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UK UFO Sightings Declassified, Still No Intergalactic Relations
schwit1 is just one of the massive flood of readers (and publications) writing to tell us about the recently declassified UK Ministry of Defense account of a supposed UFO sighting. Included are nineteen sightings between 1986 and 1992, with the most notable being a sighting in 1991 with a US Air Force pilot's first-hand account. Not that this lends an air of credibility to anything, just more papers with more words. "Almost 200 such files will be made available by the MoD over the next four years. [...] UFO expert and journalism lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, Dr David Clarke, said the documents would shed new light on relatively little-known sightings. He said some conspiracy theorists would already have decided that the release of the papers was a 'whitewash.' He added: 'Because the subject is bedevilled by charlatans and lunatics, it is career suicide to have your name associated with UFOs, which is a real pity. The National Archives are doing a fantastic job here. Everyone brings their own interpretation. Now you can look at the actual primary material — the stuff coming into the MoD every day — and make your own mind up.'"
The U.S. government weren't trying to cover up aliens at places like Roswell, they were covering up their secret spy aircraft. Why do you think most of these "UFO cover-ups" involved strange craft spotted near isolated air force bases at the height of the Cold War? Project Blue Book wasn't about little green men, it was about making sure no one had gotten a good look at their latest prototype stealth planes and also checking to see if any hillbillies might have actually spotted any Soviet spy planes in the area.
No alien civilization is expending the mammoth amount of resources needed to traverse the vast distances of interstellar space just to stick a probe up your ass. Deal with it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Do you really think the MoD (or the CIA, NSA, etc.) are going to provide us with the real deal? Of course it's a whitewa.....NO, NO NOT THE ANAL PROBE AGAIN!!!
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it is career suicide to have your name associated with UFOs
Not career suicide, just a hilariously pointless hobby like squirrel eating ... or Warcraft.
Something that's always bothered me about Alien sightings and 'abductions' is that the sightings really didn't kick off until 1897 which coincides closely with the release of the War of the Worlds. And, interestingly enough, alien abductions didn't really take off until the 1960s when movies about abductions had been in circulation since the 50s (as any devout MST3K fan knows).
Aside from a few odd reportings (and maybe a few religions) the above holds true.
We are human beings, we have awesome imaginations and a multitude of chemicals that effect them. I don't know what it's like to be coked out in an opium den or suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning but I think a lot of UFO stuff is pretty much a direct result of the human psyche, not extraterrestrials.
My work here is dung.
To counter your wildly irresponsible statements, I offer proof.
Foolish Earth meat-creature, there are no aliens here! Just thinking about this ridiculous idea makes my vocal tubes swell with mirth! Ho ho!
I'm so excited I just made water in my pantaloons!
Say it with me folks.... UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. Of course UFO's exist! If a flaming dead cat is dropped from an airplane at night, and no one can identify it, it's a UFO. Anything that cannot readily be identified, and that flies, is a UFO. Now, whether some of these UFOs are alien spacecraft is an entirely different matter. Of course, once a UFO is identified as an alien spacecraft, it would then cease to be a UFO at all.
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Interestingly, the US has had, for several decades, a system which can detect UFOs - GEODSS, the Ground Based-Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance System. Each GEODSS site (there are three currently active, plus a mobile unit) has a pair of 40-inch telescopes. These were the first fully computerized telescopes, working since the 1980s. The telescopes scan the sky every night. They can detect moving bright objects as streaks, but there's more capability than that. They have a star atlas, and know what should be in each image, so anything that shouldn't be there is detected. If a known star is missing, that's interesting too; it may indicate a dark object. There are two telescopes, so for low-orbit objects, they can get parallax. Multiple sites can be coupled together to get parallax on more distant objects. They can even use one telescope with a laser to illuminate satellites while taking a picture with the other. This is how the USAF finds new satellites, near-earth asteroids, and nonmetallic space junk. The system was recnelty upgraded to use CCD imagers (it used to be tube camera based) and to use better alignment algorithms, so it's now both more sensitive and more accurate.
This is all tied to NORAD in Colorado Springs. GEODSS knows what an incoming ICBM trajectory looks like, and if it ever sees one, NORAD gets notified, without any action from the GEODSS site operators.
GEODSS is a real, live, functional UFO detection system that's been running for decades. If anything big enough to be interesting was anywhere near the planet for more than a few hours, it would be noticed. Even the target didn't reflect radar or light, it could be detected because it would occasionally occult a star.
There are literally tens-of-millions (if not hundreds of millions) more cameras in the hands of the residents of the planet earth than there were even 15 years ago. Cameras in phones, cameras in purses, cameras in trunks of cars, cameras in PDAs, the list goes on. Most of the cameras also shoot video.
As a consequence we have many more pictures of police misconduct and celebrity's privates than we ever have in the past, but we have no noticeable increases in the numbers of good UFO pictures (or good sasquatch pics for that matter).
If the number of UFOs are constant, and there are many more cameras, why aren't we seeing many more pictures flooding the intertubes?
When writing haiku
Use seventeen syllables
I counted eighteen