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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
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.
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
But because they are by definition unidentified, it's unreasonable to claim they are of extra-terrestrial origin.
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.
A few propositions for new article titles for the editors: - How would you rate your most recent encounter with chupacabra? - Is Yeti a good Xmas house guest? - Bigfoot - what to serve for breakfast... is tea OK? - Why are gargoyles unhappy with their medieval portraits? Looking at you BeauHD... but not only you.
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?...
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.
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.
Everyone had something to test. People saw all kinds of post ww2 Operation Paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... evaluations.
The Christofilos effect, Project 137 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
SR-71 and D-21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... 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.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
All alone at night
Bright lights flashing in the sky
Not the anal probe!
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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 'zooming further away' because they change in brightness as light cloud moves across them. 'Fading' and 'drifting west' sounds about right, as the planets would be setting.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
This Sci Fi story based on 'The Thing' has a great closing line
http://clarkesworldmagazine.co...
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.
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.
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.
Most of the stuff on Youtube is fake. Check out Captain Disillusion's channel. 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.)
Humans are terrible at correctly understanding what they are see when they lack a reference. As, for example, when looking at the sky. Almost all the interpretation done by the brain is related to something it considers known and of a known size. All that goes away when seeing something weird in the sky. So the brain makes a wild-ass guess.
I believe in little green women...oh, the forbidden pleasure!!
Bigger spirals at the same rate of turn are higher G, not lower.
I know a guy who caused a few UFO sightings in his day. Army helicopter pilot, training on flying low and fast at night, all lights off, is following the terrain in Oklahoma when he spots a pickup cruising down a lonely road. He settles in for a bit of practice following a target at a consistent distance - and then when it's time to head back base, well, he flips on their multi-million-candlepower search light and banks hard to one side before flipping it back off.
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.
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.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
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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Stephen Hawking once said that if aliens visit us they will most likely not be friendly. Whether or not he is correct is irrelevant because the aliens aren't coming. Ever.
The idea of aliens coming to earth has been the subject of countless novels, movies and television shows, and even though those stories are entirely fictional, they have greatly influenced the way we think about the idea of encountering beings from other worlds. Unfortunately, our thinking on this subject is very small and limited. If we step back and think a little bigger, we will realize that any aliens with the ability to come visit us almost certainly would not care to.
Sci-fi stories can ignore the bits that aren't very interesting. Movie aliens rarely get sick or worry about eating. Sci-fi stories rarely mention gravity because, given our limited view, we expect gravity to just work and shooting a movie without it would be a huge pain. So, screw it, all movie aliens and all future civilizations have invented artificial gravity. After all, warp-drive engines and pew-pew energy-blasters are much more fun to think about.
In the real world, however, science tends to advance in all directions, because advances in one field almost always results in advances in many others. For example, the invention of the computer resulted in many advances in other fields of human science.
In order for aliens to reach earth, they will have to, at a minimum, perfect faster-than-light travel or perfect a way to travel for thousands of years at sub-light speed, conquer the long term biological effects of space radiation and weightlessness, and master extreme long distance space navigation. All of this just so they can come to earth and . . . what? Say hello? Steal our water?
That just doesn't make sense.
So why *WOULD* aliens come to earth?
Do they really want our water (or minerals or whatever)? That implies an economic model in their decision. By definition, they need those resources and coming here to get them is their most economical choice. Getting them somewhere closer to home or manufacturing them must be more "expensive" (in some sense of the word) than the cost of traveling all the way here, gathering our resources and flying them home.
While not impossible, that seems unlikely - both technologically and economically. Even we have (expensively) already mastered alchemy. We have the tech to create matter from energy. Imagine that tech in a few hundred years. What would be cheaper and better -- making stuff at home or building a fleet of galactic warships and sending them (along with thousands of soldiers and miners) to some far off planet?
Currently, we're not even able to get to Proxima Centauri (the closest star outside our solar system) much less get to a place where we think there's an actual planet. Getting us to Proxima Centauri in less than a few hundred years would require technology that is several orders of magnitude beyond what we have now. If getting humans to another star system is a 100 on some "technology ability scale", then we're currently at about 2, which is not far ahead of poodles who are probably at 1.
What about the idea that aliens might come to Earth to colonize the planet (and maybe vaporize us in the process)? You could argue that terraforming (or maybe aliens would call it xenoforming) could be a technology more advanced than FTL travel. With that assumption, you could imagine an alien race that can travel across the galaxy but not alter planets to suit their biological needs. Coming to colonize Earth could make sense. But this ignores the fact that several other requisite technologies would probably make their need to colonize obsolete.
Before they had FTL travel, they likely spent many decades traveling at less that light speed and so chances are their ships are quite comfortable. In fact probably more like sailing biodomes than ships - someplace they could live indefinitely. Assuming their other scientists were hard at work while their engi
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.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
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.
Oblig XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1235/
UFO's (in the sense of extra-terrestrials) are just the modern equivalent of ghosts. Enough "reliable" people have reported seeing UFOs and ghosts that the effect seems to be real as far as a human brain is concerned. However, the complete and utter lack of physical evidence suggests that they are purely a psychological effect and not a physical one.
I was taking my dog out to go to the bathroom around 2am. I was looking up at the night sky because it happened to be a particularly clear night and you could see a lot. What happened next baffles me to this day. Two green lights went silently from one side of the horizon to the other in about 10 seconds time. It seemed like they were attached to something; however, you could see clear space between the two lights. They were roughly as high as a jetliner, but definitely weren't a plane. I live near an airport and Lake Michigan (where the military routinely runs drills) so I'm very familiar with all that...it wasn't a plane, helicopter, drone, etc. Since then I've done my own research (satellite tracks and whatnot) and talked to amateur skygazers, but haven't gotten an answer. So yeah, I believe in UFO's because I saw one.
Why don't people ask the UFO what it identifies as? It would be wrong for us to make any assumptions that could cause offense.
My view on UFO sightings is always blurry.
In UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS.
I do not necessarily believe they came from alien intelligences.
I just believe they're "UNIDENTIFIED"