Ask Slashdot: What Is Your View On UFO Sightings? 384
dryriver writes: UFOs sightings have been reported in the tens of thousands over the last decades. In the past, some have seen flying cigar-shaped craft (blimps?), some flying triangles, some more rounded-looking flying saucers. Often the apparent spacecraft does something improbable like standing completely still in the sky and then shooting off to somewhere at an incredible speed. Some sightings are just lights or light formations flying around or dancing around in the night sky -- which could be military aircraft like helicopters and F16s training at night. There seem to be people who genuinely see stuff that is hard to explain, people who fake UFO sightings, photos and videos for profit to keep the "UFO industry" of websites, radio shows and magazines afloat, and yet others that think a regular airplane flying at night with its lights on is a UFO. What is your view on all this? Are we being visited from outer space? Is it prototype aircraft that look like UFOs to the untrained eye? Was some 190 IQ inventor-prankster having fun with quadcopter drones with colored lights four decades before quadcopters became a thing (hey, tons of people have created fake crop-circles in the past)? Where do all these supposed UFO sightings and reports come from? Did events like the famous "Battle Of Los Angeles" actually happen? And do you find any UFO reports credible at all?
why is this shit even on slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
go away and watch tv
Re:why is this shit even on slashdot? (Score:5, Informative)
I'll answer "dryriver":
U.F.O. is an initialism which stands for Unidentified Flying Object. That is any object which is aloft and which cannot be identified is a U.F.O. A flying saucer is not a U.F.O. because you have identified what it is.
Does alien life exist in the universe? Probably. Have any of those aliens somehow found our tiny speck of dust among all of the stars and galaxies throughout the vastness of the universe (or beyond) and decided that they really needed to visit? Probably not.
Re:why is this shit even on slashdot? (Score:4, Insightful)
A flying saucer is not a U.F.O. because you have identified what it is.
Can you not have an unidentified flying saucer?
Real, but psychological not physical (Score:3)
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No, an acronym is a very specific type of initialism - one that is spoken as if it was a word itself rather than having the letters spelled out. So FBI is an initialism, while HAARP is an acronym. Just because most people don't understand the distinction doesn't mean there isn't one.
I've seen a UFO, and it demonstrated science (Score:5, Informative)
I saw a fascinating UFO once, and several friends witnessed it as well. What we saw was an instance of "Often the apparent spacecraft does something improbable like standing completely still in the sky and then shooting off to somewhere at an incredible speed." Being an ultralight and RC pilot, I'm well aware that "standing still" can be when the object is moving toward or away from you, but I couldn't explain the maneuvers this thing was doing. It was night, a light in the sky moving in ways that planes don't. The four or five people watching it were confused and a little bit amazed.
Then it flew in front of a tree and we all recognized the lightning bug for what it was.
The whole incident demonstrated several scientific principles. A point of light against the dark sky could be 10 miles away and moving at 1,000 MPH or 300 feet away and moving at 1MPH - your eyes cannot tell the difference. (I don't feel like doing the math to convert arc seconds to MPH, but you get the point). Stereopsis isn't very effective after a hundred feet or so and and stops working at all at a distance of several hundred feet. We thought it was large object, far away moving fast. It was actually a small object, close, moving much slower, and the two are indistinguishable against a dark sky. Only when it flew in front of a tree did we have any way to estimate its true distance and size.
If this kind of thing interests a person, watch large planes fly around an airport before landing at night. They'll appear to come to a dead stop in midair as they turn to fly toward you. They my also seem to shoot almost straight up, though they are actually losing altitude, because they are coming toward you, to fly over your head. Overhead *seems* higher than being near the horizon, but the apparent altitude is unrelated to the actual altitude.
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Same experience here. I was camping near Ocean City, MD and had gotten out of my tent around 2AM to go see a man about a horse. I looked up into the night sky and saw a streak of phosphorescent gas that corkscrewed into a spiral perhaps dozens of miles long. I rushed back to my tent, grabbed a pad of paper and sketched it. Wow! A genuine UFO.
Um, no. A genuine high altitude rocket launch from the nearby Wallops Island, VA NASA launch site. D'oh.
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I like the parent comment's story of the lightning bug. Reminds me of the time I watched the moon being nuked: Standing outside, looking at the moon through hazy clouds. There were points of light on the moon's surface that would grow and shrink - truly, it looked like a huge explosion. One after another after another. Really spooky.
Obviously, I knew the moon wasn't being nuked, though I can imagine the article some tabloid might have written. It took several minutes for me to understand what I was seeing.
Re:I've seen a UFO, and it demonstrated science (Score:4, Insightful)
Mine was much better. We were driving west on I40 and passing west of Winston-Salem when we saw -- my wife and I together -- a light that literally rippled in the sky, lights flashing like they were rolling around on some invisible shape. It flew first to the right of the road, then made an impossible turn and came back diagonally across the road in front of is, then rose and zipped back to the right and came directly towards us, parallel to the road, the lights growing brighter and brighter and with the whole thing literally glittering with rippling sparkles of light. I'm a physicist, she's a physician and at no time did we actually believe we were being visited by aliens following I40 in to attack Winston, but we certainly could not identify what we were seeing -- it was absolutely a Unidentified Flying Object!
Then it smoothly passed us on the right about a mile away, and we could see that it was a biplane towing an advertising display, heading back for another pass over some stadium where they were apparently playing football. We were barely too far away to see exactly what they were selling, but damn, that display rippled and sparkled in the night JUST LIKE lights spinning around on a flying disk, one that constantly tumbled or changed shape.
The moral of the story is mixed. Lack of evidence isn't evidence of lack, and one anecdote cannot address every UFO sighting in the history of mankind. However, as I've pointed out to my sons -- who are much more inclined to give credence to the idea that we are constantly being watched by aliens and that their experiences like this one HAVE no natural explanation -- during the 50's through the 80's, the US was more or less constantly under the threat of air attack and ICBM attack from the USSR and to a lesser extent China. SAC had every border lit up with radar that was being watched continuously for "unidentified flying objects" that without question would have been interpreted as an attack by the USSR, not visitation by snoopy space aliens. Every commercial airport was equipped with radar and flight control, (and still is today) and any object not identified by procedure and law would be immediately detected and in all probability investigated, especially post-9/11.
So sure, space aliens could be masters of stealth AND nefariously snoopy AND could be malevolent (spying us out To Serve Man) or constrained by THEIR laws and customs not to interfere while we rush to destroy each other, waiting to see if we survive long enough to build a peaceful global society. Science fiction novels delight in this kind of stuff. But Bayesian assessments of stacked arguments of this sort are never very convincing. Every special explanation required decreases the probability of the truth of the conclusion. Our governments -- all of them -- have to be members of a global conspiracy to hide "area 51" evidence. Reliable sightings have to be suppressed. The alien stealth has to be almost perfect to hide from civilian radar, or civilian radar has to be part of the conspiracy (which by now has grown to include the entire air force, NASA, the top levels of every government, all of the major intelligence and police services -- worldwide). AND we need psychotic aliens because REAL aliens intent on invasion would have crafted a killer virus long before now and collapsed civilization or would have just fired a few nukes at Russia and the US simultaneously and than sat back snacking on popcorn while we collapsed it for ourselves and left them some simply mopping up to do before they took over the rest of the world without credible opposition, and REAL aliens interested in making friend would have made friends long ago. But Bayesian reasoning is a bit difficult for most folks, sadly, and explosion of premises/priors (a.k.a. common sense, withholding a significant degree of belief in the absence of credible evidence AND a credible, evidence supported explanation) is all too rare.
After all, roughly 80% of the people on Earth believe in malevolent and beneficent
Re:I've seen a UFO, and it demonstrated science (Score:5, Funny)
Re:why is this shit even on slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:why is this shit even on slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hype is what is valued today, not merely boring news. It enables the masses to take part in slinging their own version of the truth is the information game we now play in society. And liars are having a fucking field day with that; an instant gratification delivery schedule allows for zero fact checking. UFO discussions fit that "click" model rather perfectly.
The X-Files was a popular show when most millenials were still in grade school, and it pretty much embodies this paragraph. Hype fixation wasn't invented recently, or even in our lifetimes.
People want to believe in something amazing and inexplicable, if for no other reason than it gives them hope: reality is just too boring and depressing. Religion is failing us, the stories and legends sound increasingly unlikely and unreal as time and education advances, so something else is filling the void. UFOs for those looking for the unworldy, scandals for those looking for the carnal, social media for those who like a good fight.
There are good reasons to hate millenials: ex. skinny jeans. But this isn't one.
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People want to believe in something amazing and inexplicable, if for no other reason than it gives them hope: reality is just too boring and depressing. Religion is failing us, the stories and legends sound increasingly unlikely and unreal as time and education advances, so something else is filling the void. UFOs for those looking for the unworldy, scandals for those looking for the carnal, social media for those who like a good fight.
Funny you should bring up religion. There is actually a lot of current thought that these are actually the same phenomenon. Historical sightings of angels, saints, and miracles often have the same descriptions that more modern UFO sightings have: disks and sphere flying through the sky, often described as moving in a tumbling or skipping motion, bright lights, and even abductions with transport to another place or missing time. From there, you get into different camps as to what is going on. Either people o
Re: why is this shit even on slashdot? (Score:3)
You might want to cut those cursed millenials a little slack. It's not so much about clicks, although sure, that plays a role everywhere nowadays - it's called economics. I think the reality is that to many of them it's still a potential mystery. I'm not totally ashamed to say that when I was a teen I wondered about all of the "proof" out there, I looked up in wonder after walking out of my first screening of CE3K, and there was a distinct hot summer when I was absolutely convinced of the veracity of Chario
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You've made a few large assumptions:
> lacking FTL means it requires millenia to cross between stars
- only to an outside observer: if you've got the energy to burn you can use relativistic time dilation to make the journey arbitrarily short.
> FTL would necessarily be extremely advanced technology
- in fact it could be something well with our own technological grasp, which we've overlooked because our concepts of the universe, and with it our physics theories are based on a fundame
UFO existence (Score:5, Insightful)
UFOs are just that - Unidentified Flying Objects.
The hoopla around them is just because for *some* people, their existence is more exciting than the boring reality of human existence.
Personally, the more boring something tends to be (like water, air, gravity), the more grounded in reality I find it to be.
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People are kind of easy to convince. Hell I remember once sitting with a friend watching some lights in the air do some really crazy shit out in a backyard of a friends once.
It wasn't untill later on I realised, both me and my friend where really really high. All I got proof of , was that my universith years where kinda fun.
But honestly, for a while there, I was pretty spooked.
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I'll second that. There are many natural phenomena that look really strange. I once saw a UFO which I then identified, but if I had not been carrying powerful binoculars I would have remained extremely weirded-out. I was with a group of people and we all saw a saucer like object in the sky, which kept fading in and out, pulsing from a solid grey form to near invisibility.
All of us were amazed and we had no idea what it could be. Was this some alien technology? A cloaking device malfunctioning? As soon as
Clearly UFOs exist (Score:5, Insightful)
But because they are by definition unidentified, it's unreasonable to claim they are of extra-terrestrial origin.
Re:Clearly UFOs exist (Score:5, Funny)
If you identify a UFO as a UFO, is it still a UFO?
The Galactic Community (Score:2)
Intelligent life has had more than enough time to fill every corner of the galaxy, even traveling at sub-light speeds. We're either still-undiscovered, or we're being kept isolated as a sort of nature preserve. Assuming information has become the coin of the galaxy, we are valuable as an untouched phenomena to study.
It seems likely that most UFOs are optical illusions, affected by the current era's psychological concepts. (There used to be sightings of fantasy airships and flying sailing boats) If some of t
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Well AC, I suppose any alien species seem "insane" to each other, and experienced explorers will simply watch us calmly from a safe distance.
And our pipsqueak atom bombs haven't produced any gamma ray bursts that could possibly be seen over the glare of the Sun and all other natural phenomena.
It doesn't make sense for aliens to secretly contact our governments unless it is to give time to prepare for their imminent coming. And nothing our governments are doing seem to be with that in mind. Aliens are more l
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What's your point? Who said we were special? I didn't.
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I haven't said this thing you challenge me to defend. Your question is like asking what makes me believe there's more than one family in a given continent, and why this same family hasn't gotten to Betelgeuse yet. I don't think you really understand how big a galaxy is and how far apart they are. I don't think you understand that a civilization has a maximum size due to a need for internal communication.
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Intelligent life has had more than enough time to fill every corner of the galaxy, even traveling at sub-light speeds
Even traveling at light speed 1 million years is not enough to go from one galaxy to the nearest one.
With the nearest galaxy [wikipedia.org] being about 70,000 light years away, it would take only 70,000 years to get there at the speed of light, not in excess of 1,000,000 years (or 25,000 if the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is counted).
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Traveling at sub-light speeds, say up to 10% the speed of light, intelligent life could have filled the galaxy by now. Especially if originating from multiple points. THE GALAXY. Not the universe. Other galaxies are way way way way out of the scope of my point.
Smartphones (Score:5, Insightful)
I have noticed that UFO sightings were a lot more common when people weren't carrying smartphones with integrated cameras with them. Now that everybody's got one, the UFOs have disappeared.
Re:Smartphones (Score:4, Informative)
Ah ha - another person who liked xkcd!
https://xkcd.com/1235/ [xkcd.com]
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It's because they're all looking down at their phones to read about the latest recycled meme on facebook. The glare of the screens backlight blinds them from the reptilian saucers hovering above, so they never even see them.
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Consider this as a possibility then. The reason there were lots of UFO sightings before is because there were. Now that "everyone has a integrated camera" it's become too risky to keep doing what they were doing. That could mean one of two things: They do exist, and don't want cultural contamination aka culture would inherently think people as nuts(which is okay, everyone is a bit crazy). Or, they never existed in the first place and people were experiencing hallucinations or other it falls into the re
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I'd venture to suggest that advanced alien technology could probably intercept our cameras and microphones, making physical fly-bys no longer necessary!
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Perhaps the issue was that film cameras were low-resolution, blurry, and more prone to smudging. So lots of ghost/UFO videos and photos abounded, showing something small and blurry. Digital cameras gave a clearer outline.
Either that or the film exposure chemicals were extracted from the bodies of dead aliens.
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Film is higher-resolution than digital: 35mm is about equivalent to 80 megapixels. Larger formats are even better.
Light in sky == UFO? (Score:2)
I have noticed that UFO sightings were a lot more common when people weren't carrying smartphones with integrated cameras with them. Now that everybody's got one, the UFOs have disappeared.
I don't really have issues with the basic idea of UFOs as long as you manage to treat them as just that, Unknown Flying Objects and manage to restrain your imagination and maintain critical thinking when evaluating a sighting. I have issues with people who default to the assumption that UFOs are alien spacecraft and often get angry when you point out an alternative explanation or raise questions. Something like 99% of UFOs are known natural phenomenons of some kind, or caused by mundane man made objects. Of
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Also literally everyone knows what "photoshopping" is (even if they don't know it's the name of a piece of software).
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Before you jump into conclusions with that observation; an alternate explanation is that those smartphone owners are now looking down to their phone all the time, leaving no moment for their gaze to reach the sky, therefore decimating the chance to spot an UFO.
Just saying...
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Governments could fly their new toys at night knowing the risk of a person with the correct film ready, having a really good camera and skills in a small town was low.
Filming fast moving test flights at night could be detected when person when public with their "evidence".
All the phone calls to respected UFO and science journalists? Bait publications and magazines with UFO expert contact numbers?
Invite a trusted expert over
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Why continue to play cat and mouse with a civilization which carries cameras and microphones with them everywhere, when you can just tap in and use them to monitor from a safer distance?
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Because there's no evidence there are aliens, so it's pointless conjecture? We might as well discuss Bigfoot's favourite flavour of ice cream.
What's next on nerd news? (Score:5, Funny)
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Famous UFO Sighting Video (Score:2)
Here is one of the most famous videos of a UFO sighting. It's not your typical shaky shot of some light(s) off in the distance; the quality is quite good and at around 33 seconds you can actually see some detail of the alleged UFO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
simple (Score:2)
Sometimes there are flying things we don't know what they are. studying them usually identify them.
The biggest unique resource we have (Score:5, Funny)
It's our media in general.
Water, oxygen etc must be easy for space traveling civilizations to come by, but can be safely assumed that music, art etc is quite unique on every planet.
Which means the visitors are probably just pointing their advanced downloading devices to our planet and copying up EVERYTHING to some database that gets shared/sold later on.
And there's not a damn thing esa/riaa/mpaa can do to stop the space pirates.
Our "powerful encryptions and digital locks" probably falls in mere seconds on their advanced computers and cracking techniques.
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There could be a web of communications links sharing science and history.
Re:The biggest unique resource we have (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, where else would you put the "Whole.contents.of.earth.S2017M4.UNIPAK-Zarbulians.spacetorrent" ?
US and Soviet/Russian tests (Score:5, Informative)
The Christofilos effect, Project 137 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
SR-71 and D-21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] testing.
Then the stealth work. Now its MAV and Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System.
People have seen a lot of mil work been done and had to be dissuaded from talking. UFO was the perfect cover to bait and infiltrate any people, groups watching for mil/gov work.
Their results when seeing mil projects could be covered up with the mention of been a UFO enthusiast.
What is this shit? (Score:2)
This seems to be a deliberate feeding of the conspiracy theorists that are so out of touch with reality that they take InfoWars seriously. I for one am not looking to indulge those people in the fantasies of secret shadow government conspiracies that are beyond improbable and firmly in the realm of the absurd. If you are interested in conspiracies then you need look no further than our own President's election campaign.
The LA battle definitely happened (Score:2)
There's a whole wiki article on it. It definitely wasn't aliens though, or even Japanese aircraft. In the early days of WW2, panic makes perfect sense. News reports back then were even harder to get than now. Many people at that time, even in the military, wouldn't know what the Japanese were going to attack next. Once a few shots were fired, tracers became targets that generated more tracers that generated more targets. That really does seem like the most reasonable explanation.
Occam's Razor (Score:2)
I'd have to think that any civilization advanced enough to have interstellar travel would at least be able to match our own ability at stealthing atmospheric craft (including basic things like turning off the running lights and not flying during the daytime when they'd be easily seen). I also know how easy it is for people to get confused about what they're seeing when they know what they're seeing, let alone when they don't. And I can't see any motivation for extraterrestrial visitors to let themselves be
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I, personally don't care about what's going on in bird's brains. But thousands of highly-trained ornithologists do. And they glean lots of useful information about the environment, evolution, archeology, and geology. Oh, and there are people who examine those little bacteria too. Perhaps there are pompous little bacteria out there who scoff at other bacteria who claim The Great Eye is there to watch them and see what happens.
Aliens Lost Credibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you exclude the UFOs that can be confirmed as something mundane, then what else a UFO could be is effectively unfalsifiable. Either it's classified, or a one-off unrecorded meteorological/optical phenomenon laymen are ignorant of, or something 'new to science'. Completely new macroscopic phenomena are very rare nowadays, because anything that conspicuous was likely to have been noticed thousands of years ago, and thoroughly explained hundreds of years ago. Every now and then a legend is confirmed real, but sometimes is debunked (Loch Ness monster.)
More relevantly, aliens are passe in American culture now. They've lost credibility as a trope in media, having been replaced by Zombies and Vampires, who more closely resemble our current cultural anxieties. Xenophobia led to broad fear of space aliens, and the cold war Red Scare led to general fear of invasion. The fall of the USSR was accompanied by a shift in anxieties to fear of the internal moral collapse of one's society. Vampires represent the hidden minority slowly corrupting society, whereas Zombies represent a foolish majority clamoring for society's downfall.
In a society that promotes coexisting with other ethnicities, or even pluralism, it's difficult to take "nuke the little green men because they're all evil!" seriously.
Richard Feynman gives his preferred explanation of (Score:2)
Go have a look:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Aligns perfectly with my opinion about it btw.
Swamp gas⦠(Score:5, Funny)
Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.
A lot of UFO organisations are dying. (Score:2)
Simple reason: we have high definition cameras everywhere now. The tactic of the "UFOs are aliens" crank is to take blurry, low res photos that invite pareidolia.
A lot of former UFO enthusiasts are packing it in for this very reason. If we were being visited by aliens, we absolutely should have concrete evidence. And we don't.
Are aliens up there in space? Yeah, probably. I reckon probably NOT in our galaxy, and possibly NOT in our hubble volume (observable universe). If we were a competent species that woul
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It's too obvious, I don't know why I have to explain it. Aliens don't have to swoop over our cities any more. They record and photograph us through our own cameras.
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They used to come for our women. But now pornography is so pervasive, "They record and photograph us through our own cameras".
UFOs are echos of future us... (Score:2)
UFOs or Aliens (Score:2)
UFOs? Yes. People see things they can't identify, they're flying, thus Unidentified Flying Objects. Most of the time, you'll eventually get a pretty good explanation for them. What's left usually happens near weapon testing sites where governments try out their new toys. And why would governments act strange and keep the alien myth alive? Because it's better to send you on a wild goose chase for aliens and flying saucers, that way you don't want to investigate their much more mundane new stealth bomber.
Ther
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UFOs? Yes. People see things they can't identify, they're flying, thus Unidentified Flying Objects. Most of the time, you'll eventually get a pretty good explanation for them.
In addition, people are pretty poor eye witnesses. They interpret what they saw which may not be an accurate depiction of what they actually saw. I've worked with operators in simulators who would swear they saw X, even after the videotape showed they didn't.
What's left usually happens near weapon testing sites where governments try out their new toys. And why would governments act strange and keep the alien myth alive? Because it's better to send you on a wild goose chase for aliens and flying saucers, that way you don't want to investigate their much more mundane new stealth bomber.
True, but then you get a Congressional inquiry about the UFO because a nutcase constituent wrote their Cogresscritter about the UFO they saw near base X; and you need to draft a reply and can't say "Your constituent is a nut case, please ignore..."
There is very little reason to believe it's aliens. For a very simple reason: You want to tell me that these people (or whatever they are) are capable of FTL travel, come here to this rather insignificant marble in a godforsaken corner of a nondescript galaxy... and then crash land because they can't brake in time? Please.
Mayb
Life exists elswhere (Score:2)
Does intelligent life exist elsewhere? Most likely
due to the countless amount of stars and planets and galaxies the above is most likely
Have we been visited by any of them? not likely.
why? because it would be obvious. If humans travelled to a planet with less intelligent creatures would it not be obvious to them that we have arrived? so why are we so arrogant to believe that other creatures would go out of their way to remain elusive to us upon coming to earth
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I agree that the odds look like they favour others living in the neighbourhood. If you select for what we know works - a yellow dwarf star with high metallicity in a relatively low density area that manages to avoid nearby supernovas for a few billion years, and has a wet rock of approximately 1 Earth mass in the stellar Goldilocks zone - well, even with all those qualifiers there are still ~10 billion stars to look at, and we are quickly learning that most stars have planets.
The problem is the size of the
The Truth Is Out There (Score:2)
You just need a Fox Mulder to put all of the pieces together.
My story (Score:2)
Grad students (Score:2)
I believe in UFO's and Crop Circles (Score:3)
Here the deal. I live near a military base, two airports, a fault scar, and a great lake. We tons powerful winds and air traffic. So often we get UFO's making wide turns around densely inhabited areas. The local rumor is that the military is testing unmanned, long range, stealth flight vehicles. The crop circles are presumed to be caused by circular patterns similar to small localized tornadoes. In general there are one or two sightings a year the get documented and doesn't have an easy explanation. And no, I'm not one of those people that has filed one of those unexplained sightings. Still it keeps the dinner table conversations interesting.
Didn't believe until I saw one myself (Score:3)
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They have occurred. People have watched something flying and they were unable to identify what it was. So they saw an Unidentified Flying Object.
Oh, you mean that people "saw aliens"? No, that never occurred.
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Come now, many people saw Michael Jackson. Admittedly he wasn't an alien when he started out, but that's what he became.
Re: I have no views (Score:5, Insightful)
If it is unidentified and appears to be flying, it's an UFO.
The connection "strange lights in the sky -> it must be advanced ships from another galaxy" is the faulty logic step.
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All alone at night
Bright lights flashing in the sky
Not the anal probe!
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Yes, and for some reason the images are always extremely blurry or they were "improved" with known Adobe After Effects packages (thanks Cpt. Disillusion!).
As for mere sightings, who cares? People also often see pink elephants, Elvis and the Holy Mary.
Re:I have no views (Score:5, Interesting)
there's just always some mundane explanation.
The explanation is not always mundane. There have been several examples of small plane pilots intentionally spoofing people by flying in formation with weird synchronized lights. That is almost as cool as the guys that faked all crop circles. I really admire these people. Their ingenuity and hard work have made the world a more interesting place.
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Current regulations do not let them fly without anti-collision lights over US Airspace.
FAA regulations don't apply to military aircraft flying in military airspace.
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I've had one certain sighting, where I was outside at night gazing at the night sky. For about 20 minutes I watched a small light which seemed very high up in the air, moving in a tight spiral, then moving over a little and then moving in a spiral again. It eventually faded from view. It was too high up to be a plane in a search pattern and those spirals probably would have been high-G maneuvers.
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That's a whole lot of probably's for a "certain sighting".
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The light was moving in those spiral paths QUICKLY. Thus they were high-G. I'm not going to debate the rest with you. I truly don't care if you believe that people can't tell if something is far away.
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Bigger spirals at the same rate of turn are higher G, not lower.
Re:I don't doubt it & know what else? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the stuff on Youtube is fake. Check out Captain Disillusion's channel [youtube.com]. After you've seen a few videos, you won't trust many videos on Youtube any longer. He easily spots indicators that I would never recognize. It's just a pity that he can't produce more - the production quality of his videos is very, very high, so it takes a lot of time to make them.
That being said, among the more legit sources such as multiple recordings from TV channels, these are very rare and I've never seen anything that wasn't easily explained as an airplane, laser-show or reflection of headlights in the sky. The latter seems to be the most common phenomenon. They are also described by eye witnesses very often. When you see some blurry illuminated objects in the sky that are static or in slow uniform motion and then suddenly accelerate extremely fast, maybe changing their course rapidly, then chances are very, very high that you've seen the reflections of lights of some vehicle on ground.
All of that is not to say that you haven't seen a UFO, APK. I'm just pointing out that most of the sightings are not very credible. (Why did I write this? UFOs and possible life on extrasolar planets are among my long-term interests and I'm writing science fiction novels in my spare time.)
Typical sighting of some planets. (Score:3)
This has all the hallmarks of a standard sighting of a couple of planets. Planets are much brighter than people expect them, and 'bright, silvery-white, almost glowing' sounds about right. Two of them appear close together (a conjunction, in astronomical terms) rarely enough for people to be surprised by them. By the way, your eyes can't determine distances, at all, above a few hundred meters away - from there you are guessing based on things like brightness.
Planets are often seen as 'getting closer' and 'z
Re:Typical sighting of some planets. (Score:4, Informative)
Heh, no. Planets do not make little spirals and then spurt around in random directions to spiral around again.
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No they don't - but people regularly feel that they do. Atmospherics are part of it, and the other is that people use mobile reference points for that movement. Often the person is moving, and as they are interpreting something millions of kilometers away as being a few hundred meters away, they see it as moving at high speed. Relative motions between the planet and clouds is also misinterpreted as motion of the mysterious light.
Of course, unlike the case I replied to, I cannot be sure what your apparently
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Your hand-waving might be slightly more credible if I were a person who has never since then laid on his back looking at the night sky watching for satellites. Bye.
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When I was about 10 I saw one. I was laying in bed and was looking out the Window and something white and oval shaped zoomed by at lightning speed. Seconds later it zoomed by again and came to an immediate stop. From lightning fast to dead stop. Then immediately zoomed off again. No slowing down, no gaining speed, all immediate. I lived about 20 miles from an AFB and this was late 80's.
Just thought I'd share.
Re: I've actually seen 2 @ once (w/ witnesses) (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)ve seen those too. I live near an airport. As planes are landing at night they turn on some very bright lights on the nose and on the wings. Looks like 3 orbs, they can appear to be âoespinningâ as the planes wait for a runway pretty high up. Then, depending on angle they appear to either slowly or quickly approach to only slow down/speed up near the end of the âoesightingâ until they go out of view.
What you consider âoetight circleâ is actually a relatively wide are
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Nah, they were just doing research to help understand how to test secret aircraft more stealthily.
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Yeh, heard about the one that so stealthy, they still cant find it?
Its like the best camo clothing, cant find that either.
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This Sci Fi story based on 'The Thing' has a great closing line
http://clarkesworldmagazine.co... [clarkesworldmagazine.com]
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Awesome story! Thanks!
Re:None since the invention of cell phone cameras (Score:5, Insightful)
This is quite similar to psychokinetic and telekinetic powers. About 200 years ago, mediums could use the 'power of the mind' to move very heavy objects such as tables or people. And somehow, during the 20th century, the 'movable' size decreased while the ability to detect frauds increased. Nowadays people with powers can barely move teeny weeny objects and only when the conditions are good (aka no expert watching them to detect frauds).
UFOs are a bit like that. They are still sittings but most of the proofs, usually videos, do not resist a careful analysis by a CGI specialist or anyone with a true critical mind. See for instance the Oskar Jungell videos on YT. https://www.youtube.com/user/O... [youtube.com]
Of course, one could argue that aliens want to remain undetected (e.g. the Star-Trek Prime Directive) and consequently they stopped visiting us when the risk of being caught on camera became too high. That is a reasonable argument but that does not help to prove that aliens really exist and have visited us.
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Personally I find it interesting how the shapes of the crafts have changed over time. Starting with hubcap shapes and gaining more size and details much in line with current at the time sci fi movies.
My favorite though is the mysterious lack of X-ray tech on UFOs. Why so much probing and prodding as though they were still using medical tech from the 40s? Perhaps they came all this way to learn about MRIs.
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My theory is that some alien species have senses that can detect TV transmissions, and the probing is an equivalent form of revenge. “This is for Seinfeld!”
More plausible, however, is that it’s CIA agents equipped with aerosol hallucinogens, slightly customized gas masks and dildos creating a cover story for black ops projects (or possibly just having an office party).
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Oblig XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1235/ [xkcd.com]
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Well, that pretty much wraps up Norway for a period of several years. Glad the whole world-wide mystery is solved in your mind!
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I believe in little green women...oh, the forbidden pleasure!!