many years knowing the phenomenon.

When I was a kid I used to live in the country, not far from the airport (my father was a commercial pilot too). It was common to see airliners doing a visual landing traffic to land, passing just overhead. One afternoon, I was coming out to feed the dogs when I saw a very bright green light, just the same type of green that shines at the right wing of airplanes, but this light's trajectory was 90º to the normal traffic one, and was heading away from the airport. At first I thought It was a crashing airplane, but it was completely silent. It was very weird, I stared at it for a minute or so, till it disappeared to the East. I thought then that it was a hight (and heavy) meteorite composed of Cu. Next day the local newspaper talked about it, how everybody reported it to the police, and how it was in fact a meteorite that brushed the higher atmosphere and rebounded again to the space.

If you are expecting or believing in alien UFOs, it´s easy to mistake something like this for a real UFO. I read some time ago this report http://www.amazon.com/Conclusions-Controlled-UFO-Hoaxes-Inst... It's about a couple of guys that join a UFO sighting group, and start doing fake UFOs with helium balloons and a flash to see how they responded to it (spoiler: not very accurately or sceptical). Highly recommended.

Don't forget drones.

Project Blue Book itself was based out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which is outside Dayton, Ohio.

Information is classified by default, and only ever declassified when there is a high degree of confidence that the information is no longer sensitive.

The concern almost certainly has nothing to do with the possibility that someone might have seen an alien spacecraft, but the risk of revealing information about military aircraft movements.

It has been alleged that the US Air Force actively encouraged UFO conspiracy theories to draw attention away from secret weapons programs.

See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men

Or if you choose different values for the variables in the Drake Equation for which we have only a single known data point -- i.e. most of them -- there is probably exactly one civilization in the galaxy.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand the statistics and distances involved here. Millions of civilizations? Only if you take the most optimistic of all statistical stretches. I personally think that there are at most a dozen civilizations that are within our technological range +- 10,000 years (really generous given the enormity of time) and the speed of light conspires to keep them forever beyond our reach.

Aliens do not walk among us.

While the Drake Equation indicates that there are probably loads of other intelligent species in our galaxy, there's no reason to think that it's practical for them to visit.

On the other hand, everything that has ever been declassified regarding UFOs suggests the phenomenon is mundane. That the government has probably taken advantage of the popular culture of UFOs to cover up their own projects with false reports and sightings makes the waters purposely murky.

Belief isn't evidence of anything but a convincing story. People believe in things which turn out to have been untrue, misconstrued or plain fraud all the time (see: the Cottingley fairies, Piltdown man, WMD in Iraq.)

Yes, there always could be some super-super secret treasure trove of classified information showing that UFOs are really alien spacecraft but it also seems increasingly likely that none of them are.

I checked out Friedman's website: http://www.stantonfriedman.com/index.php?ptp=ufo_challenge

Anyone know what these 5 major studies he references on that page are?

I'm not sure about Neil Armstrong - although I can't find any evidence supporting the view that he believed in UFOs.

Buzz Aldrin doesn't though:

On Apollo 11 in route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us. There were many explanations of what that could be, other than another spacecraft from another country or another world - it was either the rocket we had separated from, or the 4 panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft. So in the close vicinity, moving away, were 4 panels. And i feel absolutely convinced that we were looking at the sun reflected off of one of these panels. Which one? I don't know. So technically, the definition could be "unidentified."

We well understood exactly what that was. And when we returned, we debriefed and explained exactly what we had observed. And I felt that this had been distributed to the outside world, the outside audience, and apparently it wasn't, and so many years later, I had the time in an interview to disclose these observations, on another country's television network.[1]

I'm not sure it can be much clearer than that.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2a5vg8/i_am_buzz_aldri...