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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.
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"
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.
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.