I assume because there is a feeling that the footage is not faked (as footage of UFO's tend to be), and because the military's incentives to fake a UFO video are usually very much in the opposite direction (i.e. nothing to see here, carry on).
I actually think it's perfect. Imagine they have future tech that absolutely crushes any current or next-gen competitors. The public is nosey and every year becoming more and more able to record high quality footage.
So let's drum up the "crazy" about UFOs. So when real UFOs are seen (the ones we created and want to keep secret) nobody can get a serious dialogue going because the UFO signal-to-noise ratio is awful. Everyone will focus on how crazy anyone sounds when they claim they have UFO footage. Especially when one of our military partners or adversaries manage to snag some airborne or satellite imagery of it.
If you haven't watched the video, especially the one with the two pilots chatting about the object, you should. If anything it is at least entertaining and will remind you quite a bit of the ATC scene from Close Encounters.
Linguistically it suggests it might be identified or identifiable, which belies the whole first word, unidentified, of the acronym. It's not just silly, it's an oxymoron.
So where does the rubber hit the road? Oh, you saw a UFO flying around, great. Might as well be 1 million lightyears away if they aren't going to give us advanced technology. The first wheel the people of the interior of Papua New Guinea ever saw was on the bottom of a Japanese airplane flying overhead, so there's that. Seriously, we might as well be a primitive tribe in the Amazon seeing an airplane flying overhead in the 1950s. Ho hum, time to get back to work scavenging for food.
There is a very deep soviet science-fiction novel by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: Roadside Picnic. It is relatively unknown in western world, which is very sad since in Russia it is considered one of the pinnacles of Soviet-Russian science fiction works. The plot is as follows:
One day, several strange zones appeared in the world, on a line that extends to a star Deneb. The brave 'stalkers' found all sorts of strange and miraculous objects there - artefacts (some people will remember a popular russian game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with similar things): they can kill and they can cure, but what we do know that the civilization that left them exists on an unfathomable scientific level to us and we can not even start to comprehend them, these objects are like magic to us.
And these strange zones, these strange objects were just a waste to this civilization. They just traveled through the cosmos and did not even notice us when they dumped them, like we, humans, do not notice ants that crawl under our feet while we take a picnic near a road.
I've always loved this book. I still remember the phrase "HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND LET NO ONE LEAVE UNSATISFIED!" to this day.
I think it presents an incredibly realistic view of an ETI visiting this planet, especially if life is common in the universe. They don't come for us; hey are just passing through.
I have to wonder, realistically, how modern governments would respond to such a visitation.
Unfortunately, the sources in the story DO NOT inspire credibility...
>"...said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program [Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program]...
This guy has also been involved in "paranormal investigations" and "zero-point energy research" according to wikipedia. Nice fodder for the X-files, but not reality. It is a pity that the NYT reporter didn't take more skeptical view.
This is a common retort (in my view, to make people feel better and not have to consider the implications otherwise) -- here's the pentagon official in charge of the program stating unequivocally that these are almost certainly not related to any aircraft in any national inventory
The thing that makes these interesting is the fact that they exhibit aeronautic behavior, while tracked by multiple computers and witnesses, that is not physically possible with known methods of propulsion, not because they look like shiny discs.
There's nothing that's not physically possible here, just bottlenecked by G forces limitations on human passengers. Given the fact that drone technology testing was extremely popular at the time, I wouldn't be surprised if it's just experimental drone testing.
There are no exhaust trails or visible jet engines in the footage, so I'd say those UFOs are outside the limits of the physically possible as we understand it.
The director of this program is on record saying that after deploying extensive analytical resources at the Pentagon onto all the evidence (cross referencing radar signatures, satellite feeds, etc) and leveraging internal expertise to rule out alternatives there remain cases for which there remains no explanation consistent with the idea that these are aircraft in any government's inventory or any other natural phenomena.
Either this person is lying, or somehow otherwise should be given no credibility, or the government has decided to reveal that there are in fact objects in the sky whose origin are, to the best of our country's ability to analyze them, unknown. This person specifically ruled out the idea in their NPR interview that these objects are part of some hidden government advanced aircraft program.
You can believe what you want to sleep better at night, such as that there is in fact some hyper-advanced tech the government has that this program was kept in the dark about, but there's not much wiggle room at this point other than to accept that the level of public acknowledgement of the UFO phenomena by the federal government (and particularly, the department of defense) has changed significantly now and that there is a very high prior that there are objects in the sky whose origins are a mystery.
Indeed. I’m as skeptical as it gets re: UFOs—and in general, really—and I have no idea how to process these videos without coming to the conclusion that something significantly outside of all current human understanding is going on.
Reading about the Avrocar, I am surprised the design was not taking up more recently. It’s kind of the jet equivalent of the quadracopter, in terms of its operating envelope. It seems like all the problems that Frost had back in the 50s could’ve been fixed with modern design tools and competitions fluid dynamics. Except for the inability to achieve high speed flight let alone Mach 3.3 which military was interested in. But I wonder about using the flying saucer design has more efficient drone or regional delivery system, as it has the efficiency of jet power with the mobility of a helicopter, and its short range and low speeds are not a concern in those applications.
I hope some enterprising aeronautical engineering student at Calpoly parters with some compsci engineers at Stanford to take this up...
That would be the simplest explanation. Given the huge amount of money spent on US military, the value of having advanced military aircraft in their inventory, and the desire to keep the technology secret and out of enemy hands - military based UFOs seems like a reasonable conclusion.
The fact that the aircraft is moving at G forces unsustainable by biological life isn't surprising either given advances in drone tech.
It would also make sense to shut the UFO program down as well if it was ending up with these secret programs getting accidentally revealed.
Excuse me, I am generally a naive person. But what is your take on this video? Do you think this is legitimate? Do you think this “proves ” there are UFOs?
Or this could be just a strategy for another goal?
For example, somebody mentioned they are trying hard to redirect attention from something else?
The video quality is terrible, so who knows, but I've never seen any UFO footage that had any kind of decent quality video. Hell, a 2004 camera phone would be almost as good as this video. Yes, yes, its in the dark and moving fast and whatnot, but I thought that the military would have had much better imaging tech, even back in 2004, than this grainy low res thing. May as well be someones camcorder.
The only thing it has going for it, in my opinion, is that the pilots would have been pretty used to seeing stuff in their cameras and would know the difference between something ordinary and something extraordinary. I do think its more likely that it was some military test plane than something extraterrestrial though, personally.
They intentionally degrade the quality of to avoid giving competitors data. I'm sure Congress has seen the original, and it's pretty startling that they still think the object is a legit UFO
> I'm sure Congress has seen the original, and it's pretty startling that they still think the object is a legit UFO
This is just conjecture though. Its pretty difficult for us to have a meaningful discussion about whether Congresses reaction is noteworthy without knowing for sure what they did or didn't see.
Based on what we have to work with, I'm not seeing anything noteworthy here besides some ATC/pilot folks conversation looking at a black smudge on a grainy sky. I guess unless we got to see the original video, its impossible to tell, really.
> They intentionally degrade the quality of to avoid giving competitors data.
Do we know this for sure? Is there a source for that?
It's been precedent for a long time. For example, we could have much better satellite photos but it's illegal to sell footage with resolution better than 1 pixel/meter. If they're doing it publicly for commercial satellite imagery I have zero doubts similar secret restrictions for video quality exist for military footage taken with optics
Others have said this but it's probably worth re-iterating. When the military call something a UFO, they mean it literally. It's an unidentified flying object i.e. an object moving through the air that they can't identify.
It's a popular culture thing that this term is used to mean "of extraterrestrial origin".
So, is it a UFO? Absolutely, pretty much by definition until someone identifies it.
Is it of extraterrestrial origin? Almost definitely not. It just doesn't make sense that there are aliens hurtling around and occasionally buzzing rural folk in Alabama, and the occasional fighter pilot, for larks. They might be doing that but it's much more likely that they're not.
This is, of course, entirely unrelated to the question of whether or not there is extraterrestrial life (probably) and extraterrestrial civilisation (no idea).
At first I thought it was a spec of dirt stuck on the window, because it kept its position constant relative to the moving airplane. But then when it twisted, I had to give up that explanation.
Camera could be gimbal mounted, behind a fixed glass dome - if the speck is on the dome and the camera gimbal moves, it would appear like "the UFO" rotating.
My brother is in the Navy, and lots of his friends are pilots.. those guys are jokesters, and I could absolutely see them pulling a prank along the lines of "oh my, thats a UFO! oh, its a smudge of cream cheese on the display."
Watch the angle displayed near the top of the screen. It passes 0° precisely when the object rotates. I say you're the winner.
(I think the speck would have to be on the lens itself though; a speck on the dome would stay fixed during gimbal rotation. Speck on the lens rotates by virtue of the DSP compensating for the camera rotation to keep the world level.)
I suppose also the "shape" of the object could be lens flare (or another imaging artifact) due to the object being very bright. At least some portion of such an artifact would track with the lens as well.
Yes, I know. But almost any object is hotter than the sky, especially if you are above cloud cover. If you own an IR thermometer, point it at the sky on a clear day to see what I mean (you'll get readings well below 0°F).
So just because the object is hotter than the sky & clouds doesn't mean much. It could be "room temperature" (say, an insect or fresh bird poo). Or it could be reflective, and simply be reflecting the heat of the plane or camera itself.
What would be helpful is to know the range of temperatures represented by that image. The object is overexposed, so at least we could get a lower bound on its temperature.
Pretty good theory. Although I don't think an insect would be able to hang on to a window/camera lens while traveling supersonic. (Maybe there is a double window and the insect is in-between, which explains why it doesn't get blown away?)
Yeah, pet peeve of mine. The word "possible" was added inappropriately. They are absolutely sure, already, that it's a UFO. Which isn't saying much, and deliberately so. It's the first and vaguest thing they call it. If they ever found out what it was, they would stop calling it a UFO. So a more accurate title, if you're optimistic about it being some particular (identified) thing, such as (I presume) alien spacecraft, would be "Possible Non-UFO Spotted by US Fighters."
Misspelled "Camera" also.
Edit: Well this comment is obsolete now that they updated the title. Good work!
Well I guess medias have taught people that UFO means extraterrestrial alien craft. I think the most optimal response to such new neologisms is to accept them once they attain a critical momentum ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Does anyone think it could be a reflection or a trick of light that is dependent of the viewers position? Eg it's int he same position relative to the viewer and then suddenly "flys away" because the conditions for it to be visible have changed?
New planes go through extensive experimental phases. The F-35 took over a decade from first flight to being generally available and that’s not even considering the several competing aircraft that were weeded out before the F-35 was selected.
Not saying you are wrong, but a 13 year span doesn’t necessarily rule out the link OP posted.
I'm sold on the whole UFO cover-up thing. If you peel back the social ridicule (very successfully induced by US government collaboration with Hollywood) and consider the huge number of circumstantial reports from across the military and non-military it seems pretty clear there's stuff in the skies of non-human origin. Historical art suggests they've been flying for centuries.
There's also the publicly acknowledged reports of NASA and various governments/military conducting investigations and spending millions of dollars in the process.
Historically it would have been politically difficult for governments to come out and admit this - and when they did (like after Roswell) it was quickly retracted.
Peel back the social conditioning and reconsider the likelihood of this given all the reports.
I’m open minded to what you’re saying, and I agree that dismissing alien contact due to popular zeitgeist is silly.
But here’s my problem with what you’re saying: where did they come from then, and how did they get here? Why do we not have any evidence of their planet in any reasonable distance from Earth? Given what we understand about modern physics, we have three conclusions we can arrive at:
1. We fundamentally misunderstand physics, in particular the central concept that the speed of light is a hard speed limit on motion, and aliens are capable of arriving here faster than light,
2. The aliens have technology capable of arriving here from so distant a home world that they are either inconceivably long lived or else their entire society existed on a transport vessel for generations and generations,
3. Sightings of UFO are examples of popular hysteria, and aliens are not, and have never been anywhere near Earth.
Given the available evidence, Occam’s Razor suggests #3. I understand that reports from distributed and disconnected sources can be encouraging, but realistically speaking it still presents insufficiently extraordinary evidence to me to abandon possibility #3.
Yeah #3 is certainly the most likely and is what I always assumed. But over time I've come to think that they are here. So probably the next most likely is #1. Maybe they just know more science than we do. Look how far we've come in the last 200 years. What if they have a few millennia on us?
What if it's some sort of psychological phenomenon, but one which has a physical manifestation?
Yes, I know that that idea is pretty out there, but we're already talking about ideas that bend or break the known physical laws, so why not consider it? I honestly don't see it as being any less absurd than the idea that the speed of light is not a universal constant, an that is required for almost all hypotheticals involved extra-solar intelligence.
Keep in mind that we think we know how to reach a destination faster than light (although not travel faster than light). We just don't know how [edit: to build the engine] or even if it's a practical approach. What it shows is that physics does allow us to reach a distant star and return in a single lifetime.
> inconceivably long lived
I'm not sure about this one. That species would have had to evolve somehow, unless they solved the mortality problem or unless Earth-like evolution is not universal. Even if they could, given the timeframes, why would they visit?
My point is that, yes, we don't have enough evidence to abandon possibility #3. We also don't have enough knowledge to abandon possibility #1 and #2.
That being said, I'd wager that if ET has visited Earth less than 1% of the sightings are authentic - we aren't that interesting.
I used to be fascinated with the UFO reports and such as a kid.
However, I grew up, and learned physics. And then later I learned about things like Molecular Nanotechnology.
Aliens, as popularly conceived, have not been here, and will not be coming here.
Why? I'll explain.
Space is big. Like, really big. The distance to the nearest star system is 4 light-years away. Even for a small object, it takes an enormous amount of energy to get going at a "reasonable" speed, like at some fraction of the speed of light. For an example of a more reasonably-sized object, Voyager 1 would take 70k years to get to the closest star system (4LY away) if it was headed in the right direction.
But then you have to stop! If you accelerate up to 0.1c (very fast), you have to decelerate to arrive at your destination. This is where the rocket equation kills you. Even with super-mass efficient ion drives (which with our current technology provide very low thrust), accelerating your spaceship to a reasonable speed, and then have enough delta-V to stop at the destination requires an even more crazy amount of energy.
If any aliens are headed to our solar system, we'd see their drive flairs from a long way out.
The most efficient system is to use a light sail (really, a laser sail). This is so you don't have to carry all that reaction mass with you, thus bypassing the rocket equation. And then there's a trick where you detach most of your sail, allowing it to reflect light back towards the ship for the deceleration half of the trip.
But again, even for a small (like 1kg) payload, this requires a stupendous amount of energy. And we'd see them coming because they'd be shining a big, big laser in our direction.
There are also Bussard ramjet drives, and other speculated technology, but these would all likely be slower because of the mass required to build it.
Now simply flinging out a bunch of von Neumann replicators out in every direction would be much less obvious (though very slow), until the space dust starts building infrastructure in our solar system... but that's a talk for another day.
But maybe the UFO are really old machines (like millions of years old) in which case they can take all they time they need to travel and decelerate, such that wouldn't produce drive flairs.
Anything is possible, but that doesn't seem likely.
It is helpful to think of what would aliens want from us that they can't get at home.
Raw material, like in the mini-series V, Oblivion, Uplift War trilogy, etc? It is too expensive to ship matter anywhere. If you need a lot of it for a construction project, you'd be better off heading to the galactic core.
Maybe they want our cultural uniqueness? But they could easily simulate many virtual worlds with different starting conditions, and poke around those without leaving the comfort of home. That would be much easier, especially after they get bored with humans.
And if they have advanced molecular nanotechnology, it isn't just waiting millions of years for results. They are likely running at a much higher "clock rate" than we are now. You can run an uploaded mind much faster than a biological one. So these hypothetical aliens would instead be waiting billions of years of subjective time for their probes to find something interesting.
Maybe they just want to study us. If we discovered an alien race it'd be pretty interesting to watch them evolve. It'd be just like the fun parents have seeing children grow up.
Maybe they just want to study us. If we discovered an alien race it'd be pretty interesting to watch them evolve. It'd be just like the fun parents have seeing children grow up.
Maybe, but I find that unlikely.
If they do want to pursue those sorts of activities, then can do much more, much faster while closer to home. Why settle for observing one naturally evolved species, when you can make dozens (or thousands) of your own?
Unknown unknowns mean you don't know if there's a way to make fast, long distance travel feasible.
From a Newtonian perspective quantum physics sounds like a complete joke. There are undoubtedly other discoveries yet to be made. I can certainly countenance that future scientific advancements could make what we think of today as being impossible as being possible without violating the laws we have discovered.
While there are definitely gaps in our understanding, the standard model of physics is one of the best scientific theories... ever.
So we don't yet have a grand unified field theory, but for what we do understand, at reasonably attainable energy levels, there just isn't room to jam in some sort of faster-than-light communication or faster-than-light travel.
If you look at how it all fits together, any sort of magic like that seems highly unlikely.
Nothing we've observed in the sky, dating back billions of years, suggests FTL either. Until I see something that can even hint at FTL, I'm completely discounting it.
Not sure I agree with the analysis, although I do agree with the conclusion.
We've only known there's a pervasive limit for a century. We've known for a few decades that the limit is quite subtle i.e. the violation of local realism. It's not at all difficult to imagine that there is more to know in this field. I mean, it took 200-odd years before Newtonian mechanics was supplanted. So there's form.
Also, you don't need to go faster than light as long as you don't go back. If alien explorers are going at a decent fraction of light speed, they can get a fairly long way in a sensible timespan for them. Just not for the folk back home.
My objection to the conspiracy theory idea is that it just doesn't make any sense. They drew huge pictures and built great monuments then got shy. They now play peekaboo with rednecks and the odd fighter pilot.
Governments could be covering up alien tech from a long gone race but one that's still here? A race that they collude with but let out to do a bit of probing because, presumably, the government can't find bodies for them.
So nah. They're not here but it's not technically inconceivable that they haven't been in the past or won't be in the future. It just doesn't seem very likely.
4. The entire world is a simulation and UFOs are moving around in debug mode. The size of the simulation could be anywhere from the entire universe to the Solar System (or less, if you can come up with a plausible reason why the Pioneer probes appear to continue to operate despite being outside of a smaller simulation volume).
Occam's Razor would throw that one out too of course.
There's a perfectly consistent explanation that doesn't really break Occam's razor unless you have huge assumptions about AI takeoff and the drake equation:
- These are really old things
- They are autonomous and are driven by some computing system/AI
- They have the ability to harvest, store, and leverage an immense amount of energy and convert it into propulsion (or more specifically, allows the repositioning of the object's atoms in spacetime) in a way we don't understand but doesn't break the laws of thermodynamics and allows travel at near light speed for long periods of time.
- Their purpose isn't to communicate back to the origin (since the speed of light) but to autonomously take interventional action at their destination upon arrival based upon observation (this is the part that should scare you and if I were to go out on a limb is the reason these things aren't disclosed)
That's it. Speculation about their original origin is irrelevant with regards to assuming it's an extremely unlikely thing for unmanned autonomous agents to exist with (a relatively incremental) post-human level of technological capability.
If anything, there are many variants of resolving the drake equation which would make it surprising to not see such things, since it would imply there was never AI takeoff anywhere or any mechanism to deploy long-lived, self sufficient, autonomous probes. I'd expect us to be able to construct primitive versions of this within 100 years.
> Peel back the social conditioning and reconsider the likelihood of this given all the reports.
Well, for starters, it would require an extraordinary number of people to keep such a secret [1], so not really as probable as you may think. But it's still fun to think about.
That was rude, I know, but remember that the evidence required is proportional to the claim.
Extraterrestrial machines literally flying within our atmosphere is an extraordinary claim and requires more evidence than a huge number of circumstantial reports.
I imagine the claim like a hole in the ground that needs to be filled with nice clear evidence in order for people to swim in it comfortably. These circumstantial reports are like a bunch of 12oz cups and the hole you're trying to fill is more akin to a lake than a puddle.
There’s no evidence that FTL is possible and even if it were it would probably require huge amounts of power. We’d notice it being used.
We may as well be saying that these are angels from heaven, I guess is my point. There are tons of reports of ‘divine’ stuff happening as well, but jumping to God existing being a likelihood is not something an objective observer would do.
What I really want to know is what the alien technology is that makes all of these videos grainy and impossible to make out details in, and how did Bigfoot acquire it?
In a totally unrelated comment, I want to say, one reason why I find the UFO thing interested is in hypothetical situation if we can have proofs of existence of aliens, all those nonsense, ridiculous religions (like Islam, Christianity, Judaism, etc) would be horseshit to common people. With a simple question of : “Why your God only sent his prophet to earth?”
> one reason why I find the UFO thing interested is in hypothetical situation if we can have proofs of existence of aliens, all those nonsense, ridiculous religions (like Islam, Christianity, Judaism, etc) would be horseshit to common people. With a simple question of : “Why your God only sent his prophet to earth?”
How is that question substantively any different than “Why your God only sent his prophet to the Middle East?”
If the Abrahamic religions (not even to mention all the religions that don't rest on a singular preeminent emissary, which don't have this problem at all) can survive and thrive in the face of the latter question, the former isn't much of a challenge.
>How is that question substantively any different than “Why your God only sent his prophet to the Middle East?”
Nice question. I remember when I was 12,13 and lived with my family (in religious country) I have thought about the exact same question. I think you are totally right.
I've found the issue interesting from another perspective: given I found the eye-witness evidence for Christianity compelling, can I test myself to come to the right conclusion in a similarly contentious but unrelated field? The shear amount of eye witness testimony for UFO sightings and encounters is overwhelming, particularly from people who have impeccable credentials and have everything to lose (meeting strongly the criterion of embarrassment, similar to the apostles). Both make big claims that rest on eye-witness (or claimed eye-witness) testimony. One isn't accessible to the scientific method whereas the other is. If ridicule has been misplaced on the UFO issue, I'm inclined the think we should give pause for thought about the other issues that are commonly ridiculed by society. Regarding aliens rendering religion nonsense: on Christianity, no-one ever said that all creatures were made in the image of God or if they were that God should decide to show his grace towards them. It's clearly compatible with Christianity - can't speak for Islam.
Interesting that you use the word ridicule because that's a key theme that runs through both the UFO field and popular response to any religious claim. As Feynmans says: "Another of the qualities of science is that it teaches the value of rational thought as well as the importance of freedom of thought ; the positive result that come from doubting that the lessons are all true." We should doubt, question and test but not ridicule.
The main schools of thought are that Jesus is unique to Earth (there are explanations as to why, such as Earth being the only sinful planet), Jesus has existed in one way or another on every planet with sapient life (this is viewed as heretical by the church) or that the same Jesus visits multiple planets. Some of these religions do not believe that the messiah (there have always been multiple prophets in these religions) has yet arrived. I'm sure that Scientology would feel vindicated, unless ET confirmed that Xenu does not exist.
> The main schools of thought are that Jesus is unique to Earth
Citation needed.
The Roman Catholic Church (certainly a "main school of thought") is on record as saying it's certainly possible that Jesus visited other planets, if there is life on those planets.
The Catholic Church's astronomers, philosophers, and theologians have been on the record for more than half a century as saying that intelligent life on other planets is not heretical.
But the sort of people who learn everything they know about religion from Family Guy continue to perpetuate long-dead stereotypes on the internet.
Also, the fact that you use the phrase "the church" to describe all of Christianity shows your information level about religion is pretty low.
The RCC has also stated that Christ might not be necessary for other species, as the redemption of mankind (Christ's purpose) was only made necessary by the Fall.
There are plenty of simple questions that already blow apart the majority of religions if someone is unbiased / not indoctrinated. It would likely just be used as further proof of righteousness and a source of xenophobia by those in control of said religions.
"God sent his prophet because we're the chosen species, the only one created in His image. Only He can protect you from the alien threat," garbage like that. It's easy to spin this type of thing when you've thrown all rationality out the window.
Here's another interesting idea, then: what if aliens arrive tomorrow, and the first thing out of their mouths is: "Greetings! We have received your radio transmissions and have come to worship the one true God, Jesus Christ, with you."
True, but remember that ~75% of the universe is 'dark energy' that is making the universe fly apart, eventually, faster than light speed. So, we hypothesize that eventually, everything will be faster than light.
What I am saying is that we don't know enough physics at the moment to say definitely that FTL is impossible. We really don't know any physics when talking about the majority of mass-energy of what we know currently, really. Extra-solar visitors may have figured a bit more of this out and realized that FTL is somthing you just go around, who knows.
Why would an alien species just do atmosphere drive-bys? Why wouldn’t they pop down and say hello?
Why on earth would NASA, SETI, SpaceX, etc cover up the biggest scoop (biggest FUNDING scoop) of Earth’s history?
Why wouldn’t any of the other LEO piercing countries in the world grass it up? Thousands of people working in each of the space-faring countries, all keeping quiet about it.
Why would the US, Russia, China, probably even North Korea agree on this one thing? Alright guys we are all agreed on not telling the plebs about the aliens? Ok cool, back to the war then lads.
If you can answer why, I’m down to clown on your theory.
When we send scientists to document and study the penguins in Antarctica and their march to lay and sit on eggs, do we have the scientists go walk down to where they are, measure them, interact with them, etc? Or do we spot them from a distance, as discretely as possible, so that we don't disturb the subjects, and don't bias the study of their interactions?
Remember "Occam's Razor?" It is so incredibly difficult to travel through interstellar space that "aliens" is not the simplest explanation. Any civilization so advanced that it could bridge such distances in space to study earth would definitely have the technology to be undetectable. They'd have molecular sized drones collecting info. They wouldn't be detectable on radar. And it certainly wouldn't be the aliens themselves travelling, collecting data, it would be thousands of tiny robots. A more logical explanation is that this phenomenon is terrestrial in origin. The object from the pilot's video in 2012 was tracked and seen for several weeks by a Navy ship. Where are those records? Maybe this whole thing was an experiment to see how the military responds to an advanced piece of equipment. The fact that the object appeared on radar at the pilot's rendezvous point 60 miles away is very suspicious.
Exactly. Sci-fi writers have contemplated this. Advanced civilizations might consider cultural contamination of a relatively-primitive civilization so bad that they'll strive to avoid it (e.g. Star Trek's Prime Directive).
But they're not keeping quiet. Literally hundreds of reports have been made, ex-military willing to testify before US Congress (Disclosure Project), cryptic comments from ex-astronauts that hopefully in future "the truth will come out" (Armstrong or Aldrin IIRC). Governments have investigated, but perhaps if an advanced civilisation doesn't want to make contact and just wants to observe us then it's difficult to get conclusive proof? And then what? Tell your populace "Hi everyone, we can't keep our skies safe, but don't worry, it's probably OK".
There's some odd stuff in some NASA footage you can see for yourself. But now with CGI you probably won't accept any videos you can see on youtube as being real.
But this still isn't enough for you because until you actually see one with your own eyes you aren't willing to accept it. That is excellent scepticism. However, we accept a lot of scientific reports without actually running the experiments ourselves... There seems to be a mismatch there.
Healthy scepticism is healthy, but barring a "smoking gun" that is unavoidable (i.e. an "Independence Day"/"District 9" scenario) you probably will never believe it. I suggest that's due to conditioning and how the US Gov directed Hollywood to ridicule this sort of thing in the past.
If we relax things back to "normal" and view the reports (the volume, quality of sources, corroborating evidence like multiple witnesses, radar confirmation, WW1 Foo fighter reports, etc) then the balance of probabilities seems to lie with "yes, they're here and they've been here a long time", at least for me.
I mean the Mahabarata alone does appear to contain an account of nuclear fallout and diagrams of UFOs, and that was written thousands of years ago.
Why not? It's obviously very fact based. #2 seems pretty likely. If the US (or some other government) has a drone that can move in ways not generally known about, it seems like news to me.
This story got picked up because there’s actual video footage. But unfortunately only one video. If there were multiple observers, why can’t we see multiple videos?
If it's a secret experimental aircraft and you're afraid of a 3rd party leak, isn't it better to get ahead of that, release the video yourself and then say it isn't yours? Let the media and general population come to their own conclusions, wildly speculating about UFOs.
Was this how the video was released? It seems edited specifically in a way to cause the most mystery. The video starts and ends with it in sight of the camera. There is obviously more to the encounter which raises the question, why was it edited out?
The video is either edited for stabilization or that is the smoothest tracking while banked of another flying object that I've seen - or it's something in the camera system.
It's the camera system. Another forum where I was reading about this has lots of military and ex-military pilot members, and they identified the make and model of the imaging equipment that was used. No one there seemed to question the validity of the video itself.
For those interested in other "legitimate" UFO sightings, I'd recommend "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record" by Leslie Kean [1]. The author is an investigative journalist who sets out to interview observers of relatively well-documented UFO encounters, and ends up speaking mostly with military pilots from around the world. It's a good read, and is even-handed and well written, especially considering the genre.
In the book, two things stood out to me. First, there are a quite a few UFO sightings that are corroborated by non-human sensor data (mostly radar and video). Second, the narrative paints a picture where US government officials are much more secretive than any other nation, by far. Within that context, the releases of the last few weeks are even more surprising.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in a modern, not-too-X-files-like take on UFO phenomena.
I agree that the releases from the US Gov the last few weeks have been VERY surprising, nearly a 90 degree shift from the "deny everything" policy that they assumed for the last few decades.
Going one step further, at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I just wonder, what actually has changed to prompt this change in policy of denying everything
I've been suspicious for some time that the US federal government believes that there is likely to be sort of major societal upset in the near future. I can't imagine that it would be "Disclosure", though. I don't know what it could be.
My only issue with this - and I can’t figure a way out - is that this was a program launched in secrecy, funded with soft money, officially shut down five years ago but by all accounts has continued to operate in the dark... yet we get all this info, military videos, and more from individuals that participated in said program all in public and without extreme anonymity, etc such that would be typical in such a case.
I just don’t see why if we had a “confirmed” ufo sighting on military video that was a product of such a program, would we really discussing this in such a manner?
Hey meta question here, why do dupes not link to the thing they're a duplicate of. Kinda sounds like it would make navigating to dupes a lot less of a pain.
Not meta comment, aren't all flying objects UFOs until you've identified them?
Alternative view: "We're successful because we have a site that works simply, without much unneeded complexity, and choose to keep it simple for the sake of our users."
I once saw something I can't explain. Two spots on the night sky a bit larger than a star and of the color of an incandescent light about a half thumb on an outstreched arm apart. They were slowly moving across the sky, however with a swinging movement forward and backwards about a thumb with a period of two seconds. Like two people side by side walking together two steps ahead then a step back the whole time, just in the sky and this was a smooth movement.
Then suddenly one of the two lights went out. The other one continued the same movement and also went out about a minute later.
This steady swinging movement is an unexplainable riddle for me.
A friend of mine also sighted something in the bright day sky of Spain. He told me that he looked up and then that thing whooshed away in an incredible speed over the Mediterranean Sea.
It's really weird. Either our senses and even the technical equipment like cameras are just fooled or we have extremely strange things going on over our heads.
I know a family friend, ~ 80-year-old woman, told me that she one day looked out of the window and saw a really dark, saucer-like object, far, hovering over the woods, she said she blinked, rubbed her eyes, walked outside and it was still there, yelled for her kids to wake up and look out of the window but when her kids woke up it was too late, the object just vanished. She got visibly annoyed when her kids started chuckling at the story.
Rational me doesn't want to believe me, but well, what if it was something.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadWhat important news is getting buried? ;)
So let's drum up the "crazy" about UFOs. So when real UFOs are seen (the ones we created and want to keep secret) nobody can get a serious dialogue going because the UFO signal-to-noise ratio is awful. Everyone will focus on how crazy anyone sounds when they claim they have UFO footage. Especially when one of our military partners or adversaries manage to snag some airborne or satellite imagery of it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRA
But seeing as this is from the military, it makes it more implicit that it's alien.
One day, several strange zones appeared in the world, on a line that extends to a star Deneb. The brave 'stalkers' found all sorts of strange and miraculous objects there - artefacts (some people will remember a popular russian game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with similar things): they can kill and they can cure, but what we do know that the civilization that left them exists on an unfathomable scientific level to us and we can not even start to comprehend them, these objects are like magic to us.
And these strange zones, these strange objects were just a waste to this civilization. They just traveled through the cosmos and did not even notice us when they dumped them, like we, humans, do not notice ants that crawl under our feet while we take a picnic near a road.
I think it presents an incredibly realistic view of an ETI visiting this planet, especially if life is common in the universe. They don't come for us; hey are just passing through.
I have to wonder, realistically, how modern governments would respond to such a visitation.
Unfortunately, the sources in the story DO NOT inspire credibility...
This guy has also been involved in "paranormal investigations" and "zero-point energy research" according to wikipedia. Nice fodder for the X-files, but not reality. It is a pity that the NYT reporter didn't take more skeptical view.https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Ha...
(a picture of Have Blue - the precursor to the stealth fighter. It defiantly looks like something out of this world to the eyes of someone in 1977)
So, really, its likely that any UFO is military in nature, rather than extraterrestrial.
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/571868263/secret-program-at-t...
The thing that makes these interesting is the fact that they exhibit aeronautic behavior, while tracked by multiple computers and witnesses, that is not physically possible with known methods of propulsion, not because they look like shiny discs.
The director of this program is on record saying that after deploying extensive analytical resources at the Pentagon onto all the evidence (cross referencing radar signatures, satellite feeds, etc) and leveraging internal expertise to rule out alternatives there remain cases for which there remains no explanation consistent with the idea that these are aircraft in any government's inventory or any other natural phenomena.
Either this person is lying, or somehow otherwise should be given no credibility, or the government has decided to reveal that there are in fact objects in the sky whose origin are, to the best of our country's ability to analyze them, unknown. This person specifically ruled out the idea in their NPR interview that these objects are part of some hidden government advanced aircraft program.
You can believe what you want to sleep better at night, such as that there is in fact some hyper-advanced tech the government has that this program was kept in the dark about, but there's not much wiggle room at this point other than to accept that the level of public acknowledgement of the UFO phenomena by the federal government (and particularly, the department of defense) has changed significantly now and that there is a very high prior that there are objects in the sky whose origins are a mystery.
I hope some enterprising aeronautical engineering student at Calpoly parters with some compsci engineers at Stanford to take this up...
The fact that the aircraft is moving at G forces unsustainable by biological life isn't surprising either given advances in drone tech.
It would also make sense to shut the UFO program down as well if it was ending up with these secret programs getting accidentally revealed.
Or this could be just a strategy for another goal?
For example, somebody mentioned they are trying hard to redirect attention from something else?
Update: I put the word prove in quotations.
The only thing it has going for it, in my opinion, is that the pilots would have been pretty used to seeing stuff in their cameras and would know the difference between something ordinary and something extraordinary. I do think its more likely that it was some military test plane than something extraterrestrial though, personally.
This is just conjecture though. Its pretty difficult for us to have a meaningful discussion about whether Congresses reaction is noteworthy without knowing for sure what they did or didn't see.
Based on what we have to work with, I'm not seeing anything noteworthy here besides some ATC/pilot folks conversation looking at a black smudge on a grainy sky. I guess unless we got to see the original video, its impossible to tell, really.
> They intentionally degrade the quality of to avoid giving competitors data.
Do we know this for sure? Is there a source for that?
It's a popular culture thing that this term is used to mean "of extraterrestrial origin".
So, is it a UFO? Absolutely, pretty much by definition until someone identifies it.
Is it of extraterrestrial origin? Almost definitely not. It just doesn't make sense that there are aliens hurtling around and occasionally buzzing rural folk in Alabama, and the occasional fighter pilot, for larks. They might be doing that but it's much more likely that they're not.
This is, of course, entirely unrelated to the question of whether or not there is extraterrestrial life (probably) and extraterrestrial civilisation (no idea).
Yes, they legitimately saw something that they could not explain at the time.
> Do you think this proofs there are UFOs?
Of course there are flying objects that haven't been identified by someone. That doesn't mean they are extra terrestrial though.
> Somebody mentioned they are trying hard to redirect attention from something else?
Who's "they"?
Also what is an ASA.
(I think the speck would have to be on the lens itself though; a speck on the dome would stay fixed during gimbal rotation. Speck on the lens rotates by virtue of the DSP compensating for the camera rotation to keep the world level.)
I suppose also the "shape" of the object could be lens flare (or another imaging artifact) due to the object being very bright. At least some portion of such an artifact would track with the lens as well.
Also, the "halo" effect is an artifact of the imaging system I'm told.
So just because the object is hotter than the sky & clouds doesn't mean much. It could be "room temperature" (say, an insect or fresh bird poo). Or it could be reflective, and simply be reflecting the heat of the plane or camera itself.
What would be helpful is to know the range of temperatures represented by that image. The object is overexposed, so at least we could get a lower bound on its temperature.
Misspelled "Camera" also.
Edit: Well this comment is obsolete now that they updated the title. Good work!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/boeing-unveils-new-pl...
Not saying you are wrong, but a 13 year span doesn’t necessarily rule out the link OP posted.
https://www.defensenews.com/air/2017/12/19/boeing-offers-sne...
There's also the publicly acknowledged reports of NASA and various governments/military conducting investigations and spending millions of dollars in the process.
Historically it would have been politically difficult for governments to come out and admit this - and when they did (like after Roswell) it was quickly retracted.
Peel back the social conditioning and reconsider the likelihood of this given all the reports.
But here’s my problem with what you’re saying: where did they come from then, and how did they get here? Why do we not have any evidence of their planet in any reasonable distance from Earth? Given what we understand about modern physics, we have three conclusions we can arrive at:
1. We fundamentally misunderstand physics, in particular the central concept that the speed of light is a hard speed limit on motion, and aliens are capable of arriving here faster than light,
2. The aliens have technology capable of arriving here from so distant a home world that they are either inconceivably long lived or else their entire society existed on a transport vessel for generations and generations,
3. Sightings of UFO are examples of popular hysteria, and aliens are not, and have never been anywhere near Earth.
Given the available evidence, Occam’s Razor suggests #3. I understand that reports from distributed and disconnected sources can be encouraging, but realistically speaking it still presents insufficiently extraordinary evidence to me to abandon possibility #3.
Yes, I know that that idea is pretty out there, but we're already talking about ideas that bend or break the known physical laws, so why not consider it? I honestly don't see it as being any less absurd than the idea that the speed of light is not a universal constant, an that is required for almost all hypotheticals involved extra-solar intelligence.
A satellite program like this could easily monitor distant parts of the galaxy without travelling faster than light, or require a generational ship.
Keep in mind that we think we know how to reach a destination faster than light (although not travel faster than light). We just don't know how [edit: to build the engine] or even if it's a practical approach. What it shows is that physics does allow us to reach a distant star and return in a single lifetime.
> inconceivably long lived
I'm not sure about this one. That species would have had to evolve somehow, unless they solved the mortality problem or unless Earth-like evolution is not universal. Even if they could, given the timeframes, why would they visit?
My point is that, yes, we don't have enough evidence to abandon possibility #3. We also don't have enough knowledge to abandon possibility #1 and #2.
That being said, I'd wager that if ET has visited Earth less than 1% of the sightings are authentic - we aren't that interesting.
However, I grew up, and learned physics. And then later I learned about things like Molecular Nanotechnology.
Aliens, as popularly conceived, have not been here, and will not be coming here.
Why? I'll explain.
Space is big. Like, really big. The distance to the nearest star system is 4 light-years away. Even for a small object, it takes an enormous amount of energy to get going at a "reasonable" speed, like at some fraction of the speed of light. For an example of a more reasonably-sized object, Voyager 1 would take 70k years to get to the closest star system (4LY away) if it was headed in the right direction.
But then you have to stop! If you accelerate up to 0.1c (very fast), you have to decelerate to arrive at your destination. This is where the rocket equation kills you. Even with super-mass efficient ion drives (which with our current technology provide very low thrust), accelerating your spaceship to a reasonable speed, and then have enough delta-V to stop at the destination requires an even more crazy amount of energy.
If any aliens are headed to our solar system, we'd see their drive flairs from a long way out.
The most efficient system is to use a light sail (really, a laser sail). This is so you don't have to carry all that reaction mass with you, thus bypassing the rocket equation. And then there's a trick where you detach most of your sail, allowing it to reflect light back towards the ship for the deceleration half of the trip.
But again, even for a small (like 1kg) payload, this requires a stupendous amount of energy. And we'd see them coming because they'd be shining a big, big laser in our direction.
There are also Bussard ramjet drives, and other speculated technology, but these would all likely be slower because of the mass required to build it.
Now simply flinging out a bunch of von Neumann replicators out in every direction would be much less obvious (though very slow), until the space dust starts building infrastructure in our solar system... but that's a talk for another day.
It is helpful to think of what would aliens want from us that they can't get at home.
Raw material, like in the mini-series V, Oblivion, Uplift War trilogy, etc? It is too expensive to ship matter anywhere. If you need a lot of it for a construction project, you'd be better off heading to the galactic core.
Maybe they want our cultural uniqueness? But they could easily simulate many virtual worlds with different starting conditions, and poke around those without leaving the comfort of home. That would be much easier, especially after they get bored with humans.
And if they have advanced molecular nanotechnology, it isn't just waiting millions of years for results. They are likely running at a much higher "clock rate" than we are now. You can run an uploaded mind much faster than a biological one. So these hypothetical aliens would instead be waiting billions of years of subjective time for their probes to find something interesting.
Maybe, but I find that unlikely.
If they do want to pursue those sorts of activities, then can do much more, much faster while closer to home. Why settle for observing one naturally evolved species, when you can make dozens (or thousands) of your own?
From a Newtonian perspective quantum physics sounds like a complete joke. There are undoubtedly other discoveries yet to be made. I can certainly countenance that future scientific advancements could make what we think of today as being impossible as being possible without violating the laws we have discovered.
So we don't yet have a grand unified field theory, but for what we do understand, at reasonably attainable energy levels, there just isn't room to jam in some sort of faster-than-light communication or faster-than-light travel.
If you look at how it all fits together, any sort of magic like that seems highly unlikely.
Nothing we've observed in the sky, dating back billions of years, suggests FTL either. Until I see something that can even hint at FTL, I'm completely discounting it.
We've only known there's a pervasive limit for a century. We've known for a few decades that the limit is quite subtle i.e. the violation of local realism. It's not at all difficult to imagine that there is more to know in this field. I mean, it took 200-odd years before Newtonian mechanics was supplanted. So there's form.
Also, you don't need to go faster than light as long as you don't go back. If alien explorers are going at a decent fraction of light speed, they can get a fairly long way in a sensible timespan for them. Just not for the folk back home.
My objection to the conspiracy theory idea is that it just doesn't make any sense. They drew huge pictures and built great monuments then got shy. They now play peekaboo with rednecks and the odd fighter pilot.
Governments could be covering up alien tech from a long gone race but one that's still here? A race that they collude with but let out to do a bit of probing because, presumably, the government can't find bodies for them.
So nah. They're not here but it's not technically inconceivable that they haven't been in the past or won't be in the future. It just doesn't seem very likely.
Occam's Razor still suggests #3, but #4 is more likely than #1 and #2.
Occam's Razor would throw that one out too of course.
- These are really old things
- They are autonomous and are driven by some computing system/AI
- They have the ability to harvest, store, and leverage an immense amount of energy and convert it into propulsion (or more specifically, allows the repositioning of the object's atoms in spacetime) in a way we don't understand but doesn't break the laws of thermodynamics and allows travel at near light speed for long periods of time.
- Their purpose isn't to communicate back to the origin (since the speed of light) but to autonomously take interventional action at their destination upon arrival based upon observation (this is the part that should scare you and if I were to go out on a limb is the reason these things aren't disclosed)
That's it. Speculation about their original origin is irrelevant with regards to assuming it's an extremely unlikely thing for unmanned autonomous agents to exist with (a relatively incremental) post-human level of technological capability.
If anything, there are many variants of resolving the drake equation which would make it surprising to not see such things, since it would imply there was never AI takeoff anywhere or any mechanism to deploy long-lived, self sufficient, autonomous probes. I'd expect us to be able to construct primitive versions of this within 100 years.
Well, for starters, it would require an extraordinary number of people to keep such a secret [1], so not really as probable as you may think. But it's still fun to think about.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/math-formula-charts-the...
That was rude, I know, but remember that the evidence required is proportional to the claim.
Extraterrestrial machines literally flying within our atmosphere is an extraordinary claim and requires more evidence than a huge number of circumstantial reports.
I imagine the claim like a hole in the ground that needs to be filled with nice clear evidence in order for people to swim in it comfortably. These circumstantial reports are like a bunch of 12oz cups and the hole you're trying to fill is more akin to a lake than a puddle.
See http://siriusdisclosure.com/ countless testimonies, videos and proofs.
If it’s an extraterrestrial, how did it get here?
There’s no evidence that FTL is possible and even if it were it would probably require huge amounts of power. We’d notice it being used.
We may as well be saying that these are angels from heaven, I guess is my point. There are tons of reports of ‘divine’ stuff happening as well, but jumping to God existing being a likelihood is not something an objective observer would do.
What I really want to know is what the alien technology is that makes all of these videos grainy and impossible to make out details in, and how did Bigfoot acquire it?
How is that question substantively any different than “Why your God only sent his prophet to the Middle East?”
If the Abrahamic religions (not even to mention all the religions that don't rest on a singular preeminent emissary, which don't have this problem at all) can survive and thrive in the face of the latter question, the former isn't much of a challenge.
Nice question. I remember when I was 12,13 and lived with my family (in religious country) I have thought about the exact same question. I think you are totally right.
Interesting that you use the word ridicule because that's a key theme that runs through both the UFO field and popular response to any religious claim. As Feynmans says: "Another of the qualities of science is that it teaches the value of rational thought as well as the importance of freedom of thought ; the positive result that come from doubting that the lessons are all true." We should doubt, question and test but not ridicule.
The main schools of thought are that Jesus is unique to Earth (there are explanations as to why, such as Earth being the only sinful planet), Jesus has existed in one way or another on every planet with sapient life (this is viewed as heretical by the church) or that the same Jesus visits multiple planets. Some of these religions do not believe that the messiah (there have always been multiple prophets in these religions) has yet arrived. I'm sure that Scientology would feel vindicated, unless ET confirmed that Xenu does not exist.
Citation needed.
The Roman Catholic Church (certainly a "main school of thought") is on record as saying it's certainly possible that Jesus visited other planets, if there is life on those planets.
The Catholic Church's astronomers, philosophers, and theologians have been on the record for more than half a century as saying that intelligent life on other planets is not heretical.
But the sort of people who learn everything they know about religion from Family Guy continue to perpetuate long-dead stereotypes on the internet.
Also, the fact that you use the phrase "the church" to describe all of Christianity shows your information level about religion is pretty low.
I literally said that in my comment.
> the fact that you use the phrase "the church" to describe all of Christianity shows your information level about religion is pretty low
I was referring to the Roman Catholic Church.
"God sent his prophet because we're the chosen species, the only one created in His image. Only He can protect you from the alien threat," garbage like that. It's easy to spin this type of thing when you've thrown all rationality out the window.
True, but remember that ~75% of the universe is 'dark energy' that is making the universe fly apart, eventually, faster than light speed. So, we hypothesize that eventually, everything will be faster than light.
What I am saying is that we don't know enough physics at the moment to say definitely that FTL is impossible. We really don't know any physics when talking about the majority of mass-energy of what we know currently, really. Extra-solar visitors may have figured a bit more of this out and realized that FTL is somthing you just go around, who knows.
Why would an alien species just do atmosphere drive-bys? Why wouldn’t they pop down and say hello?
Why on earth would NASA, SETI, SpaceX, etc cover up the biggest scoop (biggest FUNDING scoop) of Earth’s history?
Why wouldn’t any of the other LEO piercing countries in the world grass it up? Thousands of people working in each of the space-faring countries, all keeping quiet about it.
Why would the US, Russia, China, probably even North Korea agree on this one thing? Alright guys we are all agreed on not telling the plebs about the aliens? Ok cool, back to the war then lads.
If you can answer why, I’m down to clown on your theory.
There's some odd stuff in some NASA footage you can see for yourself. But now with CGI you probably won't accept any videos you can see on youtube as being real.
But this still isn't enough for you because until you actually see one with your own eyes you aren't willing to accept it. That is excellent scepticism. However, we accept a lot of scientific reports without actually running the experiments ourselves... There seems to be a mismatch there.
Healthy scepticism is healthy, but barring a "smoking gun" that is unavoidable (i.e. an "Independence Day"/"District 9" scenario) you probably will never believe it. I suggest that's due to conditioning and how the US Gov directed Hollywood to ridicule this sort of thing in the past.
If we relax things back to "normal" and view the reports (the volume, quality of sources, corroborating evidence like multiple witnesses, radar confirmation, WW1 Foo fighter reports, etc) then the balance of probabilities seems to lie with "yes, they're here and they've been here a long time", at least for me.
I mean the Mahabarata alone does appear to contain an account of nuclear fallout and diagrams of UFOs, and that was written thousands of years ago.
However we know it is one of...
* A hoax, like hundreds of other videos of UFO sightings.
* One branch of the military testing a piece of equipment another branch is not able to identify.
* A video showing an actual space craft built by aliens from another planet.
Consider which of these is most likely and which is least likely. Consider also that extraordinary claims should be backed by extraordinary evidence.
I'm surprised BBC picked this up.
It's basically a filler story that the BBC news would put on at the end of the news along the lines of "little boy saves hamster".
Nothing here says the audio is even genuine.
In the book, two things stood out to me. First, there are a quite a few UFO sightings that are corroborated by non-human sensor data (mostly radar and video). Second, the narrative paints a picture where US government officials are much more secretive than any other nation, by far. Within that context, the releases of the last few weeks are even more surprising.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in a modern, not-too-X-files-like take on UFO phenomena.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8287034-ufos
I agree that the releases from the US Gov the last few weeks have been VERY surprising, nearly a 90 degree shift from the "deny everything" policy that they assumed for the last few decades.
Going one step further, at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I just wonder, what actually has changed to prompt this change in policy of denying everything
The election of credulous anti-science buffoons.
I just don’t see why if we had a “confirmed” ufo sighting on military video that was a product of such a program, would we really discussing this in such a manner?
That transition happens at precisely the moment that the object rotates.
Count me as convinced by the "speck of dust on gimbal-mounted camera" idea [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15961848
Not meta comment, aren't all flying objects UFOs until you've identified them?
HN eschews all modern UI affordances as a form of status signalling. It's like how millionaire startup founders like to wear cargo shorts and hoodies.
It's Y Combinator's way of saying, "we're so fucking successful we can afford to have a site that eclipses even Craigslist in un-usability."
Then suddenly one of the two lights went out. The other one continued the same movement and also went out about a minute later.
This steady swinging movement is an unexplainable riddle for me.
A friend of mine also sighted something in the bright day sky of Spain. He told me that he looked up and then that thing whooshed away in an incredible speed over the Mediterranean Sea.
It's really weird. Either our senses and even the technical equipment like cameras are just fooled or we have extremely strange things going on over our heads.
Rational me doesn't want to believe me, but well, what if it was something.