What if it’s a hack? Get the enemy to think they’re seeing UFOs and maybe they’ll slip up on “mundane” foreign planes? Not a huge effect but it might only need to work once.
But the news of water ice on titan - and a huge band of it - makes me wonder if life hasn’t spawned twice (at least) in the solar system.
The femtosecond mini plasma holograms are cold enough (on average) to touch - Fairy Lights in Femtoseconds: Aerial and Volumetric Graphics Rendered by Focused Femtosecond Laser Combined with Computational Holographic Fields - https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06668
Well a nuclear sub might have the power needed. Still insane though. :) Probably you would need several lasers too, intersecting where you want to have the plasma ball.
It's possible foreign drones might be speedy. It's implausible for them to be speedy with no visible Stonking Big Flame out the back. It's also implausible for them to accelerate really suddenly or submerge underwater without harm.
>"We know a little more about the UFO itself. It is described as “wingless, white, and shaped like an oblong pill. It was 24-30 (40 in the NYT article) feet long and had no visible markings or glass. The USS Princeton was able to faintly track the “capsule” via its SPY-1B radar system, but the fighters were not able to get a radar lock on the object. The “capsule” was not only more maneuverable than the Hornets but also much faster —for it to have reached the CAP point ahead of the Navy fighters it would have had to have flown in excess of 2,400 miles an hour. According to FighterSweep.com, which published a detailed chronicle of the event in 2015, the object did not emit hot jet exhaust typical of ordinary aircraft."
I always think to myself that the technology we see and know about now, the spy planes and such, are ~50 years old, so what is operating now that we won't know about until some of us are 70 or 80 years old?
In some cases for things like stealth tech, sure. In most cases though, where there's an obvious commercial aspect to successful research, we see things fast. When there's a military invention that could lead to something like a microwave or nylon the company behind it want to reap billions from selling to the public as soon as possible.
This is one reason why I find stories like this one unlikely. If we assume this object is, say, a Chinese spy drone, why would the Chinese use this amazing new tech for something as mundane and boring as a spy drone? They could turn it in to a commercial engine, mount it on some aircraft, and completely dominate the air travel and air freight. As far as using technology to crush your enemies goes that would have a much greater impact on the US than watching what the country is up to from a drone.
>They could turn it in to a commercial engine, mount it on some aircraft, and completely dominate the air travel and air freight.
It's entirely possible that some novel propulsion technology would only work with extremely light craft under specific conditions, and either couldn't scale to the size of a commercial aircraft, or would be less efficient or cost effective at that scale than existing technology.
Ion propulsion is only useful in space, for instance.
You appear to be making a number of assumptions here which don't actually prove anything, you're just preaching to the choir of UFO believers.
First, that all UFO reports accurately describe craft that defy known physical laws (discarding the likelihood of hoaxes or misidentifications of conventional craft or other phenomena.) The significance of the fraction, in this case, is irrelevant.
Second, that people are able to accurately gauge the size of objects in the sky (they aren't, see phenomenon like the moon illusion as an example of how difficult it is, and how biased human perception can be.) Just because people see a roughly triangular formation of lights in the night sky, doesn't mean there's a vast, football-field sized black triangle hovering over the city.
And you should have said "A significant fraction of reported UFOs appear much, much larger," for your actual comment to be true, we would need examples of actual UFOs to test against the size of conventional jets.
Third, that the phenomenon on the video in the posted article shows a craft which uses the same or a similar form of technology as "much larger" UFOs, and that this somehow invalidates the premise that novel forms of propulsion exist which cannot arbitrarily scale.
Seems unlikely that foreign governments could develop flying craft that violate most of the laws of physics as we understand them as far as momentum, propulsion and a variety other factors are concerned.
I mentioned another possibility in one of my other comments; a UV laser on a satellite (or some other suitable platform with a view of the entire flight volume, or multiple overlapping platforms) being focused to create a movable plasmaball.
I think you misunderstood. I was asking if you're looking at infrared view, would you be able to tell a difference between a jet's exhaust and a plasma ball (of a similar size) in a long distance.
True, it does seem pretty unlikely. But if the reports are in any way accurate, then the explanation will be probably something that seems pretty unlikely.
You're pulling these options out of your rear end... operating from a submarine?!?! You mean those low-lying underwater things miles from land with poor line-of-sight for radio?
And systematic malfunctions? Just on military radar, in military bases? And fooling professionals repeatedly with such realistic false returns that instead of checking their equipment they claim UFO's are zipping around in the skies?
Why does it have to be aliens... so natural phenomena are totally discounted?
This kind of nonsensical guff and willingness to proffer daft ideas is what sets any sort of empirical reasoning back to stone-age style quackery!
I said operating from a submarine because of the reported disturbance in the water. The witnesses said it wasn't one, but if they were seeing other strange things, and not expecting a submarine to be there, then IMO they could easily have been mistaken.
Alternatively, it's all lies. Both those scenarios are IMO more likely that natural phenomena, because there is no other known natural phenomena that moves in any way similar to the reported UFO.
Well the Indian Army was very eager to claim they found a Yeti yesterday. People in the military clearly aren't immune to the bullshit propagation syndrome effecting everyone thanks to the news media and social media making Seeking Attention the basis of individual or group relevance.
Expect more bullshit and expect believers in bullshit to be propped up all over the place until the like/upvote/view/click count feedback loop has done enough damage and is dismantled.
I'm skeptical of the part where it went to the CAP point. First, it was apparently only detected at the CAP point by the USS Princeton, it was gone by the time the jets arrived so we don't have multiple confirmation. But more importantly, how did the craft know to go to the CAP point? Even if the jets were bearing in that direction at the time (and I don't think they were) how would it know the distance to travel? Was it listening in on radio chatter, meaning they have reverse engineered our communications protocols, broken our encryption, and understand enough of our language and technical jargon to determine where to go? Were the exact coordinates of the CAP point even discussed over the radio while in the presence of the craft?
And the whole thing just seems weird to me. If you're an alien vessel visiting our planet, it seems like you're either going to try to make contact, or ignore people and just gather samples. But this? Just sort of bothering the US Navy? You could argue it was gathering samples of ocean water or something. But then why go to the CAP point? That can't be to collect scientific data. And that doesn't make sense as their attempt to contact us. As I mentioned above, they'd have to have a lot of knowledge of our language and communication to know where that point is, which means they know enough to simply make radio contact.
Why though? If you're an advanced race that built a thought-extracting brain scanner specifically for a random race they encountered on a random planet (which it would have to be), is reading waypoints off a random pilot's brain really the best use of that technology?
Why not? Bearing in mind that telepathy is a highly recurrent feature of UFO reports, it seems they already have that capacity (probably not via a gadget either), and it's a case of "if you have a hammer..."
1) Stuff recorded on people's phones is going to have poor resolution, particularly at night when anything but the most cutting edge phone cameras produce a grainy mess.
2) The military is not going to give you full-resolution video, they keep secrets like that reflexively.
If UFO's were "real" (as in actual aliens or other amazing things) then I would have expected a vast increase in footage and photos over the last five years as cameraphones and dash cams became pervasive. This has happened for "fireballs" and meteors - lots of amazing dashcam footage from Siberia and Canada and so on.
There are an absolute heap of videos. Mostly of lights at night when phone cameras are weak, or dots high in the sky, but still. Go look on the MUFON site.
Meteors have the showmanship advantage of being big, bright, high, and visible from a very large area.
Both meteors and UFOs have the problem of "whoa what was that, didn't have time to get my camera out". UFOs additionally have the problem of "too amazed to act".
Expecting life on other planets can be justified that way. Expecting intelligent life can be weakly justified, it only happened once here and seems to involve a lot of fluke. Expecting UFOs can't rest on that argument alone - you'd need new physics to get from any A to any B at an interstellar level and even more new physics to pull right-angle turns at high mach numbers in an atmosphere.
You don't know that. Maybe there were super intelligent lizards before us. Lets not be ridiculous. We can't even know if it is a current situation because anthropomorphic ideas and agendas (or even timeframe) do not necessarily reflect other life forms - maybe fungi is already connected to other dimensions like in recent star track episodes ?
There is also thinking that merging pre-mitochondria with bacteria into more complex cell giving birth to complex multicelular life was singular event on this planet and so must be very rare, but its unpprovable really and even if true just lowers the odds.
> you'd need new physics to get from any A to any B at an interstellar level and even more new physics to pull right-angle turns at high mach numbers in an atmosphere.
Really ? Aliens having totally different understanding on universe and tech then us sounds amazing ? Just if you had a time machine and get back lousy couple centuries would make us look like aliens.
>> Intelligent life happened here, it must happen again somewhere else. This should be made axiom really. You/we/whatever is not unique in the universe.
We don't really know the probability of abiogenesis (let alone artifacts from that process leading to intelligent life). If it is sufficiently improbable -- 1 / 10^22 per star[0] -- it may very well be that we are the only ones in the observable universe.
The universe is pretty darn big, but life is also pretty darn complex, and its emergence from amino acids and "simple" organic chemistry is not very well understood. Unless the factors of abiogenesis are sufficiently well known, we shouldn't make such predictions either...
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[0]: once per (100 * 10^9 stars in the galaxy times 100 * 10^9 galaxies per hubble volume).
Yah, cell machinery is also complex yet it emerged number of times independently on this planet alone (convergent evolution).
> We don't really know the probability of abiogenesis
Abiogenesis is only one way to look at it. What about intelligent design ? Probability it is relevant is 100%, given that humans are one of those IDs already (created polio virus).
So again, most are having tunnel vision about this topic given our constraints and limitations on this planet.
Ah, I see, abiogenesis is "tunnel vision", but unjustified belief in a deus ex machina which designed life is somehow enlightened...? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is no evidence of god, therefore I don't have any confidence in the flying spaghetti monster.
>> Yah, cell machinery is also complex yet it emerged number of times independently on this planet alone
That's not even wrong. I don't even know where to begin refuting this claim -- so I just leave it there.
Sometimes it would do us some good to accept the fact that we just don't know it (yet). Yet alone considering the philosophical consequences of ID: who designed the designers? How did the first designers emerge? What were they made of (considering that the chemical abundance of the galactical environment was heavily skewerd towards lighter elements 4.5 Gy ago)?
In the meantime, I stick to the models that don't rely on an allmighty entity to bootstrap biological evolution.
You are confusing ID with creationism. The later is one foolish and easily refutable variant of ID akin to Santa and other fairy tails.
> There is no evidence of god, therefore I don't have any confidence in the flying spaghetti monster.
Comparing life to another life is not the same as comparing life to superbeings.
> who designed the designers?
That is irrelevant for this topic. It didn't stop people researching big bang, did it ?
> In the meantime, I stick to the models that don't rely on an allmighty entity to bootstrap biological evolution
In the meantime, understand it doesn't have to be allmighty :) It can simply be another advanced enough life (remember that one about advanced tech compared to magic?). The topic is about UFOs, not about origin of life or origin of origin of origin ... of life.
There are few very high profile UFO cranks, Sen. Harry Reid and Robert Bigelow, who give support for these narratives in the US and are able to lobby government money for UFO issues.
That whole 2004 incident with a video is just one man's story that nobody else in the scene saw the same way. It was not seen as worth of report or anything. One airman in the videos even says "It's a drone".
>That whole 2004 incident with a video is just one man's story
This Newsweek article quotes Gary Voorhis, whereas the pilot in previous reports was Dave Fravor.
“At a certain point, there ended up being multiple objects that we were tracking,” Petty Officer Gary Voorhis, stationed aboard the Princeton missile cruiser escorting the USS Nimitz, testified. “They all generally zoomed around at ridiculous speeds, and angles and trajectories and then eventually they all bugged out faster than our radars.”
If these things are real, and they aren't a secret US Military/R&D project, it sounds like American air superiority has come to an end and things are going to get real interesting in the next major conflict.
Americans can still have their air superiority over other humans - maybe the aliens will just stand by and watch while we destroy each other in the next conflict. With such technology one can imagine they'd have the best seat in the house for such a show...
The US spends more on defence than the next 10 countries combined and hosts many of the brightest aerospace engineers in the world. I’m not saying what you’re suggesting isn’t possible, but with those numbers stacked against them, it would be a very lucky innovation. And how kind of them to test their technology on US military instead of their own military in private...
Presumably some or many ufo sightings are highly classified military tests that any random military pilot or radar operator is not ever going know about or even be told about after they sighted it.
Its even possible tests are done knowing other military pilots are in vicinity to guage their reaction to it.
To me this is the simplest explanation (if weather balloons and drones are ruled out).
It would make sense that secretive military aviation projects would purposefully fly near unsecretive unsuspecting military aircraft to determine how detectable they are. It also makes sense that the military would publicly embrace the UFO narrative as a way to continue concealing their secretive projects.
Its also reasonable to understand the desire for people to describe these events in human terms, and ignore the possibility that we are not alone in the universe - especially since their technology appears to be far, far superior to anything we have at our disposal.
However, no such conclusions can be made - either pro- or anti- the "But its Aliens" argument - since the entire subject is couched in dire secrecy, with a lot of people whose lives would change, drastically, if it were the case that these UFO's turn out to be non-human in origin.
The assumption that people's lives would change requires scrutiny. For most I think it would be a promotion of Enquirer headlines to premiere news, but little else. SpaceX would soon become a public company. But what else? Life goes on, unaffected. People still would need to pay their taxes.
Certainly, the rationale for spending $21Trillion on military superiority instead of investing it in a healthy society, would be minimised.
If it turns out that aliens are on the planet and have advanced technology that could ruin us all, maybe the Pentagon and the Kremlin would find a reason to stop starving their own people for the sake of assumed dominance over the planet, and instead unite to either befriend, or defeat, the common alien friend/foe.
One can imagine the reason all of these events are couched in such secrecy might be, indeed, militaristic hubris. Or, in other words, FOMO at a grand scale ..
If intelligent aliens get to our planet and have any kind of aggressive intentions no amount of spending would save us. It means they already have capabilities far beyond what we could achieve in a generation and proved them by just getting to us.
> It means they already have capabilities far beyond what we could achieve
It certainly means that they have those capabilities as pertains to travel, but it is not a given that they would have those capabilities in a military sense. Of course the argument can be made that you can convert that kind of power into a weapon, but I'd hazard to say that a haphazard conversion does not in fact impart upon you a godlike ability to ignore everything we could possibly do.
I'm definitely not arguing that this means we should increase military spending. I think that is fundamentally not a great idea for us in the first place. Instead, I am arguing that while the things you are talking about are widely used as sci-fi tropes and held as beliefs by a lot of people, I do not think they stand on their own merits.
The most deadly terrorist attack on the US used civilian passenger planes. A UFO doesn't need weapons to be massively destructive. E = 0.5 * m * v^2, and UFOs reportedly go a lot faster than a 767. And if they're too agile to shoot down, and never need to land or refuel, that's "a godlike ability to ignore everything we could possibly do".
If you can project an object to another planet in any reasonable span of time, you already have vast military capabilities against that planet. All you have to do is not decelerate.
I think the magnitude of the difference between the opposing parties is a lot greater when it comes to comparing humans to an alien civilization capable of projecting some force light years away from their home in a reasonable amount of time.
It's more like neolithic man meets nuclear submarine... but worse. We have 0 tools at our disposal to fight anything that's farther away than the edge of the atmosphere. "They" can take a few decades to accelerate a really massive "civilization ending" object and slam it into us. It's not like we can go anywhere to avoid it.
Why do you assume these UFOs reached the Earth in a "reasonable" amount of time? The possibility that they were roaming the space for hundreds or even thousands of years before reaching our planet is as reasonable as any other.
Even if an alien civilization finds our planet, I don't see why that would imply we are inside their logistic operational range.
The need to “defend from aliens” would become the rationale to spend $60T. Oh, and after the money is gone it would turn out there are no aliens after all. Similar to what happened in Iraq.
If they're real, and if they have their claimed technology level, why do they only reveal themselves in such a bizarre way? The argument that it's to gradually condition humanity into accepting extraterrestrial life is implausible, because there has been no significant change in their alleged activities for many decades. Why wouldn't they instead plant microbes on Mars, or something like that? They could gradually increase the surprise level until they can reveal themselves openly.
Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence, which means they are not the product of evolution, which means they are something so strange that the idea of befriending or defeating them makes no sense. They're something more like this story: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...
You make valid points. For a long time I was looking for such answers. Unfortunately, there aren't many clever arguments like yours anywhere outside of HN.
>> Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence, which means they are not the product of evolution, which means they are something so strange that the idea of befriending or defeating them makes no sense.
This. If - and that's a big if - we assume previous bizarre aerial activities observed by humans were in fact of ET origin, then it's only natural to think of those ETs more like AI (robots) that don't necessarily share our goal-oriented intelligence, but rather possess higher levels of intelligence and their own agenda. As a result, you're right; we wouldn't even begin to understand their purpose cause theirs just has no counterpart in humans.
Even humans don't always behave in clearly goal-oriented activities. Consider how hard it is to explain practical jokes, religious ritual, or modern performance art. ET intelligence would presumably have equally inscrutable motivations.
Given the distances and ages required for interstellar travel, these things are more likely unmanned probes than busses filled with tourists.
> It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.
They could just be making observations and taking measurements. Maybe they don't want to interfere and are more interested in studying our development.
Or maybe they are scouts that were sent all over the cosmos for the purpose of exploration and they will report back their findings to their home eventually.
There are plenty of rational explanations for their behavior, especially if we are extremely far behind them in our technological development.
I don't know if faster-than-light travel would necessarily accompany other technologies indistinguishable from magic.
The Romans were arguably a flash of insight away from the hot air balloon, they had good uses for it and all the prerequisite techs. Analogously, we might be one really good flash of insight away from technology we'll just actually get a thousand years from now. So the aliens could be otherwise on our tech level, but they just figured out warp drive.
Very interesting thought. Imagine optical telegraph relay stations, or scouting with moored hot air balloons. Nothing could probably shoot them down, either.
So we're using an imaginary alien threat to justify massive military spending while literally destroying billions of dollars by just eliminating it from the economy through stock buybacks.
Fictional times indeed. Just don't think too hard about the money.
You're assuming that an alien race isn't partisan. Any intelligent alien species intent on harming humans would probably seek to exploit existing weaknesses and increase division. Who's to say they wouldn't ally with the worst humans imaginable in order to prevent humanity coming together in the first place?
I think it would change a lot of people's belief systems in a major way.
E.g. how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?
For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset. It might not affect "day to day life" in terms of the lights staying on and there being food on the shelves, but there could be a significant personal impact on a lot of people which may lead to a lot of things like depression/substance-abuse/suicides/general-"fuck it, its the end end of world, I am going to <x>"-sentiment/etc that will have knock-on effects (e.g. not turning up for work, abandoning family/responsibilities, running away to live as a hermit in the woods, gun hoarding etc)
> how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?
Like they've dealt with every other scientific advancement that killed their beliefs. They will deny it as much and as long as they can until they will be forced to admit it, at which point "god" will shrink to an even meaningful pocket of scientific ignorance. Some of them will keep denying it forever
Not just us Catholics; I think the real big takeaway from that article is this: “Three years ago, a paper for the Royal Society found that roughly 90% of believers did not think they would suffer a crisis of faith should intelligent extraterrestrial life be discovered, though two-thirds of them believed other religions would have a crisis.”
Nearly everyone is fine with this idea, but most everyone also thinks people with religious views different than their own will have trouble with it.
The garden of Eden story isn't even consistent with the other creation story in Genesis, though; if a literalist can accept it as true on faith despite that, they can do so despite any inconsistency with mere sense data, which unlike the conflicting text in the Bible they don't hold to be infallibly accurate as a matter of religious doctrine.
> how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?
The major religions have already shown how they deal with evidence of outside of the garden of Eden. Several don't care, because the garden isn't part of their belief system to start with, and most of the rest have no problem with it (because they don't view the garden as literal), and the remainder just dismiss the evidence and distrust the entire field of science associated with it.
I don't think expanding that to off Earth is likely to change a thing about those responses, though the details of exactly which groups have each response might be a little different (though I suspect not much.)
Expanding on this idea, it is unlikely that another inconsistency between a belief system and reality is going to change a believers mind when there are so many inconsistencies (in every belief system) explained away already. This is the nature of belief - it persists despite all evidence to the contrary, because it is belief, not reason. E.g. belief in flat earth persists, despite all evidence to the contrary.
"fuck it, its the end end of world, I am going to <x>"
I think that underestimates the cognitive realization lot of people will confront.
You’re taking the belief system that people retain, and introducing space aliens, and then making the leap to an automatic assumption of “apocalypse, thus rapture, thus cut loose and play Russian roulette because we’re all gonna die, so who cares.”
But these videos certainly don’t portend apocalypse. If official channels announced a message confirming alien life forms, and space craft from other planets and star systems, that does not read as The End Of The World. Tomorrow’s headline saying “ALIENS” with a frame of this video as the leading image wouldn’t cause panic.
Would it cause a stir? Yeah, but it’s simply not threatening.
So the the world view wouldn’t shift the way you claim. It would more likely upset the idea of souls, afterlife, eternal consequences, good and evil, heavan and hell, resurrections, fate and lots more in the western religions, but those effect would probably be pretty temporary. Those sorts of realizations grip kids in high school and college all the time, and yeah, during those phases people often cut loose, but soon relocate the genuine practical consequences that form the rational basis of pious restraint. Things like catching unpleasant diseases, destroying trust and reputation among peers, and so on.
So, the idea that restricting factual information protects the sheltered pedestrian psyche, at least when it comes to space aliens, is the stuff of TV shows and low budget movies. It’s fine for a plot device, but space aliens threaten behavioral norms about as much as the idea of sentient, talking sea slugs. No matter how pained a cry the sea slugs let slip, if they taste good, people wouldn’t hesitate to batter dip and deep fry them, and only stop to mull the existential dread over indigestion.
Sometimes keeping the sheltered unaware of The Truth does protect their sanity, but not within the context of space aliens. Space aliens are existential weak sauce. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t gobble up most sci-fi as comedy. We’d find it irreverent and disrespectful, and almost nobody takes such a stance. Invariably, people pay extra money for an entire cable TV channel devoted to it.
> For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset.
I don't think it would change anything for them. We're living in a golden age of science, and that did not change anything for them. The existence of aliens would just be one more thing to either reject or literally bedevil.
Or, accept in a greater sense. Like, "God is so great, he created all these planets, and the Garden of Eden is representative of that creation everywhere." That's what I would hope for, anyway. Certainly in the event that the aliens turn out to be ones that do sexual reproduction.
Occam's Razor. It is likely not aliens and more likely man made because it isn't that advanced compared to what we can currently do. It is like 5 to 10 years ahead of publiclt disclosed tech.
It is either US or Chinese skunkworks and given it was in US airspace I doubt the Chinese would do this. Also it has to be US because otherwise military brass would be freaking out the Chinese are penitrating us airspace with advanced tech.
Thus it is a us skunkworks project.
It is probably just advanced drone techonology. Probably really cool tech.
How is that Occam's Razor? This is the same guesswork as aliens or foreign countries. I just see a lot of people using "Occam's Razor" with their subjective theories and the term is giving me a headache.
It being aliens would require completely rewriting physics as we understand it, because physics as we understand it does not allow for gravity manipulation or FTL.
Occaam's Razor claims that terrestrial technology is more likely than extraterrestrial because it relies on fewer unproven assumptions, namely the existence of extraterrestrial life, its presence on Earth, and everything we know about physics being wrong, despite the math somehow working out to describe the universe incredibly well.
Occam's Razor: postulate as few as possible new entities to explain an event. Aliens causing UFOs not only postulates that aliens exist, but that they're intelligent, and have visited Earth. That's a lot of new entities we have to consider. On the other hand we know foreign governments exist. We know foreign governments test new aircraft. So the only entity we have to assume here is that an aircraft with these properties exists.
That said I think there are other alternatives that are even more likely: that these sightings are sensor malfunctions or natural phenomena that have been blown out of proportion by popular myth and deliberate disinformation -- (which is certainly the case with all other UFO sightings).
If I didn't read the report, I would have thought malfunctioning is the most likely explanation. But an active duty warship's SPY-1 radar, and 6 super hornet's IR sensor pods all malfunctioning at the same time? Unless it's a very sophisticated cyber or electronic attack or really some physical (not just optical illusion) natural phenomenon, that is very, very unlikely to happen. This sophisticated attack or natural phenomenon that let observation on Unidentified Swimming Object and UFO is also unlikely. So, by Occam's Razor, which I still insist is not appropriate assuming the reports are true, that the reports are false, hoax, or disinformation.
This is the simplest explanation, indeed. In fact UFO sightings sharply increased starting in the 1940s which corresponds exactly to the period when military aviation research and experimentation took off.
It seems much more likely that these assumed acts of God were a misunderstood natural phenomenon rather than extraterrestrial beings who we have yet to capture on camera. Considering how closely the depictions of the event match pictures of sun dogs leaves it as the most reasonable solution.
Though of course a lot of those sightings also consisted of objects which supposedly resembled saucers, which matched media mischaracterisations of a particularly famous UFO sighting and an older trend in pulp sci-fi...
(I quite like the idea of aliens drawing ideas from their spacecraft from our popular culture as a storyline, but not as an explanation for the phenomena!)
And, prior to the meme of the "flying saucer," UFO sightings often involved airships[0].
And stories of abduction by aliens often involved those aliens claiming to be from Mars or Venus before it was commonly known that those planets didn't harbor life, much less advanced civilizations.
And the archetypal "grey alien" didn't really become the template for modern alien abduction stories until Whitley Strieber popularized them in a book - many descriptions of alien encounters until that point were of "Nordic" human type aliens.
So yeah, either aliens are being careful not to appear more advanced than popular culture would allow (maybe to the point of appearing as angels and demons to humans when their view of reality was entirely dominated by religion and not science) or much of the UFO phenomenon is basically a meme.
The UFOs display fantastical properties that are lightyears ahead of state of the art fighters. I find it a bit hard to believe that some secret project can be that much better than what the public knows without the knowledge leaking somehow.
Fighters are all designed to carry humans. Humans fall unconscious under high G-forces. Imagine a drone fighter. It could turn tighter and accelerate drastically faster than a human-carrying fighter.
The US has lots of boring drones, but perhaps there is a secret drone fighter program. It would surprise me somewhat if the US weren't working on something like this, perhaps with a goal of keeping it secret until it needs to be deployed operationally. Plenty of military technologies have been kept secret for decades, such as the SR-71 and the spy satellites on which the Hubble Space Telescope was based. On that note, did you know that the Hubble was basically an extra spy satellite donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the US had a fleet of them pointed downwards toward earth? For more on this, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
So, consider: what kind of reconnaissance satellites does the US have today, that resulted in the retirement of the "Crystal" series? (Obviously something digital) Did the US's investment in supersonic spycraft end with the SR-71? If the US were going to design such a craft today, would it have a pilot or would it be autonomous?
On the other hand, if this were a top secret US technology, then I suspect all of the people who observed these phenomena would simply have been sworn to secrecy. I doubt it would be treated as a UFO and I doubt these officers would be speaking publicly about it. Unless this is all some kind of cover for the program. Who knows!
You reminded me of a quote my father once told me: "I fully expect to see UFOs in the future, and they'll be real. They'll also have USAF emblems on the side."
For decades, he worked as a civil servant in the DoD as an instrumentation and test engineer on a few well known weapons programs (and some not so much). I think he based his comment on the trajectory military technology was taking, as he commented similarly to you (referring to Pyxl101) regarding the human problem. i.e. if you remove the humans, you can save weight on life support, and you can do things you otherwise can't when you're limited to keeping the pilot alive and (mostly) functioning.
Part of me wants to believe he might've seen what we'd now call UFOs, but I'm confident that's wishful thinking. His remarks were offered based on his own experiences, and I'm sure he extrapolated from there. Regardless, I wouldn't be surprised if some of your predictions did turn out to be true in the near future.
Your last statement also reminded me of Project Mogul[1] and the use of UFOs as a cover story (or rather not, as the case might be). In all likelihood, the Roswell "UFO crash" was an errant Mogul balloon--a project shrouded in secrecy to some degree or another, mostly because we knew the Soviets had stolen our technology but we didn't want them to know we had ways of detecting their tests. I don't believe the USAF instigated the UFO theory, and neither do I believe the air force particularly cared. After all, if I understand the timeline correctly, it wasn't until the mid/late 1970s when the UFO researcher Stanton Friedman began perpetuating the myth, long after the actual event in 1947. As a cover story, that would've come far too late to be useful enough to cover for Project Mogul. To an extent--at least in the early days--I suspect early UFO "research" was largely the outcome of a means to pursue fame or money via book sales and speaking engagements more than a theory perpetuated by the government.
Now, that's not to say that the government isn't using it now that UFOs have long been established in popular culture. That may very well be a strong possibility.
Aside: I once attended a talk with my father that Mr. Friedman gave in the 1990s on UFOs. I also recall Friedman was made somewhat uncomfortable with the fact my father was not only aware of Project Blue Book but had access to the archives when he was at the air force academy. The brief exchange between the two was made when Mr. Friedman asked the audience if anyone had heard of the project and were familiar with (IIRC) volume 13.
Friedman quickly changed subjects away from "government cover up" for reasons that escape me. :)
That's a little misleading. Acceleration hasn't any effects on human body. You can't sense gravity: free fall is the same as ingravity. What you can feel is forces being transmitted by matter contact.
If you can create a field that transmits a force similar to gravity uniformly, there would be no pressure.
It's not misleading. The high G-forces are transmitted by matter contact. Can you think of a way to accelerate a person at greater than 1G without contact with something made of matter?
I try not to assume bad faith in your responses, but you're making it very difficult. My original comment was very clear that it was assuming a technology that we don't currently own. And then you put arbitrary restrictions to the conjecture to force it wrong.
Now you're moving again goal posts just "to be right". That's incredibly childish.
Of course you haven't adressed my core point, possibly because you can't understand it.
Edit: try stating my point and we'll see what's on your mind.
I don't mind being wrong (I like learning!), and "winning" is not my goal here. I don't believe that I'm moving goal posts or being childish, and so it seems like we're inadvertently talking past each other.
I believe your core point is that humans can't detect a force which acts identically on their whole body. Have I understood? This statement is true, of course, but does not seem relevant in context, as it seems to ignore all but the one sentence you quoted, which itself is true in its own context. I don't consider Pyxl101's ignoring of magical-seeming hypothetical technology to be misleading.
Pyxl101's comment [1], which you replied to, is all about practical technology. In that context, your comment seems like an irrelevant technicality (I think this is why you got downvoted), as no practical mode of transport can move someone without physical contact, which transfers force unevenly (just to the parts of the body in contact with the vehicle).
I believe your core point is that humans can't detect a force which acts identically on their whole body.
More than "detect", a uniform force simply doesn't affect us.
This statement is true, of course, but does not seem relevant in context...
On the contrary, the thread was started discussing if we could be facing a far superior technology, continued by Pyxl101 speculating UFOs could be drones because enormous accelerations prevent manned ships, and then I pointed that, if it's really a futurist technology, acceleration in itself could not be a problem.
... no practical mode of transport can move someone without physical contact
The "practical" thing has been inserted by yourself. Also it's not about "practical" it's about "known by us".
The kickoff point for your comment was about G-forces. In that context, "acceleration" is clearly felt acceleration in your local reference frame, not a free-falling acceleration relative to an outside observer. The scenario of falling into the Sun is clearly irrelevant. Then you want to accuse mkl of moving the goalposts and adding arbitrary conditions? You're the one running around with the goalposts.
well the alcubierre drive (which is purely speculative math around negative energy, not something that can be engineered) should move mass without accelerating it.
Could you submerse a human in a tank of water? I've heard that acceleration in water will be experienced as water pressure.
That would be pretty bulky and costly to include in an aircraft cockpit, but I wonder if it would solve the G-force problem.
I'm not sure if this would actually be better, though. 7 Gs of acceleration would be experienced as 7 bar pressure, equivalent to water pressure at 60 meters underwater, which is quite deep. Rapid changes in pressure between 1 bar and let's say 7 bar would probably be more uncomfortable to experience than regular G-forces.
It's encouraging that this tech exists, no matter who has it. It's obviously tech--not magic--which means it's based on laws of nature, which means we have some learning to do. I'm confident we'll do that some day soon and that's exciting.
I certainly hope so. A black budget allocation syphoning from a legitimate project of dubious progress is actually more comforting than the alternative of financial malfeasance and design/engineering/fabrication management incompetence.
The predecessor of the SR-71 first flew in April on 1962, the public announcement was July of 1964. Given how much trouble we've had with our hypersonic research programs over the decades, and the lack of need for it given stealth is more affordable, there might have been some cool stuff, but it's not a practical or likely operational tool.
The first launch of a KH-11 was mid-seventies and subject to a lot of media coverage during the spy trials a few years later. Imagery was leaked during the Reagan admin. We don't need better resolution, we need more coverage.
So IMO our secrets are less about silver-bullet platforms and more about exploits. Exploiting their radars, sensors, communications systems, networks and computers. We don't really need a Mach 5 platform or 1" resolution for anything. It would be neat, but it would be unaffordable to buy and maintain.
Exactly. This was a reasonable explanation for the first major wave of sightings in 1947, or even the WW2 foo fighters, but by now it would require such secret advanced technology to have remained black and un-reproduced for several decades.
Another explanation, which would fit with current developments, might be that these are computer-generated artifacts.
Increasingly, the picture we are being shown is generated by processing raw sensor data - for example, just compare raw (or partially processed) weather radar data to the processed maps you see in forecasts. Two recent trends -- the synthesis of views from multiple sensors of different types, and their presentation as virtual reality -- have come together in devices such as the F-35 Helmet-Mounted Display [1]. I would guess that this level of interpretation of data and synthesis of images presents an increased scope for artifact generation, and the presentation makes it seem more real.
IIRC, some SR-71 crews had a hobby of local newspapers on towns they usually flew over, to see which ones reported UFO sightings the day after the missions.
Is this video legit? Why are they turning the same direction constantly?
Are most of these UFO sightings witnessed by a pilot and co-pilot? Is radar data recorded so it can be replayed later?
The skeptic in me thinks these experiences might seem ‘real’ but aren’t. If there is some measurable and documented proof then there can be an investigation.
Is it only the US that’s detecting this stuff? That’s a very important question IMO because it might provide some insight into its origin (terrestrial or otherwise) depending on the answer.
I'm too lazy for citations, but these are detected around the world. There's been military footage released from South America (Brazil I think?), Russia and many others. I've also heard that other militaries don't have the same stigma against UFOs that the US does, given our tangled history with Project Blue Book, experimental aircraft testing and the cold war.
A side note to this is the flak the Indian army got this week for proclaiming they found evidence of a Yeti in the discovery of giant tracks through the mountain snow.
likely earthlights...little understood plasma/ball lightning phenomenon...they can move very fast at times...my aunt (a former bank VP) saw one in san antonio decades ago...in her kitchen...
Yikes, we'd be so screwed. Although from the reasons outlined in the book, I think it makes it very unlikely that actual aliens would come to the planet and look around before doing anything. They would probably just kill us from light years away.
I know this won't satisfy anyone, but I've followed this subject for years with varying degrees of interest / belief.
Someone close to me is former military whose position required a top secret clearance. The work that they did involved analyzing various forms of SIGINT.
After years of me prying, this person admitted to me:
1. Within the Navy (and presumably other armed forces) the UFO stuff is an open secret.
2. The 'official line' used internally is that the craft are extraterrestrial (or at least origin unknown), and ...
3. They're official labelled drones, i.e., there is no reason to believe that they're "manned"
In other words, it's fairly well known within the military (at least where people are likely to encounter them) and the official position is somewhere along the lines of "they're here but not here".
Personally I've never seen anything I'd label a UFO. But the prevailing narrative -- uptick in UFO sightings following the Manhattan Project, interest in our weapons / energy capabilities -- I'm 100% comfortable with.
If it is a military psy-op, it's one playing out on a massive scale over a vast timeframe. That in and of itself is mind boggling.
Am a former military intelligence officer of an MNNA nation, had SIGINT and VISINT postings during my career including in the aerospace command which is integrated with the national air and strategic missile defence systems and while we could track loose bird flocks with OTH Radar probably as far as the Indian subcontinent we've never seen aliens.
Don't get me wrong some of these are really fucked up and can't be dismissed as a weather balloon or a sensor error easily, but saying that UFOs are an open secret is simply wrong.
So either the US is unique in the of attention they get or that UFOs ignore the area between the Straights of Gibraltar and the Straights of Aden like a plague which would also contradict the first assumption given the sheer number of US assets in the area.
Having people confirm or deny such allegations doesn't really mean anything anymore.
If "they" do exist, have enough technology to travel to this planet, control somewhat stealthy drones in our atmosphere which are detected every so often,
And don't want to interfer publicly with humanity as proven by their lack of public appearances...
Honestly, it's just beyond unlikely. But if they did exist: what does it matter? We wouldn't be able to do anything about it so worrying about them is pointless
It's not about denying that UFOs exists or that they are non-terrestrial in origin but rather about the notion that UFOs are an open secret in the military which is simply laughable, getting security clearance isn't particularly difficult in the US military if you serve long enough you'll likely to get it.
However simply having a clearance isn't the same as being read into a specific program, security clearance just means you can be trusted with secret information it does not grant you access to all classified information matching your clearance.
There are 100,000's of radio and radar operators and while a lot of them seen some shit in their life they aren't come out in droves saying yeah the USAF or NAVY thinks knows about UFOs and they are definitely real.
Like seriously just think about how many sailors have rotated in and out of CIC duty on say an Arleigh Burke class missile destroyer each of which has probably some of the most advanced tracking radar and sensors developed and they aren't tracking UFOs periodically and when they do they sure as hell aren't treating them as LGM.
It's not a psy-op, we have strange videos recorded by military cameras.
I'm quite skeptical about alien-natured UFOs, but some videos are just too crazy. Like that tracking video of an object flying really fast and then going under water without slowing down.
What if some of these are optical effects? Like sunlight glinting off water or windshield? The "bright spot" can move from one position in the field of view to another with enormous apparent velocity, because there is no large distant physical object moving about.
I wouldn't discount atmospheric effects that we haven't seen much yet. Or at least not with high enough frequency to understand their origins and behavior.
I'm thinking of some form of ball-lightning, a self-contained plasma. It's still an unexplained phenomenon with a history of observation (or multiple phenomena classified under one label).
A self-contained plasma could very much be opaque/reflective for radar (depending on the plasma frequency) and also emit light. Maybe it'll even be absorptive to some of the active radars trying to paint it, making some of the involved airplane and ship radars actually stabilize and guide the phenomenon (e.g. it 'escaping' as soon as a painting radar gets closer).
Lots of maybes but infrequent natural phenomena that cannot be easily observed with human senses and where humans usually don't go are still a valid hypothesis in my opinion.
IDK, but whenI hear "moves with ridiculous speeds, and angles and trajectories, with no visible means of propulsion"; then my first thought is that seems more akin to lens flare than it seems like an aeroplane.
Which is more likely in Occam's razor: a new source of refracted light, or a new kind of aircraft?
Decide for yourself what you think is being shown there. Okay, ready? This is what the picture I just linked actually shows: I googled "grainy photo" and then "first photo ever taken" to get the grainiest one ever. I don't know if it's the first one ever taken, but this photo is one of the oldest ones we have. "Taken in 1824, it shows the view outside of a window in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes France."
I expected UFO buffs to fill in the picture with their own narrative. In reality I selected the picture literally only for its graininess. I was showing that you can read a great deal into tiny grainy images.
Pareidolia is a thing and so is its modern cousin "over-zoomed pixels that seem to make a shape".
The Nimitz videos are a relatively rare category, though, instrument-first observation. Most UFOs are observed with human eyes. Which have good resolution and good light level compensation.
Something massless (like the dot of a laser pointer against the wall). Something slinking around the laws of relativity / inertia by moving the grid, not the object on the grid, Alcubierre warp style.
Or the textbooks are wrong (it wouldn't be the first time).
Before you ask why something appears to break the laws of physics, you should first ask whether it's likely you truly understand what classified, cutting edge military technology is capable of. Remember that the SR-71 Blackbird was developed in the 1960s, and it seems advanced even today.
Come on. How is USS Princeton video not already debunked and classified as optical effect in camera? If you look at it, you can see how the "UFO" rotates at rate ~2x faster than the camera, which implies some reflection is happening. If it was an actual object, why would its rotation be coupled to the sensor recording the video?
Through the meshed radar, conceivably. You wouldn't expect it to affect the FLIR (which is displaying a sensor's input, not a tactical view) or to have an effective "position" in space.
If it's an image from a radar sensor then it still could be a software bug because the raw data has to be processed somehow and an image generated from it.
Complex software systems can have quite bizarre bugs when they interact with each other.
Well, more to the point, is the media attention. The spring weather hits, and sudden spike in UFO stories just because.
But, to play against your argument, I think there’s an idea that the sensors are sufficiently advanced, and designed to track objects, so the lock on the object means there will be some image stabilization applied, and perhaps the sensor is permitted to apply guidance to the autopilot, to steer the whole airframe within certain parameters to maintain the targeting lock, if a flight mode is engaged.
To argue against the idea that it’s just a lighting anomaly, I think there are multiple other signals in play, such that radar put the pilots onto the object first and foremost. Then upon arrival, the pilots did indeed encounter phenomenon to match, the chatter between the pilots suggests that they also can see the object with the naked eye, and then, the fact that multiple inputs all match in terms of timing and overall duration.
But, for all the really interesting things that never see the light of day, and that the news outlets do know about and could draw attention to, we only get a handful of grainy monochrome videos that serve to add more confusion than not, and tend to distract from real stories, without ever even promising to arrive at useful conclusions.
When shit like this shows up, you know, even before the ink dries, that this story is never going to fill in any blanks, resolve any question marks, or develop more deeply than the nothingburger it began as.
So today the story runs, and ten years later it shall be all the nothing it is today. Designed as a mystery never to be solved.
The zombie fad is dead. Space aliens are the new default.
After this we will cycle back to dinosaurs, and after that, we’ll have a toy marketing cartoon blitz, and run a contest between 80’s/90’s style garbage toy cut-outs like power rangers, ninja turtles and G.I. Joe.
It’ll be like Reagan all over again, except two terms of Trump instead, then we’ll vote in his veep for a term, dump him for a democrat and then crash the economy and stoke fires and blame the party lines (right gets pork barrel payola, left gets tax shamed) as readily as blaming farts on the dog, BAU.
I feel like a lot of the people commenting on this thread would really benefit from reading The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan (who was himself once a UFO believer).
He has a really good section on UFO sightings, which he compares to stories about abduction by demons from Medieval times.
His main explanation for the increase in UFO stories in the second half of the 20th century is the decline in other forms of abduction myths, like the demon one. People report seeing what they're expecting to see based on the stories they've been exposed to.
The massive increase in aircraft obviously helped too.
I would really like to believe in alien spacecraft. But so far the only "evidence" I've ever seen has been incredibly poor quality images and video that could be pretty much anything as far as I can tell.
Anyway I believe that people may sometimes see something, but its much more likely its secret military aircraft. But if there was a good recording of something really fantastical then maybe.
Also, Newsweek is the kind of publication that happily publishes whatever the military asks them to.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadWhich is fairly impressive at the reported velocity of 2400mph.
But the news of water ice on titan - and a huge band of it - makes me wonder if life hasn’t spawned twice (at least) in the solar system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a14456936/that-tim...
I can think of one more which seems more likely: US government testing secret radar spoofing tech (probably operated from a submarine).
This is one reason why I find stories like this one unlikely. If we assume this object is, say, a Chinese spy drone, why would the Chinese use this amazing new tech for something as mundane and boring as a spy drone? They could turn it in to a commercial engine, mount it on some aircraft, and completely dominate the air travel and air freight. As far as using technology to crush your enemies goes that would have a much greater impact on the US than watching what the country is up to from a drone.
It's entirely possible that some novel propulsion technology would only work with extremely light craft under specific conditions, and either couldn't scale to the size of a commercial aircraft, or would be less efficient or cost effective at that scale than existing technology.
Ion propulsion is only useful in space, for instance.
First, that all UFO reports accurately describe craft that defy known physical laws (discarding the likelihood of hoaxes or misidentifications of conventional craft or other phenomena.) The significance of the fraction, in this case, is irrelevant.
Second, that people are able to accurately gauge the size of objects in the sky (they aren't, see phenomenon like the moon illusion as an example of how difficult it is, and how biased human perception can be.) Just because people see a roughly triangular formation of lights in the night sky, doesn't mean there's a vast, football-field sized black triangle hovering over the city.
And you should have said "A significant fraction of reported UFOs appear much, much larger," for your actual comment to be true, we would need examples of actual UFOs to test against the size of conventional jets.
Third, that the phenomenon on the video in the posted article shows a craft which uses the same or a similar form of technology as "much larger" UFOs, and that this somehow invalidates the premise that novel forms of propulsion exist which cannot arbitrarily scale.
Is jet exhaust distinguishable from hot plasma ball in IR?
I'm thinking a very very big version of this - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/a-floating-holograph...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOTYgcdNrXE
Thanks for sharing
And systematic malfunctions? Just on military radar, in military bases? And fooling professionals repeatedly with such realistic false returns that instead of checking their equipment they claim UFO's are zipping around in the skies?
Why does it have to be aliens... so natural phenomena are totally discounted?
This kind of nonsensical guff and willingness to proffer daft ideas is what sets any sort of empirical reasoning back to stone-age style quackery!
Alternatively, it's all lies. Both those scenarios are IMO more likely that natural phenomena, because there is no other known natural phenomena that moves in any way similar to the reported UFO.
Expect more bullshit and expect believers in bullshit to be propped up all over the place until the like/upvote/view/click count feedback loop has done enough damage and is dismantled.
ha! Got a link to this?
Or some other nation. By far the most likely explanation to me is that this is some classified military tech.
And the whole thing just seems weird to me. If you're an alien vessel visiting our planet, it seems like you're either going to try to make contact, or ignore people and just gather samples. But this? Just sort of bothering the US Navy? You could argue it was gathering samples of ocean water or something. But then why go to the CAP point? That can't be to collect scientific data. And that doesn't make sense as their attempt to contact us. As I mentioned above, they'd have to have a lot of knowledge of our language and communication to know where that point is, which means they know enough to simply make radio contact.
2) The military is not going to give you full-resolution video, they keep secrets like that reflexively.
Why not alien spaceships?
Because alien spaceships are not here.
Meteors have the showmanship advantage of being big, bright, high, and visible from a very large area.
Both meteors and UFOs have the problem of "whoa what was that, didn't have time to get my camera out". UFOs additionally have the problem of "too amazed to act".
Intelligent life happened here, it must happen again somewhere else. This should be made axiom really. You/we/whatever is not unique in the universe.
So, "If UFO's were real" is not really a question. Whether this was an UFO or something else is a question.
Your other questions "why not spaceships etc" are antrophorphic in nature and not relevant at all.
You don't know that. Maybe there were super intelligent lizards before us. Lets not be ridiculous. We can't even know if it is a current situation because anthropomorphic ideas and agendas (or even timeframe) do not necessarily reflect other life forms - maybe fungi is already connected to other dimensions like in recent star track episodes ?
There is also thinking that merging pre-mitochondria with bacteria into more complex cell giving birth to complex multicelular life was singular event on this planet and so must be very rare, but its unpprovable really and even if true just lowers the odds.
> you'd need new physics to get from any A to any B at an interstellar level and even more new physics to pull right-angle turns at high mach numbers in an atmosphere.
Really ? Aliens having totally different understanding on universe and tech then us sounds amazing ? Just if you had a time machine and get back lousy couple centuries would make us look like aliens.
We don't really know the probability of abiogenesis (let alone artifacts from that process leading to intelligent life). If it is sufficiently improbable -- 1 / 10^22 per star[0] -- it may very well be that we are the only ones in the observable universe.
The universe is pretty darn big, but life is also pretty darn complex, and its emergence from amino acids and "simple" organic chemistry is not very well understood. Unless the factors of abiogenesis are sufficiently well known, we shouldn't make such predictions either...
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[0]: once per (100 * 10^9 stars in the galaxy times 100 * 10^9 galaxies per hubble volume).
> We don't really know the probability of abiogenesis
Abiogenesis is only one way to look at it. What about intelligent design ? Probability it is relevant is 100%, given that humans are one of those IDs already (created polio virus).
So again, most are having tunnel vision about this topic given our constraints and limitations on this planet.
>> Yah, cell machinery is also complex yet it emerged number of times independently on this planet alone
That's not even wrong. I don't even know where to begin refuting this claim -- so I just leave it there.
Sometimes it would do us some good to accept the fact that we just don't know it (yet). Yet alone considering the philosophical consequences of ID: who designed the designers? How did the first designers emerge? What were they made of (considering that the chemical abundance of the galactical environment was heavily skewerd towards lighter elements 4.5 Gy ago)?
In the meantime, I stick to the models that don't rely on an allmighty entity to bootstrap biological evolution.
Humans are designers already, what more proof do you need: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2122619.stm
You are confusing ID with creationism. The later is one foolish and easily refutable variant of ID akin to Santa and other fairy tails.
> There is no evidence of god, therefore I don't have any confidence in the flying spaghetti monster.
Comparing life to another life is not the same as comparing life to superbeings.
> who designed the designers?
That is irrelevant for this topic. It didn't stop people researching big bang, did it ?
> In the meantime, I stick to the models that don't rely on an allmighty entity to bootstrap biological evolution
In the meantime, understand it doesn't have to be allmighty :) It can simply be another advanced enough life (remember that one about advanced tech compared to magic?). The topic is about UFOs, not about origin of life or origin of origin of origin ... of life.
That whole 2004 incident with a video is just one man's story that nobody else in the scene saw the same way. It was not seen as worth of report or anything. One airman in the videos even says "It's a drone".
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2018/05/navy_pilots_2004_ufo_a...
This Newsweek article quotes Gary Voorhis, whereas the pilot in previous reports was Dave Fravor.
“At a certain point, there ended up being multiple objects that we were tracking,” Petty Officer Gary Voorhis, stationed aboard the Princeton missile cruiser escorting the USS Nimitz, testified. “They all generally zoomed around at ridiculous speeds, and angles and trajectories and then eventually they all bugged out faster than our radars.”
But it's probably just the US military testing something secret, or just a complete fabrication, either way leaked to project magical capabilities.
Its even possible tests are done knowing other military pilots are in vicinity to guage their reaction to it.
To me this is the simplest explanation (if weather balloons and drones are ruled out).
However, no such conclusions can be made - either pro- or anti- the "But its Aliens" argument - since the entire subject is couched in dire secrecy, with a lot of people whose lives would change, drastically, if it were the case that these UFO's turn out to be non-human in origin.
If it turns out that aliens are on the planet and have advanced technology that could ruin us all, maybe the Pentagon and the Kremlin would find a reason to stop starving their own people for the sake of assumed dominance over the planet, and instead unite to either befriend, or defeat, the common alien friend/foe.
One can imagine the reason all of these events are couched in such secrecy might be, indeed, militaristic hubris. Or, in other words, FOMO at a grand scale ..
I'm not saying I think these things, I'm just trying to point out that your conclusion is not a given.
It certainly means that they have those capabilities as pertains to travel, but it is not a given that they would have those capabilities in a military sense. Of course the argument can be made that you can convert that kind of power into a weapon, but I'd hazard to say that a haphazard conversion does not in fact impart upon you a godlike ability to ignore everything we could possibly do.
I'm definitely not arguing that this means we should increase military spending. I think that is fundamentally not a great idea for us in the first place. Instead, I am arguing that while the things you are talking about are widely used as sci-fi tropes and held as beliefs by a lot of people, I do not think they stand on their own merits.
A well equipped squad of marines would still eventually succumb to a gird of barbarians unless they could resupply.
It's more like neolithic man meets nuclear submarine... but worse. We have 0 tools at our disposal to fight anything that's farther away than the edge of the atmosphere. "They" can take a few decades to accelerate a really massive "civilization ending" object and slam it into us. It's not like we can go anywhere to avoid it.
Even if an alien civilization finds our planet, I don't see why that would imply we are inside their logistic operational range.
Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence, which means they are not the product of evolution, which means they are something so strange that the idea of befriending or defeating them makes no sense. They're something more like this story: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...
>> Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence, which means they are not the product of evolution, which means they are something so strange that the idea of befriending or defeating them makes no sense.
This. If - and that's a big if - we assume previous bizarre aerial activities observed by humans were in fact of ET origin, then it's only natural to think of those ETs more like AI (robots) that don't necessarily share our goal-oriented intelligence, but rather possess higher levels of intelligence and their own agenda. As a result, you're right; we wouldn't even begin to understand their purpose cause theirs just has no counterpart in humans.
Given the distances and ages required for interstellar travel, these things are more likely unmanned probes than busses filled with tourists.
> It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft
They only have a tiny poorly manned outpost?
Or maybe they are scouts that were sent all over the cosmos for the purpose of exploration and they will report back their findings to their home eventually.
There are plenty of rational explanations for their behavior, especially if we are extremely far behind them in our technological development.
Are you sure you know what their goals would be?
The Romans were arguably a flash of insight away from the hot air balloon, they had good uses for it and all the prerequisite techs. Analogously, we might be one really good flash of insight away from technology we'll just actually get a thousand years from now. So the aliens could be otherwise on our tech level, but they just figured out warp drive.
Fictional times indeed. Just don't think too hard about the money.
E.g. how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?
For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset. It might not affect "day to day life" in terms of the lights staying on and there being food on the shelves, but there could be a significant personal impact on a lot of people which may lead to a lot of things like depression/substance-abuse/suicides/general-"fuck it, its the end end of world, I am going to <x>"-sentiment/etc that will have knock-on effects (e.g. not turning up for work, abandoning family/responsibilities, running away to live as a hermit in the woods, gun hoarding etc)
Like they've dealt with every other scientific advancement that killed their beliefs. They will deny it as much and as long as they can until they will be forced to admit it, at which point "god" will shrink to an even meaningful pocket of scientific ignorance. Some of them will keep denying it forever
https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2014/may/14/po...
Nearly everyone is fine with this idea, but most everyone also thinks people with religious views different than their own will have trouble with it.
Non-abrahamic religions like Hinduism,Jainism, Buddhism, believes in existence of world systems other than current one.
Buddhism is especially is accommodative in terms of acceptance, of evidences that refutes Buddhist world view[0].
[0]http://www.openculture.com/2016/09/carl-sagan-the-dalai-lama...
The major religions have already shown how they deal with evidence of outside of the garden of Eden. Several don't care, because the garden isn't part of their belief system to start with, and most of the rest have no problem with it (because they don't view the garden as literal), and the remainder just dismiss the evidence and distrust the entire field of science associated with it.
I don't think expanding that to off Earth is likely to change a thing about those responses, though the details of exactly which groups have each response might be a little different (though I suspect not much.)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fqQrT84kjc4
You’re taking the belief system that people retain, and introducing space aliens, and then making the leap to an automatic assumption of “apocalypse, thus rapture, thus cut loose and play Russian roulette because we’re all gonna die, so who cares.”
But these videos certainly don’t portend apocalypse. If official channels announced a message confirming alien life forms, and space craft from other planets and star systems, that does not read as The End Of The World. Tomorrow’s headline saying “ALIENS” with a frame of this video as the leading image wouldn’t cause panic.
Would it cause a stir? Yeah, but it’s simply not threatening.
So the the world view wouldn’t shift the way you claim. It would more likely upset the idea of souls, afterlife, eternal consequences, good and evil, heavan and hell, resurrections, fate and lots more in the western religions, but those effect would probably be pretty temporary. Those sorts of realizations grip kids in high school and college all the time, and yeah, during those phases people often cut loose, but soon relocate the genuine practical consequences that form the rational basis of pious restraint. Things like catching unpleasant diseases, destroying trust and reputation among peers, and so on.
So, the idea that restricting factual information protects the sheltered pedestrian psyche, at least when it comes to space aliens, is the stuff of TV shows and low budget movies. It’s fine for a plot device, but space aliens threaten behavioral norms about as much as the idea of sentient, talking sea slugs. No matter how pained a cry the sea slugs let slip, if they taste good, people wouldn’t hesitate to batter dip and deep fry them, and only stop to mull the existential dread over indigestion.
Sometimes keeping the sheltered unaware of The Truth does protect their sanity, but not within the context of space aliens. Space aliens are existential weak sauce. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t gobble up most sci-fi as comedy. We’d find it irreverent and disrespectful, and almost nobody takes such a stance. Invariably, people pay extra money for an entire cable TV channel devoted to it.
I doubt it.
If the last few years have taught me anything, it's that no amount of evidence can dissuade someone from believing something they want to believe in.
I don't think it would change anything for them. We're living in a golden age of science, and that did not change anything for them. The existence of aliens would just be one more thing to either reject or literally bedevil.
Humans began in the Garden of Eden, but that's only one species, albeit an important one.
It is easier to square religion with life on other planets than it is to square the odds of evolution happening in a similar way on multiple planets.
It is either US or Chinese skunkworks and given it was in US airspace I doubt the Chinese would do this. Also it has to be US because otherwise military brass would be freaking out the Chinese are penitrating us airspace with advanced tech.
Thus it is a us skunkworks project.
It is probably just advanced drone techonology. Probably really cool tech.
Occaam's Razor claims that terrestrial technology is more likely than extraterrestrial because it relies on fewer unproven assumptions, namely the existence of extraterrestrial life, its presence on Earth, and everything we know about physics being wrong, despite the math somehow working out to describe the universe incredibly well.
That said I think there are other alternatives that are even more likely: that these sightings are sensor malfunctions or natural phenomena that have been blown out of proportion by popular myth and deliberate disinformation -- (which is certainly the case with all other UFO sightings).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_ov...
https://web.archive.org/web/20121214172708/http://ancientali...
It seems much more likely that these assumed acts of God were a misunderstood natural phenomenon rather than extraterrestrial beings who we have yet to capture on camera. Considering how closely the depictions of the event match pictures of sun dogs leaves it as the most reasonable solution.
Yeah... sundogs are weird, leaping sundogs are weirder[0].
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPk0mKVnnCs
(I quite like the idea of aliens drawing ideas from their spacecraft from our popular culture as a storyline, but not as an explanation for the phenomena!)
And stories of abduction by aliens often involved those aliens claiming to be from Mars or Venus before it was commonly known that those planets didn't harbor life, much less advanced civilizations.
And the archetypal "grey alien" didn't really become the template for modern alien abduction stories until Whitley Strieber popularized them in a book - many descriptions of alien encounters until that point were of "Nordic" human type aliens.
So yeah, either aliens are being careful not to appear more advanced than popular culture would allow (maybe to the point of appearing as angels and demons to humans when their view of reality was entirely dominated by religion and not science) or much of the UFO phenomenon is basically a meme.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_airship
I don't mean anything supernatural.
The US has lots of boring drones, but perhaps there is a secret drone fighter program. It would surprise me somewhat if the US weren't working on something like this, perhaps with a goal of keeping it secret until it needs to be deployed operationally. Plenty of military technologies have been kept secret for decades, such as the SR-71 and the spy satellites on which the Hubble Space Telescope was based. On that note, did you know that the Hubble was basically an extra spy satellite donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the US had a fleet of them pointed downwards toward earth? For more on this, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
So, consider: what kind of reconnaissance satellites does the US have today, that resulted in the retirement of the "Crystal" series? (Obviously something digital) Did the US's investment in supersonic spycraft end with the SR-71? If the US were going to design such a craft today, would it have a pilot or would it be autonomous?
On the other hand, if this were a top secret US technology, then I suspect all of the people who observed these phenomena would simply have been sworn to secrecy. I doubt it would be treated as a UFO and I doubt these officers would be speaking publicly about it. Unless this is all some kind of cover for the program. Who knows!
For decades, he worked as a civil servant in the DoD as an instrumentation and test engineer on a few well known weapons programs (and some not so much). I think he based his comment on the trajectory military technology was taking, as he commented similarly to you (referring to Pyxl101) regarding the human problem. i.e. if you remove the humans, you can save weight on life support, and you can do things you otherwise can't when you're limited to keeping the pilot alive and (mostly) functioning.
Part of me wants to believe he might've seen what we'd now call UFOs, but I'm confident that's wishful thinking. His remarks were offered based on his own experiences, and I'm sure he extrapolated from there. Regardless, I wouldn't be surprised if some of your predictions did turn out to be true in the near future.
Your last statement also reminded me of Project Mogul[1] and the use of UFOs as a cover story (or rather not, as the case might be). In all likelihood, the Roswell "UFO crash" was an errant Mogul balloon--a project shrouded in secrecy to some degree or another, mostly because we knew the Soviets had stolen our technology but we didn't want them to know we had ways of detecting their tests. I don't believe the USAF instigated the UFO theory, and neither do I believe the air force particularly cared. After all, if I understand the timeline correctly, it wasn't until the mid/late 1970s when the UFO researcher Stanton Friedman began perpetuating the myth, long after the actual event in 1947. As a cover story, that would've come far too late to be useful enough to cover for Project Mogul. To an extent--at least in the early days--I suspect early UFO "research" was largely the outcome of a means to pursue fame or money via book sales and speaking engagements more than a theory perpetuated by the government.
Now, that's not to say that the government isn't using it now that UFOs have long been established in popular culture. That may very well be a strong possibility.
Aside: I once attended a talk with my father that Mr. Friedman gave in the 1990s on UFOs. I also recall Friedman was made somewhat uncomfortable with the fact my father was not only aware of Project Blue Book but had access to the archives when he was at the air force academy. The brief exchange between the two was made when Mr. Friedman asked the audience if anyone had heard of the project and were familiar with (IIRC) volume 13.
Friedman quickly changed subjects away from "government cover up" for reasons that escape me. :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul
That's a little misleading. Acceleration hasn't any effects on human body. You can't sense gravity: free fall is the same as ingravity. What you can feel is forces being transmitted by matter contact.
If you can create a field that transmits a force similar to gravity uniformly, there would be no pressure.
Now you're moving again goal posts just "to be right". That's incredibly childish.
Of course you haven't adressed my core point, possibly because you can't understand it.
Edit: try stating my point and we'll see what's on your mind.
I believe your core point is that humans can't detect a force which acts identically on their whole body. Have I understood? This statement is true, of course, but does not seem relevant in context, as it seems to ignore all but the one sentence you quoted, which itself is true in its own context. I don't consider Pyxl101's ignoring of magical-seeming hypothetical technology to be misleading.
Pyxl101's comment [1], which you replied to, is all about practical technology. In that context, your comment seems like an irrelevant technicality (I think this is why you got downvoted), as no practical mode of transport can move someone without physical contact, which transfers force unevenly (just to the parts of the body in contact with the vehicle).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19805808
More than "detect", a uniform force simply doesn't affect us.
This statement is true, of course, but does not seem relevant in context...
On the contrary, the thread was started discussing if we could be facing a far superior technology, continued by Pyxl101 speculating UFOs could be drones because enormous accelerations prevent manned ships, and then I pointed that, if it's really a futurist technology, acceleration in itself could not be a problem.
... no practical mode of transport can move someone without physical contact
The "practical" thing has been inserted by yourself. Also it's not about "practical" it's about "known by us".
That would be pretty bulky and costly to include in an aircraft cockpit, but I wonder if it would solve the G-force problem.
I'm not sure if this would actually be better, though. 7 Gs of acceleration would be experienced as 7 bar pressure, equivalent to water pressure at 60 meters underwater, which is quite deep. Rapid changes in pressure between 1 bar and let's say 7 bar would probably be more uncomfortable to experience than regular G-forces.
That must be some damn nice secret propulsion system.
The predecessor of the SR-71 first flew in April on 1962, the public announcement was July of 1964. Given how much trouble we've had with our hypersonic research programs over the decades, and the lack of need for it given stealth is more affordable, there might have been some cool stuff, but it's not a practical or likely operational tool.
The first launch of a KH-11 was mid-seventies and subject to a lot of media coverage during the spy trials a few years later. Imagery was leaked during the Reagan admin. We don't need better resolution, we need more coverage.
So IMO our secrets are less about silver-bullet platforms and more about exploits. Exploiting their radars, sensors, communications systems, networks and computers. We don't really need a Mach 5 platform or 1" resolution for anything. It would be neat, but it would be unaffordable to buy and maintain.
Increasingly, the picture we are being shown is generated by processing raw sensor data - for example, just compare raw (or partially processed) weather radar data to the processed maps you see in forecasts. Two recent trends -- the synthesis of views from multiple sensors of different types, and their presentation as virtual reality -- have come together in devices such as the F-35 Helmet-Mounted Display [1]. I would guess that this level of interpretation of data and synthesis of images presents an increased scope for artifact generation, and the presentation makes it seem more real.
[1] https://www.f35.com/about/capabilities/helmet
CIA records here: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/ufos-fact...
Are most of these UFO sightings witnessed by a pilot and co-pilot? Is radar data recorded so it can be replayed later?
The skeptic in me thinks these experiences might seem ‘real’ but aren’t. If there is some measurable and documented proof then there can be an investigation.
https://mobile.twitter.com/adgpi/status/1122911748829270016
Just to add that the stigma surrounding paranormal occurrences is not universal.
Unless I'm missing some context here
My Quest for the Yeti: Confronting the Himalayas' Deepest Mystery by Reinhold Messner
Yes, that Reinhold Messner. It's a really good book, with an interesting ending.
Someone close to me is former military whose position required a top secret clearance. The work that they did involved analyzing various forms of SIGINT.
After years of me prying, this person admitted to me:
1. Within the Navy (and presumably other armed forces) the UFO stuff is an open secret.
2. The 'official line' used internally is that the craft are extraterrestrial (or at least origin unknown), and ...
3. They're official labelled drones, i.e., there is no reason to believe that they're "manned"
In other words, it's fairly well known within the military (at least where people are likely to encounter them) and the official position is somewhere along the lines of "they're here but not here".
Personally I've never seen anything I'd label a UFO. But the prevailing narrative -- uptick in UFO sightings following the Manhattan Project, interest in our weapons / energy capabilities -- I'm 100% comfortable with.
If it is a military psy-op, it's one playing out on a massive scale over a vast timeframe. That in and of itself is mind boggling.
Don't get me wrong some of these are really fucked up and can't be dismissed as a weather balloon or a sensor error easily, but saying that UFOs are an open secret is simply wrong.
So either the US is unique in the of attention they get or that UFOs ignore the area between the Straights of Gibraltar and the Straights of Aden like a plague which would also contradict the first assumption given the sheer number of US assets in the area.
Having people confirm or deny such allegations doesn't really mean anything anymore.
If "they" do exist, have enough technology to travel to this planet, control somewhat stealthy drones in our atmosphere which are detected every so often, And don't want to interfer publicly with humanity as proven by their lack of public appearances...
Honestly, it's just beyond unlikely. But if they did exist: what does it matter? We wouldn't be able to do anything about it so worrying about them is pointless
However simply having a clearance isn't the same as being read into a specific program, security clearance just means you can be trusted with secret information it does not grant you access to all classified information matching your clearance.
There are 100,000's of radio and radar operators and while a lot of them seen some shit in their life they aren't come out in droves saying yeah the USAF or NAVY thinks knows about UFOs and they are definitely real.
Like seriously just think about how many sailors have rotated in and out of CIC duty on say an Arleigh Burke class missile destroyer each of which has probably some of the most advanced tracking radar and sensors developed and they aren't tracking UFOs periodically and when they do they sure as hell aren't treating them as LGM.
I'm quite skeptical about alien-natured UFOs, but some videos are just too crazy. Like that tracking video of an object flying really fast and then going under water without slowing down.
I'm thinking of some form of ball-lightning, a self-contained plasma. It's still an unexplained phenomenon with a history of observation (or multiple phenomena classified under one label).
A self-contained plasma could very much be opaque/reflective for radar (depending on the plasma frequency) and also emit light. Maybe it'll even be absorptive to some of the active radars trying to paint it, making some of the involved airplane and ship radars actually stabilize and guide the phenomenon (e.g. it 'escaping' as soon as a painting radar gets closer).
Lots of maybes but infrequent natural phenomena that cannot be easily observed with human senses and where humans usually don't go are still a valid hypothesis in my opinion.
Which is more likely in Occam's razor: a new source of refracted light, or a new kind of aircraft?
https://imgur.com/a/uhFOF9u
Decide for yourself what you think is being shown there. Okay, ready? This is what the picture I just linked actually shows: I googled "grainy photo" and then "first photo ever taken" to get the grainiest one ever. I don't know if it's the first one ever taken, but this photo is one of the oldest ones we have. "Taken in 1824, it shows the view outside of a window in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes France."
How did you do?
The Nimitz videos are a relatively rare category, though, instrument-first observation. Most UFOs are observed with human eyes. Which have good resolution and good light level compensation.
I don't know what I'm supposed to see here, but it looks suspiciously like the first photo ever taken.
...
345. Topics to consider on Fridays and periods with no really important news.
.../s
Or the textbooks are wrong (it wouldn't be the first time).
Consider the fact that this was a radar incident too. And that the ships were using meshed synthesized radar, not just one ship at a time.
That's an issue in itself if so.
Complex software systems can have quite bizarre bugs when they interact with each other.
But, to play against your argument, I think there’s an idea that the sensors are sufficiently advanced, and designed to track objects, so the lock on the object means there will be some image stabilization applied, and perhaps the sensor is permitted to apply guidance to the autopilot, to steer the whole airframe within certain parameters to maintain the targeting lock, if a flight mode is engaged.
To argue against the idea that it’s just a lighting anomaly, I think there are multiple other signals in play, such that radar put the pilots onto the object first and foremost. Then upon arrival, the pilots did indeed encounter phenomenon to match, the chatter between the pilots suggests that they also can see the object with the naked eye, and then, the fact that multiple inputs all match in terms of timing and overall duration.
But, for all the really interesting things that never see the light of day, and that the news outlets do know about and could draw attention to, we only get a handful of grainy monochrome videos that serve to add more confusion than not, and tend to distract from real stories, without ever even promising to arrive at useful conclusions.
When shit like this shows up, you know, even before the ink dries, that this story is never going to fill in any blanks, resolve any question marks, or develop more deeply than the nothingburger it began as.
So today the story runs, and ten years later it shall be all the nothing it is today. Designed as a mystery never to be solved.
The zombie fad is dead. Space aliens are the new default.
After this we will cycle back to dinosaurs, and after that, we’ll have a toy marketing cartoon blitz, and run a contest between 80’s/90’s style garbage toy cut-outs like power rangers, ninja turtles and G.I. Joe.
It’ll be like Reagan all over again, except two terms of Trump instead, then we’ll vote in his veep for a term, dump him for a democrat and then crash the economy and stoke fires and blame the party lines (right gets pork barrel payola, left gets tax shamed) as readily as blaming farts on the dog, BAU.
He has a really good section on UFO sightings, which he compares to stories about abduction by demons from Medieval times.
His main explanation for the increase in UFO stories in the second half of the 20th century is the decline in other forms of abduction myths, like the demon one. People report seeing what they're expecting to see based on the stories they've been exposed to.
The massive increase in aircraft obviously helped too.
Anyway I believe that people may sometimes see something, but its much more likely its secret military aircraft. But if there was a good recording of something really fantastical then maybe.
Also, Newsweek is the kind of publication that happily publishes whatever the military asks them to.