UFOs In the News

Several readers have let us know about a report on MSNBC that France's space agency has announced plans to publish its archive of UFO sightings in a month or so. The archive includes some 6,000 reports relating to around 1,600 incidents over 30 years. In a separate development, many readers have sent in word of the reported UFO that at least six United Airlines workers saw over Chicago's O'Hare International Airport last November. National Public Radio picked up the story with an interview with the Chicago Trib reporter who wrote about it yesterday. United is, strangely, denying that any such incident was ever brought up. The FAA admits there was an incident but is not investigating it.

Comments

UFO vs. alien spacecraft

[Kelson]

A while back I was reading some book of short stories by Arthur C. Clarke, and in an essay between stories, he described the time he saw a U.F.O. I was taken aback. Here's an author who practically invented "hard sci-fi," talking about seeing a U.F.O. By the end of the essay he mentioned what it turned out to be (I forget what, exactly, but it was something mundane and Earth-based). But at the time, "UFO" was the appropriate term, not because he thought it was a spacecraft, but because he couldn't figure out what it was.

That left an impression on me. People tend to use "UFO" as a shorthand for alien spacecraft... but when you get down to it, "Unidentified Flying Object" refers to anything unidentified that you see in the sky. A segment of a sun halo, a satellite, an odd cloud, a distant airplane with the sun glinting off of it... The same would apply to the "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" term used in the O'Hare article.

Conversely, if alien spacecraft are ever verified, they wouldn't really be UFOs, would they?

Re:UFO vs. alien spacecraft

[Jerf]

The reason UFOs are a crock isn't that they are fundamentally impossible in some absolute sense, it's that the line about "If there are aliens that powerful, they aren't going to just buzz us in UFOs" is far, far more true than 1950s scientists could ever have dreamed of.

Read Accelerando (free eBook available), and consider that nothing in that book is particularly physically implausible.

It is exceedingly unlikely that aliens that are just like we are now, only with spaceships, would come by and buzz us. At this point it seems far more likely that if any aliens ever do make "contact", it'll be in the form of a fully-automated colony ship that stops somewhere, maybe in the rings of Saturn or the asteroid belt, and proceeds turning our entire Solar System into computronium. All we could do is hope and pray the probe is programmed to do something nice for us, because we sure as hell couldn't stop it.

Any civilization that has the resources to cross the stars is extremely unlikely to use those resources to build a tin can capable of holding meat-bodies in it, with mass that could instead be made into enough computronium to perform mind-blowing amounts of computation, and blow unspeakable numbers of human-lifetimes worth of energy moving that across the stars, just to buzz humans for no apparently reason. (Yes; in a world of computronium, one standardized human life can be used as measurement of energy.)

The putative aliens of the UFOs are a product of a very peculiar sort of shortsightedness about the ultimate limits of technology that dates from a relatively narrow understanding of science, and are as out-of-date as the idea that the world only needs five computers. Interestingly, both ideas are out-of-date for the same basic reason...

What about employee safety?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Many people saw something and United is unable to give a reasonable explanation for what it was. This might not be a huge threat, it surely is a potential and perceived threat. That nothing showed up on radar is surely more of a worry. It means that the radar is not able to see everything there and surely leaves passenger and flight staff safety in question.

Local Engineers

[frinkster]

While I doubt what they saw is locally-made, I used to live in that area and have seen some crazy stuff at some nearby forest preserves. Many of the forest preserves near O'Hare have radio controlled aircraft landing strips and are heavily used by local hobbyists. Last year I personally saw a home-built craft performing some absolutely incredible tricks and maneuvers with a small radio controlled helicopter-like machine.

It Left a Hole in the Clouds

[toonerh]

The fact observers said it made a hole in the cloud deck for minutes, to me, rules out any purely optical effect. It must have been some physical device, whatever that may be. Further, professional airline pilots saw it and stated it was not familiar to them as a known aircraft. My take is a new stealth military craft - hence all the coverup by the FAA.

Re:It Left a Hole in the Clouds

[R3d M3rcury]

My take is a new stealth military craft - hence all the coverup by the FAA. I don't have a problem with the secret military aircraft theory except for one problem.

What the hell is a secret military aircraft doing in the middle of the busiest airport in America?

First, if it's supposed to be a secret, it certainly shouldn't be hovering over an airport. It should be out in a more deserted environment. Second, even if it was some kind of weird test, the fact that it distracted people who were doing things like driving airplanes, repairing airplanes, etc. implies a threat to public safety and I don't think the military would go for that. Finally, the risk that something could go wrong--collision, malfunction, etc.--and end up spilling the beans and potentially injuring people would be really stupid. Even the military isn't that stupid.

Smells like a hoax...

[blackmonday]

All those people saw it and no one took a moment to use a cell phone camera to take a pic? Sure a cell phone camera doesn't prove or disprove anything, but at least we could take more guesses as to what was actually seen. I keep waiting for photos of this to appear, but none have surfaced AFAIK.

Correct

[dino213b]

Sure, a UFO is a bone fide sighting. It means exactly what it stands for: Unidentified Flying Object. Only an idiot would jump to some kind of a conclusion that it's the master alien race visiting Earth under the command of god-king Marduk without concrete evidence.

Alien != Little green men from space necessarily

[Saikik]

"Alien" means just that. Until it's been identified as a alien spaceship, it could just as well be the alien spaghetti monster. I don't know why everyone assumes just because humans can't identify something in the sky it MUST be little green men from space. Humans have terrible long range vision and generally very poor video recording devices. Most people probably can't identify something 1 mile in front of them on the ground.

Re:how about a little money?

[Rick Genter]

But the government can just spend a little bit of money.

No. No, it can't.

Re:Good going, France!

[oohshiny]

Oh what short memories we have. 9-11 comes, tanks the economy, raises unemployment rates, scares the shit out of the country, and today all people can remember is the number 3,000.

Well, looks like you never quite figured it out. See, 9-11 "tanked the economy" and "raised unemployment rate" because people had the shit scared out of them. Why did they? Because politicians like Bush wanted to spread fear to distract from their incompetence and institutionalized corruption.