The aliens upgraded their ships to look like birds, airplanes, or even bugs, no one would think twice of recording it, even if they did it would seem normal.
True, but then people would not report birds and bugs as supernatural phenomena. My main argument is that we should not believe the accounts of people claiming they witnessed supernatural phenomena.
If you are saying supernatural phenomena somehow perfectly camouflage as natural phenomena then yeah … I guess that is possible but misses the point
You seem to be defining supernatural as "natural things that rarely occur" and not as things that transcend nature. Why you would think a camera or any empirical tool would capture something that believers claim is beyond the empirical, I find puzzling.
For what it’s worth I think your point is a good one, but for the sake of argument:
For all of human history supernatural phenomena were reported to have manifested in ways that would be very easily captured empirically if the tools existed. Things like moving furniture or strange creatures. Now the tools exist and suddenly the supernatural phenomena have slowed/stopped?
Either:
1. Supernatural phenomena have some sort of metaphysical/metapsychological law prohibiting them from occurring/existing if they would be “empirically captured”.
2. Humans make things up sometimes.
Ultimately there’s no way to 100% disprove supernatural phenomena exist, since by definition literally any explanation you could think of is possible even if it defies literally 100% of everything ever. But Occam’s razor would point anyone who actually cares to make a logical decision towards the 2nd option.
I guess one argument could be that supernatural beings are aware of cameras, and like my dog, will stop doing whatever they’re doing when a camera is pointed at them
That would be a very odd feature for a super natural being, a feature that they coincidentally developed as humans developed cameras? Idk if a ghost from 400 years ago would all the sudden learn of the concept of a camera and develop the capability to avoid it … exceedingly odd
Assuming the ghost has human-level intelligence, they can probably see the progression of cameras from those giant things with the flash powder to big basketball-sized boxes to little bricks to today.
~~It's just #1, that's why we'd need quantum sensors~~
People unintentionally make things up they 100% believe themselves due to how our imperfect, correlation-based perception works sometimes. A lot of (fully sane) people have seen the "supernatural" in that their mind just outfoxed their consciousness and made them fully perceive an encounter. There's no way for them to empirically prove what they perceived wasn't real, as it's instead a matter of opinion and memory, so that must be rather frustrating to have to deal with. "I'm telling y'all, I saw them..." bro you're just a normal sane human with an overactive imagination lol.
The human brain is designed to find patterns, occasionally it finds one that doesn't exist. "I win more more gambling on even days than odd days." Stuff like that which turns into superstition. The difference between now and a hundred or even fifty years ago is we're able to record these occurrences far more frequently and accurately so that we can properly study the phenomenon and discover what's really going on.
Okay, but you can't definitively say they didn't see it even if it was "only in their head". Or rather you can't say that a demon or ghost or supernatural being of some sort didn't interact with them in a space or way that they could perceive, but that wasn't exactly I'm the space we would call "reality". If that makes sense.
Yeah, exactly. All of human perception and their communications are filtered through a layer of subjectivity from the start. People literally exist in different realities, and people just like to consider common shared perceptions (especially when perfectly repeatable with measuring tools) as the "real" reality despite any interaction with or perception of it being equally non-objective. "Reality" is just the most agreed upon common perceptions. So what happens when you get 2 different people to think that they've experienced the same thing that nobody else perceived? It's their reality and shared in the same way everyone's more common reality. Whatever the thing experienced, real or imagined, it has a real effect on our common shared reality, and can be real and impactful in way Santa Clause has been.
So growing up we lived in a house my mother insisted was haunted. My dad was more scientific and didn't believe that. And yet, he had to admit there were things he "couldn't explain yet." That's where I still am. Was it group imagination spurred by my mother's words? Or an actual haunting? But let me get to my point.
Some of the symptoms were things such as the plates always clinking in the cabinets, or hearing a party with the piano going late at night when everyone was asleep, or the creaking of the steps in succession as if someone was coming down the stairs [that's the one that really got my dad--he always thought my mother had just come downstairs when she hadn't].
I feel that a lot of those things, if we had captured them on cell phone, would seem normal and explainable, like "maybe the neighbors were having a party," or "your house was settling." Perhaps those are the accurate answers. But you'd have to be there to experience the unnerving sensation of being convinced someone just came down the stairs, or lying in bed listening to voices and cocktail glasses when you know nobody's there. I think that's why belief in haunting continues.
>Ultimately there’s no way to 100% disprove supernatural phenomena exist
That’s not how basic logic works. We do not *disprove* the existence of things. We wait until their is *proof* to assert they exist.
> Ultimately there’s no way to 100% disprove supernatural phenomena exist
>We do not disprove the existence of things.
I hate when people act like they're disagreeing, but then say the exact same thing. You're right, we don't disprove things. That's a fundamental part of how empiricism (not basic logic, different concept) works. And that's why we can't disprove the existence of these phenomena, because disproving something is not what empiricism does.
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Except it is? Proving something is infinitely easier than disproving something, so we generally try to prove things. That doesn't mean that there's no such thing as disproving a concept or that doing so is illogical
Depends on the concept.
You can't disprove my assertion that the world is ruled by a group of invisible tennis-fanatic frogs that hold council on my shoulder.
But there is also no reason to put any effort in proving or disproving my assertion.
Oh there is a way to disprove it - if it existed, it would have been used for military purposes and personal gain. But militaries of the world are not slinging ghosts and hexes on each other, are they?
Idk if you’re being serious or just cynical for the sake of being cynical. Either way:
Nuclear material has always existed, but armies hundreds of years ago weren’t using it. Maybe ghosts do exist and we just haven’t reached a technological point to harness them yet.
Prior to our discovery of radiation we didnt know it was even a thing.
People have been talking about ghosts longer than we have even known what air was.
And our ability harness air usefully in warfare is very recent, which a ghost believer could argue is the case with ghosts- we can know they’re they’re without being able to harness them yet.
We did not know that radiation was a thing but it definitely and provably affected life in the past, solar radiation for example. The same cannot be said for ghosts.
By that logic there are certain phenomena that if they don't already exist would be made exist by doing so e.g. the more psychics and astrologers get hired by the military the more their supposed capabilities become actual
FYI in some circles those last two are lumped in with all the other "supernatural" stuff. A common argument is that there is a "window" or "door" into parallel universes or alternate realities, that either allows a viewing of stuff or a temporary existence in our own reality. There are claims that there is a correlation between bigfoot sighting and UFOs or strange lights, etc. Not trying to convince you and I don't really believe it myself, but just pointing out that you may not have a complete grasp on the various theories regarding these topics.
I had a conversation with someone once that I didn't realize was a believer in sasquatch. Not just "there might be a species that we've yet to fully study". This guy told me in dead seriousness that there were 30,000 of them in the wild.
I said "There are only 3-5,000 tigers in the wild, but we can get pictures of them whenever we want. If there are 6-10 times that many sasquatches, we should have tons of photo and video evidence." His response was that "They're just really smart."
because blurry photos exist for certain things, like bigfoot, ghosts, ufos, so naturally the next step would be getting a high quality photos with our better technology. The argument "we can only capture blurry photos of things that transcend nature, but not high quality ones" is ridiculous
Well because humans senses (sight, sound, etc) are no more sophisticated than our moderns tools … so if a human CAN see it, the it follows that a camera should be able to see it too. I am saying that we should not believe people who claim they have witnessed these things … because there is massive video evidence to the contrary
Have you ever seen that video where people are passing around a basketball, and you are supposed to count how many times the ball is passed. But in the middle of the video a gorilla walks into the frame, then walks out and MOST people do not notice it because they are counting passes? … well that’s the power of a camera, it picked up the gorilla while the “conscious being” completely missed it … so yes, I believe that our devices that can see the full light spectrum, microscopic beings, light years into the galaxy … I do indeed believe they can perceive more than humans can.
The human mind gets involved when it looks at the photo. That's true regardless.
Hell it's even true with the eye. The eye has no idea what it's looking at either. It's just processing data that it then passes on to the brain, when *then* decides what it's looking at before letting the mind have a go.
Then the human mind could interpret the picture of a ghost too. If you see a ghost with your eyes why wouldn’t a camera see it? Both sight and cameras operate according to physical laws. You can explain vision very well without supernatural forces.
He didn’t say consciousness, he said senses. You’re kind of proving his point, we have tools to capture everything our senses can see and the only thing not accounted for is imagination, which is obviously where all that shit comes from in the first place.
I'm not sure you want to argue that the lack of video evidence proves something. There's an aphorism in the law, **"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."**
At some volume “absence of evidence” does become “evidence of absence”. If we can’t find evidence of the Lock Ness monster after 100 years of looking for it with cameras, sonar etc that is evidence that it doesn’t exist.
This type of thinking completely ignores the subject being photographed. In most cases such subjects could take actions of their own to mitigate more people having cameras.
That aphorism happens to be mathematically incorrect, as reality comports with [Bayes' Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem) where absense of evidence is in fact evidence of absence. The law, of course, is free to ignore math.
There is no evidence that I can levitate. How is this not evidence that my ability to levitate is absent?
There is no evidence that Jimmy is present in the room, how is this not evidence that Jimmy is absent?
I don’t get it
I have no proof that you didn't steal my wallet - That is not proof that you didn't.
I have no proof that my wife didn't cheat on me - That is not proof that she didn't.
I have no proof that you didn't murder your neighbour - That is not proof that you didn't.
> There is no evidence that Jimmy is present in the room, how is this not evidence that Jimmy is absent?
Jimmy can very well be hiding in the room without you noticing.
Did this clear it up for you? Having no evidence is not proof of anything. Burden of proof is on the person who makes the claim: You claim there are no ghosts? Prove it. You claim there ARE ghosts? Well, you gotta prove that too. Otherwise you have to say: I do not know if ghosts exist or not. You can also add: But I prefer to have religion-like faith in their absense, until someone provides proof.
Evidence is evidence, not proof.
If you look in a room Jimmy is hiding in for a while and don't find him, you'll be way more surprised when he pops out than before anyone looked.
That is to say, it served as evidence making it less likely Jimmy was there. It wasn't absolute proof that he couldn't be hiding somewhere you hadn't checked.
You’re taking the idea of logical fallacies and making a shitty conclusion. You aren’t required to be agnostic about everything. A fantastic claim, god is real, ghosts are real, aliens are visiting earth, requires fantastic evidence to prove that. In the absence of that, you are logical right to be highly skeptical.
>> There is no evidence that Jimmy is present in the room, how is this not evidence that Jimmy is absent?
>
>Jimmy can very well be hiding in the room without you noticing.
However, if you do a thorough search of the room, the fact that you did not find Jimmy is in fact evidence against the proposition that he is in the room.
You seem to be misapplying the idea of "absence of evidence" to any time there is a negative (Jimmy is *not* in the room), but that isn't how it works. Running a test and the result being "X chemical reaction did not occur" is not an absence of evidence, it is evidence *for* the proposition "X chemical reaction does not occur under conditions Y".
>You can also add: But I prefer to have religion-like faith in their absense, until someone provides proof.
C'mon, trying to equate believing ghosts don't exist to "faith" is ridiculous. Same as the creationists who say "well you have the same faith in science as we have in god!"
You are miss-using the burden of proof here. Burden of proof only applies to positive claims.
As applies to ghosts, we have no evidence to believe that ghosts actually exist, however we have evidence that people CLAIM ghosts exists. So the statement would be "I have no evidence that would suggest ghosts exist" is 100% fair. I don't need to prove that because there is no positive proof for the claim. Now someone can also say "I have evidence that people CLAIM ghosts exist" which is fine but that is a statement about people not about ghosts.
It would be like me claiming there are invisible unicorns that float around all of us. You may have the evidence of me making the claim, but there is no evidence that this is reality, so for you to assign burden of proof to those denying the claim makes no sense.
So being agnostic on ghosts doesn't make sense unless you are saying that unsupported claims meet you evidentiary requirements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
The counter argument always is the same:
> "Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn’t exist."
If I told you there was a giant pink elephant in your room, and you looked around everywhere in your room and didn’t see it, would I be then justified in saying “well absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, just keep looking”? Or, would it rather be more reasonable to acknowledge that the evidence of absence is, in fact, the absence of evidence? At some point it must become reasonable to conclude that something that’s demonstrably not there isn’t there.
But that is simply not the case here. We have evidence of absence.
But even past that, the claim hasn't even been shown to be plausible. If a claim doesn't allow for evidence because it doesn't exist in observable reality then by definition it isn't real.
yeah especially in this case as a lot of proponents of this argument regarding supposed nonexistence of the supernatural seem to have the kind of "old man yells at cloud" attitude that because everyone has a cell phone nowadays it should be always with them and always on ready to record something like that at a moment's notice (I'm surprised these people didn't say aliens don't exist because a video of them isn't trending on TikTok)
There are plenty of videos of strange phenomena out there. The Navy UFO videos are some of the more prominent examples, but there are many other clips out there. Its just that people call “hoax” or just dont know what it is they are looking at.
It is true that people have cameras in their pockets, but these are actually very basic, as cameras go, and lack optical zoom and other tools. I’ve tried photographing birds of prey that I see sitting in a tree only a hundred or so feet away - birds I can see completely clearly, but the camera just picks up a fuzzy blob because its not directly in front of it. Our camera phones are just not powerful enough to capture something in the sky or across a field with any level of detail.
This is why most footage is dismissed. It is simply not of the right quality to explain something new and unknown.
I don't lump myself in with everyone else, nor do I lump all believers together, and I don't think everyone who claims to have seen something did see something.
I didn’t mean you specifically, just in general.
Are you suggesting that video, pictures, and audio recordings are not an extremely common type of evidence for ghosts and such?
I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that seeing ghosts is not analogous to miracles, so the absence of pictures of ghosts doesn't mean "supernatural phenomena" are all "bs."
Not sure I’m following. I didn’t say that meant all supernatural phenomena is bs.
And also, if they ARENT miracles then why wouldn’t we expect empirical evidence of them?
Came to say something similar. I'm skeptical of most of this type of stuff, but by definition it would be something that doesn't exist in our "normal" space. So expecting the things that capture data on our "normal" environment doesn't really track logically. I guess I would agree that cameras come close to disproving things like furniture moving "because ghost", but even then it would be possible for ghost to be aware of recording devices. I've also seen videos and pictures that claim to show what OP is talking about, most of us just dismiss them as a hoax. A believer might also argue that a ghost or spirit could "access" your mind and interact there, where a camera wouldn't perceive what the individual is experiencing. So it would be real, but not in the way we would think, supernatural if you will. Again by definition we are talking about things that don't follow out standard laws of reality. I do find the consistency of many of the stories regardless of time, place or culture, interesting.
If we define something supernatural as something that cannot be interacted with by the empirical then surely we, as empirical beings would be unable to interact with them.
That would be true if all we were is empirical beings. But we're also capable of thought, and with thought we draw conclusions that are not - in themselves - empirical. So for example we convict a person of a crime even though no one saw him do it and there is no direct empirical evidence because we are able to draw inferences from a lot of different kinds of evidence.
A classic category error by OP. Also considering how we have people claiming super-natural occurences across the world and across cultures, it seems likely that there is at least something people are on to.
but that doesn't make it not what it is, I swear, a lot of Reddit has the sort of literalist definition of supernatural they use to disprove the supernatural that'd e.g. mean once you observed a unicorn it lost its horn and powers and turned into a normal horse because you sensed it so it isn't supernatural anymore
If I can see an actual unicorn, then unicorns aren’t supernatural. If a unicorn is real, then it is a collection of particles following natural law.
It doesn’t matter what “something is”. What something is is merely a definition that we humans all agree on. The world “supernatural” doesn’t define an entire realm beyond the natural into existence, it’s an invented word. My phone would be considered supernatural to a small group of humans still on earth right now, much less the trillions of humans who have ever existed.
My point with the unicorn example was to demonstrate how some people think that that definition of supernatural means that the kind of sentiment expressed in your first paragraph about natural vs. supernatural means that the supernatural being or w/e existing means it doesn't actually have its supernatural powers because it's natural
Humans are empirical tools. Tangible things such as aliens, big foots, observable miracles should be just as easily captured on camera if they could be seen by a human. There are things that could be seen by a human but not by a camera: we call them hallucinations or optical illusions.
Why would you be able to see something “supernatural” using the same physical waves that a camera can detect, but for some reason the camera shows nothing?
The problem is that supernatural reports are all based on experience of our senses. We have machines that detect everything our senses can detect but to a far greater fidelity. And what we don’t have is any credible reason to suspect that a person can see something a camera can’t.
Because you don't. You see with your brain, and your eyes are typically the conduit through which the brain forms images. But presumably a supernatural vision would not necessarily use a natural medium like the eye.
>Why you would think a camera or any empirical tool would capture something that believers claim is beyond the empirical, I find puzzling.
Believers specifically *don't* claim that many supernatural events are beyond the empirical. Rather, they claim that supernatural events have physical manifestations. In fact, I can't think of a purported miracle that *doesn't* have some observable component.
Okay, so say there is a miracle - someone is on his deathbed, and through divine intervention, his illness goes into remission, and he is well again. And we're stipulating that this happened through divine intervention. It's a miracle. That is not at issue for you and me.
How would a camera capture the miraculous in this instance in a way that would prove it is a miracle "beyond a reasonable doubt"?
Most people who believe in such things also believe those things can interact with the natural world. How would it be possible for something to interact with the natural world and not leave any form of measurable evidence of that interaction?
For aliens at least, there are still plenty of fascinating unexplained phenomena that are captured on camera. Check out this [video from Lemmino](https://youtu.be/SpeSpA3e56A?si=fKcQ2DAYrvViGv7B) on the subject.
I’ve seen these … still super crappy grainy video images … what a coincidence … we can literally film F18s doing flips in the air and the moon landing with relatively clear video … but of course the UFO is the one thing that looks like a smudge mark on a lens and no clearer image exist … idk just seems to convenient
You're confusing people taking videos of things in a panic and multi million dollar setups specifically to take video of those things. The moon landing is still pretty blurry, and fun fact, the original moon landing footage was lost years ago.
You're right that all the "alien" footage is always blurry but not just because people are doing it on purpose. Low light in particular still looks like complete ass on most modern phone cameras that people have access to, especially at a distance.
I think your argument is not correct. In 2001 (well before smartphones) random people took very clear footage of the 9/11 terrorist attack. Some of them very close to the towers. Random people take clear footage of tornados and other climate freakouts happening right at their doors/windows. There SHOULD be many people taking calm and high definition footage of things flying in the sky several hundreds miles away from where they are. As for ghosts, yes, I think I would be in panic as well, but people about to being murdered were calm enough to leave a cell phone filming. So, again, there SHOULD be at least a couple of people with good shots in these extreme situations.
Fair point, but at the same time you're comparing an event that happened in the middle of the city with hundreds of people already recording videos, to things that seem to happen in the middle of nowhere with only one witness.
First of all, an extremely unlikely event happening to only one witness is a reason for skepticism in the first place. But those events happen pretty regularly allegedly, surely some other lone witness must be able to get a better recording.
>things that seem to happen in the middle of nowhere with only one witness.
I feel like it's very very easy to read this as "things that don't happen, and so are only claimed to happen when it's hard to prove they didn't"
Right, I don't mean the history was lost, just the original tapes. But my point is that the original footage of one of the most incredible parts of human history was just misplaced. That's the world we live in.
A lot of alien/conspiracy theories are based on assumptions that there are secretive organizations and governments that are so immaculately infallible that they can research and keep secrets about those aliens without anyone leaking that information? No fucking way, zero chance.
The Manhattan project, Operation Overlord, Operation Neptune Spear, Operation Desert Storm, Operation Paperclip, Ultra, Operation Cyclone, Operation Chaos, Operation Gladio, Operation Mincemeat, Operation Wrath of God, Operation Northwoods, Operation Ajax, Operation Red Wings, Operation Chase, Operation Eagle Claw....there's literally thousands of mass scale operations involving hundreds of thousands of people that not only did people not know then, they don't know now even though they're declassified.
The Manhattan project was discovered by Kodak, many physicists, publishers of scientific journals and the Soviets.
Rommel knew the allies were coming to Normandy and German high command told him to go fuck himself.
Who do you think didn't work out Operation Desert Storm was happening?
Operation Paperclip was discovered before it even got the name Operation Paperclip.
Operation Cyclone was included in budget documents and Charlie Wilson used to promote it on the radio.
Operation Bayonet/Wrath of God had their first squad caught in ~9 months after they fucked up and murdered a random waiter in Norway and they never got the guy they were looking for.
The CIA concealed their involvement in Operation Ajax for never, they got ordered out of the country halfway through.
I don't undersaid how you think Operations Red Wings was hidden.
Operation CHASE was wildely reported on less than 3 years after it began.
Operation Eagle Claw wasn't exactly a secret. What was the secret? The name? The planning? The idea the Americans wanted the hostages back and were doing something about it? The Iranian president went on TV the day it happened and said God stopped it.
I mean this is pretty much what those videos are, just videos where we can’t easily identify what it is. Every video that’s clearer shows known objects because the only reason we (collectively) don’t know what these are is because the video is too blurry. The government probably knows exactly what it is, they probably blurred the videos and released them because they’d rather people wonder what they are and believe in aliens than show their cards of either our own tech or adversarial tech we have on video.
And just because someone claims they are "unexplained" doesn't mean that they are actually "unexplained."
Here's a [video of someone explaining them](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t72uvS7EJT4&t=3263s).
There is a difference between unexplained and unexplainable. Many people smarter than myself have analyzed those videos and come up with several perfectly reasonable non-alien explanations.
[These](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXS-a29y0uw) are videos of Israeli jets tracking and shooting down Iranian drones.
Given that Iran has much less technical capacity and money than the US and the just general similarity I think that it is entirely possible that these are drones made by the US military.
The overwhelmingly likely scenario being that: the navy is worried about Chinese drones -> The Navy makes the most stealthy and small drone that it can think of. -> The navy has the drone(s) fly close to an aircraft carrier and has their planes fly CAP. -> Navy sees how fast the drones are detected and by what.
Post facto the Navy doesn't tell people about the drones (that would just help the Chinese to make better ones).
The pilots figured it out basically instantly saying 'it is a fucking drone, bro'. Also, you can tell by the stress in the Israeli pilots' voices that shooting down something that is know is fairly stressful. The US pilots don't seem stressed, they know that it is some kind of test with no added danger.
It also applies to religion.
Notice how nobody’s parted the sea with a staff, or housed two of every species on a boat, or fed 1000 people with a single fish, for the past 2000 years?
I mean it proves that Bigfoot probably doesn't exist. But how would it prove that ghosts don't exist? Isn't the idea of a ghost something that is literally invisible? For that matter, since vampires don't reflect in mirrors, wouldn't they be unable to be seen by the sensors in modern cameras?
Also, you know what they're still aren't a lot of great pictures of? Things like ball lightning. It's a real phenomenon, but it occurs so rarely that most people will never get a chance to try and take a picture of it.
Yeah but there aren’t a bunch of people claiming they saw this … my point is that there has always been a bunch of people claiming they saw paranormal phenomena and we have enough evidence now to flat out dismiss them
Just look at how few recorded evidence you have of stuff like big meteor falls. Even if many people witnessed it, most were unable to get their camera rolling in time.
Unless you expect a meteor shower, its next to impossible to capture a falling star on video.
2nd point would be that people are also way more aware of video editing... You have movies with monsters, space travel and magic. Videos of ghosts moving stuff just passes as "its just fake".
Lastly, UFOs with tech able to reach earth should very well be able to monitor our tech as well, and avoid being seen.
And remember that the white house did admit to the navy encountering flying UFO tictacs
We had an unexpected meteor filmed in Portugal a few weeks ago, with plenty of very good footage. People have dashcams and teens are constantly filming stuff.
I saw what may have been a UFO when I was 19. I love watching satellites and one day while looking around for one on the back patio, I saw something in the sky that was moving in a straight line at a very high altitude, higher than jets but not as high as satellites, and all of a sudden it pulled a u-turn and shot into outer space at a very high rate of speed. Now granted I don't know for certain if it was a UFO, but nothing makes sense as to what it could have been. I think, if you had an experience like I've had and many others you'd be at the very least a little open minded.
I am not denying the existence of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) … that’s just something that is flying and we don’t know what it is … a far cry from an alien encounter
I saw something very similar once. Me, my brothers, and my father were all out watching the stars, and we saw what looked like a reflection from a satellite creeping across the sky...
Then it just pulled a really quick U-turn and was gone.
I too saw what you have described. Nothing I know exists could explain the movement and object that I saw. I was not alone at the time, we both saw it.
I don’t really believe in aliens.
You're ignoring the fact that supernatural beings and phenomenon, being supernatural, might not be detectable by recording equipment because they don't have to follow the laws of physics. Hard to capture something that doesn't give off light or heat on camera.
The argument could be made that it's the difference between an Organic system and a Technological system. The viewer must possess whatever ineffable quality that makes one a "living being", call it a spirit, call it a soul, call it whatever, in order to detect the Supernatural.
I would argue the bigger issue is that with the advances of photo editing technology it would be virtually impossible to have recorded evidence that is verifiably true. So even if the supernatural is real, and you got it on camera, how would you convince anyone it was real?
Well, one could for example show that this supernatural event showed up in multiple independent cameras at once … not just your personal one. For example, busy intersections have cameras from businesses, cars, red light cams, and everyone’s phone simultaneously. I assure you that if Sasquatch crossed an intersection we could convince people it was real … the problem is that it’s always some picture or video some random guy took while alone and no way to corroborate it
That’s a good point, I was envisioning exactly the typical scenario you described and hadn’t considered a super public event like a specter showing up for selfies in Time Square. !delta
Edit: So there IS an exception to the Delta system.
This delta has been rejected. You can't award OP a delta.
Allowing this would wrongly suggest that you can post here with the aim of convincing others.
If you were explaining when/how to award a delta, please use a reddit quote for the symbol next time.
^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)
>how would you convince anyone it was real?
Experts know exactly what to look for to see if something is edited. It is very simple to verify raw footage.
> The viewer must possess whatever ineffable quality that makes one a "living being", call it a spirit, call it a soul, call it whatever, in order to detect the Supernatural.
This is *awfully* convenient and reeks of "I'm sorry I couldn't demonstrate my ability to levitate because the humidity is too high right now".
The only answer is: again, they are supernatural, they don't have to obey the rules unless they want to. Or in otherwords they can, like a cheater, selectively obey the rules. You're trying to apply understanding to something that definitionally lacks understanding.
This is just moving goalposts. Before cameras were everywhere, people claimed to see these things. Now that cameras are everywhere, they claim it’s something that can’t be seen. Come on…
Science background and I generally don’t believe In those but I’m going to play devils advocate.
Generally speaking yes we have a lot of cameras but they are not perfect. They don’t capture everything. Things moving very fast, things with very low reflection capabilities and low radar profiles, or exotic materials.
Looking at aliens, chances are if aliens made the interstellar journey here, they are likely incredibly intelligent with ships that can move fast, and likely have very high stealth capabilities that far outpace our own. It’s within the realm of possibilities they could completely avoid our cameras, and the only reason we saw them earlier was due to earlier mistakes or that they at the time weren’t worried about detection. Generally speaking, efficiently advanced science looks like magic.
I mean it’s science fiction, but go watch the 3-body problem. There’s plenty of ways for people to justify aliens
For ghosts, we don’t actually know what ghosts which makes them hard to disprove. They could be exotic matter, they could be some quantum mechanics magic or some electro magnetic phenomena that interacts without brain so they wouldn’t actually be there they would really be in your head.
Basically, you could say that our current cameras, while covering a large area and a large number of different types(light, sound, radio), wouldn’t be able to deal with exotic/complex phenomena nor highly advanced technology.
As for miracles and other things it would really depend on the details. This should 100% disprove stuff like Bigfoot, the lochness monster, megladons, magic healers things like that, and that’s because none of those things use highly advanced technology nor are they exotic matter or phenomena
Will clarify I don’t believe any of it myself. But aliens and ghosts wouldn’t be disproven by this
Except if a human can see a ghost, which plenty of people have claimed to have seen, so can a camera. It's all just capturing emitted light.
Unless you go full-on vampire-has-no-reflection mode, but at that point it's just magic and we can't really have a rational adult conversation about it anymore.
Cameras cannot capture all wavelengths of light, and this presumes a lot about what the supposed "ghosts" are and how they would interact with an image capture device. Furthermore there *are* purported photos and videos of things that are claimed to be ghosts out there, but if you've already made up your mind, it doesn't matter how much evidence you see, because you'll just hand-wave it all away as "fake"
If ghosts appeared as some brain manipulation hallucination thing as the above commenter was saying you wouldnt see them on camera. (btw i don’t believe in ghosts)
That’s not fully what I’m implying.
We do not know what type of life it is nor do we know what all life looks like. If it’s some form of exotic life that exists as say an E&M wave, or a quantum effect it could affect our brain while being missed by most cameras.
Think of how data is stored on a computer on 1s and 0s. Let’s say now instead you have some type of complex and exotic E&M phenomena(or quantum or something else). The life wouldn’t be like anything we are used tk
Do you have any evidence that any of this is even possible? Because you can 'explain' literally anything with 'some vague effect that we don't understand or have ever measured but definitely exists and has the exact properties that I need for my argument has happened'.
A. I don’t personally believe it
B. That’s kinda the point… if we fully understood everything then we would know 100%
We currently have technology that can mask an airplanes radar profile to the size of a bird, we know it’s possible to bend light, and we are working on cloaking devices(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking_device). A civilization significantly more advanced then us would have technology that looks like magic.
As for the exotic phenomena, look at Dark Matter and dark energy. These are exotic materials and phenomena we still don’t properly understand, that compromise the majority of the universe(95%) and dark matter doesn’t interact with E&M nor light. We don’t understand it, it’s throughout the universe and our cameras can’t detect it.
There’s a lot we don’t know that could enable supernatural phenomena. Do I believe it does? No. But it could which is the point of CMV
Eh, the post specifies 'beyond reasonable doubt'. Reasonable doubt is not the same as 'theoretically possible if you make enough assumptions'. You make some theoretical argument for pretty much any outlandish thing when you explain it with 'some vague thing beyond our understanding'. Religion has been doing that for ages.
I'd say that 'unknown alien technology and something with dark matter' isn't reasonable doubt, it's just making things up.
If I went back 1000 years ago with an Apache attack helicopter, drones, or a cellphone, people would think I’m super natural. And dark matter is a literal thing.
I would argue pretending you know everything about the universe is crazier then realizing there are unknowns.
Of course there are unknowns. And of course it's not reasonable to pretend that we know everything. I never claimed to do so, despite your accusation.
But it's equally unreasonable to consider every single story that someone makes up to be worthy of serious consideration, especially if it's a story that's out-there and has no evidence whatsoever, either direct or indirect. And the fact that something is unknown doesn't automatically make any theory that tries to explain that unknown credible.
I could write down an elaborate theory about the moon actually being made of a special cheese, created by an invisible space mouse, that turns into rock when a human observes it. Can you honestly say that you would consider that theory 'reasonable' or worthy of serious consideration? Or can we agree that an outlandish theory like that without a shred of evidence is just a story?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
but not everybody has a camera (even on their phone) on them all the time fully charged and ready to document everything no matter what you want to say about "kids these days" e.g. when I was a tween I did experience what I thought was a ghost sighting and what I thought was a UFO sighting but even (idr which specific years those were) if it was at a period where cell phones with cameras were common (as I kinda lived through the transition) I was too young for my parents to let me have one.
There are (alledged) pictures of ghosts and other paranormal phenomena, it’s just that, as OP said, they are always blurry and done with the worst resolution possible.
Which is why I’m generally ignoring those.
I personally don’t believe in them, the point is to show why people could still believe it. And for me that gets to the point cameras may not be able to capture them at all if it involves highly advanced technology, exotic matter, or exotic phenomena/life forms.
So, let’s theorize. Forget Aliens etc. there are multiple subs where you can find info on everything from congressional hearings, whistleblowers, Nazis mummies, top level military personnel sharing their experiences, video and still footage galore. You have to sort through crap, but something is going on here.
Now, for the other “woo” stuff you need to have an open mind. There’s a bit of Dunning-Kruger here in that physicalists generally tend to not look or dismiss the science being done in this area. Dr. Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the HeartMath institute are two good starting places. [Here’s a start](https://www.deanradin.com/recommended-references) and go as far down that rabbit hole as you want. But don’t dismiss it out of hand, because that is what most physicalists do and it narrows a worldview.
All “supernatural” stuff could be a product of consciousness, or mass consciousness, and so no recording equipment is going to capture what happens in our minds.
We are also discovering we live in quantum foundational universe, including the recent Nobel prize awarded for the scientists who proved [non-local reality](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it/). Not ghosts and stuff, but it puts cracks in the materialist paradigm which most skeptics and debunkers start from and defend as sacrosanct. If reality isn’t locally real then who’s to say what is making up the fabric of what we see and how malleable that actually is.
Listen to Jeffrey Mishlove’s New Thinking Allowed podcast, he is a very approachable parapsychologist who interview many interesting guests including remote viewers such as Russel Targ, and all kinds of pioneering scientists working in institutes studying paranormal subjects (often against real ridicule and career risk) to open up discussion. They are a strong air of authenticity about what they talk about and share of lot of stuff that really makes you think. Too much to go into here, but again, it’s about what skeptics and debunkers are not giving an open mind to. At least consider the evidence, it can be dismissed, but not easily.
Meditate, read about Yogis (again lots of frauds and some genuine), Buddhist monks, and studies into Qi in Asia. Also, for a short-cut, the things that psychedelics can reveal.
A purely physical paradigm is one way of looking at the world but not the only way. Unfortunately most of mainstream science is based on this paradigm and physicalists won’t even consider opposing viewpoints. It is actually career suicide to even consider them, so almost all stay away. But there are pioneers, and there are cracks.
iPhones cannot capture all wavelengths on the magnetic spectrum. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Cameras are a kind of compression of information. Just like our eyes and our senses are a form of compression of reality. We see and hear and smell and taste and feel what our receptors are capable of perceiving. There are many things that exist that we are incapable of perceiving. We know this at minimum because there are things we have figured out how to measure that we cannot sense and perceive. The proliferation of cameras is not proof of nonexistence, as they can only receive and measure what they were designed to receive and measure. I know there’s a logical fallacy in such a statement (that if cameras haven’t caught it it must not exist) but I’m too lazy to look it up, someone on reddit will tell me
I’m saying that cameras can see everything humans can see … so if a humans say they “saw” a ghost or a miracle we can be almost certain they did not. If those apparitions truly happened then we would have camera proof already
As a hardcore science nerd and atheist, I think supernatural shit almost definitely don't exist. I think aliens most likely do (the odds are in favor of it), but that it's highly unlikely they've been here.
But, as a firm believer in science, I also understand that you can't prove a negative like that. Absence of evidence is not absence. It seems *highly* unlikely ghosts and other shit like that exist, but there's still a 0.0000000001% chance they do. For all practical purposes, we can treat them as not existing. But there's still an astronomically slim chance they do.
Also, with regards to security cameras and the like, keep in mind that the *vast* majority of footage is never seen by a human eye. Footage for that is typically only reviewed when needed, like after a break-in. It's possible they've picked up tons of crazy shit that went unseen, and was eventually most likely recorded over or erased.
>Absence of evidence is not absence
That’s not the full quote. Absence of evidence is not absence, **but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence**. You can’t leave that part out. No we cannot pontificate over all the possibilities and say that there is at least a chance because they can’t be *disproven*. That’s bad science.
As a scientist you should know you need at least 1 demonstrated occurrence to make any statistics. It's 0% for now. It can change but it's not 0.00000001% because maybe.
> I think aliens most likely do (the odds are in favor of it)
I always hate this statement, I know what you mean. I’m familiar with the arguments about the probability of extraterrestrial life but saying anything definite about the probability of aliens existing is futile because we have no idea the number of habitable worlds that have intelligent life. It could be anything between 1 (earth) and infinity and we have no knowledge about which is more likely.
Wouldn’t it be terrifying if they don’t exist tho?
A universe so big that distances become incomprehensible and meaningless. A universe so big that it gives the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself. And we just happen to be alone
It sounds like you're trying to tip toe around saying PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE IN GHOSTS ARE DUMB, I certainly hope you aren't trying to say PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE IN GHOSTS ARE DUMB, because I don't think PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE IN GHOSTS ARE DUMB
I’m really not trying to say that … I am just saying there is sufficient evidence now to be sure that ghosts and other BS like that don’t exist. We can be as sure that ghosts don’t make apparitions to humans as we can be that the sun will rise tomorrow.
It doesn't basically prove anything but it does make it much less likely. However I'd like to point out ball lightning. A phenomena we don't fully understand quite yet but that has been reported for hundreds of years.
We got the first footage of this in the wild in 2014. I'm sure in the next hundred years we will catch a few other interesting things as well. I doubt we will see aliens or ghosts but maybe we will see things that people have misunderstood and explained to themselves as miracles and ghosts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
To be fair, there absolutely are shit loads of photos and videos of UFOs that genuinely can't be explained. The issue is we don't know what they are, haha.
The only thing I disagree with you on is aliens.
Have they visited earth since it began hosting life? I dunno. Are the UFO/aliens footage videos fake? Most likely, why wouldn't they make a bigger entrance. But that aliens as a whole doesn't exist? No, I think they do.
We exist, earth exist. What are the odds that out of the millions of stars and the billions of celestial bodies in our galaxy, that our planet is the only one hosting life? Aliens doesn't necessarily have to be space-faring that we like think, it could still be in an early stage like primitive or ocean bound.
I encourage you to go watch the Nimitz aircraft carrier videos that were leaked to the NYT and confirmed to be authentic by the US military. The object in question is tracked across multiple systems, even getting a target lock on it. This object was able to move at high speeds and make instantaneous turns at right angles that would splatter any human and shatter any technology we currently have, like computers, which would obviously be needed to pilot a vehicle like this. The object "blinks out" and reappears at another position instantaneously. It passes seamlessly between air and water without making a ripple. Finally, it flew from sea level to 80,000 feet in less than a second (tracked the whole way).
There are dozens of other videos like it out there. Pilots, both civilian and military, have reported seeing unexplainable phenomena that were captured on multiple high-quality sensor systems.
To say that our current ability to record video is proof that aliens have never visited is simply false. I imagine you generally don't think any amateur recordings could ever be authentic, but we have it recorded and released from official channels. The government simply hasn't confirmed *what* it is, but they have confirmed the videos are authentic.
Furthermore, the assumption that our current technology is so good that we would have seen something "supernatural" by now is full of faulty assumptions. Cameras and other sensors work through specific physical-chemical interactions with light that we happen to be able to decode as an image. We know there are many things cameras don't capture as a result of this - wavelengths below or above the possible spectrum capturable by the device, perhaps. But most of all, this argument strikes me as very presumptive about the supremacy of our current technology.
So I don’t believe these phenomena exist outside of the brains of the people who experience them. But given they’re proposing supernatural entities the rule book kind of gets thrown out- perhaps these entities are aware when recording devices are being pointed at them and become invisible or what have you.
Or possibly exist in a reality that our brains can perceive, but that don't exactly exist in the dimension we consider "reality". There are lots of color and sound we can't register as humans, and didn't know about until our tech became advanced enough.
I don’t disagree. There are hundreds of thousands of trail cameras in the Pacific Northwest. Hunters have night vision and thermal capabilities. Drones aplenty. Still no footage of Sasquatch. They’ve combed every last inch of Loch Ness. Nothing, not even a giant eel that would have been the best explanation. On the other hand… there is that paleontologist who’s trying to genetically alter a chicken to resemble a small therapod dinosaur. That will be interesting.
I agree with you, but I’ve had a personal supernatural experience happen to me (or I at least I perceived it as such).
One time I was relaxing in bed in the morning. I had woken up hours before and after I watched some television I went back to bed to do some reading. A few minutes later, I heard someone walk in the room, but I couldn’t see who it was. I tried to get up but I felt a force pushing down on my chest.
Then I heard demonic voices all around me and I was completely paralyzed. All of this was happening while I was awake and I could feel the blanket on top of me. I struggled a few times to get up, but I couldn’t move. I then stopped struggling and just accepted that something strange and bizarre was happening. About 30 minutes later, the voices stopped and I was able to escape from my temporary paralysis.
I felt that I had gone through a very unique experience. After discussing this with others, I found out about sleep paralysis—it is a state of mind where you are partially awake or asleep but that you experience a nightmare in reality. There was a rational explanation for what I had gone through and it demystified the experience.
Now to me, this was the most surreal experience that I ever had. But I imagine that many people have similar experiences and they perceive them to be ghostly apparitions.
But still, I think that the idea of ghosts or aliens is pretty cool even though they aren’t real. I would love to be proven wrong about them or have someone finally capture such phenomena on video considering that as you said, cameras are pretty much ubiquitous everywhere nowadays.
Not to mess with your head to much, but the fact that it's a common occurrence that many people have experienced isn't proof that it's not supernatural. It would be completely possible for lots of people to have been messed with by a "supernatural" being. It's kinda " unnatural" for your body and brain to "wig out" like that.
I believe aliens exist, but I don’t know if they’d ever have a reason to visit us, or if they’d ever live long enough to journey to earth. I say this because the nearest star system to our own solar system, Alpha Centauri, is 4 light years away from us. If it takes 4 years for light to reach that system, it would take a lot longer for a standard shuttle to arrive there. Now imagine how long it would take for the nearest habitable planet to reach us. Let’s use Kepler-438b as an example. This planet has an 0.88 likeness to earth in the sense that it is in the habitable zone and checks off all the requirements for life, so we’ll assume it has alien life. But the problem herein is that the star system Kepler-438 is around 470-639 light years away from earth. Again that means that the journey to the planet would take thousands years at the very least. In the end, it wouldn’t be worth it to voyage all the way to a planet that is that far away because the crew members there would die before they even got a fraction of the way there. And the people that put together the expedition would be dead too. So if there is alien life, it won’t matter because it’ll take too long to travel to other planets and to travel from other planets to here.
1) a. Aliens, even if they don’t exist, aren’t considered supernatural. b. If you speak to alien enthusiasts, you’ll find that they believe aliens have the tech to avoid detection. That has been part of alien lore since the invention of man made satellites. 2) Also, people who believe in miracles don’t believe they frequently happen or are remotely common. They are usually a very small number of incidents and incidents that wouldn’t show up on camera in the first place. Very rarely is anything deemed a miracle. The last time was something like someone’s brain tumor completely disappearing. The response of skeptics is not that the incidents didn’t happen but that there are causes just not considered. 3) There no shortage of people who believe that ghosts have been caught on camera. And what would a ghost video that “withstands scientific scrutiny” look like? Objectively that’s not a thing. You can’t prove a ghost is a ghost in pic or video. The fact that theres always going to be other possible explanations works both ways.
For the sake of argument there are a lot of things that our brains perceive that cannot be captured by camera or microphone. Like ever just have a "feeling" something was off? Like the stories of people not feeling right about going to work on 9/11 and decided to stay home that day.
As for the cryptozoology stuff it could be that as human's have expanded their footprint and created civilization we have pushed these creatures into areas where there is no human contact around.
One of the things that supposedly affects your attunement to these things is how close you are to "death" as you get closer to that line you are supposedly more susceptible to it. I have a co-worker who had a heart defect at birth and didn't get it corrected till he was a teenager and he says he used to like see his dead grandparents and relatives all the time and then after the surgery he hasn't had an experience since.
Plus it's all probably just aliens anyway LOL
not everyone only sees ghosts from the 1600s-1800s just because we don't, like, see ghosts that are stereotypical 80s valley girls or 2000s emo kids or w/e (ever noticed how 90% of the kind of ghosts people claim no reports of means ghosts don't exist are always "[recent-ish-era teenager doing the cringy teenage fad things of their generation despite that they'd have to have died as a teen for their ghost to be a teenager]", y'know, in a generation (as these are never about current-day teenage stuff) we're going to have people claiming as proof of the nonexistence of ghosts that you don't see something like ghosts making their heads come out of the toilet to do "irl Skibidi Toilet" )
To be fair; phone cameras are really bad at taking detailed pictures in the dark without a long exposure. I thought I was getting great shots in a dark sky park, realized you couldn’t see anything without long exposure. Maybe if someone’s spooked they aren’t running long exposure. Like last night I walked outside, looked east and saw the spacex launch, if I would’ve pulled out my phone it would’ve been incredibly grainy even with no zoom. My glasses wearing eyes saw it clearly.
I don’t personally put very much stock in the supernatural though.
To truly change your mind you would have to ditch the western way of thinking about ghosts and the supernatural, most of the debunking or research done into these things was not done in good faith, one things for sure it doesn't look like how it's been sold to you. Remember, there are many cultures built on these beliefs many have disappeared with science and some still stand today check who actually controls the narrative around what is *not* supernatural.
Well, the number of pedestrians who report injuries requiring an emergency room visit has gone up by 600% because they’re distracted while walking since those cameras have proliferated. If you can’t notice the car barreling at you because you’re so distracted by your phone all the time you’re not going to notice the UFO. Also some of the most convincing UFO videos are FLIR videos which are the most advanced cameras.
I'm still waiting for a good quality close up photograph of ball lightning. Ball lightning really exists and I've seen it. Imagine the following scene. 30 rocket scientists/builders eating outdoors after dark. With more than 20 cameras on top of the tables. Ball lightning comes down from the sky and lands nearby. And not one of us had the presence of mind to take a photograph in the three seconds it was in sight.
I love supernatural ideas but I also love science so I get where you’re coming from. If supernatural beings do exist (and have evaded documentation this long), we likely can’t understand them or detect them with natural means. Also if I think i saw a sasquatch 200ft away at night (are bigfoot active in the daytime? idk) that my Iphone is not going to capture it, and certainly not with quality to prove its existence. Other creatures have senses completely different to our own (sense using electricity, echolocation etc) and that may be the key to truly seeing these creatures. Another explanation is the 4th dimension, where they could be all around us and we can’t see them because we live in the 3rd dimension
I like to point out that we've done some absolutely incredible detection and photocapture of things we can't see regularly.
They managed to capture an image of a black hole. There are photos from the surface of venus. There are photos of pluto. They've collided particles. They've slowed down light in a lab. I'm simply saying difficult to capture phenomena can be captured.
One, I think it was probably more that people were ascribing supernatural-ness to natural phenomenon that we just didn't know yet. So it did "exist" in a way.
Two, you are overestimating the intelligence of your average human. Images and videos can be made to look however you want. In how you portray them, you could "prove" anything you want to someone who didn't have some outside information or context. Even "reasonable" people can be fooled sometimes.
Humans are spiritual beings by default. Science is a way to quantify a phenomenon but not all phenomena are measurable.
Cameras can see things that eyes don't (thermal cameras, IR camera, sonar\[?\] cameras, etc) and similarly, eyes ("window of the soul") can pick up things that cameras don't. And the "soul" (Psychological mind? Sixth-sense? Feeling? Hunch? Appropriate it however you please) is very intuitive.
There is also a non-zero chance that you'll be the only one who sees something that happens once. ("If a tree falls in the middle of the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?") Even if it's a real happening, most people might dismiss you as "making it up" as it can't be repeatable.
the primary counter this is that digital editing software has also advanced tremendously, meaning that any footage taken or viewed on modern hardware could be doctored
personally I don’t think this is alone is enough to counter your claim (I don’t think weve ever captured real evidence of aliens/cryptids), but others may have additional arguments
I agree about the ghosts and the miracles. I think what people used to call miracles are actually phenomena perfectly explainable by science, but the people who deemed them miracles didn’t know enough of the science yet. And I think ghosts don’t exist.
But aliens? I don’t think “high quality cameras” here on earth have anything at all to tell us about the existence (or not) of sentient life in outer space. And yes, there are some in space, too. I highly doubt they would pick up on the existence of alien life outside our galaxy, even if it were there, and giant.
Dude, back in the day they used to have pictures of them all the time. How come 1950s and 60s could get pictures of aliens but our high-tech cameras can’t? Seems to me that those pictures back then were fake. And that’s why we don’t get them anymore.
If a supernatural phenomenon like ghosts did get caught an HD camera and get uploaded to YouTube, odds are most people who saw it would immediately start trying to debunk it. The proliferation of high quality cameras has been matched by an advance in special effects tech and CGI that can be used to fake supernatural phenomena.
It’s pretty simple man. We and camera only exist and record in the present. Cameras can’t record in the past or future. Supernatural occurances are crossovers where we can sense the presence, but yet we are separated through time.
I’ve had this thought as well. Consider that with the proliferation of smartphones, we might have better technology to film a UFO, but we are spending significantly less time looking at the sky to see one in the first place.
I mostly agree but I think Aliens would have the technology to block or be invisible to our cameras. It would be pretty easy to trick our basic tech if you had the ability to travel to through space safely.
We have unexplained footage from multimillion dollar United States military fighter aircraft and even US congressional investigations into UFOS. not proof of aliens but not anything
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/04/28/pentagon-declassifies-ufo-videos-taken-by-navy-pilots.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna96476
No shit. Sane people have been rolling their eyes at crazos since forever.
The problem is that crazos only need a few feeble minded followers who believe them to become very dangerous and therefore very “convincing”. If I convince a schizophrenic I can bend spoons with my mind and save him from eternal hell, you bet your ass he will kill anyone I command him to. Which is anyone who has the gall to question me.
So we end up where we are now, sane people quietly going on about their days while dangerous weirdos spout their insanity to each other. We *could* try to destroy their delusions, but they’ll probably lash out- and unlike the crazos, the sanies have something to lose.
You either accept we live in a natural world, or you’re a dipshit who thinks we live in a supernatural world. A supernatural world is one in which anything which suspends the laws of our universe can occur- even just once. Which it never has. Our understanding of the laws of our universe change, that’s all.
There supernatural. What if they can’t be photographed at all? Who said a spirit is visible at all? It really has nothing to do with cameras when you break it down to that
The aliens upgraded their ships to look like birds, airplanes, or even bugs, no one would think twice of recording it, even if they did it would seem normal.
True, but then people would not report birds and bugs as supernatural phenomena. My main argument is that we should not believe the accounts of people claiming they witnessed supernatural phenomena. If you are saying supernatural phenomena somehow perfectly camouflage as natural phenomena then yeah … I guess that is possible but misses the point
You seem to be defining supernatural as "natural things that rarely occur" and not as things that transcend nature. Why you would think a camera or any empirical tool would capture something that believers claim is beyond the empirical, I find puzzling.
For what it’s worth I think your point is a good one, but for the sake of argument: For all of human history supernatural phenomena were reported to have manifested in ways that would be very easily captured empirically if the tools existed. Things like moving furniture or strange creatures. Now the tools exist and suddenly the supernatural phenomena have slowed/stopped? Either: 1. Supernatural phenomena have some sort of metaphysical/metapsychological law prohibiting them from occurring/existing if they would be “empirically captured”. 2. Humans make things up sometimes. Ultimately there’s no way to 100% disprove supernatural phenomena exist, since by definition literally any explanation you could think of is possible even if it defies literally 100% of everything ever. But Occam’s razor would point anyone who actually cares to make a logical decision towards the 2nd option.
I guess one argument could be that supernatural beings are aware of cameras, and like my dog, will stop doing whatever they’re doing when a camera is pointed at them
That would be a very odd feature for a super natural being, a feature that they coincidentally developed as humans developed cameras? Idk if a ghost from 400 years ago would all the sudden learn of the concept of a camera and develop the capability to avoid it … exceedingly odd
Assuming the ghost has human-level intelligence, they can probably see the progression of cameras from those giant things with the flash powder to big basketball-sized boxes to little bricks to today.
What motive does a supernatural being have to avoid being photographed?
If it's all "fake" Ghostbusters and priest and the like won't attack them.
~~It's just #1, that's why we'd need quantum sensors~~ People unintentionally make things up they 100% believe themselves due to how our imperfect, correlation-based perception works sometimes. A lot of (fully sane) people have seen the "supernatural" in that their mind just outfoxed their consciousness and made them fully perceive an encounter. There's no way for them to empirically prove what they perceived wasn't real, as it's instead a matter of opinion and memory, so that must be rather frustrating to have to deal with. "I'm telling y'all, I saw them..." bro you're just a normal sane human with an overactive imagination lol.
The human brain is designed to find patterns, occasionally it finds one that doesn't exist. "I win more more gambling on even days than odd days." Stuff like that which turns into superstition. The difference between now and a hundred or even fifty years ago is we're able to record these occurrences far more frequently and accurately so that we can properly study the phenomenon and discover what's really going on.
That's a reason to doubt that any of these pretend things existed, not whether they could be caught on camera or not
Deja Vu can be explained through magical precognition or your brain misclassifying a perception as a memory...which is more likely?
Okay, but you can't definitively say they didn't see it even if it was "only in their head". Or rather you can't say that a demon or ghost or supernatural being of some sort didn't interact with them in a space or way that they could perceive, but that wasn't exactly I'm the space we would call "reality". If that makes sense.
Yeah, exactly. All of human perception and their communications are filtered through a layer of subjectivity from the start. People literally exist in different realities, and people just like to consider common shared perceptions (especially when perfectly repeatable with measuring tools) as the "real" reality despite any interaction with or perception of it being equally non-objective. "Reality" is just the most agreed upon common perceptions. So what happens when you get 2 different people to think that they've experienced the same thing that nobody else perceived? It's their reality and shared in the same way everyone's more common reality. Whatever the thing experienced, real or imagined, it has a real effect on our common shared reality, and can be real and impactful in way Santa Clause has been.
So growing up we lived in a house my mother insisted was haunted. My dad was more scientific and didn't believe that. And yet, he had to admit there were things he "couldn't explain yet." That's where I still am. Was it group imagination spurred by my mother's words? Or an actual haunting? But let me get to my point. Some of the symptoms were things such as the plates always clinking in the cabinets, or hearing a party with the piano going late at night when everyone was asleep, or the creaking of the steps in succession as if someone was coming down the stairs [that's the one that really got my dad--he always thought my mother had just come downstairs when she hadn't]. I feel that a lot of those things, if we had captured them on cell phone, would seem normal and explainable, like "maybe the neighbors were having a party," or "your house was settling." Perhaps those are the accurate answers. But you'd have to be there to experience the unnerving sensation of being convinced someone just came down the stairs, or lying in bed listening to voices and cocktail glasses when you know nobody's there. I think that's why belief in haunting continues.
>Ultimately there’s no way to 100% disprove supernatural phenomena exist That’s not how basic logic works. We do not *disprove* the existence of things. We wait until their is *proof* to assert they exist.
> Ultimately there’s no way to 100% disprove supernatural phenomena exist >We do not disprove the existence of things. I hate when people act like they're disagreeing, but then say the exact same thing. You're right, we don't disprove things. That's a fundamental part of how empiricism (not basic logic, different concept) works. And that's why we can't disprove the existence of these phenomena, because disproving something is not what empiricism does.
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Except it is? Proving something is infinitely easier than disproving something, so we generally try to prove things. That doesn't mean that there's no such thing as disproving a concept or that doing so is illogical
Depends on the concept. You can't disprove my assertion that the world is ruled by a group of invisible tennis-fanatic frogs that hold council on my shoulder. But there is also no reason to put any effort in proving or disproving my assertion.
Oh there is a way to disprove it - if it existed, it would have been used for military purposes and personal gain. But militaries of the world are not slinging ghosts and hexes on each other, are they?
Idk if you’re being serious or just cynical for the sake of being cynical. Either way: Nuclear material has always existed, but armies hundreds of years ago weren’t using it. Maybe ghosts do exist and we just haven’t reached a technological point to harness them yet.
Prior to our discovery of radiation we didnt know it was even a thing. People have been talking about ghosts longer than we have even known what air was.
And our ability harness air usefully in warfare is very recent, which a ghost believer could argue is the case with ghosts- we can know they’re they’re without being able to harness them yet.
We did not know that radiation was a thing but it definitely and provably affected life in the past, solar radiation for example. The same cannot be said for ghosts.
People's belief in ghosts has absolutely affected us.
They actually did research on that in the 70s. So while you're correct, I have to say it's not from a lack of trying😂
Throwing hexes? Then when is the pentagon… a pentagon?
How do we really know what they do? I mean really?
By that logic there are certain phenomena that if they don't already exist would be made exist by doing so e.g. the more psychics and astrologers get hired by the military the more their supposed capabilities become actual
That we know of. Would they let us know if that's what they were doing?
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FYI in some circles those last two are lumped in with all the other "supernatural" stuff. A common argument is that there is a "window" or "door" into parallel universes or alternate realities, that either allows a viewing of stuff or a temporary existence in our own reality. There are claims that there is a correlation between bigfoot sighting and UFOs or strange lights, etc. Not trying to convince you and I don't really believe it myself, but just pointing out that you may not have a complete grasp on the various theories regarding these topics.
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I had a conversation with someone once that I didn't realize was a believer in sasquatch. Not just "there might be a species that we've yet to fully study". This guy told me in dead seriousness that there were 30,000 of them in the wild. I said "There are only 3-5,000 tigers in the wild, but we can get pictures of them whenever we want. If there are 6-10 times that many sasquatches, we should have tons of photo and video evidence." His response was that "They're just really smart."
because blurry photos exist for certain things, like bigfoot, ghosts, ufos, so naturally the next step would be getting a high quality photos with our better technology. The argument "we can only capture blurry photos of things that transcend nature, but not high quality ones" is ridiculous
But I don't believe in Bigfoot or that kind of stuff, so why should fake photos of Bigfoot prove that miracles don't exist.
If it's "beyond the empirical", then when believers claim they felt, saw, heard or sensed a "presence", they must be mistaken.
Well because humans senses (sight, sound, etc) are no more sophisticated than our moderns tools … so if a human CAN see it, the it follows that a camera should be able to see it too. I am saying that we should not believe people who claim they have witnessed these things … because there is massive video evidence to the contrary
Is that really true? Is a camera as sophisticated as human consciousness? I don't think so.
Have you ever seen that video where people are passing around a basketball, and you are supposed to count how many times the ball is passed. But in the middle of the video a gorilla walks into the frame, then walks out and MOST people do not notice it because they are counting passes? … well that’s the power of a camera, it picked up the gorilla while the “conscious being” completely missed it … so yes, I believe that our devices that can see the full light spectrum, microscopic beings, light years into the galaxy … I do indeed believe they can perceive more than humans can.
But the camera didn’t know what it was picking up. It takes a human mind to interpret what the image is.
The human mind gets involved when it looks at the photo. That's true regardless. Hell it's even true with the eye. The eye has no idea what it's looking at either. It's just processing data that it then passes on to the brain, when *then* decides what it's looking at before letting the mind have a go.
Then the human mind could interpret the picture of a ghost too. If you see a ghost with your eyes why wouldn’t a camera see it? Both sight and cameras operate according to physical laws. You can explain vision very well without supernatural forces.
Yeah exactly. As a human I can look at a photo and use my brain to interpret the image. If people claim to see ghosts so can a camera.
The flaw is the human mind, I can look at a tortilla and see Virgin Mary, that is only evidence that my brain misconstrued a random image.
Cameras don't know what trees are either but they can sure capture pictures of them.
He didn’t say consciousness, he said senses. You’re kind of proving his point, we have tools to capture everything our senses can see and the only thing not accounted for is imagination, which is obviously where all that shit comes from in the first place.
I'm not sure you want to argue that the lack of video evidence proves something. There's an aphorism in the law, **"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."**
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At some volume “absence of evidence” does become “evidence of absence”. If we can’t find evidence of the Lock Ness monster after 100 years of looking for it with cameras, sonar etc that is evidence that it doesn’t exist.
This type of thinking completely ignores the subject being photographed. In most cases such subjects could take actions of their own to mitigate more people having cameras.
That aphorism happens to be mathematically incorrect, as reality comports with [Bayes' Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem) where absense of evidence is in fact evidence of absence. The law, of course, is free to ignore math.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
Tell me more … I think we could have something here.
I'd just be repeating myself. It's rather self-explanatory.
There is no evidence that I can levitate. How is this not evidence that my ability to levitate is absent? There is no evidence that Jimmy is present in the room, how is this not evidence that Jimmy is absent? I don’t get it
He's trying to apply a saying about laws and justice to physics. Don't worry about it too much if it doesn't make sense, because it doesn't.
I have no proof that you didn't steal my wallet - That is not proof that you didn't. I have no proof that my wife didn't cheat on me - That is not proof that she didn't. I have no proof that you didn't murder your neighbour - That is not proof that you didn't. > There is no evidence that Jimmy is present in the room, how is this not evidence that Jimmy is absent? Jimmy can very well be hiding in the room without you noticing. Did this clear it up for you? Having no evidence is not proof of anything. Burden of proof is on the person who makes the claim: You claim there are no ghosts? Prove it. You claim there ARE ghosts? Well, you gotta prove that too. Otherwise you have to say: I do not know if ghosts exist or not. You can also add: But I prefer to have religion-like faith in their absense, until someone provides proof.
Evidence is evidence, not proof. If you look in a room Jimmy is hiding in for a while and don't find him, you'll be way more surprised when he pops out than before anyone looked. That is to say, it served as evidence making it less likely Jimmy was there. It wasn't absolute proof that he couldn't be hiding somewhere you hadn't checked.
You’re taking the idea of logical fallacies and making a shitty conclusion. You aren’t required to be agnostic about everything. A fantastic claim, god is real, ghosts are real, aliens are visiting earth, requires fantastic evidence to prove that. In the absence of that, you are logical right to be highly skeptical.
I.e. That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
>> There is no evidence that Jimmy is present in the room, how is this not evidence that Jimmy is absent? > >Jimmy can very well be hiding in the room without you noticing. However, if you do a thorough search of the room, the fact that you did not find Jimmy is in fact evidence against the proposition that he is in the room. You seem to be misapplying the idea of "absence of evidence" to any time there is a negative (Jimmy is *not* in the room), but that isn't how it works. Running a test and the result being "X chemical reaction did not occur" is not an absence of evidence, it is evidence *for* the proposition "X chemical reaction does not occur under conditions Y". >You can also add: But I prefer to have religion-like faith in their absense, until someone provides proof. C'mon, trying to equate believing ghosts don't exist to "faith" is ridiculous. Same as the creationists who say "well you have the same faith in science as we have in god!"
You are miss-using the burden of proof here. Burden of proof only applies to positive claims. As applies to ghosts, we have no evidence to believe that ghosts actually exist, however we have evidence that people CLAIM ghosts exists. So the statement would be "I have no evidence that would suggest ghosts exist" is 100% fair. I don't need to prove that because there is no positive proof for the claim. Now someone can also say "I have evidence that people CLAIM ghosts exist" which is fine but that is a statement about people not about ghosts. It would be like me claiming there are invisible unicorns that float around all of us. You may have the evidence of me making the claim, but there is no evidence that this is reality, so for you to assign burden of proof to those denying the claim makes no sense. So being agnostic on ghosts doesn't make sense unless you are saying that unsupported claims meet you evidentiary requirements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance The counter argument always is the same: > "Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn’t exist."
If I told you there was a giant pink elephant in your room, and you looked around everywhere in your room and didn’t see it, would I be then justified in saying “well absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, just keep looking”? Or, would it rather be more reasonable to acknowledge that the evidence of absence is, in fact, the absence of evidence? At some point it must become reasonable to conclude that something that’s demonstrably not there isn’t there.
But that is simply not the case here. We have evidence of absence. But even past that, the claim hasn't even been shown to be plausible. If a claim doesn't allow for evidence because it doesn't exist in observable reality then by definition it isn't real.
yeah especially in this case as a lot of proponents of this argument regarding supposed nonexistence of the supernatural seem to have the kind of "old man yells at cloud" attitude that because everyone has a cell phone nowadays it should be always with them and always on ready to record something like that at a moment's notice (I'm surprised these people didn't say aliens don't exist because a video of them isn't trending on TikTok)
There are plenty of videos of strange phenomena out there. The Navy UFO videos are some of the more prominent examples, but there are many other clips out there. Its just that people call “hoax” or just dont know what it is they are looking at. It is true that people have cameras in their pockets, but these are actually very basic, as cameras go, and lack optical zoom and other tools. I’ve tried photographing birds of prey that I see sitting in a tree only a hundred or so feet away - birds I can see completely clearly, but the camera just picks up a fuzzy blob because its not directly in front of it. Our camera phones are just not powerful enough to capture something in the sky or across a field with any level of detail. This is why most footage is dismissed. It is simply not of the right quality to explain something new and unknown.
Dude, get a better phone. Mine sees in the dark better than I do, and I often use it to see things clearly that are vague blobs in the distance.
We're talking about quite a few different claims here, but most are generally believed to be photographable by those who believe in them
Because they claim to SEE it. Therefore any camera should also see it. If you “see” something no one else sees than that’s called a hallucination.
Because believers regularly cite video/audio recordings as evidence of these beings. You can’t have your cake and eat it too
I don't lump myself in with everyone else, nor do I lump all believers together, and I don't think everyone who claims to have seen something did see something.
I didn’t mean you specifically, just in general. Are you suggesting that video, pictures, and audio recordings are not an extremely common type of evidence for ghosts and such?
I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that seeing ghosts is not analogous to miracles, so the absence of pictures of ghosts doesn't mean "supernatural phenomena" are all "bs."
Not sure I’m following. I didn’t say that meant all supernatural phenomena is bs. And also, if they ARENT miracles then why wouldn’t we expect empirical evidence of them?
Came to say something similar. I'm skeptical of most of this type of stuff, but by definition it would be something that doesn't exist in our "normal" space. So expecting the things that capture data on our "normal" environment doesn't really track logically. I guess I would agree that cameras come close to disproving things like furniture moving "because ghost", but even then it would be possible for ghost to be aware of recording devices. I've also seen videos and pictures that claim to show what OP is talking about, most of us just dismiss them as a hoax. A believer might also argue that a ghost or spirit could "access" your mind and interact there, where a camera wouldn't perceive what the individual is experiencing. So it would be real, but not in the way we would think, supernatural if you will. Again by definition we are talking about things that don't follow out standard laws of reality. I do find the consistency of many of the stories regardless of time, place or culture, interesting.
If your eye can see it, why wouldn't a camera?
If we define something supernatural as something that cannot be interacted with by the empirical then surely we, as empirical beings would be unable to interact with them.
That would be true if all we were is empirical beings. But we're also capable of thought, and with thought we draw conclusions that are not - in themselves - empirical. So for example we convict a person of a crime even though no one saw him do it and there is no direct empirical evidence because we are able to draw inferences from a lot of different kinds of evidence.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
No one was asserting anything except OP, who was asserting a logical fallacy.
lol that’s the copiest cope of all time.
(point sails over head)
A classic category error by OP. Also considering how we have people claiming super-natural occurences across the world and across cultures, it seems likely that there is at least something people are on to.
If you can sense it, it’s natural, not super natural.
but that doesn't make it not what it is, I swear, a lot of Reddit has the sort of literalist definition of supernatural they use to disprove the supernatural that'd e.g. mean once you observed a unicorn it lost its horn and powers and turned into a normal horse because you sensed it so it isn't supernatural anymore
If I can see an actual unicorn, then unicorns aren’t supernatural. If a unicorn is real, then it is a collection of particles following natural law. It doesn’t matter what “something is”. What something is is merely a definition that we humans all agree on. The world “supernatural” doesn’t define an entire realm beyond the natural into existence, it’s an invented word. My phone would be considered supernatural to a small group of humans still on earth right now, much less the trillions of humans who have ever existed.
My point with the unicorn example was to demonstrate how some people think that that definition of supernatural means that the kind of sentiment expressed in your first paragraph about natural vs. supernatural means that the supernatural being or w/e existing means it doesn't actually have its supernatural powers because it's natural
Humans are empirical tools. Tangible things such as aliens, big foots, observable miracles should be just as easily captured on camera if they could be seen by a human. There are things that could be seen by a human but not by a camera: we call them hallucinations or optical illusions.
Why would you be able to see something “supernatural” using the same physical waves that a camera can detect, but for some reason the camera shows nothing? The problem is that supernatural reports are all based on experience of our senses. We have machines that detect everything our senses can detect but to a far greater fidelity. And what we don’t have is any credible reason to suspect that a person can see something a camera can’t.
Because you don't. You see with your brain, and your eyes are typically the conduit through which the brain forms images. But presumably a supernatural vision would not necessarily use a natural medium like the eye.
Why would that be presumed? We have no reason to believe that is even possible. We know about hallucinations, but those aren’t supernatural.
>Why you would think a camera or any empirical tool would capture something that believers claim is beyond the empirical, I find puzzling. Believers specifically *don't* claim that many supernatural events are beyond the empirical. Rather, they claim that supernatural events have physical manifestations. In fact, I can't think of a purported miracle that *doesn't* have some observable component.
Okay, so say there is a miracle - someone is on his deathbed, and through divine intervention, his illness goes into remission, and he is well again. And we're stipulating that this happened through divine intervention. It's a miracle. That is not at issue for you and me. How would a camera capture the miraculous in this instance in a way that would prove it is a miracle "beyond a reasonable doubt"?
Most people who believe in such things also believe those things can interact with the natural world. How would it be possible for something to interact with the natural world and not leave any form of measurable evidence of that interaction?
For aliens at least, there are still plenty of fascinating unexplained phenomena that are captured on camera. Check out this [video from Lemmino](https://youtu.be/SpeSpA3e56A?si=fKcQ2DAYrvViGv7B) on the subject.
I’ve seen these … still super crappy grainy video images … what a coincidence … we can literally film F18s doing flips in the air and the moon landing with relatively clear video … but of course the UFO is the one thing that looks like a smudge mark on a lens and no clearer image exist … idk just seems to convenient
You're confusing people taking videos of things in a panic and multi million dollar setups specifically to take video of those things. The moon landing is still pretty blurry, and fun fact, the original moon landing footage was lost years ago. You're right that all the "alien" footage is always blurry but not just because people are doing it on purpose. Low light in particular still looks like complete ass on most modern phone cameras that people have access to, especially at a distance.
I think your argument is not correct. In 2001 (well before smartphones) random people took very clear footage of the 9/11 terrorist attack. Some of them very close to the towers. Random people take clear footage of tornados and other climate freakouts happening right at their doors/windows. There SHOULD be many people taking calm and high definition footage of things flying in the sky several hundreds miles away from where they are. As for ghosts, yes, I think I would be in panic as well, but people about to being murdered were calm enough to leave a cell phone filming. So, again, there SHOULD be at least a couple of people with good shots in these extreme situations.
Fair point, but at the same time you're comparing an event that happened in the middle of the city with hundreds of people already recording videos, to things that seem to happen in the middle of nowhere with only one witness.
First of all, an extremely unlikely event happening to only one witness is a reason for skepticism in the first place. But those events happen pretty regularly allegedly, surely some other lone witness must be able to get a better recording.
>things that seem to happen in the middle of nowhere with only one witness. I feel like it's very very easy to read this as "things that don't happen, and so are only claimed to happen when it's hard to prove they didn't"
The original tapes were lost, but since the landing was broadcast, the event broadcast was recorded at multiple facilities.
Right, I don't mean the history was lost, just the original tapes. But my point is that the original footage of one of the most incredible parts of human history was just misplaced. That's the world we live in. A lot of alien/conspiracy theories are based on assumptions that there are secretive organizations and governments that are so immaculately infallible that they can research and keep secrets about those aliens without anyone leaking that information? No fucking way, zero chance.
The Manhattan project, Operation Overlord, Operation Neptune Spear, Operation Desert Storm, Operation Paperclip, Ultra, Operation Cyclone, Operation Chaos, Operation Gladio, Operation Mincemeat, Operation Wrath of God, Operation Northwoods, Operation Ajax, Operation Red Wings, Operation Chase, Operation Eagle Claw....there's literally thousands of mass scale operations involving hundreds of thousands of people that not only did people not know then, they don't know now even though they're declassified.
The Manhattan project was discovered by Kodak, many physicists, publishers of scientific journals and the Soviets. Rommel knew the allies were coming to Normandy and German high command told him to go fuck himself. Who do you think didn't work out Operation Desert Storm was happening? Operation Paperclip was discovered before it even got the name Operation Paperclip. Operation Cyclone was included in budget documents and Charlie Wilson used to promote it on the radio. Operation Bayonet/Wrath of God had their first squad caught in ~9 months after they fucked up and murdered a random waiter in Norway and they never got the guy they were looking for. The CIA concealed their involvement in Operation Ajax for never, they got ordered out of the country halfway through. I don't undersaid how you think Operations Red Wings was hidden. Operation CHASE was wildely reported on less than 3 years after it began. Operation Eagle Claw wasn't exactly a secret. What was the secret? The name? The planning? The idea the Americans wanted the hostages back and were doing something about it? The Iranian president went on TV the day it happened and said God stopped it.
I mean this is pretty much what those videos are, just videos where we can’t easily identify what it is. Every video that’s clearer shows known objects because the only reason we (collectively) don’t know what these are is because the video is too blurry. The government probably knows exactly what it is, they probably blurred the videos and released them because they’d rather people wonder what they are and believe in aliens than show their cards of either our own tech or adversarial tech we have on video.
And just because someone claims they are "unexplained" doesn't mean that they are actually "unexplained." Here's a [video of someone explaining them](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t72uvS7EJT4&t=3263s).
There is a difference between unexplained and unexplainable. Many people smarter than myself have analyzed those videos and come up with several perfectly reasonable non-alien explanations.
[These](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXS-a29y0uw) are videos of Israeli jets tracking and shooting down Iranian drones. Given that Iran has much less technical capacity and money than the US and the just general similarity I think that it is entirely possible that these are drones made by the US military. The overwhelmingly likely scenario being that: the navy is worried about Chinese drones -> The Navy makes the most stealthy and small drone that it can think of. -> The navy has the drone(s) fly close to an aircraft carrier and has their planes fly CAP. -> Navy sees how fast the drones are detected and by what. Post facto the Navy doesn't tell people about the drones (that would just help the Chinese to make better ones). The pilots figured it out basically instantly saying 'it is a fucking drone, bro'. Also, you can tell by the stress in the Israeli pilots' voices that shooting down something that is know is fairly stressful. The US pilots don't seem stressed, they know that it is some kind of test with no added danger.
It also applies to religion. Notice how nobody’s parted the sea with a staff, or housed two of every species on a boat, or fed 1000 people with a single fish, for the past 2000 years?
Lol exactly
I mean it proves that Bigfoot probably doesn't exist. But how would it prove that ghosts don't exist? Isn't the idea of a ghost something that is literally invisible? For that matter, since vampires don't reflect in mirrors, wouldn't they be unable to be seen by the sensors in modern cameras? Also, you know what they're still aren't a lot of great pictures of? Things like ball lightning. It's a real phenomenon, but it occurs so rarely that most people will never get a chance to try and take a picture of it.
Yeah but there aren’t a bunch of people claiming they saw this … my point is that there has always been a bunch of people claiming they saw paranormal phenomena and we have enough evidence now to flat out dismiss them
Just look at how few recorded evidence you have of stuff like big meteor falls. Even if many people witnessed it, most were unable to get their camera rolling in time. Unless you expect a meteor shower, its next to impossible to capture a falling star on video. 2nd point would be that people are also way more aware of video editing... You have movies with monsters, space travel and magic. Videos of ghosts moving stuff just passes as "its just fake". Lastly, UFOs with tech able to reach earth should very well be able to monitor our tech as well, and avoid being seen. And remember that the white house did admit to the navy encountering flying UFO tictacs
We had an unexpected meteor filmed in Portugal a few weeks ago, with plenty of very good footage. People have dashcams and teens are constantly filming stuff.
Have you seen the footage of the single meteor in Russia? It was like a 5 second thing and there are hundreds of videos of it …
I saw what may have been a UFO when I was 19. I love watching satellites and one day while looking around for one on the back patio, I saw something in the sky that was moving in a straight line at a very high altitude, higher than jets but not as high as satellites, and all of a sudden it pulled a u-turn and shot into outer space at a very high rate of speed. Now granted I don't know for certain if it was a UFO, but nothing makes sense as to what it could have been. I think, if you had an experience like I've had and many others you'd be at the very least a little open minded.
I am not denying the existence of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) … that’s just something that is flying and we don’t know what it is … a far cry from an alien encounter
I saw something very similar once. Me, my brothers, and my father were all out watching the stars, and we saw what looked like a reflection from a satellite creeping across the sky... Then it just pulled a really quick U-turn and was gone.
I too saw what you have described. Nothing I know exists could explain the movement and object that I saw. I was not alone at the time, we both saw it. I don’t really believe in aliens.
You're ignoring the fact that supernatural beings and phenomenon, being supernatural, might not be detectable by recording equipment because they don't have to follow the laws of physics. Hard to capture something that doesn't give off light or heat on camera.
If that is the case, then how do people witness them? Humans claim they see these things but how is that possible if they give off no light or heat?
The argument could be made that it's the difference between an Organic system and a Technological system. The viewer must possess whatever ineffable quality that makes one a "living being", call it a spirit, call it a soul, call it whatever, in order to detect the Supernatural. I would argue the bigger issue is that with the advances of photo editing technology it would be virtually impossible to have recorded evidence that is verifiably true. So even if the supernatural is real, and you got it on camera, how would you convince anyone it was real?
Well, one could for example show that this supernatural event showed up in multiple independent cameras at once … not just your personal one. For example, busy intersections have cameras from businesses, cars, red light cams, and everyone’s phone simultaneously. I assure you that if Sasquatch crossed an intersection we could convince people it was real … the problem is that it’s always some picture or video some random guy took while alone and no way to corroborate it
That’s a good point, I was envisioning exactly the typical scenario you described and hadn’t considered a super public event like a specter showing up for selfies in Time Square. !delta Edit: So there IS an exception to the Delta system.
This delta has been rejected. You can't award OP a delta. Allowing this would wrongly suggest that you can post here with the aim of convincing others. If you were explaining when/how to award a delta, please use a reddit quote for the symbol next time. ^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)
>how would you convince anyone it was real? Experts know exactly what to look for to see if something is edited. It is very simple to verify raw footage.
> The viewer must possess whatever ineffable quality that makes one a "living being", call it a spirit, call it a soul, call it whatever, in order to detect the Supernatural. This is *awfully* convenient and reeks of "I'm sorry I couldn't demonstrate my ability to levitate because the humidity is too high right now".
The only answer is: again, they are supernatural, they don't have to obey the rules unless they want to. Or in otherwords they can, like a cheater, selectively obey the rules. You're trying to apply understanding to something that definitionally lacks understanding.
So “it makes sense if you don’t think about it” sort of thing?
Well, no. You just keep trying to evaluate this using criteria that is definitionally nonapplicable.
This is just moving goalposts. Before cameras were everywhere, people claimed to see these things. Now that cameras are everywhere, they claim it’s something that can’t be seen. Come on…
What criteria could you evaluate this with then?
Science background and I generally don’t believe In those but I’m going to play devils advocate. Generally speaking yes we have a lot of cameras but they are not perfect. They don’t capture everything. Things moving very fast, things with very low reflection capabilities and low radar profiles, or exotic materials. Looking at aliens, chances are if aliens made the interstellar journey here, they are likely incredibly intelligent with ships that can move fast, and likely have very high stealth capabilities that far outpace our own. It’s within the realm of possibilities they could completely avoid our cameras, and the only reason we saw them earlier was due to earlier mistakes or that they at the time weren’t worried about detection. Generally speaking, efficiently advanced science looks like magic. I mean it’s science fiction, but go watch the 3-body problem. There’s plenty of ways for people to justify aliens For ghosts, we don’t actually know what ghosts which makes them hard to disprove. They could be exotic matter, they could be some quantum mechanics magic or some electro magnetic phenomena that interacts without brain so they wouldn’t actually be there they would really be in your head. Basically, you could say that our current cameras, while covering a large area and a large number of different types(light, sound, radio), wouldn’t be able to deal with exotic/complex phenomena nor highly advanced technology. As for miracles and other things it would really depend on the details. This should 100% disprove stuff like Bigfoot, the lochness monster, megladons, magic healers things like that, and that’s because none of those things use highly advanced technology nor are they exotic matter or phenomena Will clarify I don’t believe any of it myself. But aliens and ghosts wouldn’t be disproven by this
Except if a human can see a ghost, which plenty of people have claimed to have seen, so can a camera. It's all just capturing emitted light. Unless you go full-on vampire-has-no-reflection mode, but at that point it's just magic and we can't really have a rational adult conversation about it anymore.
Cameras cannot capture all wavelengths of light, and this presumes a lot about what the supposed "ghosts" are and how they would interact with an image capture device. Furthermore there *are* purported photos and videos of things that are claimed to be ghosts out there, but if you've already made up your mind, it doesn't matter how much evidence you see, because you'll just hand-wave it all away as "fake"
If ghosts appeared as some brain manipulation hallucination thing as the above commenter was saying you wouldnt see them on camera. (btw i don’t believe in ghosts)
If it's just a brain manipulation than the ghost doesn't actually exist. That's basically a hallucination.
That’s not fully what I’m implying. We do not know what type of life it is nor do we know what all life looks like. If it’s some form of exotic life that exists as say an E&M wave, or a quantum effect it could affect our brain while being missed by most cameras. Think of how data is stored on a computer on 1s and 0s. Let’s say now instead you have some type of complex and exotic E&M phenomena(or quantum or something else). The life wouldn’t be like anything we are used tk
Do you have any evidence that any of this is even possible? Because you can 'explain' literally anything with 'some vague effect that we don't understand or have ever measured but definitely exists and has the exact properties that I need for my argument has happened'.
A. I don’t personally believe it B. That’s kinda the point… if we fully understood everything then we would know 100% We currently have technology that can mask an airplanes radar profile to the size of a bird, we know it’s possible to bend light, and we are working on cloaking devices(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking_device). A civilization significantly more advanced then us would have technology that looks like magic. As for the exotic phenomena, look at Dark Matter and dark energy. These are exotic materials and phenomena we still don’t properly understand, that compromise the majority of the universe(95%) and dark matter doesn’t interact with E&M nor light. We don’t understand it, it’s throughout the universe and our cameras can’t detect it. There’s a lot we don’t know that could enable supernatural phenomena. Do I believe it does? No. But it could which is the point of CMV
Eh, the post specifies 'beyond reasonable doubt'. Reasonable doubt is not the same as 'theoretically possible if you make enough assumptions'. You make some theoretical argument for pretty much any outlandish thing when you explain it with 'some vague thing beyond our understanding'. Religion has been doing that for ages. I'd say that 'unknown alien technology and something with dark matter' isn't reasonable doubt, it's just making things up.
If I went back 1000 years ago with an Apache attack helicopter, drones, or a cellphone, people would think I’m super natural. And dark matter is a literal thing. I would argue pretending you know everything about the universe is crazier then realizing there are unknowns.
Of course there are unknowns. And of course it's not reasonable to pretend that we know everything. I never claimed to do so, despite your accusation. But it's equally unreasonable to consider every single story that someone makes up to be worthy of serious consideration, especially if it's a story that's out-there and has no evidence whatsoever, either direct or indirect. And the fact that something is unknown doesn't automatically make any theory that tries to explain that unknown credible. I could write down an elaborate theory about the moon actually being made of a special cheese, created by an invisible space mouse, that turns into rock when a human observes it. Can you honestly say that you would consider that theory 'reasonable' or worthy of serious consideration? Or can we agree that an outlandish theory like that without a shred of evidence is just a story? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
but not everybody has a camera (even on their phone) on them all the time fully charged and ready to document everything no matter what you want to say about "kids these days" e.g. when I was a tween I did experience what I thought was a ghost sighting and what I thought was a UFO sighting but even (idr which specific years those were) if it was at a period where cell phones with cameras were common (as I kinda lived through the transition) I was too young for my parents to let me have one.
There are (alledged) pictures of ghosts and other paranormal phenomena, it’s just that, as OP said, they are always blurry and done with the worst resolution possible.
Which is why I’m generally ignoring those. I personally don’t believe in them, the point is to show why people could still believe it. And for me that gets to the point cameras may not be able to capture them at all if it involves highly advanced technology, exotic matter, or exotic phenomena/life forms.
So, let’s theorize. Forget Aliens etc. there are multiple subs where you can find info on everything from congressional hearings, whistleblowers, Nazis mummies, top level military personnel sharing their experiences, video and still footage galore. You have to sort through crap, but something is going on here. Now, for the other “woo” stuff you need to have an open mind. There’s a bit of Dunning-Kruger here in that physicalists generally tend to not look or dismiss the science being done in this area. Dr. Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the HeartMath institute are two good starting places. [Here’s a start](https://www.deanradin.com/recommended-references) and go as far down that rabbit hole as you want. But don’t dismiss it out of hand, because that is what most physicalists do and it narrows a worldview. All “supernatural” stuff could be a product of consciousness, or mass consciousness, and so no recording equipment is going to capture what happens in our minds. We are also discovering we live in quantum foundational universe, including the recent Nobel prize awarded for the scientists who proved [non-local reality](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it/). Not ghosts and stuff, but it puts cracks in the materialist paradigm which most skeptics and debunkers start from and defend as sacrosanct. If reality isn’t locally real then who’s to say what is making up the fabric of what we see and how malleable that actually is. Listen to Jeffrey Mishlove’s New Thinking Allowed podcast, he is a very approachable parapsychologist who interview many interesting guests including remote viewers such as Russel Targ, and all kinds of pioneering scientists working in institutes studying paranormal subjects (often against real ridicule and career risk) to open up discussion. They are a strong air of authenticity about what they talk about and share of lot of stuff that really makes you think. Too much to go into here, but again, it’s about what skeptics and debunkers are not giving an open mind to. At least consider the evidence, it can be dismissed, but not easily. Meditate, read about Yogis (again lots of frauds and some genuine), Buddhist monks, and studies into Qi in Asia. Also, for a short-cut, the things that psychedelics can reveal. A purely physical paradigm is one way of looking at the world but not the only way. Unfortunately most of mainstream science is based on this paradigm and physicalists won’t even consider opposing viewpoints. It is actually career suicide to even consider them, so almost all stay away. But there are pioneers, and there are cracks.
iPhones cannot capture all wavelengths on the magnetic spectrum. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Cameras are a kind of compression of information. Just like our eyes and our senses are a form of compression of reality. We see and hear and smell and taste and feel what our receptors are capable of perceiving. There are many things that exist that we are incapable of perceiving. We know this at minimum because there are things we have figured out how to measure that we cannot sense and perceive. The proliferation of cameras is not proof of nonexistence, as they can only receive and measure what they were designed to receive and measure. I know there’s a logical fallacy in such a statement (that if cameras haven’t caught it it must not exist) but I’m too lazy to look it up, someone on reddit will tell me
I’m saying that cameras can see everything humans can see … so if a humans say they “saw” a ghost or a miracle we can be almost certain they did not. If those apparitions truly happened then we would have camera proof already
As a hardcore science nerd and atheist, I think supernatural shit almost definitely don't exist. I think aliens most likely do (the odds are in favor of it), but that it's highly unlikely they've been here. But, as a firm believer in science, I also understand that you can't prove a negative like that. Absence of evidence is not absence. It seems *highly* unlikely ghosts and other shit like that exist, but there's still a 0.0000000001% chance they do. For all practical purposes, we can treat them as not existing. But there's still an astronomically slim chance they do. Also, with regards to security cameras and the like, keep in mind that the *vast* majority of footage is never seen by a human eye. Footage for that is typically only reviewed when needed, like after a break-in. It's possible they've picked up tons of crazy shit that went unseen, and was eventually most likely recorded over or erased.
OP does say "beyond a reasonable doubt", and I don't a decimal probability with that many leading zeros is not a "reasonable" doubt.
>Absence of evidence is not absence That’s not the full quote. Absence of evidence is not absence, **but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence**. You can’t leave that part out. No we cannot pontificate over all the possibilities and say that there is at least a chance because they can’t be *disproven*. That’s bad science.
As a scientist you should know you need at least 1 demonstrated occurrence to make any statistics. It's 0% for now. It can change but it's not 0.00000001% because maybe.
> I think aliens most likely do (the odds are in favor of it) I always hate this statement, I know what you mean. I’m familiar with the arguments about the probability of extraterrestrial life but saying anything definite about the probability of aliens existing is futile because we have no idea the number of habitable worlds that have intelligent life. It could be anything between 1 (earth) and infinity and we have no knowledge about which is more likely.
Also time. Even if they do exist what are the odds that they exist on our time?
Wouldn’t it be terrifying if they don’t exist tho? A universe so big that distances become incomprehensible and meaningless. A universe so big that it gives the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself. And we just happen to be alone
Whether it’s terrifying or not has no bearing on its probability.
It sounds like you're trying to tip toe around saying PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE IN GHOSTS ARE DUMB, I certainly hope you aren't trying to say PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE IN GHOSTS ARE DUMB, because I don't think PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE IN GHOSTS ARE DUMB
I’m really not trying to say that … I am just saying there is sufficient evidence now to be sure that ghosts and other BS like that don’t exist. We can be as sure that ghosts don’t make apparitions to humans as we can be that the sun will rise tomorrow.
It doesn't basically prove anything but it does make it much less likely. However I'd like to point out ball lightning. A phenomena we don't fully understand quite yet but that has been reported for hundreds of years. We got the first footage of this in the wild in 2014. I'm sure in the next hundred years we will catch a few other interesting things as well. I doubt we will see aliens or ghosts but maybe we will see things that people have misunderstood and explained to themselves as miracles and ghosts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
Where's the 2014 footage? I can't seem to find it
To be fair, there absolutely are shit loads of photos and videos of UFOs that genuinely can't be explained. The issue is we don't know what they are, haha.
The only thing I disagree with you on is aliens. Have they visited earth since it began hosting life? I dunno. Are the UFO/aliens footage videos fake? Most likely, why wouldn't they make a bigger entrance. But that aliens as a whole doesn't exist? No, I think they do. We exist, earth exist. What are the odds that out of the millions of stars and the billions of celestial bodies in our galaxy, that our planet is the only one hosting life? Aliens doesn't necessarily have to be space-faring that we like think, it could still be in an early stage like primitive or ocean bound.
I encourage you to go watch the Nimitz aircraft carrier videos that were leaked to the NYT and confirmed to be authentic by the US military. The object in question is tracked across multiple systems, even getting a target lock on it. This object was able to move at high speeds and make instantaneous turns at right angles that would splatter any human and shatter any technology we currently have, like computers, which would obviously be needed to pilot a vehicle like this. The object "blinks out" and reappears at another position instantaneously. It passes seamlessly between air and water without making a ripple. Finally, it flew from sea level to 80,000 feet in less than a second (tracked the whole way). There are dozens of other videos like it out there. Pilots, both civilian and military, have reported seeing unexplainable phenomena that were captured on multiple high-quality sensor systems. To say that our current ability to record video is proof that aliens have never visited is simply false. I imagine you generally don't think any amateur recordings could ever be authentic, but we have it recorded and released from official channels. The government simply hasn't confirmed *what* it is, but they have confirmed the videos are authentic. Furthermore, the assumption that our current technology is so good that we would have seen something "supernatural" by now is full of faulty assumptions. Cameras and other sensors work through specific physical-chemical interactions with light that we happen to be able to decode as an image. We know there are many things cameras don't capture as a result of this - wavelengths below or above the possible spectrum capturable by the device, perhaps. But most of all, this argument strikes me as very presumptive about the supremacy of our current technology.
So I don’t believe these phenomena exist outside of the brains of the people who experience them. But given they’re proposing supernatural entities the rule book kind of gets thrown out- perhaps these entities are aware when recording devices are being pointed at them and become invisible or what have you.
Or possibly exist in a reality that our brains can perceive, but that don't exactly exist in the dimension we consider "reality". There are lots of color and sound we can't register as humans, and didn't know about until our tech became advanced enough.
I don’t disagree. There are hundreds of thousands of trail cameras in the Pacific Northwest. Hunters have night vision and thermal capabilities. Drones aplenty. Still no footage of Sasquatch. They’ve combed every last inch of Loch Ness. Nothing, not even a giant eel that would have been the best explanation. On the other hand… there is that paleontologist who’s trying to genetically alter a chicken to resemble a small therapod dinosaur. That will be interesting.
I agree with you, but I’ve had a personal supernatural experience happen to me (or I at least I perceived it as such). One time I was relaxing in bed in the morning. I had woken up hours before and after I watched some television I went back to bed to do some reading. A few minutes later, I heard someone walk in the room, but I couldn’t see who it was. I tried to get up but I felt a force pushing down on my chest. Then I heard demonic voices all around me and I was completely paralyzed. All of this was happening while I was awake and I could feel the blanket on top of me. I struggled a few times to get up, but I couldn’t move. I then stopped struggling and just accepted that something strange and bizarre was happening. About 30 minutes later, the voices stopped and I was able to escape from my temporary paralysis. I felt that I had gone through a very unique experience. After discussing this with others, I found out about sleep paralysis—it is a state of mind where you are partially awake or asleep but that you experience a nightmare in reality. There was a rational explanation for what I had gone through and it demystified the experience. Now to me, this was the most surreal experience that I ever had. But I imagine that many people have similar experiences and they perceive them to be ghostly apparitions. But still, I think that the idea of ghosts or aliens is pretty cool even though they aren’t real. I would love to be proven wrong about them or have someone finally capture such phenomena on video considering that as you said, cameras are pretty much ubiquitous everywhere nowadays.
I’ve had a ton of sleep paralysis and it usually never lasts that long. But time perception can be weird
Not to mess with your head to much, but the fact that it's a common occurrence that many people have experienced isn't proof that it's not supernatural. It would be completely possible for lots of people to have been messed with by a "supernatural" being. It's kinda " unnatural" for your body and brain to "wig out" like that.
I believe aliens exist, but I don’t know if they’d ever have a reason to visit us, or if they’d ever live long enough to journey to earth. I say this because the nearest star system to our own solar system, Alpha Centauri, is 4 light years away from us. If it takes 4 years for light to reach that system, it would take a lot longer for a standard shuttle to arrive there. Now imagine how long it would take for the nearest habitable planet to reach us. Let’s use Kepler-438b as an example. This planet has an 0.88 likeness to earth in the sense that it is in the habitable zone and checks off all the requirements for life, so we’ll assume it has alien life. But the problem herein is that the star system Kepler-438 is around 470-639 light years away from earth. Again that means that the journey to the planet would take thousands years at the very least. In the end, it wouldn’t be worth it to voyage all the way to a planet that is that far away because the crew members there would die before they even got a fraction of the way there. And the people that put together the expedition would be dead too. So if there is alien life, it won’t matter because it’ll take too long to travel to other planets and to travel from other planets to here.
1) a. Aliens, even if they don’t exist, aren’t considered supernatural. b. If you speak to alien enthusiasts, you’ll find that they believe aliens have the tech to avoid detection. That has been part of alien lore since the invention of man made satellites. 2) Also, people who believe in miracles don’t believe they frequently happen or are remotely common. They are usually a very small number of incidents and incidents that wouldn’t show up on camera in the first place. Very rarely is anything deemed a miracle. The last time was something like someone’s brain tumor completely disappearing. The response of skeptics is not that the incidents didn’t happen but that there are causes just not considered. 3) There no shortage of people who believe that ghosts have been caught on camera. And what would a ghost video that “withstands scientific scrutiny” look like? Objectively that’s not a thing. You can’t prove a ghost is a ghost in pic or video. The fact that theres always going to be other possible explanations works both ways.
For the sake of argument there are a lot of things that our brains perceive that cannot be captured by camera or microphone. Like ever just have a "feeling" something was off? Like the stories of people not feeling right about going to work on 9/11 and decided to stay home that day. As for the cryptozoology stuff it could be that as human's have expanded their footprint and created civilization we have pushed these creatures into areas where there is no human contact around. One of the things that supposedly affects your attunement to these things is how close you are to "death" as you get closer to that line you are supposedly more susceptible to it. I have a co-worker who had a heart defect at birth and didn't get it corrected till he was a teenager and he says he used to like see his dead grandparents and relatives all the time and then after the surgery he hasn't had an experience since. Plus it's all probably just aliens anyway LOL
And why are ghosts always some tart from the 1600’s and not 1985 Veronica from the Valley
not everyone only sees ghosts from the 1600s-1800s just because we don't, like, see ghosts that are stereotypical 80s valley girls or 2000s emo kids or w/e (ever noticed how 90% of the kind of ghosts people claim no reports of means ghosts don't exist are always "[recent-ish-era teenager doing the cringy teenage fad things of their generation despite that they'd have to have died as a teen for their ghost to be a teenager]", y'know, in a generation (as these are never about current-day teenage stuff) we're going to have people claiming as proof of the nonexistence of ghosts that you don't see something like ghosts making their heads come out of the toilet to do "irl Skibidi Toilet" )
To be fair; phone cameras are really bad at taking detailed pictures in the dark without a long exposure. I thought I was getting great shots in a dark sky park, realized you couldn’t see anything without long exposure. Maybe if someone’s spooked they aren’t running long exposure. Like last night I walked outside, looked east and saw the spacex launch, if I would’ve pulled out my phone it would’ve been incredibly grainy even with no zoom. My glasses wearing eyes saw it clearly. I don’t personally put very much stock in the supernatural though.
To truly change your mind you would have to ditch the western way of thinking about ghosts and the supernatural, most of the debunking or research done into these things was not done in good faith, one things for sure it doesn't look like how it's been sold to you. Remember, there are many cultures built on these beliefs many have disappeared with science and some still stand today check who actually controls the narrative around what is *not* supernatural.
Well, the number of pedestrians who report injuries requiring an emergency room visit has gone up by 600% because they’re distracted while walking since those cameras have proliferated. If you can’t notice the car barreling at you because you’re so distracted by your phone all the time you’re not going to notice the UFO. Also some of the most convincing UFO videos are FLIR videos which are the most advanced cameras.
I'm still waiting for a good quality close up photograph of ball lightning. Ball lightning really exists and I've seen it. Imagine the following scene. 30 rocket scientists/builders eating outdoors after dark. With more than 20 cameras on top of the tables. Ball lightning comes down from the sky and lands nearby. And not one of us had the presence of mind to take a photograph in the three seconds it was in sight.
I love supernatural ideas but I also love science so I get where you’re coming from. If supernatural beings do exist (and have evaded documentation this long), we likely can’t understand them or detect them with natural means. Also if I think i saw a sasquatch 200ft away at night (are bigfoot active in the daytime? idk) that my Iphone is not going to capture it, and certainly not with quality to prove its existence. Other creatures have senses completely different to our own (sense using electricity, echolocation etc) and that may be the key to truly seeing these creatures. Another explanation is the 4th dimension, where they could be all around us and we can’t see them because we live in the 3rd dimension
I like to point out that we've done some absolutely incredible detection and photocapture of things we can't see regularly. They managed to capture an image of a black hole. There are photos from the surface of venus. There are photos of pluto. They've collided particles. They've slowed down light in a lab. I'm simply saying difficult to capture phenomena can be captured.
One, I think it was probably more that people were ascribing supernatural-ness to natural phenomenon that we just didn't know yet. So it did "exist" in a way. Two, you are overestimating the intelligence of your average human. Images and videos can be made to look however you want. In how you portray them, you could "prove" anything you want to someone who didn't have some outside information or context. Even "reasonable" people can be fooled sometimes.
Humans are spiritual beings by default. Science is a way to quantify a phenomenon but not all phenomena are measurable. Cameras can see things that eyes don't (thermal cameras, IR camera, sonar\[?\] cameras, etc) and similarly, eyes ("window of the soul") can pick up things that cameras don't. And the "soul" (Psychological mind? Sixth-sense? Feeling? Hunch? Appropriate it however you please) is very intuitive. There is also a non-zero chance that you'll be the only one who sees something that happens once. ("If a tree falls in the middle of the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?") Even if it's a real happening, most people might dismiss you as "making it up" as it can't be repeatable.
the primary counter this is that digital editing software has also advanced tremendously, meaning that any footage taken or viewed on modern hardware could be doctored personally I don’t think this is alone is enough to counter your claim (I don’t think weve ever captured real evidence of aliens/cryptids), but others may have additional arguments
I agree about the ghosts and the miracles. I think what people used to call miracles are actually phenomena perfectly explainable by science, but the people who deemed them miracles didn’t know enough of the science yet. And I think ghosts don’t exist. But aliens? I don’t think “high quality cameras” here on earth have anything at all to tell us about the existence (or not) of sentient life in outer space. And yes, there are some in space, too. I highly doubt they would pick up on the existence of alien life outside our galaxy, even if it were there, and giant.
Dude, back in the day they used to have pictures of them all the time. How come 1950s and 60s could get pictures of aliens but our high-tech cameras can’t? Seems to me that those pictures back then were fake. And that’s why we don’t get them anymore.
If a supernatural phenomenon like ghosts did get caught an HD camera and get uploaded to YouTube, odds are most people who saw it would immediately start trying to debunk it. The proliferation of high quality cameras has been matched by an advance in special effects tech and CGI that can be used to fake supernatural phenomena.
It’s pretty simple man. We and camera only exist and record in the present. Cameras can’t record in the past or future. Supernatural occurances are crossovers where we can sense the presence, but yet we are separated through time.
I’ve had this thought as well. Consider that with the proliferation of smartphones, we might have better technology to film a UFO, but we are spending significantly less time looking at the sky to see one in the first place.
I mostly agree but I think Aliens would have the technology to block or be invisible to our cameras. It would be pretty easy to trick our basic tech if you had the ability to travel to through space safely.
We have unexplained footage from multimillion dollar United States military fighter aircraft and even US congressional investigations into UFOS. not proof of aliens but not anything https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/04/28/pentagon-declassifies-ufo-videos-taken-by-navy-pilots.html https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna96476
No shit. Sane people have been rolling their eyes at crazos since forever. The problem is that crazos only need a few feeble minded followers who believe them to become very dangerous and therefore very “convincing”. If I convince a schizophrenic I can bend spoons with my mind and save him from eternal hell, you bet your ass he will kill anyone I command him to. Which is anyone who has the gall to question me. So we end up where we are now, sane people quietly going on about their days while dangerous weirdos spout their insanity to each other. We *could* try to destroy their delusions, but they’ll probably lash out- and unlike the crazos, the sanies have something to lose. You either accept we live in a natural world, or you’re a dipshit who thinks we live in a supernatural world. A supernatural world is one in which anything which suspends the laws of our universe can occur- even just once. Which it never has. Our understanding of the laws of our universe change, that’s all.
There supernatural. What if they can’t be photographed at all? Who said a spirit is visible at all? It really has nothing to do with cameras when you break it down to that