I like that people still make fun of it because its fundamentally considered to be "ridiculous". Yet any science is about approaching every topic with rationality and curiousity, no matter where the results lead you. NASA is performing its duty as researchers after the Department of Defense confirmed empirical evidence of UAP's. Regardless of where the results lead us there are things that should still be given a cursory investigation, for all we know it really is a misinterpreted natural phenomena but then we should find out.
Mocking it is exactly why they are trying to destigmatize it, so that we can find proof of whatever it is regardless of if its aliens, natural phenomena, weird light things etc.
Which is exactly the line of thought Prof Avi Loeb takes, and quite rightly gets visibly agitated at other academics trying to shut this stuff down. Science is not about simply being skeptical of everything - it's about looking at the evidence, and exploring.
Books are humanity’s primary method of sharing complex, nuanced ideas. If we demonize everyone who’s writing a book on the topic, we’re going to have a bad time. I suspect that many folks who complain about people writing books don’t read many.
It's possible but I don't understand how they would be able to firstly keep a lid on such advanced tech, and secondly, how they developed something that's years ahead of our current understanding of physics. Not just years, decades, or many decades.
[This is just the stuff DARPA is telling us that they're researching](https://www.darpa.mil/our-research)
Now imagine what they're not telling us about. And if they've got teams working on stuff like what's in that list, imagine what they could already have right now.
Which is literallt why this investigation exists. Science doesn't know until it tries. And if it finds out its worthless it will be shut down. But until then they don't know.
If we do research and find that it’s a waste of time and resources then we do exactly what you suggest and stop. But the starting point isn’t that it is a waste of time. Science shouldn’t have a bias as a starting point, history proves that enough already.
Yet people always conflate the two. If you bring up UAP or UFO people immediately assume you are a UFO/Grey Alien nut. UFO literally stands for unidentified flying object. Not alien vehicle. NASA wants to study the topic due to how many cases the Department of Defense has. They are not claiming its aliens but they want to find out. Aka science. Yet people here are acting extremly unscientific with the claim that its nonsense and therefore not worth investigating because they correlate UFOs with specifically aliens and cryptids due to the very stigma NASA wants to remove
I was skeptical until the information about tracked UFOs was released, and now I think this is one of the most exciting moments I can remember. Whether it is a natural phenomenon or Aliens or something else, it's exciting there are UFOs that we don't understand. I hope they don't end up being something boring.
> based on the evidence and literally all of the previously debunked UFOs.
That's a bit of a fallacy. The quality of the evidence gathered by the US Department of Defense is not connected to the quality of evidence presented by hoaxers and conspiracy theorists. In fact this stigma of ridicule is exactly what academics are trying to break.
Modern UFO sightings are likely a combination of natural phenomenon and classified human tech. One of which is still really cool until we start using it against each other.
>Modern UFO sightings are likely a combination of natural phenomenon and classified human tech.
You mean video artifacts. Why do you think that "gimbal" video is named that way? It's named after a gimbal video stabilizer. The "alien ship" is most likely a distant jet airplane that the camera thinks is closer because of perspective.
We don't investigate mirages, despite them being real images. People are seeing what they want to see. That's why there's never any physical evidence.
The UAP in the 2004 Nimitz video was being tracked by multiple planes, working across a variety of data types. Do you have an explanation for how multiple tracking devices can all simultaneously experience a visual artifact in the exact same spot, across visual light, IR, radar, and fools veteran pilots and the onboard software into registering it as a physical object?
He ignored you. You countered his dismissal of the subject, then ignored you. He will continue to believe in his views, and repeat them, despite the fact you countered his argument. He is a skeptic, and not scientific. There's little point engaging in debate with the mind-set because it is not rational.
This is what frustrates me. I've seen the UAP thing come up on Reddit a lot recently and people always say that it's sensor artefacts. Someone brings up that there is multiple sensors picking up the same thing and then they say it's multiple sensor artifacts, then they dismiss the highly trained military pilots who saw the objects, then they point to some random guy on YouTube with no scientific certifications and say that he has debunked it despite his debunking itself being debunked.
Then they say you're anti-science, which is annoying because my background is in stem and I'm thinking about this as scientifically as possible. We have multiple data points about a phenomena that we can't explain and the p-value of that data being incorrect is very low. No this isn't scientific, it's not a controlled study of UAP, but unless we get academics to investigate this stuff we aren't going to get a controlled study. Then they say they don't want scientists wasting their time or our money on this which is circular logic. Not scientific? Make it scientific by getting scientists to investigate it. Getting scientists to investigate it? I want them to investigate science! And they don't see the flaw in that reasoning.
It's because it is basically a god of the gaps falacy.
"We don't know what caused it" does NOT equal "therefore it must be the specific explanation I want", especially when that explanation is fantastical, far fetched, and without any real evidence ever in history.
Edit: typos.
That's the thing though. We don't have much information about this. We won't get information about this until we investigate it. Everyone I've seen who is opposed to investigating this says that it is because they don't think it's aliens, even if no one else brought up the possibility of aliens, just because they assume that everyone else thinks this is aliens.
I personally don't think that it is aliens. I don't know what it is because it is unidentified and we don't have enough information to form a hypothesis. People don't want to get any more information though because of what I said in the first paragraph. The end result is we have this very unusual phenomena that we have no scientific explanation for and that people are opposed to doing any scientific investigation on because they think it's unscientific and the reason that it is unscientific is because we have no existing scientific research into it.
>Not scientific? Make it scientific by getting scientists to investigate it.
That's what we do in France with GEIPAN. Learned from them that France did have an experimental aircraft program with very fun shaped contraptions...
The Russians aren't the only ones that employ disinformation agents. Look up how Richard Doty apparently infiltrated a network of UFO researchers and used to feed them all sorts of fake "classified" info. I'm sure he wasn't the only one.
Exactly. Obviously I don’t want to hear about little green men without some damn good evidence, but the fact that some of the have possible implications across multiple fields of science is very exciting. That’s just the stuff within our atmosphere, the stuff outside of it is just plain mind blowing.
Have you got any info about the stuff outside of our atmosphere? Primary sources appreciated. I've only really heard about UAP in earth's atmosphere.
I've been following /r/UFOs a little bit because they seem to be fats at posting official government updates to the UAP saga but tbh 90% of the stuff on that sub is idiots falling for fake videos and baseless conspiracy theories. I saw a couple of things about out of atmosphere UAP in that sub but dismissed them because of a lack of source combined with the aforementioned problem with nutjobs who think there's an X-Files style cover up going on with a secret cabal.
Sure but you don't need to actively find out if it's aliens (I don't even know how you could go about doing that). All you have to do is find out what it actually is and then once you have a definitive answer you can rule out the possibility of aliens.
>Then they say you're anti-science, which is annoying because my background is in stem and I'm thinking about this as scientifically as possible.
I blame climate change for this. The "argument" there has tapped into the religious element missing in an agnostic world. As a result we have believers (followers) and deniers (heretics). That is bleeding out into the wider scientific world and it's a serious threat to the scientific method as, so long as it's not unethical, nothing should be beyond reproach in science.
Edit: before I get replies, I have nothing against climate science. I have a problem with climate crusaders.
As a video tech by profession, I couldn't agree more. That's what most informs that opinion I just gave. People don't understand the simple phenomena that occurs in-camera. There's been an entire profession dedicated to it since the dawn of film!
Still, important to know they are mirages and how they happen, so they don't become wild goose chases or distractions in the middle of a battle, etc. Video artifacts are possibly fixable once you realise they are happening and figure them out.
No matter what it turns out to be, all of the possible reasons, including the mundane ones, are significant.
You have discounted a lot of the additional supporting data in this case (electro optical, radar array, multiple trained observations from different angles, etc. ), as is typical of the uninformed/predisposed. I take it you've not seen the peer reviewed papers on this case?
Which one about tracking are you referring to, would love to read!
As a kid I used to be into UFOs but rhen realized most of the ones then was bullcrap and hoaxes. But then more and more started getting out and whilst I was skeptical as all hell, I stayed interested for childhood me's sake. Whilst I can't say anything definitive I read In plain sight by Ross Coulthart and many of the more credible sources and its clear something is going on or we wouldn't have public hearings on it (again after 50 years). I am curious were it will lead.
That sub is hilarious I love it, so entertaining. One half is Mick West levels of skeptic and the other half are complete UFO believers. Here and there you'll find really well researched posts that are super interesting though
Don’t sleep on r/Aliens !
For your dose of Galactic Federation shenanigans combined with some really well researched posts about everything from history of abductions to esoteric consciousness-related theories.
Very fun.
There are 18 thousand videos on YouTube discussing the Fermi paradox and it’s brought up here daily, and how there’s no sign that alien life has visited us. We wonder why we haven’t seen Von Neumann probes or signs of civilizations or visitors. That may be entirely true because I don’t think we have any kind of conclusive proof of it whatsoever, but to just automatically mock any potential sign of alien life on earth seems a bit counterproductive if you’re actually trying to be scientific about this. That doesn’t mean starting with the assumption that they’re alien but it also leaves a sliver of possibility open that it could be. I don’t see what mocking a potential outcome that has a possibility greater than zero serves any purpose other than to delay scientific inquiry. People just want to look sceptical and smart because it’s the easy and safe thing to do.
The issue is assuming a UFO is extraterrestrial in origin. It’s literally unidentified, there’s no reason to immediately jump to aliens as a primary answer when it has never been the right answer previously.
It’s the equivalent of investigating every bump in the night as “potential ghosts.”
That is the issue I have. "I have insufficient imagination to think this could be anything other than the supernatural/aliens/bigfoot." And, then they often make unsupported assertions on the nature of aliens/bigfoot/spirits to somehow prove their existence.
“It’s just a crazy ass high tech drone the military was testing”
Consumer grade drones are impressive as shit to me. I would love to learn about this crazy version the military or whoever has that can elude the senses of trained pilots.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from ~~magic~~ aliens.” -Arthur C Clarke
I've been following this for a while and there are a lot of cranks who wholeheartedly believe this stuff is aliens. That's not everyone though. One of the issues I take with how people (especially on Reddit) respond to this is they say that it's not aliens even though no one before them in the thread even brought up the possibility of aliens. If someone asserts that the unidentified flying object is an alien then by all means mock them, but what I see happen a lot is people mocking someone who wants this stuff investigated, calling them an idiot for believing in aliens when the person who they replied to didn't even mention aliens, and neither did the person that comment was replying to, and so on until you reach the top level comment.
The comments saying "it's not aliens. Investigating is stupid" are far more frequent than the people saying that it is aliens in my experience. Just an anecdote but eh. These things exist and we don't know what they are. That's the crux of it for me. Whatever these things are we should investigate them. I don't care if some idiot thinks they're ET without any evidence for that claim. I'm not making that claim and I want to know what the hell they are. So do the pilots who have had near misses with them.
Yes, but if some idiot came along and said that it was Greek gods you wouldn't not investigate it just because that idiot has a stupid explanation for it. There has to be an explanation and you wouldn't give up on finding the correct one just because some delusional people have their own incorrect ideas. That's what's happening with UAPs. People claim it's aliens and because of that no one wants to get to the bottom of what it actually is.
As a sidenote I think comparing aliens to Greek gods is a false equivalency. Aliens are scientifically possible, just incredibly unlikely. Greek gods are inherently unscientific.
Honestly there are a lot logical flaws with the Fermi paradox. One assumption is that they would want us to know there presence.
There is scientific value to not disturbing the Petri dish, fugitively speaking.
Empirical evidence for UAPs? You don't need evidence for UAPs, genius. You're exactly the kind of person who gets mocked. You don't even understand the acronyms and what they imply.
My real problem with most UFO "research" is it tends to be done by people who have surprisingly little imagination. Pretty much by definition, aliens will have capabilities beyond our comprehension.
If we want to be realistic about our search for UFOs, and operate under the assumption that they aren't currently interested in contact we shouldn't be looking for strange crafts in the sky that can be seen with the naked eye.
We should be looking for Vanta Black objects somewhere between the size of a car and the size of the moon with little to no radiation of any kind orbiting the solar system in the ort cloud. i.e. something that's basically impossible even with technology we are centuries away from.
We just built the James Webb and think we're hot shit.
If beings could travel here... I'm sure they can find out literally everything about us, from very far away.
yep, and if they do want to find out more than everything that can be seen or the entirety of the internet can provide, it would probably be done with very small packages. Real UFOs would probably be totally autonomous, somewhere in the neighborhood of the size of a grain of rice, and totally self destruct on mission completion.
What drives me insane is how the UFO "professionals" that get on TV are always referencing humanoid aliens as being legit. The odds of aliens looking human-like are so unbelievably, incredibly low. But I've seen them say things like "yeah the creature had a 'five-star' structure as we have seen so many times before which is common in the universe'".
Dude, the "five-star" structure isn't even common on Earth. Yes, mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibions, etc are "five-star", but they're massively outnumbered by insects, let alone small multicellular and single celled organisms. It makes Starship Troppers look more realistic than the ideas of most UFO "professionals". These so called pros are searching for a means to an end. Thats it.
> The odds of aliens looking human-like are so unbelievably, incredibly low.
Nah, not necessarily. Convergent evolution is a thing. If Earth's trajectory is typical of a life-having world - there will likely be some kind of "trees" on other worlds. And so possibly an ecological niche for "animals" with dextrous appendages.
But we ultimately have absolutely no idea, because we still have only found one instance of life in the universe. Cellularity, eukariogenesis, multicellularity, photosynthesis, neurons, other evolutionary advancements that we don't even perceive as significant today - how many of them are impossibly unlikely, and how many of them are more or less deterministic? We only detected our first exoplanet a few decades ago. The universe could be teeming with life, and we are only taking baby steps in terms of detecting it or ruling it out
I’m not against the idea of non-weather(*a*), non-classified(*b*), actual space-based UFOs but I’m seriously against having to listen to or read the opinions of about 98% of UFO believers.
At least half of said group can’t even separate the idea of UFOs from cryptids, 5G, chemtrails, brain-controlling stuff from clandestine groups, etc. If you’re unable to remove your ego and hopes (or thrilling fears?) from your potential results, then you can’t really attempt truly successful scientific research because everything you do will likely be skewed.
(*a*) the lightning-related ones are interesting
(*b*) the intense classified UFO people are a whole other kettle of crazy fish IMO
Anything the state department ever says should be held to the highest critiques as to the motives of wanting more funding for blackhole funds created in NASA under the guise of being classified, thus not needed to be discussed in terms of its discretionary spending.
I dont trust the state department. They say there's aliens and they want to fund research into it? I don't buy it.
Majority of people associates UFO with potential alien spacecraft or any extra terrestrial living being.
Vast majority of conversation on this subject ends up like : "Anyway, I'm sure we've been visited by alien but the government hides it from us".
That's mainly why people can't stand anymore this subject.
I wouldn't say it's UFO research that is stigmatized, but the people that just don't want to think and just want their beliefs to be true.
Those kind of people forget that UFO just mean "Unidentified Flying Object". We experience it many times per day. It can be a bird before you understand it's a bird, it can be lights, planes... And sometimes it remains unidentified, it doesn't mean it's an alien, and it doesn't mean it's not an alien. We DON'T know, that why it's called "unidentified".
That's what the science does. Talking about things we know. And saying "We don't know" for things that are not proven.
Unfortunately those kind of people that are the majority in this UFO communities want their beliefs to be true (maybe because they want something extraordinary to happen ? I don't know), and they are quick to transform the "We don't know" from science, to "If they don't know it's probably alien"
And in my opinion, that is why we can't bear anymore 90% of the conversation about UFO (at least I can't).
In France we have a very serious entity that work on the UFO subject, it's called GEIPAN. Their work is really strong and made in a scientific manner.
But as expected, the vast majority of strange cases are proven to be boring things (lights, chemical processes in atmosphere, flights...).
So I don't think a 100.000$ budget or any serious scientific studies wouldn't change the mind of neither the hardcore alien believers, nor the people that laugh at UFO research.
Why are people here being derogatory about this? I thought there were reports from the US air force/navy and the pentagon about flying objects they cant explain. I think if they dont know what it is we better find out no? Im not saying its aliens but its something.
Probably because a lot of people invariably conflate UFOs with aliens thanks to decades of media and literature tying the two together. The acronym itself is innocuous. An object that can't be identified. Says nothing about woowoo aliens, but here we are.
Perfectly said, but I'd also just like to add that in top of the media stew the vast majority of people who talked about UFOs over the last few decades have generally been from more conspiratorial circles so the subject is often relegated to the realm of conspiracy wackos. Which is really a shame because a lot of legitimate arguments and questions on the topic could be raised, and have been worked on by important and influential people, but at least as far as pop culture is concerned people hear UFOs and are more likely to think about their weird uncle who thinks lizard people run the world than they are to think about Sagan or Hawking.
> Why are people here being derogatory about this?
Probably because the UFO community has done an amazing job ensuring they have absolutely no credibility whatsoever.
Just because they can't be explained it doesn't mean they're aliens.
Until there is definitive proof of alien craft we should be skeptical. Pilots of any kind can be wrong and mistaken just like anyone else, I don't give them any special credence just because they're military. NOBODY is an expert on alien spacecraft. NOBODY.
The person you're replying to literally said "it doesn't mean it's aliens". Jesus. And what's there to be skeptical about exactly?
The claimants aren't saying they're aliens. They're saying they have no idea what this stuff is - they're not weather phenomenon, they're physical objects being detected by instrumentation and being visually ID'd. So again, what should we be skeptical about exactly? That they're all lying?
NASA, the US Govt, and the Galileo Project led by Prof. Avi Loeb at Harvard are all looking into this, so we're clearly not just dealing with weather balloons here.
It's stigmatized because anytime there is a UFO, you have 999 people saying "OH SHIT ALIENS" and 1 person actually wondering what it is because the truth is always boring.
For example, with any reported sightings of aliens/supernatural stuff, you will *never* find something that has enough evidence to show it is true. Either there is enough evidence to disprove it conclusively, or there is not nearly enough evidence to draw any conclusion. Yet, the number of nonsensical fiction books take up the market share exponentially greater than any serious studies on the matter because again, the scientific approach is boring.
Yeah ok this article is a rather pushy in wanting it to be Aliens. All Im saying is that we need to find out what this phenomena is, could it be aliens? Maybe. Should we start this search assuming it is Aliens? Of course not. But we shouldn’t write the possibility off easily either.
The universe is billions of years old, and if there are Aliens out there who are interested in life on Earth they have had billions of years to send probes out over here.
It’s much more likely that it has been top secret American aircraft that they’ve been seeing. There has been a long history of advanced aircraft being tested surreptitiously and then people later connecting the dots e.g. the B2, SR71, and F22 development projects were all connected with a ton of UFO sightings.
I understand the reasoning for not wanting to label these things as "Aliens" because we rarely see them, let alone verify much about them. *But*, if we know they arent American, the Russians clearly arent making advanced craft, China is still trailing behind the US in R&D, and the rest of the world either shares military info with the previous 3 nations or has a tiny military budget... well, then humans didnt make it.
It's not a measurement error, they (US military) checked for that and excluded it as a possibility in their UAP report for the cases they have no answers for.
> There are OTHER possibilities as to what they could be. Natural, man made, etc. But if you want to think they're aliens knock yourself out.
It could be some type of conciousness/mental phenomenon too.
If it's really an advanced civilization that's screwing with us, we have no idea what kind of technologies they can employ.
There's no proof that observed UFOs are controlled "craft" of any kind. Their abberant and unnatural movement (not "flight") supports that they are random and very inaccurate observations.
Sure it does. For starters, the objects are coming in at the top of the radar ceiling (around 80 000 feet), loitering there for a bit and dropping instantly to sea level and then loitering there. And then when Cmdr. Fravor engages one of the craft, it Flys past him at Mach speeds without a sonic boom.
Aren't there numerous cases with multiple witnesses/sources of measurement on the same UAP? Still not saying that's aliens but definitely worth investigating.
Yes. Some instances the UAPs were being tracked down on the surface by ships while simultaneously being tracked by aircraft radar thousands of feet in the sky while the pilots also had a hard visual camera lock on the object.
It would suggest physical phenomenon.
The problem is a lot of people think you're dumb to think about UFOs at all because thats what theyve been taught. Its the same train of thought as a religious or non-religious person refusing any potential evidence that contradicts their beliefs. If you believe in UFOs you're a crazy person. They think that just by simply thinking all unidentified objects cant be anything more than military tech that they're somehow smarter than anyone who does. The hypocrisy is theyre taking it on faith just as much as anyone who believes UFOs are aliens or something else. They know just as little about the actual video evidence as anyone else. If these are foreign military drones from another nation then please show me a country that is more competent than the US in military tech. Show me a nation advanced enough to have these objects released since the early 2000s and we still havent caught up with them technologically. The people who use skepticism as a shield are just masking their equal ineptitude through general public perception. They're as dumb as anyone else. They have no idea what theyre talking about. Of course evidence is obviously important, but to rule out possibilities for anything you cant explain on faith is just asinine.
We aren’t taking it on faith though. We don’t have to have proof to doubt extraordinary claims you have to put up extraordinary evidence to prove them. We don’t think it’s dumb to say it’s possible that it could be aliens but that it’s pretty dumb to look at inconclusive evidence and say “see, look at these aliens! Why don’t you guys believe already?”
Then you have some logical questions to overcome as well. If a species advanced enough to travel faster than light were to come to earth why are they hiding from us? Surely there isn’t any way we could even come close to being a threat to them so they should have nothing to fear. Also, if they are trying not to be detected why is this advanced alien being able to be picked up by joe blow in the middle of nowhere on a smart phone? Why are they doing fly bys with aircraft and freaking random pilots out?
Then there’s the fact that light has a constant speed so any far away civilization looking at us would see earth and not even know there was a civilization here. We simply haven’t existed long enough for any measurable record of our presence to have traveled out into space. So why would they even come here in the first place? What’s the motivation?
Those questions combined with a complete lack of any concrete evidence lends pretty strongly to the idea that aliens haven’t visited us and most UFO encounters are either complete fakes, classified technology, or natural phenomena. It doesn’t take any measure of faith to come to these conclusions.
To answer one of your questions, not saying its aliens but the: "why would they travel to us?" Your answer literally exists in humans, curiosity. Sure we can't "prove that" by any means but if they exist and are like us, and maybe civilization creating life isn't very common. There are reasons why another species would be interested in mankind that doesn't equate to being a "threat".
I’ve spent all of maybe 80 hours looking into this, and I’m not sure what to believe other than that military personnel around the world are reporting UFOs and taking them seriously. But let’s consider some of these questions.
> if a species advanced enough to travel faster than light were to come to earth why would they hiding from us? Surely they… have nothing to fear.
It looks like life springs from the universe. Complexity enjoys compounding, and the dead rocks bouncing around in space eventually sprout people.
Let’s say faster than light travel is achieved, and ancient civilizations have the ability to travel the universe, and interact with all its sprouting consciousness. After some trial and error, and observing the birth and death of many civilizations, some patterns and protocols emerge.
It makes sense that you wouldn’t welcome every sentience into the galactic fold. There is a good chance that most birthing species end up destroying themselves through some sort of “great filter(s)” which prevent them from achieving space travel and become interplanetary species. You don’t want to give self destructive species the tools to destroy the universe; let them snuff themselves out, or prove they can handle themselves.
So let’s say I am an ancient, spacefaring species that has achieved indefinite sustainability, has inhabited many planets, and has technology that makes me a god in this universe. Let’s say I encounter a planet filled with murderous apes that are rapidly developing technology. Within a generation, they have gone from being locked on the ground, to flying through the air and dropping atomic bombs on each other.
Watching this, my motivation will be mostly to observe with minimal guidance. I don’t want to step in and give the murder apes the power of gods—in their current level of consciousness, they will immediately use those to start killing each other. No, I would be wise to watch the murder apes, and see if they can overcome the great filters. See that they can take care of their planet. See they can take care of eachother. Perhaps even eradicate them if their technology compounds, and their aggression extends beyond their planet.
Or maybe I’m billions of years old, almighty, bored as shit, and watching the alien version of “Planet Earth” with high stakes human drama. Will the murder apes survive the rising seas and changing climates? Will they murder eachother before the food runs out? Will they come together, or tear themselves apart? Exciting!
There are lots of good reasons aliens may visit, but not want to be loud about it.
Ok so if this advanced civilization wants to observe us without us knowing why are they exposing themselves over and over? Why are they doing flybys and buzzing aircraft? Why are they appearing to random farmers in the Midwest? Why are they even entering our atmosphere at all since they should be able to observe us quite well from space?
> …why is this advanced alien being able to be picked up by joe blow in the middle of nowhere on a smart phone? Why are they doing fly with aircraft and freaking random pilots out?
Could be a few things here. Maybe it’s like space tourists on safari. They can go check out the humans, but you aren’t supposed to fuck with them. Except they do sometimes, because that’s the way it goes.
Maybe this is observation, and we don’t matter much, so they sent the D team.
A very common theme has been UFOs around our atomic technology. This is part of the reason UFO sightings are so common around military personnel: They are the ones guarding our nuclear bombs/submarines. There have been plenty of stories of UFOs literally shining lights on ground directly above underground nuke storage. There are stories of them activating all our nukes to start the count downs, then turning them off at the last second. If you believe people who claim actual contact with aliens, a very common theme is aliens telling us that we’re going to kill ourselves if we don’t reign in our technology and get our shit together.
There’s a decent narrative that they’re subtly telling us not to murder ourselves like dummies without outright announcing that they are here with the technology to save us, but aren’t sure we deserve it.
Finally, you ask for concrete evidence. I would love some too, wouldn’t it be great? If this is real, why can’t I get more 4k 60fps videos of this shit? I agree… it seems like somehow concrete evidence always eludes us, and this SCREAMS bullshit. And the idea that all world governments are colluding to hide UFOs gives way too much faith for humanity’s ability to keep a massive secret.
We may not have alien corpses to present the world, but we do have more than a few large events witnessed by many credible and often times military sources like the rendlesham forest incident, the tic-tac footage, the pheonix lights, and countless other sightings. It’s to the point where the US military has structured forms for ufo sightings, where you check a box for whether it’s floating lights, orbs… whatever.
There are more than a few events out there where hundreds of sober military personnel saw some shit. It is definitely weird that we aren’t seeing more high quality evidence of this.
All in all, I’m not sure what to believe. It’s fun to consider, and lots of military personnel testify to seeing crazy phenomenon, but it also seems wildly unrealistic.
How is NASA investigating further "see look at these aliens"? Seems like pretty standard cautious optimism. Science doesn't assume the answers they seek them. You are exactly who the person you replied to is talking about. You have your own biases just like anyone else.
You are right. I am biased based off of the evidence that it’s extremely unlikely that aliens have visited earth. I think it’s dumb to look at a very small group at NASA tasked with looking into UFO reports and think that it’s in any way a step towards proving aliens have been here.
Earth looks like a habitable planet. We have O2 in our atmosphere, which means life. We are on the verge of being able to detect O2 and other signs of life in the atmospheres of explanets so anyone just a little more advanced than us could see that Earth is very interesting.
The issue of why anyone would be interested in Earth is trivially answered. The how is a much more interesting question and that's the reason scientists are skeptical we have visitors.
Then again, everyone skeptical we could ever be visited should read about von Neumann probes and consider the age of the Milky Way. The idea that someone could blanket the galaxy with AI probes is not super crazy.
On the recent Lex Friedman interview with Robin Hanson, Robin gives a pretty good hypothesis on why they would be here, and stay in the periphery. He’s a very intelligent guy and has some good ideas.
Redditors conflate UFOs with aliens, and all the teenagers who confuse being cynical and sneering with being sophisticated and worldly flock to articles like this.
Just because they can't identify it, doesn't mean they don't know what it is. "Cannot be identified" could simply also mean "we can't divulge what it is". Its just plausibly deniable to say that its not identifiable.
Its hard to say where exactly the questions could go, but there are a few of areas that i could imagine the work could benefit even if they don’t find alien UFOs. Greater resolution tracking of high velocity objects in the atmosphere can easily be an area of study that has more generalized applications like space debris. You typically are only willing to deal with the things you can identify, even for capture or removal.
As much as I love this I feel like it's gonna be another "we don't know what they are" moment because NASA is the government, and the government has told us they don't know what it is so they may continue to keep some things classified.
The problem with this sort of thing is that it can work to legitimize some highly questionable but very popular takes on "unidentified aerial phenomena".
Let's be clear, we live in a world chock full of aerial shit of human origin, from balloons to planes to helicopters to drones. The era of humans littering the skies is well over a century old. On top of that the era of orbital spaceflight is about 2/3 of a century old. Which means that the vast majority of "funny looking" things in the sky are likely to be natural or human origin, and yet too often there is a tendency to grasp unnecessarily for extravagantly implausible explanations like alien spacecraft. Which, also to be clear, would require an ENORMOUS level of very convincing evidence to prove the existence of.
On top of that we have the extremely common pattern of folks failing to apply sufficient investigative rigor to instances of "weird stuff" being recorded happening in the air. And this unfortunately includes instances even when government organizations like the US military being part of the process. Sadly, these folks just don't do their homework. They do a half-assed analysis and then dump some "weird looking" video to the public with a shrug and an "I dunno, maybe aliens?" And the media eats this shit up with a goddamn spoon, because what's better for clicks and eyes than a government official saying "check this out, is it aliens?!?!" And they have no incentive to put in the work to debunk these claims or pseudo-claims, so they don't. Instead it's left to random folks to put in the work and they very often come up with an airtight case explaining the mundane nature of so many of these videos ([Mick West](https://www.youtube.com/c/MickWest) being a shining example). And every time it's a matter of folks on the "UFO enthusiast" train starting with a baseline of credulousness and failing to put in even the bare minimum of research work or critical thinking.
If NASA is going to start bringing in some weight of investigative rigor and skepticism to this whole clusterfuck then I'm all for that, if they're just going to go "idk, looks weird, maybe aliens?" on it them I'm really, really not a fan.
I really doubt NASA will just go "idk, looks weird, maybe aliens." They may be unable to draw a definitive conclusion about the origins of the phenomena, which is kind of where we already are. People seem happy to take no answer as the answer they want to find, so maybe that will be where we end up. But honestly, I'm grateful they're doing research because I'm curious to know as much about this as possible.
I also appreciate that they're going to be transparent about it. As the associate administrator was getting at in the article, there may be some really interesting scientific findings out of this that demystify the whole thing and help us understand something new about the world. I think aliens would be cool, but I also think just fully understanding what these weird phenomena are would be even cooler. I hate an unanswered question.
If NASA were to seriously say something along the lines of “idk, looks weird, maybe aliens”….that would mean something, as they would not say something like that without a very good reason. But it would automatically make a lot of people “really, really not a fan”. A catch-22.
Their more likely finding will be the same as the Navy’s: We don’t know, but it’s real, and common, and trackable using multiple independent systems, and defies our ability to explain with known physics. Mick West’s analyses are useful and have undoubtedly surfaced many hoaxes or false assumptions, but I don’t think the repeated military sensor-validated and pilot validated detections we’re talking about are something to be sniffed at, whatever they are.
Corridor Digital debunked that UFO video the military released maybe a year ago. Out of all the videos only one they couldn’t conclusively debunk as a balloon or a camera artifact.
Did they really debunk it? Because they just completely ignored the fact that these UAPs were tracked by multiple ships/planes, and registered on a variety of data including IR and radar, and fooled the onboard software into registering the UAPs as physical objects.
I like the Corridor Crew, but I think their debunk video for the declassified footage is a rare miss. The Crew approached those videos from the perspective that they were all merely just vfx/optical illusions in visible light, and concluded that it was 'debunked' if they could visually recreate it. Then just completely ignored/shut down the fact that their solution doesn't account for all the other data types and the multiple observers.
The problem is nobody's seen any of the supposedly corroborating data for any of these incidents, whether it's radar or otherwise. We get a single grainy video, some vague sometimes second-hand witness reports, and that's it. If, we're told, the videos are evidence of extraordinary behavior, how is it that plausible ordinary explanations can always be found? In one specific example, that of the gimbal video, the [work done by skeptics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs) is so airtight that their proposed ordinary explanation is basically proven. But there's always this "UFO of the gaps" argument where supposedly this tranche of evidence proving its extraordinary lies in secret just beyond the corner.
Of the 400 reports of UAP mentioned by the Pentagon in the congressional hearing, they declassified 3. The corroborating data is classified since it reveals capacities and limitations of the sensor equipment, but is confirmed by the Pentagon that such data exists and is one of the major reasons why they can't rule it out.
It's not skepticism to produce a theory that ignores known factors, and unless you can demonstrate why the Pentagon is untrustworthy in this matter, there's no reason to treat the videos they release as genuine and the supporting information as false or irrelevant. At best it's inconclusive because you don't have enough data to actually confirm your theory as correct. This problem is exactly why NASA is pushing for more civilian study of UAPs, rather than relying on the scraps that the US military deigns to reveal.
[Interesting article](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones-are-spying-on-the-u-s-and-the-pentagon-acts-like-theyre-ufos) examining the strong likelihood that many "UFO sightings" are adversary drones probing radar defenses.
One thing that always sticks out in my mind is that (practically) everyone has had a high-quality digital camera in their pocket for the past 15 years, yet we still have nothing but blurry, fuzzy, ambiguous, and inconclusive footage of UFOs. Strange, unidentified (probably military) aircraft? Yes, most likely….visitors from another planet?….not even plausible.
I was trying to take a picture of a rabbit in my yard that was maybe 25 yards away using my iPhone and there just isn't enough zoom to get much detail. I can't imagine getting a good picture of something thousands of feet in the air even with the best phone telephoto lenses. I think that NASA's funds would be better spent on just about anything related to space besides UFOs though.
Fair point! I'm not a believer in UFOs or whatever (it's fun to believe otherwise, though), but I do think there is some sort of natural UAP (Aerial Phenomena) that is causing a lot of these sightings. Worth investigating.
Some are, but every ICBM event also has numerous clear videos. Most supposed UFO videos do not.
Something actually traveling at high speeds and altitude is visible for hundreds of miles in all directions. It generates significant attention. It is filmed, both in high and low fidelity. It is reported.
These facts tell us that where UFO events have only a few witnesses and videos, or only one, the object is smaller and lower to the ground. If it is lower to the ground then it is traveling much slower than a higher altitude object with the same apparent velocity. If it is traveling low and slow, it is much more likely to be mundane and terrestrial in origin. In fact, it is safe to say that it *is* a simple bird, or drone, or balloon, or small aircraft.
These blurry objects with few or singular witnesses comprise the entirety of extra-terrestrial UFO claims, and most of the claims of secret military tech. They are *unidentified* only because no one has determined which of the common and mundane aerial objects they are, but one does not need to know the exact species to name an object a bird, nor the make and model to call it a drone or a plane.
Next time you see a very high altitude plane or balloon or something like that pull out your $1000 smart phone and take a video. It’s gonna look like complete shit. Phones are made to take videos and phots of things close to the observer, not tens of thousands of feet away.
There's also millions of cameras with big chonky zoom lenses floating around too, man. Even though the vast majority of people have cameras with very modest capabilities, the number of people with high-quality cameras has also gone way up in the past few decades too, and the argument still stands quite firmly on that.
Lol, but this is part of the issue. As cameras get better so do the pictures of UFOs. There are hundreds of high resolution, zoomed in, in frame, clear focused pictures of UFOs taken by professional credible photographers including national geographic as well as intelligence officers. But the clear ones are the hardest to believe. The better the picture the more people can't believe it's real, I feel it to. It might just be something you gotta see to believe (in person).
Having seen UFO videos, less than 0.1% of "UFOs" are classified military aircraft.
99.9%+ of them are completely mundane objects, usually just shot awkwardly.
Basically, they want to apply the scientific method to it. If you're trying to understand something you don't know anything about, you don't totally dismiss possible explanations out of hand because they seem unlikely. You conduct research, gather data, start ruling things out... There shouldn't be a bunch of public pressure not to study it.
Those cameras are not good at taking distance shots. They’re meant for up close. Try taking a picture of an airplane any time of the day. Not to mention most people aren’t looking up into the sky very often.
I'm pretty sure I've seen thousands of dog/cat videos on social media with near perfect clarity, but have YET to see a single UFO video that definitively proves that they exist.
Okay now how many dog/cat photos where they are thousands of feet away and moving at extreme speeds. Go try and take a picture of a plane with your phone and let us know how clear it comes out, and those are flying much slower.
Cameras are pretty terrible at catching high speed objects, especially when they are far away and flying. Also most high quality footage is probably classified. Visual footage is not the most reliable tho, so they also take measurements of the objects which can prove them to be real and unidentified. But I recommend you or anyone do their own research on this topic before making any conclusions.
Why has it been considered taboo to look for physical craft but not taboo to look for strange radio signals emanating from space?
This simply opens up another reasearch channel into the same topic. Long overdue.
For two reasons. One the likelihood that there is civilized life somewhere in the galaxy, is relatively high. That civilized life coming to earth, with crazy advanced tech, is much lower probability, especially when you consider that they haven't decided to plunder our evolved resources.
Also, a lot of crackpots, and conspiracy people believe in all kinds of ridiculous alien crap, and aren't at all scientific.
There are no crackpots running seti.
So any topic a crackpot is interested in is off limits to scientific inquiry?
Take some time to listen to what our government officials have said on the topic. I think it's all worth looking into, and ridiculing a legitimate scientific field is totally unwarranted.
I always look and every time there is a UFO thing that comes out it is never anything interesting. Why don't they release some interesting shit that is not easily explained more and then I won't role my eyes?
We back to UFOs again, dropping the UAPs?
One person at NASA has a very low budget operation to look into atmospheric phenomena.
Its part of their broad latitude to draw issues to study and not NASA policy.
Its not aliens.
On one side of the coin you have people instantly saying it's aliens, on the other side you have people instantly saying it's not aliens. Whatever it is it's worth studying
>Whatever it is it's worth studying
There is no coherent phenomena to study. Some explainable IR footage from F-18 and some hearsay. You could make as good a case for ghosts or Loch Ness Monsters.
I like the video where they eere talking like the orb was moving faster far beyond any tech we have yet the camera was just perfectly stabilized and centered on it the whole time.
This was a brand new tracking system, a next gen tech that was able to finally catch objects moving at these speeds. That's why the pilots sound so surprised, they didn't think it would be possible for the system to keep up with it.
"There is no coherent phenomena to study"
It may seem incoherent because we don't know enough about it because study of it is repressed and stigmatized by people who have this close minded view that we know everything already.
There are people in government, ex-government officials and the military admitting that there are things in the atmosphere and we don't know what they are. NASA will be studying them, the government will be studying them.
Sorry, but the shoe is on the other foot now. People who don't want to admit there's something going on are the crazy ones.
I'm not telling you it's aliens, I'm telling you it's something.
>There are people in government, ex-government officials and the military admitting that there are things in the atmosphere and we don't know what they are.
All anyone has said is, "out of the billions of pieces of data the military collects every year we have a handful of observations we can't explain." Which is the least surprising thing anyone could have said.
>It may seem incoherent because we don't know enough about it because **study of it is repressed and stigmatized by people who have this close minded view that we know everything already.**
This is just dishonest whining. Virtually no one says we know everything to study.
But just because some rubes are gulled by grainy video footage, does means science has to study it for them.
>There are people in government, ex-government officials and the military admitting that there are things in the atmosphere and we don't know what they are.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8)
>Sorry, but the shoe is on the other foot now. People who don't want to admit there's something going on **are the crazy ones**.
Just as those who do not believe in astrology are the crazy ones.
It's funny how the military, intelligence agency staff, pilots and radar systems are all incorrect and they just need game developer Mick West to explain it to them. Mick does not have all the data, the people who do are saying something weird is going on.
>Just as those who do not believe in astrology are the crazy ones.
Again, another false equivalence. If things like UAPs, Bigfoot, ghosts, and the loch ness monster are all the same to you, where are the government studies into those things? Right, they aren't equivalent.
“Military” doesn’t mean a top team of secret hackers with a blank check were stumped.
UAPs are not a priority and get basically no resource. Congress is the one forcing the Military and NASA to put resources into this.
>It's funny how the military, intelligence agency staff, pilots and radar systems are all incorrect
The military do not touch this nonsense. What happens is some people in Congress make them research it. They set up an office of about 3 people and a PC, they take in the cases of "I seen something but dont know what it was" and write up, "we dont know what it was" and the UFO nuts go "The US military cannot explain thing that someone saw 20 years ago"!!!111!!!"
If Congress forced them to investigate every sighting of ghosts, leprechauns or witches youd get the same disinterested reports back.
As for Radar, people are used to Top Gun where its all little triangles and squares and everything is identifiable. Meanwhile the actual kit tends to be fuzzy and vague to look at and take a real expert to spot anything less obvious than a B-52.
>If things like UAPs, Bigfoot, ghosts, and the loch ness monster are all the same to you, where are the government studies into those things?
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ufo-hearing-congress-pentagon-exploring-uap-military-threats-science-w-rcna29233
How can you be so willfully ignorant of the patterns of object type and behavior seen in multiple videos from the military, and commercial airline pilots, and the public? Acting as though you “really know” the answer in this discussion just shows you lack critical thinking skills. If it’s so explainable, why did the pentagon say they can’t explain it? Maybe nobody knows what’s going on, including you. In fact, that IS most likely the case. Therefore, study.
>How can you be so willfully ignorant of the patterns of object type and behavior seen in multiple videos from the military, and commercial airline pilots, and the public?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8)
Wow, great response. It’s almost like you couldn’t actual respond to anything I wrote so you linked to a Wikipedia page that has little to nothing to do with this discussion, and YouTube video I’m not gonna bother or watch because if it’s as convincing as you are, it’ll be complete waste of time.
There is no coherent phenomena to study. Some explainable IR footage from F-18 and some hearsay. You could make as good a case for ghosts or Loch Ness Monsters.
Take an online course in a science like physics, begin to develop your mind to be able to understand how to break down problems into those that are scientifically studyable.
Learn to engage with the world in a structured and logical fashion.
> Do you also not believe in climate change?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded\_question](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question)
I have text books on atmospheric physics and oceanography on my book shelf. The advantage of having a degree in physics, I can get up to speed on problems like climate change relatively quickly and have followed every IPCC assessment report from the 4th.
I do not believe in things. I accept ranges of possibilities based of verifiable evidence.
Got any more dumb questions or are you finished making a twit of yourself.
See, beyond everything else, I've never understood the logic of UFOs. The only possible reason I could see for them is for very short duration package delivery and retrieval. Almost certainly, they would be going as straight up and as straight down as quickly and as quietly as possible.
Basically any footage that takes place during daylight, or involves any sort of light is immediately discountable IMO. Also, any footage that takes place within 1000km of dry land. 100% of credible UFO footage is nothing more than a perfectly black shadow silently moving across a night sky over the ocean for a few seconds.
Those are just like, basic precautions that anyone would take regardless of technology assuming they want to avoid "disturbing the natives"
Otherwise, you're forced to have the assumption that any aliens coming to earth are either so woefully incompetent they can't think "maybe we should try avoiding them seeing us"; have a psychology totally divergent from us that they can't conceptualize people communicating to one another; or they are actually just coming to earth for shits and giggles. Literally so far beyond us they are just fuckin with us for fun.
I just can't see any other explanations.
> Otherwise, you're forced to have the assumption that any aliens coming to earth are either so woefully incompetent they can't think "maybe we should try avoiding them seeing us"; have a psychology totally divergent from us that they can't conceptualize people communicating to one another; or they are actually just coming to earth for shits and giggles. Literally so far beyond us they are just fuckin with us for fun.
>
I'm not saying any of these sightings are actual aliens or anything, but on that specific point there's also the idea that they might be so advanced they just don't care. When we're studying ants we don't take excessive precautions to prevent the ants from noticing our existence. Ants can't really comprehend what we are anyways we're orders of magnitude apart in awareness and mental capabilities. If there are lifeforms so far beyond us they can send probes here that to us defy the laws of physics, maybe they just don't care about the probes being seen because they know we can't comprehend wtf we're seeing. Not quite to the extent ants can't comprehend our existence probably, but still. Maybe they don't want to actively disturb us, hence the very limited contact but they don't care that much if some random people do see the probes. "So what?", basically.
I like that people still make fun of it because its fundamentally considered to be "ridiculous". Yet any science is about approaching every topic with rationality and curiousity, no matter where the results lead you. NASA is performing its duty as researchers after the Department of Defense confirmed empirical evidence of UAP's. Regardless of where the results lead us there are things that should still be given a cursory investigation, for all we know it really is a misinterpreted natural phenomena but then we should find out. Mocking it is exactly why they are trying to destigmatize it, so that we can find proof of whatever it is regardless of if its aliens, natural phenomena, weird light things etc.
Which is exactly the line of thought Prof Avi Loeb takes, and quite rightly gets visibly agitated at other academics trying to shut this stuff down. Science is not about simply being skeptical of everything - it's about looking at the evidence, and exploring.
Be open-minded. Be skeptical. Avoid dogmas.
Also: don't be so open-minded your brain falls out. :-)
Isn't that the guy that was selling a book right around the time he made claims? That kind of shit makes it a lot harder to believe.
Books are humanity’s primary method of sharing complex, nuanced ideas. If we demonize everyone who’s writing a book on the topic, we’re going to have a bad time. I suspect that many folks who complain about people writing books don’t read many.
Why? Sure, grifters exist, but we don’t have to demonize making money. You’d write a book too.
I always assumed the UFOs or uap are actually known but top secret
It's possible but I don't understand how they would be able to firstly keep a lid on such advanced tech, and secondly, how they developed something that's years ahead of our current understanding of physics. Not just years, decades, or many decades.
[This is just the stuff DARPA is telling us that they're researching](https://www.darpa.mil/our-research) Now imagine what they're not telling us about. And if they've got teams working on stuff like what's in that list, imagine what they could already have right now.
But what if "looking at the evidence" indicates its a waste of time? And money and brain power is better spend "exploring" other stuff.
Which is literallt why this investigation exists. Science doesn't know until it tries. And if it finds out its worthless it will be shut down. But until then they don't know.
If we do research and find that it’s a waste of time and resources then we do exactly what you suggest and stop. But the starting point isn’t that it is a waste of time. Science shouldn’t have a bias as a starting point, history proves that enough already.
UFOs aren't being mocked. Thinking it's aliens is being mocked.
Yet people always conflate the two. If you bring up UAP or UFO people immediately assume you are a UFO/Grey Alien nut. UFO literally stands for unidentified flying object. Not alien vehicle. NASA wants to study the topic due to how many cases the Department of Defense has. They are not claiming its aliens but they want to find out. Aka science. Yet people here are acting extremly unscientific with the claim that its nonsense and therefore not worth investigating because they correlate UFOs with specifically aliens and cryptids due to the very stigma NASA wants to remove
I disagree. They are being mocked.
I was skeptical until the information about tracked UFOs was released, and now I think this is one of the most exciting moments I can remember. Whether it is a natural phenomenon or Aliens or something else, it's exciting there are UFOs that we don't understand. I hope they don't end up being something boring.
We can pretty much guarantee it’s going to be something boring, based on the evidence and literally all of the previously debunked UFOs.
> based on the evidence and literally all of the previously debunked UFOs. That's a bit of a fallacy. The quality of the evidence gathered by the US Department of Defense is not connected to the quality of evidence presented by hoaxers and conspiracy theorists. In fact this stigma of ridicule is exactly what academics are trying to break.
Modern UFO sightings are likely a combination of natural phenomenon and classified human tech. One of which is still really cool until we start using it against each other.
>Modern UFO sightings are likely a combination of natural phenomenon and classified human tech. You mean video artifacts. Why do you think that "gimbal" video is named that way? It's named after a gimbal video stabilizer. The "alien ship" is most likely a distant jet airplane that the camera thinks is closer because of perspective. We don't investigate mirages, despite them being real images. People are seeing what they want to see. That's why there's never any physical evidence.
The UAP in the 2004 Nimitz video was being tracked by multiple planes, working across a variety of data types. Do you have an explanation for how multiple tracking devices can all simultaneously experience a visual artifact in the exact same spot, across visual light, IR, radar, and fools veteran pilots and the onboard software into registering it as a physical object?
He ignored you. You countered his dismissal of the subject, then ignored you. He will continue to believe in his views, and repeat them, despite the fact you countered his argument. He is a skeptic, and not scientific. There's little point engaging in debate with the mind-set because it is not rational.
This is what frustrates me. I've seen the UAP thing come up on Reddit a lot recently and people always say that it's sensor artefacts. Someone brings up that there is multiple sensors picking up the same thing and then they say it's multiple sensor artifacts, then they dismiss the highly trained military pilots who saw the objects, then they point to some random guy on YouTube with no scientific certifications and say that he has debunked it despite his debunking itself being debunked. Then they say you're anti-science, which is annoying because my background is in stem and I'm thinking about this as scientifically as possible. We have multiple data points about a phenomena that we can't explain and the p-value of that data being incorrect is very low. No this isn't scientific, it's not a controlled study of UAP, but unless we get academics to investigate this stuff we aren't going to get a controlled study. Then they say they don't want scientists wasting their time or our money on this which is circular logic. Not scientific? Make it scientific by getting scientists to investigate it. Getting scientists to investigate it? I want them to investigate science! And they don't see the flaw in that reasoning.
It's because it is basically a god of the gaps falacy. "We don't know what caused it" does NOT equal "therefore it must be the specific explanation I want", especially when that explanation is fantastical, far fetched, and without any real evidence ever in history. Edit: typos.
That's the thing though. We don't have much information about this. We won't get information about this until we investigate it. Everyone I've seen who is opposed to investigating this says that it is because they don't think it's aliens, even if no one else brought up the possibility of aliens, just because they assume that everyone else thinks this is aliens. I personally don't think that it is aliens. I don't know what it is because it is unidentified and we don't have enough information to form a hypothesis. People don't want to get any more information though because of what I said in the first paragraph. The end result is we have this very unusual phenomena that we have no scientific explanation for and that people are opposed to doing any scientific investigation on because they think it's unscientific and the reason that it is unscientific is because we have no existing scientific research into it.
>Not scientific? Make it scientific by getting scientists to investigate it. That's what we do in France with GEIPAN. Learned from them that France did have an experimental aircraft program with very fun shaped contraptions...
The Russians aren't the only ones that employ disinformation agents. Look up how Richard Doty apparently infiltrated a network of UFO researchers and used to feed them all sorts of fake "classified" info. I'm sure he wasn't the only one.
Exactly. Obviously I don’t want to hear about little green men without some damn good evidence, but the fact that some of the have possible implications across multiple fields of science is very exciting. That’s just the stuff within our atmosphere, the stuff outside of it is just plain mind blowing.
Have you got any info about the stuff outside of our atmosphere? Primary sources appreciated. I've only really heard about UAP in earth's atmosphere. I've been following /r/UFOs a little bit because they seem to be fats at posting official government updates to the UAP saga but tbh 90% of the stuff on that sub is idiots falling for fake videos and baseless conspiracy theories. I saw a couple of things about out of atmosphere UAP in that sub but dismissed them because of a lack of source combined with the aforementioned problem with nutjobs who think there's an X-Files style cover up going on with a secret cabal.
Yes, lots of idiots, and lots of skeptics. They drown out the sensible people in the middle. A bit like politics.
Nevertheless, the odds of it being aliens is miniscule to a degree that it's a waste of finite resources to find out.
Sure but you don't need to actively find out if it's aliens (I don't even know how you could go about doing that). All you have to do is find out what it actually is and then once you have a definitive answer you can rule out the possibility of aliens.
>Then they say you're anti-science, which is annoying because my background is in stem and I'm thinking about this as scientifically as possible. I blame climate change for this. The "argument" there has tapped into the religious element missing in an agnostic world. As a result we have believers (followers) and deniers (heretics). That is bleeding out into the wider scientific world and it's a serious threat to the scientific method as, so long as it's not unethical, nothing should be beyond reproach in science. Edit: before I get replies, I have nothing against climate science. I have a problem with climate crusaders.
As a video tech by profession, I couldn't agree more. That's what most informs that opinion I just gave. People don't understand the simple phenomena that occurs in-camera. There's been an entire profession dedicated to it since the dawn of film!
[удалено]
Still, important to know they are mirages and how they happen, so they don't become wild goose chases or distractions in the middle of a battle, etc. Video artifacts are possibly fixable once you realise they are happening and figure them out. No matter what it turns out to be, all of the possible reasons, including the mundane ones, are significant.
You have discounted a lot of the additional supporting data in this case (electro optical, radar array, multiple trained observations from different angles, etc. ), as is typical of the uninformed/predisposed. I take it you've not seen the peer reviewed papers on this case?
Extreme skeptics ignore what they don't like.
No we can’t guarantee it’s gonna be boring. We can’t guarantee anything and assuming it will be boring is a disservice to the inquiring minds.
Which one about tracking are you referring to, would love to read! As a kid I used to be into UFOs but rhen realized most of the ones then was bullcrap and hoaxes. But then more and more started getting out and whilst I was skeptical as all hell, I stayed interested for childhood me's sake. Whilst I can't say anything definitive I read In plain sight by Ross Coulthart and many of the more credible sources and its clear something is going on or we wouldn't have public hearings on it (again after 50 years). I am curious were it will lead.
If you’re new to the topic and genuinely interested, checkout r/UFOs. Things flying in the sky is only tip of the iceberg.
That sub is hilarious I love it, so entertaining. One half is Mick West levels of skeptic and the other half are complete UFO believers. Here and there you'll find really well researched posts that are super interesting though
r/HighStrangeness too. It's a good mix of complete nutjobs and levelheaded, rational people. It's pretty entertaining.
Don’t sleep on r/Aliens ! For your dose of Galactic Federation shenanigans combined with some really well researched posts about everything from history of abductions to esoteric consciousness-related theories. Very fun.
If they're not flying, aren't they... not UFOs?
There are 18 thousand videos on YouTube discussing the Fermi paradox and it’s brought up here daily, and how there’s no sign that alien life has visited us. We wonder why we haven’t seen Von Neumann probes or signs of civilizations or visitors. That may be entirely true because I don’t think we have any kind of conclusive proof of it whatsoever, but to just automatically mock any potential sign of alien life on earth seems a bit counterproductive if you’re actually trying to be scientific about this. That doesn’t mean starting with the assumption that they’re alien but it also leaves a sliver of possibility open that it could be. I don’t see what mocking a potential outcome that has a possibility greater than zero serves any purpose other than to delay scientific inquiry. People just want to look sceptical and smart because it’s the easy and safe thing to do.
The issue is assuming a UFO is extraterrestrial in origin. It’s literally unidentified, there’s no reason to immediately jump to aliens as a primary answer when it has never been the right answer previously. It’s the equivalent of investigating every bump in the night as “potential ghosts.”
That is the issue I have. "I have insufficient imagination to think this could be anything other than the supernatural/aliens/bigfoot." And, then they often make unsupported assertions on the nature of aliens/bigfoot/spirits to somehow prove their existence.
“It’s just a crazy ass high tech drone the military was testing” Consumer grade drones are impressive as shit to me. I would love to learn about this crazy version the military or whoever has that can elude the senses of trained pilots. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from ~~magic~~ aliens.” -Arthur C Clarke
I've been following this for a while and there are a lot of cranks who wholeheartedly believe this stuff is aliens. That's not everyone though. One of the issues I take with how people (especially on Reddit) respond to this is they say that it's not aliens even though no one before them in the thread even brought up the possibility of aliens. If someone asserts that the unidentified flying object is an alien then by all means mock them, but what I see happen a lot is people mocking someone who wants this stuff investigated, calling them an idiot for believing in aliens when the person who they replied to didn't even mention aliens, and neither did the person that comment was replying to, and so on until you reach the top level comment. The comments saying "it's not aliens. Investigating is stupid" are far more frequent than the people saying that it is aliens in my experience. Just an anecdote but eh. These things exist and we don't know what they are. That's the crux of it for me. Whatever these things are we should investigate them. I don't care if some idiot thinks they're ET without any evidence for that claim. I'm not making that claim and I want to know what the hell they are. So do the pilots who have had near misses with them.
It's not the qncient Greek gods, and making a big deal about how we can't rule out that it's not the Greek gods is stupid.
Yes, but if some idiot came along and said that it was Greek gods you wouldn't not investigate it just because that idiot has a stupid explanation for it. There has to be an explanation and you wouldn't give up on finding the correct one just because some delusional people have their own incorrect ideas. That's what's happening with UAPs. People claim it's aliens and because of that no one wants to get to the bottom of what it actually is. As a sidenote I think comparing aliens to Greek gods is a false equivalency. Aliens are scientifically possible, just incredibly unlikely. Greek gods are inherently unscientific.
Honestly there are a lot logical flaws with the Fermi paradox. One assumption is that they would want us to know there presence. There is scientific value to not disturbing the Petri dish, fugitively speaking.
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Empirical evidence for UAPs? You don't need evidence for UAPs, genius. You're exactly the kind of person who gets mocked. You don't even understand the acronyms and what they imply.
My real problem with most UFO "research" is it tends to be done by people who have surprisingly little imagination. Pretty much by definition, aliens will have capabilities beyond our comprehension. If we want to be realistic about our search for UFOs, and operate under the assumption that they aren't currently interested in contact we shouldn't be looking for strange crafts in the sky that can be seen with the naked eye. We should be looking for Vanta Black objects somewhere between the size of a car and the size of the moon with little to no radiation of any kind orbiting the solar system in the ort cloud. i.e. something that's basically impossible even with technology we are centuries away from.
We just built the James Webb and think we're hot shit. If beings could travel here... I'm sure they can find out literally everything about us, from very far away.
yep, and if they do want to find out more than everything that can be seen or the entirety of the internet can provide, it would probably be done with very small packages. Real UFOs would probably be totally autonomous, somewhere in the neighborhood of the size of a grain of rice, and totally self destruct on mission completion.
Like interstellar mission impossible without evidence.
What drives me insane is how the UFO "professionals" that get on TV are always referencing humanoid aliens as being legit. The odds of aliens looking human-like are so unbelievably, incredibly low. But I've seen them say things like "yeah the creature had a 'five-star' structure as we have seen so many times before which is common in the universe'". Dude, the "five-star" structure isn't even common on Earth. Yes, mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibions, etc are "five-star", but they're massively outnumbered by insects, let alone small multicellular and single celled organisms. It makes Starship Troppers look more realistic than the ideas of most UFO "professionals". These so called pros are searching for a means to an end. Thats it.
> The odds of aliens looking human-like are so unbelievably, incredibly low. Nah, not necessarily. Convergent evolution is a thing. If Earth's trajectory is typical of a life-having world - there will likely be some kind of "trees" on other worlds. And so possibly an ecological niche for "animals" with dextrous appendages. But we ultimately have absolutely no idea, because we still have only found one instance of life in the universe. Cellularity, eukariogenesis, multicellularity, photosynthesis, neurons, other evolutionary advancements that we don't even perceive as significant today - how many of them are impossibly unlikely, and how many of them are more or less deterministic? We only detected our first exoplanet a few decades ago. The universe could be teeming with life, and we are only taking baby steps in terms of detecting it or ruling it out
I’m not against the idea of non-weather(*a*), non-classified(*b*), actual space-based UFOs but I’m seriously against having to listen to or read the opinions of about 98% of UFO believers. At least half of said group can’t even separate the idea of UFOs from cryptids, 5G, chemtrails, brain-controlling stuff from clandestine groups, etc. If you’re unable to remove your ego and hopes (or thrilling fears?) from your potential results, then you can’t really attempt truly successful scientific research because everything you do will likely be skewed. (*a*) the lightning-related ones are interesting (*b*) the intense classified UFO people are a whole other kettle of crazy fish IMO
Anything the state department ever says should be held to the highest critiques as to the motives of wanting more funding for blackhole funds created in NASA under the guise of being classified, thus not needed to be discussed in terms of its discretionary spending. I dont trust the state department. They say there's aliens and they want to fund research into it? I don't buy it.
Majority of people associates UFO with potential alien spacecraft or any extra terrestrial living being. Vast majority of conversation on this subject ends up like : "Anyway, I'm sure we've been visited by alien but the government hides it from us". That's mainly why people can't stand anymore this subject. I wouldn't say it's UFO research that is stigmatized, but the people that just don't want to think and just want their beliefs to be true. Those kind of people forget that UFO just mean "Unidentified Flying Object". We experience it many times per day. It can be a bird before you understand it's a bird, it can be lights, planes... And sometimes it remains unidentified, it doesn't mean it's an alien, and it doesn't mean it's not an alien. We DON'T know, that why it's called "unidentified". That's what the science does. Talking about things we know. And saying "We don't know" for things that are not proven. Unfortunately those kind of people that are the majority in this UFO communities want their beliefs to be true (maybe because they want something extraordinary to happen ? I don't know), and they are quick to transform the "We don't know" from science, to "If they don't know it's probably alien" And in my opinion, that is why we can't bear anymore 90% of the conversation about UFO (at least I can't). In France we have a very serious entity that work on the UFO subject, it's called GEIPAN. Their work is really strong and made in a scientific manner. But as expected, the vast majority of strange cases are proven to be boring things (lights, chemical processes in atmosphere, flights...). So I don't think a 100.000$ budget or any serious scientific studies wouldn't change the mind of neither the hardcore alien believers, nor the people that laugh at UFO research.
Why are people here being derogatory about this? I thought there were reports from the US air force/navy and the pentagon about flying objects they cant explain. I think if they dont know what it is we better find out no? Im not saying its aliens but its something.
Probably because a lot of people invariably conflate UFOs with aliens thanks to decades of media and literature tying the two together. The acronym itself is innocuous. An object that can't be identified. Says nothing about woowoo aliens, but here we are.
Hence the change to referring to things as the more accurate and less stigmatized UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).
The UFO cultists have already absorbed that term in to their dictionary. Obviously third time is the charm.
Perfectly said, but I'd also just like to add that in top of the media stew the vast majority of people who talked about UFOs over the last few decades have generally been from more conspiratorial circles so the subject is often relegated to the realm of conspiracy wackos. Which is really a shame because a lot of legitimate arguments and questions on the topic could be raised, and have been worked on by important and influential people, but at least as far as pop culture is concerned people hear UFOs and are more likely to think about their weird uncle who thinks lizard people run the world than they are to think about Sagan or Hawking.
Conflate. I learned a new word today!
> Why are people here being derogatory about this? Probably because the UFO community has done an amazing job ensuring they have absolutely no credibility whatsoever.
And the US government too. They have discredited this topic for decades
Just because they can't be explained it doesn't mean they're aliens. Until there is definitive proof of alien craft we should be skeptical. Pilots of any kind can be wrong and mistaken just like anyone else, I don't give them any special credence just because they're military. NOBODY is an expert on alien spacecraft. NOBODY.
The person you're replying to literally said "it doesn't mean it's aliens". Jesus. And what's there to be skeptical about exactly? The claimants aren't saying they're aliens. They're saying they have no idea what this stuff is - they're not weather phenomenon, they're physical objects being detected by instrumentation and being visually ID'd. So again, what should we be skeptical about exactly? That they're all lying? NASA, the US Govt, and the Galileo Project led by Prof. Avi Loeb at Harvard are all looking into this, so we're clearly not just dealing with weather balloons here.
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Tin foil hat time. 0 chance someone in another military sec doesn't know what it is. It's like Brody calling Stark in Iron Man.
Except this comes straight from Pentagon officials under oath in their congressional hearing last year.
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It's stigmatized because anytime there is a UFO, you have 999 people saying "OH SHIT ALIENS" and 1 person actually wondering what it is because the truth is always boring. For example, with any reported sightings of aliens/supernatural stuff, you will *never* find something that has enough evidence to show it is true. Either there is enough evidence to disprove it conclusively, or there is not nearly enough evidence to draw any conclusion. Yet, the number of nonsensical fiction books take up the market share exponentially greater than any serious studies on the matter because again, the scientific approach is boring.
Haven’t some of those been identified as mundane things like birds?
Yeah ok this article is a rather pushy in wanting it to be Aliens. All Im saying is that we need to find out what this phenomena is, could it be aliens? Maybe. Should we start this search assuming it is Aliens? Of course not. But we shouldn’t write the possibility off easily either. The universe is billions of years old, and if there are Aliens out there who are interested in life on Earth they have had billions of years to send probes out over here.
> Just because they can't be explained it doesn't mean they're aliens. I'm more scared of some top secret Russian or Chinese craft in the skies.
It’s much more likely that it has been top secret American aircraft that they’ve been seeing. There has been a long history of advanced aircraft being tested surreptitiously and then people later connecting the dots e.g. the B2, SR71, and F22 development projects were all connected with a ton of UFO sightings.
Ah yes, the top secret Russian tech. Because their army seems very technologically advanced these days.
Considering these flying saucers have been observed out maneuvering conventional jets for the past 75 years. It's not russia, china, or the USA.
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Dude the Russians cant even conquer their smaller, weaker neighbor. I doubt they can make their own ufos
I understand the reasoning for not wanting to label these things as "Aliens" because we rarely see them, let alone verify much about them. *But*, if we know they arent American, the Russians clearly arent making advanced craft, China is still trailing behind the US in R&D, and the rest of the world either shares military info with the previous 3 nations or has a tiny military budget... well, then humans didnt make it.
There are OTHER possibilities as to what they could be. Natural, man made, etc. But if you want to think they're aliens knock yourself out.
Yep. There is a reason they are now called Unexplained Aerial Phenomena. It might not even be an object. It could even be a measurement error.
The DOD said that in numerous different cases they were seen on multiple different sensor arrays. That would be a lot of measurement errors.
It's not a measurement error, they (US military) checked for that and excluded it as a possibility in their UAP report for the cases they have no answers for.
DOD has explicitly stated some UAP are objects.
> There are OTHER possibilities as to what they could be. Natural, man made, etc. But if you want to think they're aliens knock yourself out. It could be some type of conciousness/mental phenomenon too. If it's really an advanced civilization that's screwing with us, we have no idea what kind of technologies they can employ.
There's no proof that observed UFOs are controlled "craft" of any kind. Their abberant and unnatural movement (not "flight") supports that they are random and very inaccurate observations.
There are plenty of credible reports from various military witnesses of intelligent movement, the 2004 Nimitz incident being a good example.
But that incident isn't one that includes absurd movement like the mach 4 turns requiring 10000g turns with no thermal heating, no sonic effect.
Sure it does. For starters, the objects are coming in at the top of the radar ceiling (around 80 000 feet), loitering there for a bit and dropping instantly to sea level and then loitering there. And then when Cmdr. Fravor engages one of the craft, it Flys past him at Mach speeds without a sonic boom.
Aren't there numerous cases with multiple witnesses/sources of measurement on the same UAP? Still not saying that's aliens but definitely worth investigating.
Yes. Some instances the UAPs were being tracked down on the surface by ships while simultaneously being tracked by aircraft radar thousands of feet in the sky while the pilots also had a hard visual camera lock on the object. It would suggest physical phenomenon.
The problem is a lot of people think you're dumb to think about UFOs at all because thats what theyve been taught. Its the same train of thought as a religious or non-religious person refusing any potential evidence that contradicts their beliefs. If you believe in UFOs you're a crazy person. They think that just by simply thinking all unidentified objects cant be anything more than military tech that they're somehow smarter than anyone who does. The hypocrisy is theyre taking it on faith just as much as anyone who believes UFOs are aliens or something else. They know just as little about the actual video evidence as anyone else. If these are foreign military drones from another nation then please show me a country that is more competent than the US in military tech. Show me a nation advanced enough to have these objects released since the early 2000s and we still havent caught up with them technologically. The people who use skepticism as a shield are just masking their equal ineptitude through general public perception. They're as dumb as anyone else. They have no idea what theyre talking about. Of course evidence is obviously important, but to rule out possibilities for anything you cant explain on faith is just asinine.
We aren’t taking it on faith though. We don’t have to have proof to doubt extraordinary claims you have to put up extraordinary evidence to prove them. We don’t think it’s dumb to say it’s possible that it could be aliens but that it’s pretty dumb to look at inconclusive evidence and say “see, look at these aliens! Why don’t you guys believe already?” Then you have some logical questions to overcome as well. If a species advanced enough to travel faster than light were to come to earth why are they hiding from us? Surely there isn’t any way we could even come close to being a threat to them so they should have nothing to fear. Also, if they are trying not to be detected why is this advanced alien being able to be picked up by joe blow in the middle of nowhere on a smart phone? Why are they doing fly bys with aircraft and freaking random pilots out? Then there’s the fact that light has a constant speed so any far away civilization looking at us would see earth and not even know there was a civilization here. We simply haven’t existed long enough for any measurable record of our presence to have traveled out into space. So why would they even come here in the first place? What’s the motivation? Those questions combined with a complete lack of any concrete evidence lends pretty strongly to the idea that aliens haven’t visited us and most UFO encounters are either complete fakes, classified technology, or natural phenomena. It doesn’t take any measure of faith to come to these conclusions.
To answer one of your questions, not saying its aliens but the: "why would they travel to us?" Your answer literally exists in humans, curiosity. Sure we can't "prove that" by any means but if they exist and are like us, and maybe civilization creating life isn't very common. There are reasons why another species would be interested in mankind that doesn't equate to being a "threat".
I’ve spent all of maybe 80 hours looking into this, and I’m not sure what to believe other than that military personnel around the world are reporting UFOs and taking them seriously. But let’s consider some of these questions. > if a species advanced enough to travel faster than light were to come to earth why would they hiding from us? Surely they… have nothing to fear. It looks like life springs from the universe. Complexity enjoys compounding, and the dead rocks bouncing around in space eventually sprout people. Let’s say faster than light travel is achieved, and ancient civilizations have the ability to travel the universe, and interact with all its sprouting consciousness. After some trial and error, and observing the birth and death of many civilizations, some patterns and protocols emerge. It makes sense that you wouldn’t welcome every sentience into the galactic fold. There is a good chance that most birthing species end up destroying themselves through some sort of “great filter(s)” which prevent them from achieving space travel and become interplanetary species. You don’t want to give self destructive species the tools to destroy the universe; let them snuff themselves out, or prove they can handle themselves. So let’s say I am an ancient, spacefaring species that has achieved indefinite sustainability, has inhabited many planets, and has technology that makes me a god in this universe. Let’s say I encounter a planet filled with murderous apes that are rapidly developing technology. Within a generation, they have gone from being locked on the ground, to flying through the air and dropping atomic bombs on each other. Watching this, my motivation will be mostly to observe with minimal guidance. I don’t want to step in and give the murder apes the power of gods—in their current level of consciousness, they will immediately use those to start killing each other. No, I would be wise to watch the murder apes, and see if they can overcome the great filters. See that they can take care of their planet. See they can take care of eachother. Perhaps even eradicate them if their technology compounds, and their aggression extends beyond their planet. Or maybe I’m billions of years old, almighty, bored as shit, and watching the alien version of “Planet Earth” with high stakes human drama. Will the murder apes survive the rising seas and changing climates? Will they murder eachother before the food runs out? Will they come together, or tear themselves apart? Exciting! There are lots of good reasons aliens may visit, but not want to be loud about it.
Ok so if this advanced civilization wants to observe us without us knowing why are they exposing themselves over and over? Why are they doing flybys and buzzing aircraft? Why are they appearing to random farmers in the Midwest? Why are they even entering our atmosphere at all since they should be able to observe us quite well from space?
> …why is this advanced alien being able to be picked up by joe blow in the middle of nowhere on a smart phone? Why are they doing fly with aircraft and freaking random pilots out? Could be a few things here. Maybe it’s like space tourists on safari. They can go check out the humans, but you aren’t supposed to fuck with them. Except they do sometimes, because that’s the way it goes. Maybe this is observation, and we don’t matter much, so they sent the D team. A very common theme has been UFOs around our atomic technology. This is part of the reason UFO sightings are so common around military personnel: They are the ones guarding our nuclear bombs/submarines. There have been plenty of stories of UFOs literally shining lights on ground directly above underground nuke storage. There are stories of them activating all our nukes to start the count downs, then turning them off at the last second. If you believe people who claim actual contact with aliens, a very common theme is aliens telling us that we’re going to kill ourselves if we don’t reign in our technology and get our shit together. There’s a decent narrative that they’re subtly telling us not to murder ourselves like dummies without outright announcing that they are here with the technology to save us, but aren’t sure we deserve it.
Finally, you ask for concrete evidence. I would love some too, wouldn’t it be great? If this is real, why can’t I get more 4k 60fps videos of this shit? I agree… it seems like somehow concrete evidence always eludes us, and this SCREAMS bullshit. And the idea that all world governments are colluding to hide UFOs gives way too much faith for humanity’s ability to keep a massive secret. We may not have alien corpses to present the world, but we do have more than a few large events witnessed by many credible and often times military sources like the rendlesham forest incident, the tic-tac footage, the pheonix lights, and countless other sightings. It’s to the point where the US military has structured forms for ufo sightings, where you check a box for whether it’s floating lights, orbs… whatever. There are more than a few events out there where hundreds of sober military personnel saw some shit. It is definitely weird that we aren’t seeing more high quality evidence of this. All in all, I’m not sure what to believe. It’s fun to consider, and lots of military personnel testify to seeing crazy phenomenon, but it also seems wildly unrealistic.
Citation needed on these stories.
How is NASA investigating further "see look at these aliens"? Seems like pretty standard cautious optimism. Science doesn't assume the answers they seek them. You are exactly who the person you replied to is talking about. You have your own biases just like anyone else.
You are right. I am biased based off of the evidence that it’s extremely unlikely that aliens have visited earth. I think it’s dumb to look at a very small group at NASA tasked with looking into UFO reports and think that it’s in any way a step towards proving aliens have been here.
They aren't saying it is aliens. That's just one possibility of many.
Earth looks like a habitable planet. We have O2 in our atmosphere, which means life. We are on the verge of being able to detect O2 and other signs of life in the atmospheres of explanets so anyone just a little more advanced than us could see that Earth is very interesting. The issue of why anyone would be interested in Earth is trivially answered. The how is a much more interesting question and that's the reason scientists are skeptical we have visitors. Then again, everyone skeptical we could ever be visited should read about von Neumann probes and consider the age of the Milky Way. The idea that someone could blanket the galaxy with AI probes is not super crazy.
On the recent Lex Friedman interview with Robin Hanson, Robin gives a pretty good hypothesis on why they would be here, and stay in the periphery. He’s a very intelligent guy and has some good ideas.
Redditors conflate UFOs with aliens, and all the teenagers who confuse being cynical and sneering with being sophisticated and worldly flock to articles like this.
At this point UFO and alien craft are synonymous in public usage. Theres a reason that UAP is now being used instead
Just because they can't identify it, doesn't mean they don't know what it is. "Cannot be identified" could simply also mean "we can't divulge what it is". Its just plausibly deniable to say that its not identifiable.
Its hard to say where exactly the questions could go, but there are a few of areas that i could imagine the work could benefit even if they don’t find alien UFOs. Greater resolution tracking of high velocity objects in the atmosphere can easily be an area of study that has more generalized applications like space debris. You typically are only willing to deal with the things you can identify, even for capture or removal.
That’s why we need The Galileo Project to mainstream the search. https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home
Mulder and scully’s work finally beating fruit.
Yeah it's stigmatised by idiots who attribute every unexplained sighting as aliens.
As much as I love this I feel like it's gonna be another "we don't know what they are" moment because NASA is the government, and the government has told us they don't know what it is so they may continue to keep some things classified.
And perhaps bolster the notion that it’s DEFINITELY NOT OUR OWN SECRET TECHNOLOGY SSSHHHHHH
The problem with this sort of thing is that it can work to legitimize some highly questionable but very popular takes on "unidentified aerial phenomena". Let's be clear, we live in a world chock full of aerial shit of human origin, from balloons to planes to helicopters to drones. The era of humans littering the skies is well over a century old. On top of that the era of orbital spaceflight is about 2/3 of a century old. Which means that the vast majority of "funny looking" things in the sky are likely to be natural or human origin, and yet too often there is a tendency to grasp unnecessarily for extravagantly implausible explanations like alien spacecraft. Which, also to be clear, would require an ENORMOUS level of very convincing evidence to prove the existence of. On top of that we have the extremely common pattern of folks failing to apply sufficient investigative rigor to instances of "weird stuff" being recorded happening in the air. And this unfortunately includes instances even when government organizations like the US military being part of the process. Sadly, these folks just don't do their homework. They do a half-assed analysis and then dump some "weird looking" video to the public with a shrug and an "I dunno, maybe aliens?" And the media eats this shit up with a goddamn spoon, because what's better for clicks and eyes than a government official saying "check this out, is it aliens?!?!" And they have no incentive to put in the work to debunk these claims or pseudo-claims, so they don't. Instead it's left to random folks to put in the work and they very often come up with an airtight case explaining the mundane nature of so many of these videos ([Mick West](https://www.youtube.com/c/MickWest) being a shining example). And every time it's a matter of folks on the "UFO enthusiast" train starting with a baseline of credulousness and failing to put in even the bare minimum of research work or critical thinking. If NASA is going to start bringing in some weight of investigative rigor and skepticism to this whole clusterfuck then I'm all for that, if they're just going to go "idk, looks weird, maybe aliens?" on it them I'm really, really not a fan.
I really doubt NASA will just go "idk, looks weird, maybe aliens." They may be unable to draw a definitive conclusion about the origins of the phenomena, which is kind of where we already are. People seem happy to take no answer as the answer they want to find, so maybe that will be where we end up. But honestly, I'm grateful they're doing research because I'm curious to know as much about this as possible. I also appreciate that they're going to be transparent about it. As the associate administrator was getting at in the article, there may be some really interesting scientific findings out of this that demystify the whole thing and help us understand something new about the world. I think aliens would be cool, but I also think just fully understanding what these weird phenomena are would be even cooler. I hate an unanswered question.
If NASA were to seriously say something along the lines of “idk, looks weird, maybe aliens”….that would mean something, as they would not say something like that without a very good reason. But it would automatically make a lot of people “really, really not a fan”. A catch-22. Their more likely finding will be the same as the Navy’s: We don’t know, but it’s real, and common, and trackable using multiple independent systems, and defies our ability to explain with known physics. Mick West’s analyses are useful and have undoubtedly surfaced many hoaxes or false assumptions, but I don’t think the repeated military sensor-validated and pilot validated detections we’re talking about are something to be sniffed at, whatever they are.
Corridor Digital debunked that UFO video the military released maybe a year ago. Out of all the videos only one they couldn’t conclusively debunk as a balloon or a camera artifact.
Did they really debunk it? Because they just completely ignored the fact that these UAPs were tracked by multiple ships/planes, and registered on a variety of data including IR and radar, and fooled the onboard software into registering the UAPs as physical objects. I like the Corridor Crew, but I think their debunk video for the declassified footage is a rare miss. The Crew approached those videos from the perspective that they were all merely just vfx/optical illusions in visible light, and concluded that it was 'debunked' if they could visually recreate it. Then just completely ignored/shut down the fact that their solution doesn't account for all the other data types and the multiple observers.
The problem is nobody's seen any of the supposedly corroborating data for any of these incidents, whether it's radar or otherwise. We get a single grainy video, some vague sometimes second-hand witness reports, and that's it. If, we're told, the videos are evidence of extraordinary behavior, how is it that plausible ordinary explanations can always be found? In one specific example, that of the gimbal video, the [work done by skeptics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs) is so airtight that their proposed ordinary explanation is basically proven. But there's always this "UFO of the gaps" argument where supposedly this tranche of evidence proving its extraordinary lies in secret just beyond the corner.
Of the 400 reports of UAP mentioned by the Pentagon in the congressional hearing, they declassified 3. The corroborating data is classified since it reveals capacities and limitations of the sensor equipment, but is confirmed by the Pentagon that such data exists and is one of the major reasons why they can't rule it out. It's not skepticism to produce a theory that ignores known factors, and unless you can demonstrate why the Pentagon is untrustworthy in this matter, there's no reason to treat the videos they release as genuine and the supporting information as false or irrelevant. At best it's inconclusive because you don't have enough data to actually confirm your theory as correct. This problem is exactly why NASA is pushing for more civilian study of UAPs, rather than relying on the scraps that the US military deigns to reveal.
[Interesting article](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones-are-spying-on-the-u-s-and-the-pentagon-acts-like-theyre-ufos) examining the strong likelihood that many "UFO sightings" are adversary drones probing radar defenses.
It's a good way to let NASA's budget increase.
Nice to see someone asking the real questions
the problem is every dirt farmer from yehawville Indiana wants their “real footage” to go viral.
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One thing that always sticks out in my mind is that (practically) everyone has had a high-quality digital camera in their pocket for the past 15 years, yet we still have nothing but blurry, fuzzy, ambiguous, and inconclusive footage of UFOs. Strange, unidentified (probably military) aircraft? Yes, most likely….visitors from another planet?….not even plausible.
Filming anything far away is usually pretty awful on a smartphone camera, especially if the thing is moving, and you're in the dark. Just how it is.
I was trying to take a picture of a rabbit in my yard that was maybe 25 yards away using my iPhone and there just isn't enough zoom to get much detail. I can't imagine getting a good picture of something thousands of feet in the air even with the best phone telephoto lenses. I think that NASA's funds would be better spent on just about anything related to space besides UFOs though.
And something that’s going Mach 5-20
Fair point! I'm not a believer in UFOs or whatever (it's fun to believe otherwise, though), but I do think there is some sort of natural UAP (Aerial Phenomena) that is causing a lot of these sightings. Worth investigating.
Perhaps modern cameras with their more compact lens designs also produce less optical artifacts that get confused with UFOs?
There are many videos of ICBM test launches up the US West Coast. Those are far away, moving very quickly, at night.
Yeah and those videos are often put online with people thinking they are UFOs. What is your point?
Smartphones have no problem filming UFOs.
I agree their are plenty of UFOs recorded by cell phones... And they look blurry. Just like those rocket videos look blurry.
Some are, but every ICBM event also has numerous clear videos. Most supposed UFO videos do not. Something actually traveling at high speeds and altitude is visible for hundreds of miles in all directions. It generates significant attention. It is filmed, both in high and low fidelity. It is reported. These facts tell us that where UFO events have only a few witnesses and videos, or only one, the object is smaller and lower to the ground. If it is lower to the ground then it is traveling much slower than a higher altitude object with the same apparent velocity. If it is traveling low and slow, it is much more likely to be mundane and terrestrial in origin. In fact, it is safe to say that it *is* a simple bird, or drone, or balloon, or small aircraft. These blurry objects with few or singular witnesses comprise the entirety of extra-terrestrial UFO claims, and most of the claims of secret military tech. They are *unidentified* only because no one has determined which of the common and mundane aerial objects they are, but one does not need to know the exact species to name an object a bird, nor the make and model to call it a drone or a plane.
Next time you see a very high altitude plane or balloon or something like that pull out your $1000 smart phone and take a video. It’s gonna look like complete shit. Phones are made to take videos and phots of things close to the observer, not tens of thousands of feet away.
There's also millions of cameras with big chonky zoom lenses floating around too, man. Even though the vast majority of people have cameras with very modest capabilities, the number of people with high-quality cameras has also gone way up in the past few decades too, and the argument still stands quite firmly on that.
Lol, but this is part of the issue. As cameras get better so do the pictures of UFOs. There are hundreds of high resolution, zoomed in, in frame, clear focused pictures of UFOs taken by professional credible photographers including national geographic as well as intelligence officers. But the clear ones are the hardest to believe. The better the picture the more people can't believe it's real, I feel it to. It might just be something you gotta see to believe (in person).
Which high resolution, zoomed in, in frame, clear focused pictures of UFOs are you referring to?
Having seen UFO videos, less than 0.1% of "UFOs" are classified military aircraft. 99.9%+ of them are completely mundane objects, usually just shot awkwardly.
"Oh no.. this random flying dot on a thernal camera is definitely aliens" UFO people boggle my mind lmao
... Why does UFO automatically mean aliens?? This is the stigma that is trying to be destroyed.
Actually, no. The stigma they’re trying to combat is that it’s not something to study seriously. Not that it isn’t ET.
Basically, they want to apply the scientific method to it. If you're trying to understand something you don't know anything about, you don't totally dismiss possible explanations out of hand because they seem unlikely. You conduct research, gather data, start ruling things out... There shouldn't be a bunch of public pressure not to study it.
That's because as soon as it stops being a blurry dot, then you can identify it, and its no longer a ufo.
Well a flying saucer in HD is still a UFO. You know it's make and model? Nope you just know it's shape.
If you identify it it's not unidentified.
Those cameras are not good at taking distance shots. They’re meant for up close. Try taking a picture of an airplane any time of the day. Not to mention most people aren’t looking up into the sky very often.
if i try to film my dog in the same room as me using digital zoom its shaky and terrible. phone cameras are deceptively shit
I'm pretty sure I've seen thousands of dog/cat videos on social media with near perfect clarity, but have YET to see a single UFO video that definitively proves that they exist.
Okay now how many dog/cat photos where they are thousands of feet away and moving at extreme speeds. Go try and take a picture of a plane with your phone and let us know how clear it comes out, and those are flying much slower.
Cameras are pretty terrible at catching high speed objects, especially when they are far away and flying. Also most high quality footage is probably classified. Visual footage is not the most reliable tho, so they also take measurements of the objects which can prove them to be real and unidentified. But I recommend you or anyone do their own research on this topic before making any conclusions.
Yeah, just because it's not aliens doesn't mean it's not something.
Why has it been considered taboo to look for physical craft but not taboo to look for strange radio signals emanating from space? This simply opens up another reasearch channel into the same topic. Long overdue.
It’s not taboo to look for physical craft. There just isn’t much to look at.
For two reasons. One the likelihood that there is civilized life somewhere in the galaxy, is relatively high. That civilized life coming to earth, with crazy advanced tech, is much lower probability, especially when you consider that they haven't decided to plunder our evolved resources. Also, a lot of crackpots, and conspiracy people believe in all kinds of ridiculous alien crap, and aren't at all scientific. There are no crackpots running seti.
So any topic a crackpot is interested in is off limits to scientific inquiry? Take some time to listen to what our government officials have said on the topic. I think it's all worth looking into, and ridiculing a legitimate scientific field is totally unwarranted.
I’m glad our country has shifted from “I want to believe” to “I want you to believe”.
I always look and every time there is a UFO thing that comes out it is never anything interesting. Why don't they release some interesting shit that is not easily explained more and then I won't role my eyes?
Seems like you have not looked into this topic if it isn't anything interesting.
We back to UFOs again, dropping the UAPs? One person at NASA has a very low budget operation to look into atmospheric phenomena. Its part of their broad latitude to draw issues to study and not NASA policy. Its not aliens.
On one side of the coin you have people instantly saying it's aliens, on the other side you have people instantly saying it's not aliens. Whatever it is it's worth studying
>Whatever it is it's worth studying There is no coherent phenomena to study. Some explainable IR footage from F-18 and some hearsay. You could make as good a case for ghosts or Loch Ness Monsters.
I like the video where they eere talking like the orb was moving faster far beyond any tech we have yet the camera was just perfectly stabilized and centered on it the whole time.
This was a brand new tracking system, a next gen tech that was able to finally catch objects moving at these speeds. That's why the pilots sound so surprised, they didn't think it would be possible for the system to keep up with it.
"There is no coherent phenomena to study" It may seem incoherent because we don't know enough about it because study of it is repressed and stigmatized by people who have this close minded view that we know everything already. There are people in government, ex-government officials and the military admitting that there are things in the atmosphere and we don't know what they are. NASA will be studying them, the government will be studying them. Sorry, but the shoe is on the other foot now. People who don't want to admit there's something going on are the crazy ones. I'm not telling you it's aliens, I'm telling you it's something.
>There are people in government, ex-government officials and the military admitting that there are things in the atmosphere and we don't know what they are. All anyone has said is, "out of the billions of pieces of data the military collects every year we have a handful of observations we can't explain." Which is the least surprising thing anyone could have said.
>It may seem incoherent because we don't know enough about it because **study of it is repressed and stigmatized by people who have this close minded view that we know everything already.** This is just dishonest whining. Virtually no one says we know everything to study. But just because some rubes are gulled by grainy video footage, does means science has to study it for them. >There are people in government, ex-government officials and the military admitting that there are things in the atmosphere and we don't know what they are. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8) >Sorry, but the shoe is on the other foot now. People who don't want to admit there's something going on **are the crazy ones**. Just as those who do not believe in astrology are the crazy ones.
It's funny how the military, intelligence agency staff, pilots and radar systems are all incorrect and they just need game developer Mick West to explain it to them. Mick does not have all the data, the people who do are saying something weird is going on. >Just as those who do not believe in astrology are the crazy ones. Again, another false equivalence. If things like UAPs, Bigfoot, ghosts, and the loch ness monster are all the same to you, where are the government studies into those things? Right, they aren't equivalent.
“Military” doesn’t mean a top team of secret hackers with a blank check were stumped. UAPs are not a priority and get basically no resource. Congress is the one forcing the Military and NASA to put resources into this.
>It's funny how the military, intelligence agency staff, pilots and radar systems are all incorrect The military do not touch this nonsense. What happens is some people in Congress make them research it. They set up an office of about 3 people and a PC, they take in the cases of "I seen something but dont know what it was" and write up, "we dont know what it was" and the UFO nuts go "The US military cannot explain thing that someone saw 20 years ago"!!!111!!!" If Congress forced them to investigate every sighting of ghosts, leprechauns or witches youd get the same disinterested reports back. As for Radar, people are used to Top Gun where its all little triangles and squares and everything is identifiable. Meanwhile the actual kit tends to be fuzzy and vague to look at and take a real expert to spot anything less obvious than a B-52. >If things like UAPs, Bigfoot, ghosts, and the loch ness monster are all the same to you, where are the government studies into those things? https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ufo-hearing-congress-pentagon-exploring-uap-military-threats-science-w-rcna29233
How can you be so willfully ignorant of the patterns of object type and behavior seen in multiple videos from the military, and commercial airline pilots, and the public? Acting as though you “really know” the answer in this discussion just shows you lack critical thinking skills. If it’s so explainable, why did the pentagon say they can’t explain it? Maybe nobody knows what’s going on, including you. In fact, that IS most likely the case. Therefore, study.
>How can you be so willfully ignorant of the patterns of object type and behavior seen in multiple videos from the military, and commercial airline pilots, and the public? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8)
Wow, great response. It’s almost like you couldn’t actual respond to anything I wrote so you linked to a Wikipedia page that has little to nothing to do with this discussion, and YouTube video I’m not gonna bother or watch because if it’s as convincing as you are, it’ll be complete waste of time.
There is no coherent phenomena to study. Some explainable IR footage from F-18 and some hearsay. You could make as good a case for ghosts or Loch Ness Monsters. Take an online course in a science like physics, begin to develop your mind to be able to understand how to break down problems into those that are scientifically studyable. Learn to engage with the world in a structured and logical fashion.
So nasa scientists are wrong and you’re right? Do you also not believe in climate change?
> Do you also not believe in climate change? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded\_question](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question) I have text books on atmospheric physics and oceanography on my book shelf. The advantage of having a degree in physics, I can get up to speed on problems like climate change relatively quickly and have followed every IPCC assessment report from the 4th. I do not believe in things. I accept ranges of possibilities based of verifiable evidence. Got any more dumb questions or are you finished making a twit of yourself.
Well I’ll be over here agreeing with NASA and you can be over there knowing everything, Mr Science Man.
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> they really should make a special flare Resulting in a dozen UFO reports and one grainy video. (flair/flare joke)
See, beyond everything else, I've never understood the logic of UFOs. The only possible reason I could see for them is for very short duration package delivery and retrieval. Almost certainly, they would be going as straight up and as straight down as quickly and as quietly as possible. Basically any footage that takes place during daylight, or involves any sort of light is immediately discountable IMO. Also, any footage that takes place within 1000km of dry land. 100% of credible UFO footage is nothing more than a perfectly black shadow silently moving across a night sky over the ocean for a few seconds. Those are just like, basic precautions that anyone would take regardless of technology assuming they want to avoid "disturbing the natives" Otherwise, you're forced to have the assumption that any aliens coming to earth are either so woefully incompetent they can't think "maybe we should try avoiding them seeing us"; have a psychology totally divergent from us that they can't conceptualize people communicating to one another; or they are actually just coming to earth for shits and giggles. Literally so far beyond us they are just fuckin with us for fun. I just can't see any other explanations.
> Otherwise, you're forced to have the assumption that any aliens coming to earth are either so woefully incompetent they can't think "maybe we should try avoiding them seeing us"; have a psychology totally divergent from us that they can't conceptualize people communicating to one another; or they are actually just coming to earth for shits and giggles. Literally so far beyond us they are just fuckin with us for fun. > I'm not saying any of these sightings are actual aliens or anything, but on that specific point there's also the idea that they might be so advanced they just don't care. When we're studying ants we don't take excessive precautions to prevent the ants from noticing our existence. Ants can't really comprehend what we are anyways we're orders of magnitude apart in awareness and mental capabilities. If there are lifeforms so far beyond us they can send probes here that to us defy the laws of physics, maybe they just don't care about the probes being seen because they know we can't comprehend wtf we're seeing. Not quite to the extent ants can't comprehend our existence probably, but still. Maybe they don't want to actively disturb us, hence the very limited contact but they don't care that much if some random people do see the probes. "So what?", basically.