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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.
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.