Because he once used flew a plane in Flight Simulator 2020 and knows the equipment and IR signatures of various aircrafts better than the pilots who reported this.
It is typical human self-centeredness to assume we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond.
It is also mathematically silly to assume that of all possible beings over current universe timeline that we are the most technically advanced. We have only existed for a minuscule sliver of that timespan.
That’s not to say that we are statistically likely to have been visited, however. But it is possible.
But how would anyone find us? If we accept that the max speed in space is lightspeed, then we're basically hidden.
Why?
Most of our communication relies on radiowaves... even communication to/from space. Now looking at history, we've known and used radiowaves for maybe a 100 years, and considering the current enviromental trends, we might be using it for eg. 500 more, before we die out. Or maybe 10.000. Mathematically it doesn't really matter a lot.
Now look at the waves we've been sending out... a if we assume "the world ends" in 500 years, in a million years, there will be a 600 light-year "thin" shell of a 1mio light years sphere travelling away from earth, attenuated by the square law (twice the distance, 1/4 of the power).
What are the chances, that the thin shell of radiowaves hits some other culture, on some other world, in their "600 years of power", that are able to detect those waves, and actually come visit us (if we're still alive, which we're probably not).
Our world might be everything to us, but in a universal scale, our world compared to the universe is like an atom to our body... utterly insignificant.
Say the chance of developing FTL travel is totally minuscule but still inevitable given a long enough time horizon . Once that technology is developed by its very essence it spreads rapidly almost like the development of the wheel.
But all our assumptions or beliefs about what is possible and what can/would be observable is based on our, well, current understanding of reality.
Since generally speaking, humans know or understand a bit more today than they did yesterday, it seems likely that there are things that today we think we know but do not know or know incorrectly. Thus, our rules about what is observable may be flawed. We may be missing evidence of other civilizations and visitors.
Given the vastness of time and space and the fact that we DO know that there is a lot that we do not know (as opposed to not knowing what we do not know), it seems more reasonable to err on the side of we-probably-don't-know.
It is typical human self-centeredness to assume we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond.
I don't get the feeling that most educated people believe that "we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond". In fact, I'd wager that a significant portion, if not a majority, of such people believe that there likely is (or was, or will be) other such intelligent / sentient life in the universe.
But... what I think many (maybe most) educated people hold is that it is very unlikely that Earth is being routinely visited by alien intelligences. And I think the basis for that belief structure is rooted in the underlying physical reality of the universe, regarding distances between other worlds, and the speeds that can be attained to travel between worlds.
Simply put, it appears, based on what we know today, that even at light speed, (or a very, very large fraction of light speed), it would take around hundreds of years to travel back and forth to Earth from nearby planets that are suspected of being habitable. So even in the best case, where the aliens can travel at like 0.95 of c, and happen to be located on the very nearest habitable planet, it seems likely that they would have to be both very long-lived, and very tolerant of boredom, to travel back and forth between Earth and their world.
Impossible? No. Likely? Hmm...
OTOH, it seems like we do keep discovering more and more new "possibly habitable worlds" and the "best case" range to such a world keeps shrinking. And there's no particular reason I know of to think that "aliens" might not live dramatically longer lives than us, and maybe they are in fact fine with multiple hundred year jaunts around the universe. Or maybe they've invented the sci-fi trope "suspended animation". So never say never, I guess.
It's a huge, huge leap from "Unexplainable things are happening" to "These are alien spacecraft."
You can take the unexplainable part and do something useful with it - like making observations public and collecting more data.
The rest is a speculative hypothesis about the data.
This has always been one of the biggest problems with the reaction to these phenomena. You can't stop at "Unexplainable things are happening" without being told "They can't be, because interstellar travel is impossible."
The assertion that there is intelligent life elsewhere is often conflated with UFOs being evidence of such life.
The assertion of a high probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere is reasonable.
The presence of testimony is not evidence. People report things for many reasons. Most of the time, it is a silly bid for a moment of fame and/or it just sells news/gathers clicks in an untrustworthy economy on a slow day.
One day, we ourselves may advance our own intelligence sufficiently to achieve civilisation.
For those of us who have seen for ourselves, not some far-off glimpse of something unidentifiable, but an up-close and personal encounter with something unexplainable, it's been more than possible, no matter how improbable, for quite some time now...
I don't think you have to be particularly self-centered to entertain the idea that we might be first. Despite the 8 billion year head start an alien civilization could have if it developed at the same pace as we, just early on, we see no evidence of any aliens out there anywhere. (And, despite billions of cameras, there is no evidence of any aliens here.)
We ourselves owe our existence to a chance extinction of the dominant life form on Earth 65 million years ago. Without that, our mammal ancestors would not have been able to reproduce as frequently and plentifully, which would almost certainly have slowed the development of us if it didn't rule it out outright in the timescale the Earth has left.
There's no guarantee most worlds with life even ever develop multi-cellular life. It took Earth billions of years to go from single-cell to multicellular.
Yes, there has been a lot of time and a lot of star systems, but there are so many things that are required, I'm not at all confident that there is intelligent life out there. Earth is a sample size of 1, and we tend to treat it as if its the norm, but that's just a sometimes-useful assumption. The reality is we might have won the universal lottery.
Why is it mostly Navy pilots reporting the phenomena and there are not any data in the visible spectrum? Because the Navy has Project NEMESIS[0] in the works whose goal is to spoof instrumentation.
I think Occam's razor leads me to the same conclusion. The only part that still has me questioning are the large number of reported visual sightings by the very same pilots reporting radar contact.
Recently civilian pilots have spotted similar objects and also the US military doesn’t do live tests without coordination and planning because people have died in the past when that was tried.
This reminds me to The X-files quote/theme/leitmotif "I want to believe".
I am prone to think that this again some kind of gov mass psychology Rorschach experiment, where they say if we show you this image and if we say it is flying bunny how many times do we need to show and repeat the same until you start believing it is a flying bunny ...
By the way I am not saying other sentient being do not exist in the universe, I am just saying that with that technology you would not give a fork about what humans want/need/wish ... therefore it is more likely it is some kind of political hocus/pocus
Mick West over at metabunk.org has covered a lot of these. He has a background in video game programming, which he uses when trying to reconstruct three dimensional spatial relationships from two dimensional videos.
Mick West- a game developer is in no position to question observations of trained top gun pilots and the vast infrastructure of the US Navy/Pentagon who analyze this kind of stuff for a living. If they can't explain then I am sure they have considered and debunked trivial explanations that West purports- in the NYTimes article they explicitly debunk the "weather balloon" hypothesis which has been proposed as a "rational" explanation for these ufos by some.
> Mick West- a game developer is in no position to question observations of
He's also a pilot and has been focused on topics like this for two decades - but his arguments don't require taking anything on trust or his authority.
Additionally, he interviews experienced and relevant people, like his most recent video with Alex Dietrich (the second pilot present at the Nimitz "Tic-Tac" encounter).
> trained top gun pilots and the vast infrastructure of the US Navy/Pentagon who analyze this kind of stuff for a living. If they can't explain then I am sure they have considered and debunked trivial explanations that West purports
The filename "gimbal" suggests they might have the same suspicion as West on at least one encounter. Hopefully we'll get details of what they considered in the upcoming pentagon report.
But, even if we do prematurely assume that that the pentagon thinks there's no possible explanations, consider the analogous case of the Chilean Navy UFO video where the Chilean Navy and then a 2 year investigation failed to identify a plane 100 miles away (https://www.metabunk.org/threads/explained-chilean-navy-ufo-...). The pilots are experts but they aren't completely immune from making mistakes.
> in the NYTimes article they explicitly debunk the "weather balloon" hypothesis which has been proposed as a "rational" explanation for these ufos by some.
I assume you're talking about this quote (let me know if not): "One possible explanation — that the phenomena could be weather balloons or other research balloons — does not hold up in all cases"
It's a refutation if someone believed that all cases were weather/research balloons (which I don't think anyone does). And on the flip side there's the implication that some of the UAPs are consistent with weather balloons.
"The problem is that the military don’t want to talk about this, partly because this is a classified system that these are recorded on. It’s called the Raytheon ATFLIR system. And it’s a fairly advanced targeting pod that straps on underneath the planes. And if you look for example videos shot with this on YouTube, you will find, basically, nothing—like a few really grainy ones, because even though I’m sure there’s tens of thousands of hours that have been shot with it, it’s all classified. So they don’t want to talk about it. And if they do analysis of it, that becomes classified by default. So they’re not going to release it. And they’ve actually explicitly said that they do not plan to release the results of the investigation into these videos."
The best analysis is by Cmd. Chad Underwood who actually filmed one of the videos and is a good expert on the radar and camera sensors used https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-6-lt-cmdr-chad... Also, Mick West’s so called “debunking” is poorly done and an insult to these pilots.
The media appears to miss that fact that something that happens in physical reality can become corrupted by the time it gets rendered to a computer screen. The complicated military systems are hallucinating now. Or am I missing something? Did multiple pilots see this thing with their own eyes from different angles without any technology in between?
In the tic-tac incident, yes. In the 60 minutes interview two pilots in separate planes reported seeing something causing a disturbance in the ocean, and a "tic-tac" like object about the size of their jets that seemed to notice them and matched one of the planes in a turn.
Sometimes they were visible, sometimes not, since distance was at play. The ATFLIR camera pods can see a lot farther than the human eye but these were also witnessed with human eyes by multiple Navy pilots from different angles.
There were naked eye visuals from multiple pilots, targeting pod identifications, and radar from ships were also picking up whatever it was.
It is surprisingly convincing evidence of a peer state adversary with a huge tech advantage or... something else. I was moved from "no f'ing way do ufos exist", to "wtf.. it actually seems plausible" when reading up on it.
It would be a truly novel approach for any state to develop such a huge tech advantage and neither leaking it during development nor using it to gain something in some of the many existing conflicts (cold or hot).
Yea, I would think if it was a peer state, they wouldn't risk compromising their technology just to get a closer look at a fleet of US ships that have lesser tech. The only thing I can think of for another state risking compromise is to prep the battlefield. Not really sure how deep the water is in these locations, but some nukes hiding underwater where US fleets navigate consistently could be useful if a conflict erupts. But even in that case, I can't think of a reason why they would do it during the day and not night and risk visual identification from pilots.
Both pilots called in the tic tac, their IR sensors picked it up, they were able to get a lock on with their onboard radar, and the ship picked it up on the their radar. They definitely ran into something
Yeah any time someone brings up the FLir argument I have to remind myself that even something that can exhibit IR can also be something that is not really there as a physical mass. What interested me is that David Fravor was specifically asked by Lex Fridman in his podcast if he thought these “objects” were projections and his answer was that he wasn’t a physicist and didn’t really know for sure but didn’t think so. As such the idea of a projection cannot yet be ruled out. I actually can’t believe that projections aren’t more closely scrutinized to explain this whole “phenomenon”.
The tic-tac ufo and the USS Nimitz incidents are eye witness accounts of pilots observing these crafts while them also being registered on the radar. It would be one hell of a coincidence for machinery and multiple humans to malfunction in the same way at the same time.
Most of these navy reports involve eye witness accounts of trained and credible pilots.
Here's a _long_ conversation with one of the pilots with eye visibility that day, David Fravor, though I'm linking you to the start of that specific topic:
I'm more or less a skeptic when it comes to most of what gets said / reported about UFO's / UAP's, but I will say this: David Fravor comes across as intelligent, sane, reasonable, and credible, and makes a moderately compelling argument that something exceptional happened out there. Now even he stops short, as I recall, of saying "it was little green men", but his testimony at least supports the idea that there's something there that's worthy of further analysis.
IOW, he isn't one of stereotypical, "frothing at the mouth", "true believer", "THEY ARE HERE" ufo cult types that might be fairly easy to dismiss for simple lack of credibility. He could still have been mistaken, or misjudged something, but he at least establishes a certain minimum level of credibility, to my way of thinking.
The classified version of the UAPTF (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force) report on government knowledge of real UFO events is being given to select members of the Senate ahead of the unclassified version likely to come next week. The narrative seems to be “soft disclosure” with descriptions of the public report by officials confirming that there are numerous real UFO events, that defy conventional explanations (and sometimes known physics), and do not represent secret US black projects, or even technological leaps from US adversaries. Basically, the ET hypothesis and US involvement with the phenomenon going back decades is being put on the table in a serious manner. The next step after more public pressure and interest will be a potential deeper disclosure and the government justifying its need for secrecy regarding UFOS and ET’s with national security claims in order to win back trust and faith in government and the military. Credible military witnesses, pilots, civil servants, researchers and finally whistleblowers deserve the public’s praise for these new developments.
The argument is why is the US military with a 700 billion dollar annual budget stating that they are not sure what these real objects are despite the amount of data they have collected on them. Either they are lying or they are incompetent, in either instance it’s a massive story.
Given that people (and governments/military) have believed in many phenomena that were later found to have a mundane explanation I'd expect reports like this in a world where there aren't aliens flying around.
That, and it making no sense for us to only see evidence for them on earth but not when looking at space, and that there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades (observation can be achieved with tiny machines, communication can be more direct etc.) the mundane explanations are many times more likely from where I sit.
Teleport? Wormhole? Advanced tech that makes them pop up in our space? I doubt it. But not sure how else we have those things caught on military radars and pilot cameras that are not always explainable by optical phenomenon related to orbital objects or natural atmospheric phenomenon.
People thought there's no explanations for all the ghost ship reports until we figured out Fata Morgana, too. The space of mundane explanations is large even if unknown.
Except, they have video footage of radar screen spotting objects flying at high speeds and disappearing into the sea. Not sure that there is any other way to explain it than acknowledge that there are physical objects that pop up randomly, move at high speeds and disappear. What you make if it is up to your imagination, but you cannot dismiss as optical illusions. Maybe this planet is capable of producing physical objects that fly at high speed and then disappear into the sea. Some kind if illusive sea creatures that pop up to say hello then disappear?
I like to imagine that if aliens have visited us, its for a kind of tourism or safari. Us seeing them is the pilot (some underpaid, overworked tour guide) making a mistake.
Travelling for many, many, many years just to see a bit of the planet from the window (and not even things like cities) is something I'd consider unlikely as the primary objective of visiting aliens.
> there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades
The problem with this argument is that we wouldn't know in the first place if they were also using these more covert means. At some level, we have to assume that if aliens exist and are making themselves visible to us, they're basically doing it for the lulz.
I think there are at least two plausible explanations:
1. They are actually from Earth, hiding somewhere on the bottom of the ocean. Probably Von Neumann probes which arrived millions of years ago, and not actually living things. They check our status periodically and send information to their origin system.
2. We are living in a simulation, and they are spectating us in a god mode with a visible side-effect.
There has been secrecy for decades regarding UFOs/UAPs flying on Earth, I think it's fair to say this secrecy extends to outer space as well.
there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades (observation can be achieved with tiny machines, communication can be more direct etc.)
The latest episode of the Megyn Kelly Show interviews Lue Elizondo, who headed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program.[0]
According to the article, the report will say:
"...the assessment has come up short of explaining what UAP are and that it provides no evidence to link them with any putative alien visitation—despite reviewing more than 120 incidents from the past 20 years. The report’s firmest conclusion, it seems, is that the vast majority of UAP happenings and their surprising maneuvers are not caused by any U.S. advanced technology programs."
So what are they? I see skeptics saying these are radar errors etc., but the report apparently doesn't conclude that. I'd love to see a technical analysis of what's been recorded.
Space/time tourists getting a front row seat to the demise of a civilization?
You know those historical river boat cruises you can take in Europe where it's all tied into history lessons?
Imagine that but for more advanced civilizations and the "UFOs" are actually tourist pods for aliens/time travelers to witness what Earth was like in the years before The Disaster.
Perhaps the incidence of UFO sightings can be a bellwether for how close we are to the End....
If these UFO's are travelling at super speeds and making sudden direction changes, why do we never see any effects on the atmosphere surrounding the object?
One possible hypothesis is that spacetime itself is being warped in such a way that no significant forces caused by interaction with the atmosphere are being generated.
Kinda like how because you ride an escalator people no one ever hears you climbing stairs.
I remember a video from French TV at least a decade ago. They interviewd an ex military helicopter pilot. He mentionned they one saw one of those huge cigar shaped craft flying near them. Then the craft accelerated at an insane speed that would have, in normal circumstances, disrupted the helicopter due to air displacement.
But it was like the UAP was in its own bubble, separated from the environement.
It’s interesting to understand the motivation behind all this.
Specifically: US military/intelligence/congress has historically treated UFO activity as highly classified. That’s now changed. Why is that? I don’t know. One candidate explanation:
1. Historically, some amount of “UFO” activity was actually classified, known US military/Intelligence programmes. Making the information public would compromise those programmes. So, in reality, the sightings related to identifiable flying objects. Just that they were identifiable by a small number of in-the-know people.
2. Things have changed. Some other actors - let’s guess Chinese/Russian - have stepped up their own secret programmes. Those items are now legitimately “unknown” to US authorities. If you’re from the US, that’s bad. Your putative enemies have something you lack knowledge of.
3. How to respond? In a world where the sightings are your own secrets then a strategy of silence makes sense. In a world where they’re not, the game is different. In this case, you want publicity: to cast them as unknown, (a) because it creates interest (/fear) and (b) tacitly lets your enemies know that you know they’re up to something.
That might be way off base. But the about-face in strategy is at least as interesting as the sightings themselves. I haven’t seen that covered elsewhere. Interested if anyone else has ideas/links.
Combine #2 and #3 and a culture of reticence amongst military and civilian aviation observers to report strange things, it makes sense to laugh less at them and be more encouraging.
That's what I'm trying to figure out too. The narrative is the biggest change so far. Low quality videos and eye witness reports aren't exactly new.
Sam Harris, who I consider trustworthy, was given a heads up about what's to come:
"I got contacted by somebody who gave me a heads up with respect to all of this happening and he more or less told me listen, when this other shoe drops you’re going to be in the position of having to acknowledge that all the experts are on the same page, and there’s just this blanket declaration that we’re in the presence of alien technology, and we don’t know what to make of it. So prepare your brain for that and figure out what you’re going to do."
Except that I'm not sure that there's any real mention of alien technology in the report. It's just the same old where we're seeing interesting reports about not-fully-understood optical phenomena, and people in the popular press are pattern-matching it to little green men from outer space.
Not yet, that's apparently coming, assuming Sam is correct about his source being reliable. If that's the case, what we're seeing now is a slow rollout. Presumably to get the population comfortable with officials talking about UFOs, instead of jumping immediately from denial to confirming alien tech.
That's the point, there's always been "trusted sources" from wherever claiming that exciting disclosures were just around the corner. Like I said, it's the same old.
If anything, this official report is evidence to the contrary because what better place to start revealing this stuff if there was anything at all to it? But no, for the benefit of any exobiologists in the audience, it even goes out of its way to argue against the alien-origins theory for these phenomena.
I'm probably going to get voted down for saying it, but Fox plays a lot of UFO/Bigfoot type of stuff. Clearly it gets rating, and the previous President got a lot of his ratings from the same audience as Fox so maybe there is some strategic play towards the Fox/Trump crowd.
Now that you say it... Yeah there seems to be a lot of "Your government is lying and hiding something from you, you can't trust it!" that they can conveniently extrapolate to cover other subjects, like "election fraud", or "lab leak theory".
The lab leak theory is being investigated by the Biden administration because it hasn't been able to be ruled out. Didn't you read the Vanity Fair article?
You want to hear some conspiracy theories?
Russian collusion was one.
The teargassing of Lafayette Square "by Trump" turned out to be a total lie (an internal investigation found Trump had no knowledge of the clearing of the square)
The death of Brian Sicknick on Jan 7th which was said to be due to an attack by a rioter, this claim was even repeated by House Democrats during the second impeachment, was a complete fabrication by legacy media
So tell me again how Fox promotes conspiracy theories? The ones I see are the ones in the front pages of the New York Times, CNN, WaPo et al
One thing I would like to point out is that it's not just the US government that is paying attention to these things. Many countries like China[1], France[2], the UK[3] have been investigating UFOs and find them credible.
I personally didn't find any of the UFO stuff believable until the US Navy/Pentagon stuff came out which is very credible.
At this point it is almost undeniable that there is something strange going on in the skies. Whether it is aliens or not remains an open question.
I am kind of on the same page as you. Before the Pentagon stuff came out, my adjacency to UFO's was really liking the X-Files. I casually started digging into this stuff and it's clearly a global phenomenon; but when you look at comment sections like this one, a lot of the conversation is centered on explanations centered around the United States or it's rivals (China/Russia).
Every single country talking about it has had a populist spurg and political instability recently. It just seems like a psyop to distract people who trend towards conspiratorial thinking and prevent them from focusing on politics.
> unclassified version of the report is expected to be released later this month
so has the report been released? i would like to read it rather than continuous speculation about its contents. also, i'd love to see a leak of a more classified version of the report (if one exists), just to see what they consider sensitive information and not. the more info the better really.
People forget these kinds of reports go back to the U2 spy plane in the 1950’s. When military members on Guam saw the U2 - while still top secret - take off at a 45 degree angle, the entire island was baffled and didn’t understand what they saw. It’s hard for anyone to wrap their minds around but once upon a time a plane taking off at a 45 degree angle would be as unimaginable as a craft with no heat signature (though I do think, even if true, their are many existing technologies that could explain that and we don’t need to imagine it’s an alien gravitational propulsion system.)
Does anyone think it’s an accident the most public incident involved military training flights where the military was intercepted by this and beat them to their own rendezvous point for the mission?
It’s very obvious the tic-tac UFO was either a legitimate top secret military craft (manned or unmanned) that was being tested that day against the flight crews during their training mission, or possibly it was a military hoax serving two potential purposes: 1. Basis of increased funding, and/or 2. Misinformation to unfriendly nations/militaries around the world. None of that can be admitted and so here we are where everyone has to play dumb including top levels of the pentagon.
People forget these kinds of reports go back to the U2 spy plane in the 1950’s.
Further back than that, even. AFAIK, the earliest "UFO" reports by military pilots were the so called "foo fighters"[1] which were reported during WWII.
I'm not leaping to conclude there are aliens in "tic-tacs" flying around harassing fighter jet pilots for shits and giggles but I don't think it's entirely impossible they could be controlling drones from a distance, possibly from a craft out there somewhere that's not light years away. I mean, we have a remote controlled helicopter flying around on Mars right now so that's not a leap too far to consider.
Short of our government trying to hide tech they have, which still has to be near the top of the list, or a foreign adversary having developed some sort of tech that can either fool our tech into thinking it's seeing something, or having something that actually does perform as detected, which is also a possibility, there's not a lot of other explanations.
If it's not our tech I'd have to lean towards the Chinese having developed it first. The Russians would be a very distant next guess. There's just not many other plausible earthly explanations outside of those three. I highly doubt it's any other nation or somebody in their garage deploying that tech.
Maybe Ning Li was on to something. Her and other's work in the same general field seem, at the very least, a bit more plausible now.
It's not like this is some fringe subject based on bullshit. There is concrete proof of something and it's a current topic of wide interest.
Personally I like reading what others here think about this. None of us "know" what's behind this but it's not a leap for me to think I can learn from what others here offer on it, or that someone here gets it right.
When I evaluate the places where I might find insight into this HN would come at the top of the list if the subject were allowed to run its course organically.
Kicking it to the 3rd page too fast may have prevented that.
There is concrete proof that trained fighter pilots saw and tracked something, and their ship's radar did too, and our gov says they don't know what it is.
Just how many examples and how far back to you need me to go showing you example after example of the US government deliberately lying, concealing the truth, or delivering intentional disinformation from its citizens on big topics?
Did all of a sudden the US government suddenly develop a sense of truth morality in 2021 regarding just this subject?
I'm still of the opinion that any alien capable of traveling here would have technology to be utterly undetectable to us if they so wished. I can't imagine they would even need to abduct anyone to analyse us. So to me it has always been a moot point.
101 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadThe article doesn't say that. How can you be so sure from a still image?
It is also mathematically silly to assume that of all possible beings over current universe timeline that we are the most technically advanced. We have only existed for a minuscule sliver of that timespan.
That’s not to say that we are statistically likely to have been visited, however. But it is possible.
Why?
Most of our communication relies on radiowaves... even communication to/from space. Now looking at history, we've known and used radiowaves for maybe a 100 years, and considering the current enviromental trends, we might be using it for eg. 500 more, before we die out. Or maybe 10.000. Mathematically it doesn't really matter a lot.
Now look at the waves we've been sending out... a if we assume "the world ends" in 500 years, in a million years, there will be a 600 light-year "thin" shell of a 1mio light years sphere travelling away from earth, attenuated by the square law (twice the distance, 1/4 of the power).
What are the chances, that the thin shell of radiowaves hits some other culture, on some other world, in their "600 years of power", that are able to detect those waves, and actually come visit us (if we're still alive, which we're probably not).
Our world might be everything to us, but in a universal scale, our world compared to the universe is like an atom to our body... utterly insignificant.
Maybe they are prepping the battlefield to exterminate some pests?
And the Fermi Paradox says that if it did, we would see evidence of its effects... but we don't, which imples FTL isn't even remotely possible.
Since generally speaking, humans know or understand a bit more today than they did yesterday, it seems likely that there are things that today we think we know but do not know or know incorrectly. Thus, our rules about what is observable may be flawed. We may be missing evidence of other civilizations and visitors.
Given the vastness of time and space and the fact that we DO know that there is a lot that we do not know (as opposed to not knowing what we do not know), it seems more reasonable to err on the side of we-probably-don't-know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
I don't get the feeling that most educated people believe that "we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond". In fact, I'd wager that a significant portion, if not a majority, of such people believe that there likely is (or was, or will be) other such intelligent / sentient life in the universe.
But... what I think many (maybe most) educated people hold is that it is very unlikely that Earth is being routinely visited by alien intelligences. And I think the basis for that belief structure is rooted in the underlying physical reality of the universe, regarding distances between other worlds, and the speeds that can be attained to travel between worlds.
Simply put, it appears, based on what we know today, that even at light speed, (or a very, very large fraction of light speed), it would take around hundreds of years to travel back and forth to Earth from nearby planets that are suspected of being habitable. So even in the best case, where the aliens can travel at like 0.95 of c, and happen to be located on the very nearest habitable planet, it seems likely that they would have to be both very long-lived, and very tolerant of boredom, to travel back and forth between Earth and their world.
Impossible? No. Likely? Hmm...
OTOH, it seems like we do keep discovering more and more new "possibly habitable worlds" and the "best case" range to such a world keeps shrinking. And there's no particular reason I know of to think that "aliens" might not live dramatically longer lives than us, and maybe they are in fact fine with multiple hundred year jaunts around the universe. Or maybe they've invented the sci-fi trope "suspended animation". So never say never, I guess.
You can take the unexplainable part and do something useful with it - like making observations public and collecting more data.
The rest is a speculative hypothesis about the data.
This has always been one of the biggest problems with the reaction to these phenomena. You can't stop at "Unexplainable things are happening" without being told "They can't be, because interstellar travel is impossible."
That's very poor logic and equally poor science.
Agreed.
You can't stop at "Unexplainable things are happening" without being told "They can't be, because interstellar travel is impossible."
Also agreed. We need to be able to divorce analysis of the actual phenomena - whatever they actually are - from one specific speculative hypothesis.
The assertion of a high probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere is reasonable.
The presence of testimony is not evidence. People report things for many reasons. Most of the time, it is a silly bid for a moment of fame and/or it just sells news/gathers clicks in an untrustworthy economy on a slow day.
One day, we ourselves may advance our own intelligence sufficiently to achieve civilisation.
We ourselves owe our existence to a chance extinction of the dominant life form on Earth 65 million years ago. Without that, our mammal ancestors would not have been able to reproduce as frequently and plentifully, which would almost certainly have slowed the development of us if it didn't rule it out outright in the timescale the Earth has left.
There's no guarantee most worlds with life even ever develop multi-cellular life. It took Earth billions of years to go from single-cell to multicellular.
Yes, there has been a lot of time and a lot of star systems, but there are so many things that are required, I'm not at all confident that there is intelligent life out there. Earth is a sample size of 1, and we tend to treat it as if its the norm, but that's just a sometimes-useful assumption. The reality is we might have won the universal lottery.
0: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29505/the-navys-secret...
I am prone to think that this again some kind of gov mass psychology Rorschach experiment, where they say if we show you this image and if we say it is flying bunny how many times do we need to show and repeat the same until you start believing it is a flying bunny ...
By the way I am not saying other sentient being do not exist in the universe, I am just saying that with that technology you would not give a fork about what humans want/need/wish ... therefore it is more likely it is some kind of political hocus/pocus
There are four lights!
He's also a pilot and has been focused on topics like this for two decades - but his arguments don't require taking anything on trust or his authority.
Additionally, he interviews experienced and relevant people, like his most recent video with Alex Dietrich (the second pilot present at the Nimitz "Tic-Tac" encounter).
> trained top gun pilots and the vast infrastructure of the US Navy/Pentagon who analyze this kind of stuff for a living. If they can't explain then I am sure they have considered and debunked trivial explanations that West purports
The filename "gimbal" suggests they might have the same suspicion as West on at least one encounter. Hopefully we'll get details of what they considered in the upcoming pentagon report.
But, even if we do prematurely assume that that the pentagon thinks there's no possible explanations, consider the analogous case of the Chilean Navy UFO video where the Chilean Navy and then a 2 year investigation failed to identify a plane 100 miles away (https://www.metabunk.org/threads/explained-chilean-navy-ufo-...). The pilots are experts but they aren't completely immune from making mistakes.
> in the NYTimes article they explicitly debunk the "weather balloon" hypothesis which has been proposed as a "rational" explanation for these ufos by some.
I assume you're talking about this quote (let me know if not): "One possible explanation — that the phenomena could be weather balloons or other research balloons — does not hold up in all cases"
It's a refutation if someone believed that all cases were weather/research balloons (which I don't think anyone does). And on the flip side there's the implication that some of the UAPs are consistent with weather balloons.
"The problem is that the military don’t want to talk about this, partly because this is a classified system that these are recorded on. It’s called the Raytheon ATFLIR system. And it’s a fairly advanced targeting pod that straps on underneath the planes. And if you look for example videos shot with this on YouTube, you will find, basically, nothing—like a few really grainy ones, because even though I’m sure there’s tens of thousands of hours that have been shot with it, it’s all classified. So they don’t want to talk about it. And if they do analysis of it, that becomes classified by default. So they’re not going to release it. And they’ve actually explicitly said that they do not plan to release the results of the investigation into these videos."
It is surprisingly convincing evidence of a peer state adversary with a huge tech advantage or... something else. I was moved from "no f'ing way do ufos exist", to "wtf.. it actually seems plausible" when reading up on it.
[1]https://youtu.be/sZoH5jr4P9I
[2]https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~scidemos/LightOptics/InfraRed...
[1]https://www.google.com/books/edition/Advances_in_Radar_Techn...
Most of these navy reports involve eye witness accounts of trained and credible pilots.
https://youtu.be/aB8zcAttP1E?t=4265
IOW, he isn't one of stereotypical, "frothing at the mouth", "true believer", "THEY ARE HERE" ufo cult types that might be fairly easy to dismiss for simple lack of credibility. He could still have been mistaken, or misjudged something, but he at least establishes a certain minimum level of credibility, to my way of thinking.
That, and it making no sense for us to only see evidence for them on earth but not when looking at space, and that there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades (observation can be achieved with tiny machines, communication can be more direct etc.) the mundane explanations are many times more likely from where I sit.
The problem with this argument is that we wouldn't know in the first place if they were also using these more covert means. At some level, we have to assume that if aliens exist and are making themselves visible to us, they're basically doing it for the lulz.
1. They are actually from Earth, hiding somewhere on the bottom of the ocean. Probably Von Neumann probes which arrived millions of years ago, and not actually living things. They check our status periodically and send information to their origin system.
2. We are living in a simulation, and they are spectating us in a god mode with a visible side-effect.
there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades (observation can be achieved with tiny machines, communication can be more direct etc.)
They may be doing more than just observing.
According to the article, the report will say:
"...the assessment has come up short of explaining what UAP are and that it provides no evidence to link them with any putative alien visitation—despite reviewing more than 120 incidents from the past 20 years. The report’s firmest conclusion, it seems, is that the vast majority of UAP happenings and their surprising maneuvers are not caused by any U.S. advanced technology programs."
So what are they? I see skeptics saying these are radar errors etc., but the report apparently doesn't conclude that. I'd love to see a technical analysis of what's been recorded.
0: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/truth-about-ufos-uaps-...
You know those historical river boat cruises you can take in Europe where it's all tied into history lessons?
Imagine that but for more advanced civilizations and the "UFOs" are actually tourist pods for aliens/time travelers to witness what Earth was like in the years before The Disaster.
Perhaps the incidence of UFO sightings can be a bellwether for how close we are to the End....
Kinda like how because you ride an escalator people no one ever hears you climbing stairs.
But it was like the UAP was in its own bubble, separated from the environement.
Specifically: US military/intelligence/congress has historically treated UFO activity as highly classified. That’s now changed. Why is that? I don’t know. One candidate explanation:
1. Historically, some amount of “UFO” activity was actually classified, known US military/Intelligence programmes. Making the information public would compromise those programmes. So, in reality, the sightings related to identifiable flying objects. Just that they were identifiable by a small number of in-the-know people.
2. Things have changed. Some other actors - let’s guess Chinese/Russian - have stepped up their own secret programmes. Those items are now legitimately “unknown” to US authorities. If you’re from the US, that’s bad. Your putative enemies have something you lack knowledge of.
3. How to respond? In a world where the sightings are your own secrets then a strategy of silence makes sense. In a world where they’re not, the game is different. In this case, you want publicity: to cast them as unknown, (a) because it creates interest (/fear) and (b) tacitly lets your enemies know that you know they’re up to something.
That might be way off base. But the about-face in strategy is at least as interesting as the sightings themselves. I haven’t seen that covered elsewhere. Interested if anyone else has ideas/links.
Those sailors and airmen are intelligence assets.
Sam Harris, who I consider trustworthy, was given a heads up about what's to come:
"I got contacted by somebody who gave me a heads up with respect to all of this happening and he more or less told me listen, when this other shoe drops you’re going to be in the position of having to acknowledge that all the experts are on the same page, and there’s just this blanket declaration that we’re in the presence of alien technology, and we don’t know what to make of it. So prepare your brain for that and figure out what you’re going to do."
https://samharris.org/podcasts/252-alone-universe/
I know what they are. They're real and they're spectacular, wait until you see one of these cylinders...
If anything, this official report is evidence to the contrary because what better place to start revealing this stuff if there was anything at all to it? But no, for the benefit of any exobiologists in the audience, it even goes out of its way to argue against the alien-origins theory for these phenomena.
You want to hear some conspiracy theories?
Russian collusion was one.
The teargassing of Lafayette Square "by Trump" turned out to be a total lie (an internal investigation found Trump had no knowledge of the clearing of the square)
The death of Brian Sicknick on Jan 7th which was said to be due to an attack by a rioter, this claim was even repeated by House Democrats during the second impeachment, was a complete fabrication by legacy media
So tell me again how Fox promotes conspiracy theories? The ones I see are the ones in the front pages of the New York Times, CNN, WaPo et al
I personally didn't find any of the UFO stuff believable until the US Navy/Pentagon stuff came out which is very credible.
At this point it is almost undeniable that there is something strange going on in the skies. Whether it is aliens or not remains an open question.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3136078/chin...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29755919
[3] https://www.livescience.com/uk-ufo-reports-soon-released.htm...
Yes, I see the irony in saying this.
so has the report been released? i would like to read it rather than continuous speculation about its contents. also, i'd love to see a leak of a more classified version of the report (if one exists), just to see what they consider sensitive information and not. the more info the better really.
Does anyone think it’s an accident the most public incident involved military training flights where the military was intercepted by this and beat them to their own rendezvous point for the mission?
It’s very obvious the tic-tac UFO was either a legitimate top secret military craft (manned or unmanned) that was being tested that day against the flight crews during their training mission, or possibly it was a military hoax serving two potential purposes: 1. Basis of increased funding, and/or 2. Misinformation to unfriendly nations/militaries around the world. None of that can be admitted and so here we are where everyone has to play dumb including top levels of the pentagon.
Further back than that, even. AFAIK, the earliest "UFO" reports by military pilots were the so called "foo fighters"[1] which were reported during WWII.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter
Short of our government trying to hide tech they have, which still has to be near the top of the list, or a foreign adversary having developed some sort of tech that can either fool our tech into thinking it's seeing something, or having something that actually does perform as detected, which is also a possibility, there's not a lot of other explanations.
If it's not our tech I'd have to lean towards the Chinese having developed it first. The Russians would be a very distant next guess. There's just not many other plausible earthly explanations outside of those three. I highly doubt it's any other nation or somebody in their garage deploying that tech.
Maybe Ning Li was on to something. Her and other's work in the same general field seem, at the very least, a bit more plausible now.
https://youtu.be/SuRGdnvM06M
It's not like this is some fringe subject based on bullshit. There is concrete proof of something and it's a current topic of wide interest.
Personally I like reading what others here think about this. None of us "know" what's behind this but it's not a leap for me to think I can learn from what others here offer on it, or that someone here gets it right.
When I evaluate the places where I might find insight into this HN would come at the top of the list if the subject were allowed to run its course organically.
Kicking it to the 3rd page too fast may have prevented that.
unless you can complete that sentence with something more concrete than “something”, there isn’t concrete proof of anything.
Did all of a sudden the US government suddenly develop a sense of truth morality in 2021 regarding just this subject?
Yeah, call me skeptical.