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Ask Slashdot: What Is Your View On UFO Sightings?
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?
go away and watch tv
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.
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.
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...
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.