I'll also put my tinfoil hat on, since I've had a long fascination with anamolous phenomenon. I still think the jury's out on what exactly is going on, but one thing that's consistent worldwide is that balls of light are associated with UFOs, bigfoot, poltergeists, etc.
My rational mind doesn't really believe in all of this, but if it did, I think I'd take Jacques Vallee's theory seriously. Jacques Vallee is an astronomer and computer scientist (involved in early ARPANET) who's studied the phenomenon since at least the 70s. Here's a fun paper:
I like the Zoo hypothesis. We do that to North Sentinel Island[1]. It is populated by 50-400 stone age tribes people. India does not prosecute them for murdering anyone who happens to land on their island. Previous contacts with these people led to them rapidly dying of diseases they didn't have immunity to, so staying uncontacted is literally a life or death issue for them.
Technically every hypothesis that fits our data should get a little weight, plus our best available models of the universe show there should be billions of planets as habitable as ours.
That is evidence in the abstract sense and we currently lack the technology to observe these candidate planets in enough detail to test the models further.
We're like a person sitting in the desert at night with nothing but a candle concluding that the planet is completely deserted because they can't see anyone else.
I don't think I've ever been in a desert where just by waiting a short time, visual evidence of an advanced civilization wasn't available (or in most cases, immediately).
If there's type II civilizations in our galaxy, we don't need to observe things in any more detail than we are now. If type III civilizations exist in other galaxies, we should be able to detect them as well.
There's also the Dark Forest Theory. Any civ advanced enough knows better than to broadcast information that could potentially help other advanced civs spot their location.
If you have a dyson sphere, it glows very brightly in lower wavelengths, such as IR. We don't see that in voids. Additionally, looking back into cosmic history, we can see the formation of voids in the very early universe and their expected expansion.
I find the assumption that any advanced civilization is going to emit external electromagnetic radiation and/or be warm quite curious. Most quantum computing work is at low temperatures, and work on photonics (for example : http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6397/57 )is coming along nicely. If we assume an extropian approach of uploading into a more advanced substrate, I find it more likely that they would be quite cold in nature.
ok, fine, then they are blazing in the microwave region. The Dyson sphere will always output the same amount of energy as the original star, just at a lower frequency. Otherwise the temperature would increase continuously.
> Technically every hypothesis that fits our data should get a little weight
This sounds superficially right, but unfortunately there are too infinitely many possibilities to assign more than 0 weight to them just because they're compatible with the data. It's the same fallacy as "the sun either will rise tomorrow, or it won't. Two possibilities mean a 50-50 chance."
A more practical approach will only assign weight to possibilities that might influence your decisions about what to do.
The problem is that we have basically no data, in general people (including pilots) are horrible bad at observing and recounting a situation like these and we have no other types of evidence either...
Not really the same unless ants have mapped out their universe with little left out. Unless it's just that we can't see far enough or into dark matter.
Looking at the wiki page, it seems the population on the island is decreasing. Hopefully they will either all die, thus relieving us of the ethical dilemma, or India will come to its senses and stop the abuse of these poor people and actually help them. Its criminal that they are allowed to carry on without access to any of the modern world's technology or services. And of course the islanders that killed those fishermen should also be forcibly removed and punished - murder is murder, and the fact that someone is pretending they are still in the stone age has never been a recognised defense...
On the punishment for murder end of things, they neither know or accept Indian sovereignty, so applying Indian law on them doesn't make sense. As far as the Sentinelese are concerned they're being invaded. This is more similar to a case where a soldier that doesn't know the war is over kills someone. It doesn't make sense and isn't fair to prosecute them because they're working on old information that would make the murder they committed okay legally.
I completely disagree that it's wrong to not introduce them to modern technology. To do that it would require one of us to go visit them which would probably kill them because of our diseases. I would argue it's more wrong to kill them than to not give them access to modern technology.
As far as the Sentinelese are concerned, war is not over. Every time someone visits them, the invasion begins anew.
Meanwhile, we do have the technology to contact them without giving them lethal diseases. It doesn't have to be like the Americas all over again. We can screen potential visitors for a wide range of pathogens, make them wear protective suits, vaccinate the local population, and treat them if they get ill nonetheless. The problem is that they want none of it, so any attempt to vaccinate or treat them will end up being forceful.
The time travel argument I've always found to be far more compelling than the extra terrestrial argument.
For example, similarity of physical form (with exaggerated evolutionary aspects relating to modern society, such as bigger eyes/brains, and diminished aspects that would be obsolete, such as weakened physical strength).
And in a universe where different systems could be billions of years different in age, the UFOs have always seemed closer to a few thousands of years off from current technology at best.
And yet there's zero evidence of even life, let alone advanced life, in our near proximity. Wouldn't it make more sense that the advanced species that's in near physical proximity to ourselves (i.e. humans) would be responsible for flying objects very similar to our own flying objects and supposedly operated by bipeds looking very similar to ourselves?
And the physical rules bring broken to enable time travel are roughly the same rules that would need to be broken for faster than light travel, so the scientific likelihood for time traveling UFOs is roughly the same as for extra-terrestrial UFOs, but the former makes a lot more sense in other regards than the latter.
> And in a universe where different systems could be billions of years different in age, the UFOs have always seemed closer to a few thousands of years off from current technology at best.
I think this is something that doesn't get enough attention; in a universe like our's, almost all first contact events will consist of relativisticly expanding spheres of von Neumann machines impacting planets populated solely by nonsapient life. (Say three billion years before humans evolved versus a generous million years of human 'civilization' gives a three thousand to one ratio.) We should not expect to see anything remotely near our point in the developmental timeline.
(If "relativisticly expanding spheres of von Neumann machines" sounds unlikely, let me remind you that every star in the sky is a massive pile of valuable raw materials that has unfortunately caught fire and needs to be extinguished as soon as possible.)
"in a universe like ours, almost all first contact events will consist of relativistically expanding spheres of von Neumann machines impacting planets populated solely by nonsapient life."
You talk as if that's a certain fact. (Even estimating a probability) I'm no expert in the area, but why? Is that justified? What's that based on? (Not to mention the last sentence 'reminding me' of another odd 'fact'.)
That combined with the aforementioned thousands-to-one odds that a life form that hasn't yet developed into a relativistically expanding sphere also hasn't developed sapience. (I'm not using the mathematical definition of "almost all" of course.)
There would (probably) also be a significant number of cases where two spheres run into each other, but it's debatable whether most of those count as first contact events (light speed lag versus "it's all the same civilization"). The main point was the enormous unlikelyhood of a nearby alien civilization being within a thousand years or so (out of multiple billion) of our developmental level.
The Fermi paradox is more a question of "Why hasn't anything eaten every star in the sky yet?".
I feel like I was given many more strange assumptions, without any of the things I was asking about being addressed. Your "of course", which I didn't understand, in a few different ways, makes me think I'm talking to experts. I understood almost nothing you wrote. But well, like I said, I don't buy all these assumptions. Reading this is like reading those unhelpful wikipedia pages that only make sense if you already understand what it's saying. And your way of talking as if it's all obviously true, (e.g. "let me remind you") raises my suspicions that it's not.
Can you time travel without being able to alter your location in space? I mean, the earth is moving pretty fast, if you popped back a few hours, wouldn’t you land in empty space?
Yes, you would need to adjust for that. Might be the explanation for why the guys from the future shows up in spaceships. I guess it would be dangerous calculating slightly wrong and instead end up inside earth or inside a building's wall.
Better to appear some distance out into space and then fly the last few hundred miles to earth.
I think relativity makes this impossible; you're essentially saying there's a particular trajectory that has an absolute velocity of zero. Relativity is founded on the idea that there's no such thing; any trajectory has an equal claim to be the zero velocity.
Maybe time travel would stay in the same reference frame, so if you're on the Earth's surface you end up in the same position on the Earth. On the other hand if you're on an object that experiences non-gravitational directional changes in the span of your time travel, you might be in trouble.
that presumes something like 'time teleportation'. Time travel based on changing / reversing your 'speed of time' doesn't have that.
Kind of like the difference between wormhole based FTL and warp drive based FTL. In one, you just teleport, in the other, you still travel in a continuous line.
This is how I've always imagined a fictional time machine working. You build the thing, it creates a field inside itself, and you can use it to move whoever/whatever is inside that field to other points in the timeline of the machine's existence.
Vallee is a serious person worth paying attention to, a rarity in that field. Spielberg used him as the model for that French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Another good book of his is "Messengers of Deception", expands greatly on the non-extraterrestrial idea.
Interesting. A possible explanation for some strange and poorly understood phenomenon accompanied by bright lights could be "earthquake lights", bright lights that appear in the sky around the time of an earthquake.
I have been through several earthquakes and have seen power pole transformers spark and explode as the oil inside splashes about and is ignited by the electricty. This could be a possible explanation for "earthquake lights".
Huh. I've seen this exact blue/purple light in my hometown when I was a small kid (like 15 years ago). It was late night, we were in the patio with my family, eating nuts and talking, just a normal summer evening. We saw this light, and it deeply spooked us children. For years I was wondering what the hell was that. But since an earthquake didn't hit us that night (thanks god) I suppose it likely was something else.
I've been developing a theory about abduction stories overlapping with MK Ultra-type experimentation. There seem to be a fair number of parallels in the type of activities done to subjects of the MK projects (allegedly) and casting the alien abduction story on the victims makes deniability straight forward.
I haven't thought much about UFO sightings. I always find the ones with video, especially from arial sources interesting.
Abduction stories fit very well within suggestibility + sleep paralysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis), before aliens it was demons or other things. When I've suffered from it I've had my dog ripping my face off and intruders entering the house, no alien probes yet but apart from that the experience sounds identical.
This is my conclusion as well. I grew up in a very religious household and so all of my sleep paralysis episodes revolved around some sort of demon entering my space and attempting to do something to me. Sleep paralysis is connected with lucid dreaming and so the dreams are incredibly lifelike. I could see someone dreaming about being abducted.
Once I moved out of the house, became a bit more secular, and did some research online about sleep paralysis, any rare episodes I had I knew weren't demons or anything of the sort.
But people still capture things in the sky if there's something to see. Plenty of footage exists of low flying aircraft and meteors, for instance. People aren't looking down at their smartphones all the time, completely blind to the peripheral universe around them. And there are also dashcams, security cameras, etc, to consider.
In what way does it seem like that? There are many, many more _sightings_ in the current decade than the last, with a repeating pattern for about 50 to 70 years or so. Cellphone cameras are partially responsible for that, but unfortunately camera quality of most phones kinda sucks. That represents a different set of problems.
For good reason. We know that the CIA dosed people with LSD without their knowledge, which alone would explain most bizarre phenomena, and we know that the CIA claim to have destroyed most of their records of what they did in the program. Pretty easy to link anything to the program, and it's often one of the least strange options.
> We also know that MK ULTRA and programs very similar to it, have been continued to present day.
Do we though?
People assume so, because it fits a paranoid narrative that allows them to "mind control" people, but I'm not aware of any actual proof that MK ULTRA or "programs very similar to it" continue to the present day. As far as I know the program was a failure, like experiments in remote viewing and attempts to surgically implant microphones into stray cats hoping they would wander next to the Soviets.
On the other hand, it would be naive to assume that an agency that once performed such experiments would have compunctions about performing similar experiments today.
Though I won't support the claim you're replying too, we know that as of ten years ago there were still projects with a similar end goal as MK ULTRA, broadly developing "enhanced interrogation techniques." Not as easy to connect to any unexplained phenomena though.
That theory doesn’t seem compatible with the apparent existence of similar UFO reports from before the 20th century, unless there were other similar programs.
Thanks, reading the paper now.
I liked how, when describing possible alien visitation to earth he wrote:
"sophisticated interaction with the human and animal lifeforms present on the planet."
Man A (ATC?): There's nothing showing on either primary or secondary
Woman A: Ok, it was moving so fast. [Inaudible]
Man A: Alongside you?
Woman A: Yes, it was rapidly [inaudible] bright light and then it just disappeared at a very high speed. I am still wondering.
Didn't think it was likely collision course. Wondering what sort it could be.
Man B: Meteor or another object. Some kind of re-entry. Seem to be multiple objects following the same sort of trajectory. Very bright where we were
Woman B (ATC?): Ok, that's copy, so what's the direction it was going in.
Man B: Virgin 76 [inaudible] saw that NRS 11-o'clock position two bright lights.
Woman B: Roger that's copy, thank you.
Man C: So that wasn't just me?
Man B: No. Yeah, very interesting, that one.
Man B: Virgin 76. I saw two bright lights 11 o'clock. Seem to bank over to the right and then climb away. Speed at least Mach [inaudible]
Woman B: Okay, we're passing that on, thank you.
Man D (or is it Man A?): [inaudible] 94 Shannon.
Man D: Just to let you know that other aircrafts in the area have also reported the same thing. So we're going to have a look and see.
Man E: Speed was astronomical. It was like Mach 2.
I don’t think you can trust their assessment of its speed. There’s no way to reliably determine the speed of an unknown object of unknown size and distance.
I was watching a meteor shower once, and after a few hours, the angle seemed to change. Instead of streaking across the sky, they appeared as a circle that got brighter and bigger before winking out....they were coming right at me.
This could explain the light in this video if it were a fairly large meteorite, maybe.
They enter at orbital velocity or higher, so yes. Mach 20 or 30 would be on the low end. Of course depending on their shape and mass they lose a lot of it on the way down...
The relevant regime for astronomical entities is in above the 'high-hypersonic' and into 're-entry speeds' (uber-sonic?). These are above Mach 25.
At these speeds, not only is the air no-longer considered an ideal gas, nor a two-temperature ideal gas, nor a dissociated gas (O2 and N2 become O and N along the wings), nor an ionized gas (electron temperature must now be considered), but rather a radiation dominated gas. Modeling these radiation dominant gases is very hard. As you increase the number of volumes to model, the computation load grows exponentially.
It's very unlikely but definitely possible. If the meteor is fast enough and targets outer earth atmosphere, it an enter outer atmosphere, slow down, light up due to friction, then escape earth atmosphere vertically. The only problem with this scenario is that meteor has to be much faster than Mach 2, unlike what pilots reported. But it's easily possible they saw a Mach 12 meteor and thought it's Mach 2.
would be interesting to know the relative trajectory – would help determine if it was a known satellite reentry or on a typical orbit of debris (lots of periodic comets have well known debris trails, they form most of the "meteor showers" that happen yearly.)
What if it was perceptually at Mach 2 / distance X yet really was at Mach 20 / distance 10 * X ? (Bullshitting numbers here, but you get the point)
Angular speed across FoV is a function of distance from the object and the only thing that makes us understand that high altitude airplanes are nowhere close to a standstill is that we can infer distance from the intrinsic knowledge of the airplane size.
If all observers are close enough together we'd be unable to uncover the illusion, as that would require a widespread enough configuration.
Additionally, I question the "astronomical" attribute, especially with planes cruising at ~800kph, Mach 2 is at most 2.5 their typical speed. Concorde is hardly astronomical, and although jet fighters are not chasing for top speed anymore some of them are still able to go to such Mach factors. Now, Mach 12, that would be closing in to being astronomical (entering the order of magnitude of an ICBM descent speed).
The rocket lab launch was south from New Zealand - and there aren't many planes flying around down there as far as I know.
I'm guessing only the final stage would still be airborne/in space once it orbited around to populated areas. And the second/final stage should be deliberately de-orbited for exactly this reason, right?
Since we don't usually get UFO threads on Hacker News, I may as well brush the dust off my tinfoil hat...
What's always puzzled me about UFO sightings is the preponderance of "bright lights" being what people report seeing. If some extraterrestrial being came to visit, why make itself known? And in such an obviously unnatural way, too?
One immediate counterargument I can think of is that it's good camouflage. Who needs difficult shit like invisibility when we can just pound the earthlings' pupils with light so they can't see us well! Nevertheless, has always made the skeptic in me raise my eyebrows recursively.
Even if we assume that "UFO" means "space alien", it doesn't seem puzzling to me.
Answer 1: selection bias. Obviously the only ones that people see at night are those which have lights. We aren't going to hear about the ones that people don't see because they're dark.
Answer 2: alien apathy. You've flown a million light years to spy on some great apes who aren't even sure you exist. Who cares if a few of them get flashed with bright lights, while you're looking around? They don't even have flying saucers yet, so it's not like they could chase you.
From a rational standpoint, I generally subscribe to the selection bias you (and Scriptor in a separate reply) raise as #1. However, for the sake of discussion, let's operate under the assumption these sightings are legitimate/noteworthy.
Personally, I grew out of bothering ant hills when I was about twelve. Nowadays, I pleasantly observe from high above. So why wouldn't aliens do the same?
In this case, your second theory fills in the gaps. But, one would assume some species capable of this technology would also have cultural norms about not interfering with less developed groups. Much the same way we (generally) try not to interfere with primitive tribes around the world.
I suppose, then, that the comparison could be made to the Sentinelese firing arrows at aircraft out of fear and suspicion. The aliens (in my opinion rightly) assume we would do the same to them because they are so foreign to us.
> one would assume some species capable of this technology would also have cultural norms about not interfering with less developed groups
I would assume nothing of the sort. It's not as if humans even really conform to that norm. It's a pretty recent trend, at best. With aliens of unknown evolution/history, all bets are off.
Very faint point which I predicted the keen HN audience would be quick to contend. My reasoning to assume so is a wholly intuitive instinct that all ultra-high technology societies converge in their moral and ethical norms to a common limit. That to have survived the gamble of existence long enough to reach such a point, this civilization almost certainly needed to adopt a set of values wherein the "Prime Directive" incidentally coincides. Though I concede that it betrays my personal beliefs more than any tangible insight.
For example, my hippie confidence does nothing to explain the likes of the Zerg or Tyranids, that's for sure. :)
Human ethics vary amongst groups and cultures - even highly advanced ones. I don't see any evidence to suggest a convergence on a "one true" moral code. For a brief period western values seemed to take over due to the west's influence, but that is waning today rather than increasing in momentum.
>My reasoning to assume so is a wholly intuitive instinct that all ultra-high technology societies converge in their moral and ethical norms to a common limit.
We don't know that. We also don't know if the prime directive of aliens is the same as ours. By that I mean that whatever aliens may be visiting us may not be competitive whatsoever. Maybe their planet didn't have the same explosion with life that ours did so it's relatively empty of competition. In this case cooperating with others to expand as an instinct would be much more beneficial than competing. There is also no tangible evidence of the cosmos swarming with life, on planets or traveling so it might also be that -given how long it takes for planets to form stable orbits and how long it took on Earth for humans to appear and develop instruments to observe the universe- the universe is for the time being relatively empty of life. Some people revisited the drake equation and approached it as a coin flip: Sure there is a 50/50 chance but it's either/or, so based on their calculations the most likely scenario is for 0-2 times life forming on our galaxy. And FTL is still science fiction so it might be that the only species that can visit us are coming from other galaxies and have evolved to survive for billions of years. At the same time thanks to kepler we now know that planets with the characterists of earth are rather rare as are solar systems like ours. But there are a myriad of other planets with conditions too hard for humans but good enough for life found on Earth. In this case it might have been that some sort of life exists in the cosmos but it evolves much more slowly compared to us and thus needs a few extra billion years to reach space travel. So maybe the universe is experiencing it's first explosion of life and we are one of the first multi-cell organisms or step out of the water. Who knows.
Also we don't know how technology would have evolved should it be that Earth had a different composition. Like for example metals are fairly rare on the crust but yet they are fundamental to our function. Maybe a planet that has a 10% metal crust would have evolved towards electricity much faster than us. Or a planet with lower gravity and lower or no magnetosphere could mean that whatever species developed there could have achieved space travel much faster and easier thus increasing the incentive( in human terms) of developing ftl. Right now ftl is sci-fi for us but remember that yes, it was the military who developed the internet but all the applications and the development of the science behind it came once more people could toy with it.
What a bizarre comparison, albeit a novel rebuttal! I do think your argument rests too much on the typical assumptions/biases a human brings to the table given our experience in this specific time and place. See my reply to andrewflnr for a nuanced response.
Also, I do walk a lot! About 4 miles daily in fact. People in cars also happen to be assholes to each other. And to wildlife. Heck, they can even be assholes to others in the same vehicle!
You seem to assume folks in spaceships would be scientists or part of a Star Trek like organized fleet. But what if some of them are tourists?
Americans in cars aren't part of some elite professional military or scientific service. Most Americans have cars. It's the norm here. And being a driver of a car in no way guarantees they are well educated, sophisticated, civilized types. There are even people driving illegally, without a license or insurance or whatever. That's part of why they can be such dicks to people they perceive as less powerful -- because they don't feel particularly powerful, etc. themselves.
Operating warp drives in atmospheres can cause a lot of Cherenkov radiation at the bubble border. One must be careful not to overheat the external hull.
Sorry. Couldn't resist adding one more speculative cherry to the top of this very tall tale.
You can generalize answer 1 even further. For all you know, there are hundreds of UFOs all around you that just have very advanced cloaking technology and only a few that don't. :)
>Answer 2: alien apathy. You've flown a million light years to spy on some great apes who aren't even sure you exist. Who cares if a few of them get flashed with bright lights, while you're looking around? They don't even have flying saucers yet, so it's not like they could chase you.
I just read your reply and so I deleted mine which was similar, but a bit stronger; its not like we could possibly hurt them.
3. Human cruise ships (and airplanes) have bright lights too. What if it's just an "alien" cruiseship entertaining a bunch of interterrestial holiday makers?
I could also imagine aliens that might see in different light spectrums and our visible light spectrum is 'dark' to them, like how we would perceive infrared, microwaves, or radio waves without giving a second thought as to whether or not something unknown might be able to sense that random spectrum emissions. Maybe they see in microwave range, maybe they use the light spectrum much like we use our radio spectrum and just blindly broadcast it in mass quantity as line-of-sight communication technology. Maybe it is used as a scanner/detector beam source, like how we might x-ray rock samples or something to determine composition.
But beyond something crazy like that, yeah it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to be spewing light as an alien visitor.
But wouldn't an intelligent species capable of inter-galactic travel have some of the Federation style rules to obey? Don't interfere with a less intelligent civilization for fear of disruption or whatever?
I'm not sure they would consider "us" unimportant. There's clearly some sort of "intelligence" with all of the radio energy emanating from this rock. If they sat back and observed for quite a bit of time, they would at some point be curious and want to study. Hence the probing. What's this hole for, let's find out. Plus, you'd want to dissect a couple of specimens to study it. After that, you start messing with the subject to see how it behaves/reacts.
>But wouldn't an intelligent species capable of inter-galactic travel have some of the Federation style rules to obey? Don't interfere with a less intelligent civilization for fear of disruption or whatever?
Even in the fictional universe of Star Trek, most intelligent civilizations couldn't care less about the prime directive, and even the Federation disregards it when it's convenient.
There's no reason to assume that aliens in real life should necessarily conform to a modern human moral ideal about "non-interference with primitive cultures" just because they're intelligent.
2) secretly cultivate a pop cultural mythology around aliens and alien contact. Buzz around their aircraft and flash lights at them now and then just to keep them interested, but not too interested because you know how humans can get when they're too interested.
3) infiltrate human society with shapeshifting reptoids and own the rights to numerous sci-fi properties like Star Wars, Star Trek and Men in Black, to condition humans to be comfortable with the premise of alien contact and to build brand identity and loyalty.
4) build some Star Wars and Star Trek themed casinos out in deep space.
5) show up one day and offer to loan them a warp drive, but the warp drive just happens to always fail near a casino planet.
Just like Spain didn’t interfere in South America, or Britain in Africa. Why would there be non interference when even Star Trek doesn’t have it half the time (Borg, dominion, ferengi, etc)
That's a familiar argument, but I just realized that it mistakes scale for evolution. I imagine that if there are aliens, they are closer to the scale of a human than an ant.
Devil's advocate: the aliens may simply not care about being seen, or they may be aware that they can operate "in the open" with plausible deniability from a skeptical public and governments being unwilling to admit their existence.
Interstellar speeds certainly must be in excess of the speed of light (or those creatures are chill with cruising for thousands of years), so they wouldn't do much good. :)
Maybe the alien version of anthropomorphism? If they and most galactic species eyesight was in the infra-red red range then the might not think of hiding light in our visible spectrum. Imagine if exhaust from our cars gave off visible light? We'd want to change that pretty quickly.
So long as we're brushing off tinfoil hats, my pet theory is the bright lights are necessary symptoms of whatever is powering those thing. Such immense power would naturally give off lots of light.
Life on earth survived the KT boundary asteroid impact. Life on earth isn't going to end from our activity, it will only end from our inactivity in protecting the earth and the sun from major cosmic
impacts. We need to get out shit together and stop feeling guilty about burning all the oil. We need to do whatever it takes to get established in space and the moon, ready to deflect and close call objects. We are natures best design yet to protect itself from the dangers of space, we are one people, one planet, one sun, and we need to stand together against the cosmos, or nature will find a new guardian or perish trying.
I’m a little less worried about “life” and more worried about “human life”.
> We need to get out shit together and stop feeling guilty about burning all the oil.
It’s the results that concern me.... anyway, this attitude is disgusting. A) there’s no reason our carbon output isn’t manageable and B) there’s no reason we can’t pursue the care of the earth and spreading the human population at the same time.
> Life on earth isn't going to end from our activity
Although unlikely, I can envision a plausible pessimistic runaway scenario where we turn Earth into a Venus-like world due to sheer collective stupidity over a sufficiently large timescale. Maybe not completely sterile but having only some hardened bacteria survive is hardly a hopeful outcome for "life".
While I agree about a run away scenario, o do not think were anywhere close to that. The more we look, the more redundant systems we find on the earth for maintaining balance. Nature is very resiliant, more so then we think, and it isn't going to go down without a fight. We think our pollution is bad... natures recovered from worse. We think nuclear war would end life... natures recovered from worse.
Fear is the mindkiller, and the powers that are instilling fear into our civilization have another agenda. Eyes open, no fear. Nature needs us to come together and protect the earth and sun from cosmic impacts, we need to act now. Nature can handle the co2, we need to handle the comets and asteroids that are the true threat to life on the planet and in this solar system.
A few months ago I was walking alone in the park when I saw a bright light moving in strange patterns in the sky. It scared the pants off of me.
For about a day my mind was nothing but paranoid thoughts. I had fear that I had seen something that I shouldn't have. That not only extraterrestrial life was real, but that they knew of my existence and would be coming for me. Or perhaps they were coming for all of us. I was a mess.
And sure, it was probably a drone. Or a plane. Or a shooting star, etc. But was it? I couldn't shake the thought that it wasn't.
It sounds hilariously silly now, but at the time it really screwed with my mental state.
Once this happened to me with a friend. We were staring at the sky when suddenly a progression of lights started moving quickly across the sky. At first I thought it might be a shower of large meteors about to hit us.
A similar thing happened to me a few weeks ago, I was so freaked out by it that I downloaded and paid for an app that showed satellite positions. Turns out...my rational side was right, it was indeed a satellite in low orbit, giving it the appearance of a fast speed and a very bright disposition. It was still a weird experience. There were two satellite actually.
As for what this was? Honestly it sounds like people may have seen an air force drill of some military (possibly Russian or US.)
Had that same feeling years ago. Went out to a dark place to see the stars. Ended up seeing a light jumping around on the horizon. Then there was a bright white flash that lit up the whole field and forest, but not like lightning. No shadows, no source of light. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, no thunder. It wasn't lightning.
Pretty scared, I kept watching the jumping light on the horizon. A few minutes later the white flash again. I ran back to my car.
I had the same ridiculous thoughts as you. "what if they know I saw?"
It freaked me out for a long time. The way the light was moving.... Too fast to see the movement even, it was here, then there. I watched it bounce around for at least a full half hour, it wasn't a satellite or a meteor.
Interesting. I suppose that's possible. It was a single light and it was changing colors. Its movement tended to stay within a specific range.
Do you have any thoughts on the white flashes? They were the scary part. Everything was perfectly daytime for a split second, and there was no fading of the light like with lightning. It was immediately all white then immediately dark again. It creeps me out thinking about it.
The light on the horizon seemed 50 miles away, but the flash was right on us, extremely bright, and blanketed everything evenly.
Saw a similar light when I was a child, my brothers saw it too. But this one was right above our heads in the sky, and there was no flash when it disappeared.
Bounced from one place to another, and it was really far away, so we are talking hundreds of kilometers in a second. Never forgot about it.
While I was watching I started out in awe feeling like "holy crap, I'm looking at a UFO!" But after staring at it for a long time and then having the white flashes I quickly changed to "oh fuck, I'm near a UFO".
Since we're all giving our UFO encounters I'll chip in with mine.
About 25yrs ago as a teenager and utterly obsessed with the supernatural and the unexplained, my family were on a fly drive holiday on the west coast of the US.
One night in a roadside motel in the Nevada desert, I was woken up by a strange, loud, rythmic, droning sound outside. Absolutely convinced that it was a UFO landing and terrified that if I moved or made a noise I'd be abducted, I laid still, sweating with my heart racing for hours until the sun came up.
Similar story here. As a kid I was laying in bed staring at a bright disk floating in the sky at night. Totally sure it was a UFO. Turned out to be a reflection of a street light in the window.
I was around 14 and also obsessed with aliens and the supernatural. I was living out in the boonies on a road that had just started to be developed (one long road with a smaller road splitting off down to a cul-de-sac with a few houses a mile or so off the main road).
I was walking the dog one evening, headed down the main road and turned off to walk down the side road to the cul-de-sac. It was dark and cold but as I turned down the side road, I could see a bright rectangular light floating above the ground down where the side road ended a mile away.
I was pretty freaked out and stood there squinting at it for a while, psyching myself up to go check it out. In the end, I decided that I would never forgive myself if I didn't go witness what was clearly an alien craft hovering over the road on my dark little street.
So, I walked down toward the end of the side road (with the dog to protect me of course) until about halfway down, I got one of those perspective shifts that made me laugh. In the dark (no street lights, only a few houses set a good way back from the road) I could only see the glowing light but as I got closer, I could clearly see that this was a small bus with the light from inside spilling out through the windshield.
It turns out, the local library had started a "Bookmobile" route out to our little country neighborhood so locals could check out books without driving into the city. The bus was so lit up inside and the surrounding area was so dark that from a mile away, all I could see was the bright glowing rectangle of the windshield.
Needless to say I stopped inside the bus and checked out a book or two. Probably some ridiculous fluff from Whitley Strieber or Stephen King ;)
I was on a beach off the eastern coast of Sri Lanka late in the night. I saw what seemed like a star dart around in the sky. I figured it was just an aircraft, but it moved extremely fast in a near zig-zag fashion, making sharp angled turns - something no aircraft can do.
I've been on a UFO binge lately, prompted by all the news about Oumuamua. So many credible and fascinating reports.
I've also seen less resistance to the idea of UFOs than there used to be. People claiming to have seen a UFO aren't outright dismissed as cuckoo anymore.
Probably because it was too high up, and probably because I went a few years ago when commercial drones weren't well developed or even widely available
A more rational explanation is that the region is hotly contested by a number of world powers, and that was probably some experimental military aircraft
My dad told me of seeing some fighter jets following a light in the sky near Lemore airforce base just a few years ago. He figured it was another jet, but then the light did, what seemed to him, an impossible turn, then took off north at an incredible speed. The fighter jets followed, but not even close to the same speed, as the light was no longer visible a few seconds after it turned direction due to its apparent speed.
What to make of it? Who knows.
A few years back I saw a plane that was behaving very strangely, so I tried to take a photo. My phone shut itself off. Afterwards I tried to turn it back on and it was back to 20%. I’ve since wondered if our phones come with remote shutdowns.
Your battery was wearing out. The camera draws a lot of power and if a degraded battery can't output enough then a protection circuit will shut down the device below a voltage threshold.
A lot of people typically have a "Where's the proof?" wrt UFOs. However, there is Dr Steven Greer who in 2001 fronted a 'Disclosure Project' in which many people from positions of authority (eg FAA chiefs, Tower operators, Military pilots, etc) stated quite clearly on National Press Club in Washington their testimony on UFO's. [0]
Since then, he's been often quoted as saying that there's such an abundance of proof that it's embarrassing. He has video and other testimonies from world leaders, and often sits down with heads of state advising them, and now has hundreds of testimonies from verifiable people in the military industrial complex testifying to the authenticity of their existence, as well as the massive deliberate misinformation systems put into place to control the UFO 'story'. [1]
I'd recommend watching his documentaries, Sirius and Unacknowledged [2][2b]
I can't disagree, but at what point can sworn testimonies be allowed? 100, 200, 500? What about their 'respectability'? To dismiss such a mountain of evidence is unwise, I feel.
There are also hundreds of government documents on his website, discussing various et issues.
Most of the testimonies talk about how there is a systemic coverup going on. What if they can provide proof, but due to high classification, it can't be provided, except to Congress? This was ultimately what the disclosure project was about in 2001. Most of the testimonies attest to that fact.
What specifically is unwise? I don't see any negative consequences of being skeptical.
And the notion of some grand government conspiracy is just ludicrous on the face of it. No secret could be kept that long by so many people without some more reliable evidence leaking out.
Appeals to authority in terms of the respectability of various witnesses are meaningless. A more plausible explanation is that they simply misinterpreted what they experienced, possibly primed by the ubiquity of aliens and spacecraft in popular fiction going back almost a century. Look how many people have been wrongfully convicted of crimes based on sincere but faulty eyewitness testimony.
Skepticism is all well and good, but it can go too far if it's just a blanket denial. Dr Greer himself states that he's skeptical of 95% of what he's seen, but still states:
"we have 3500 cases where ET vehicles have landed and have left physical traces. We have 4000 cases where they have been tracked on radar and seen by pilots" ~ Unacknowledged doco.
> A more plausible explanation is that they simply misinterpreted what they experienced
If you watch 'Unacknowledged' you will see:
- multiple US Presidents hint at, or directly acknowledge their existence.
- Men who've walked on the moon, testifying.
- Top US government officials, air force pilots, etc, etc who've actually interacted with them, and and seen them stored in bases in the US.
- There was even a British Lord in there.
- Various government records (also available online).
> the notion of some grand government conspiracy is just ludicrous on the face of it
Yes it is, but doesn't mean it isn't happening. Apparently $100M dollars a day is spent on US military. $25B is unaccounted for each year. (The actual numbers may be out of date, but the scale of them is correct, from memory).
> No secret could be kept that long by so many people without some more reliable evidence leaking out.
This statement is directly addressed in 'Unacknowledged'
I'd go for sworn affidavits with independently verifiable credentials for things like this. Dr Greer has collected thousands of data points on this topic, however.
(Perhaps you haven't watched the 3rd link posted above, which is >1.5hr interview with a Richard Doty from OSI whose job it was to discredit/cover up/investigate all of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShZMgbXNSBs
Also, the news wouldn't get out anyway:
"So, every news agency, every television and radio station in the Albuquerque and Santa-Fe area had our snitches in there... we paid them good money" 1:24)
This stuff is very hard to wade through, especially Greer's documentary. I just picked out something to follow up on on Google scholar, the Atacama skeleton, and it immediately falls apart. I'm not saying all of this is necessarily false, it just seems to have a pro-extraterrestrial bias that he's trying to gather evidence for, rather than just analysing evidence without foregone conclusions. I've never seen material on extraterestrials that didn't fall into that trap.
And for all these characters being interviewed, how do you know they aren't just payed actors? Has anyone followed their references? The way it looks to me it's all just a bunch of people with trumped up or vague relationships to US government, including Greer himself having "briefed" intelligence officials (which he later corrects as a talk during a dinner party, who knows whether that's true). Just a personal note as someone who's done a PhD: I've come to the conclusion that if someone introduces himself with "Dr. XYZ", it's probably a person trying to trump up their importance. I've come to get skeptical immediately when someone is doing that.
Yeah, the atacama skeleton is tough to swallow. Ironically, Dr Greer makes no claim about what it is, other than to say (he's actually a trauma physician originally) that it's not human. He goes into details on why (and documented proof and papers by recognised DNA experts). He's also directly 'calling out' the papers you've seen and the journals that have published them, as far as I'm aware.
Do any airlines have high-def video cameras on planes? Seems like something that would be financially feasible with modern technology and would provide very useful data for unexplained phenomena like this. I imagine I'm not the only one who would pay to subscribe for a streaming service for airline footage, even when there aren't UFO sightings to examine.
Actually, yes, some newer aircraft have high-def video cameras mounted on the tail and on the belly of the aircraft, and the video stream is streamed into the aircraft so that passengers can see the "outside view" on in-flight entertainment systems. The only thing is I believe the the cameras often get turned off in the middle of the flight when the boring part is going on..
Many long distance flights have cameras on the tail + nose that you can watch on your entertainment system. I wouldn't expect them to stream it to the public though.
You might be surprised at the popularity of "Slow Television" [0], which televises the long journeys of trains, cruise ships, etc. It is apparently quite popular in Norway and growing elsewhere. Add some potential UFOs to the mix, and who knows where it might go?
I remember in the 90s tuning into "space night" on a German satellite channel when I got home from the pub. Just continuous video feeds from low earth orbit with electronica/chillout playing over the top. Was really relaxing to have on in the background.
I can imagine working from home with something like that on in the background and occasionally looking up to "see where we are now" - would give me some sense of travelling and seeing something new, rather than just feeling like I've been stuck at home coding in front of my laptop all day.
It it were aliens, they are probably making contact with the cephalopod population under the sea to see if they have developed technology yet, and in this planets case they've found another monkey hominid infestation in one of those rare millennia before its civilizations manage to collectively off themselves.
The cephs are better suited to space travel owing to their ability to survive cryogenisis, replication of their memories and intelligence throughout their bodies, no need for gravity, ability to breed i large numbers and transmit information to offspring. Hominids are a peculiarity of adapting to a given planet, where the cepholopods are adaptable to more common environments in the universe.
Would love a transcript if anyone happens to find one. I have a very difficult time making out what is said, I'm not sure how they understand each other.
Yup, just did it. I had to run over it a few times and transcribe it to catch what they were saying. Even then, there are still some bits I could not comprehend though. Wonder if Amazon/Google Transcribe can do a better job?
As someone who operated marine VHF ("bridge-to-bridge") professionally for years, I'll say that these recordings sound perfectly intelligible. I imagine ATCs and pilots have a similar culture of "get the point across as fast as possible, but not so fast that it is no longer unambiguous." Especially airband, where everyone in each area tends to guard and use a single frequency.
US Air Traffic Controller here. We have what we call "phraseology". The FAA Order 7110.65 prescribes how to say what we say.
It makes for safe and efficient transmissions. If there's a set way of saying something, then pilots don't have to guess what we mean if every controller says it in a different way.
It's a 16kbps MP3 file, and MP3 doesn't work well at such a low bitrate. I found it very difficult to make out the speech over the compression artifacts. I frequently watch videos at 2x speed, so I don't think I have unusually bad audio comprehension skill.
Uh, so... I don't have precise enough times to do this, but my first question is, "Is this an Iridium Flare event?" If you have never seen "Iridium Flares", grab your phone and download an Iridium Flare app. They're confusing, spectacular, and they actually happen pretty often.
Because this sounds an awful lot like an iridium flare. And they're a kind of persistent source of "inexplicable aircraft" reports because they're SO bright you assume they have to be close by.
Iridium flares are extremely brief — they last just a couple of seconds. The pilot said "the object had come up along the left side of the aircraft". No pilot is going to describe an Iridium flare like that.
They are brief, but they can be longer than 2 seconds. They can easily last 7 seconds. Some even longer. Also, they can migrate across a huge swath of the sky and when you confuse a person's visual system, they have to interpret it.
Obviously, I don't know for sure. But I checked and there was one in the area with a pretty long duration depending on where you are.
It looks like an Iridium passed over the ocean between Ireland and Iceland around 6:30Z, around 15 minutes before the radio conversation. However it doesn't quite line up with where I'm assuming the aircraft were
I saw one not too long ago. Two white lights in the sky spaced close enough and moving so as to be obviously 'connected' to each other.
It was perfectly still night in the UK. I outstretched my hand and finger and, I forget the details exactly, but the finger just about blocked out the pair of lights I think.
A quick call to my father in law (pilot) and some info on joining the landing pattern at Boscombe Down, added to the lack of red/green lights so not normally a craft expecting to interact with other traffic, and a little investigative intuition seeing as the lights were moving so slow as to almost be gliding - and I find the Zephyr high altitude long endurance surveillance aircraft.
A bit of trigonometry showed with a wingspan of 35m (I think that was it) and the angle of my finger outstretched, put the craft at about the height it should be for following the standard approach path into Boscombe Down.
So with a little knowledge it was possibly to determine with a high degree of likelihood what this 'UFO' was.
I suspect that virtually all reports can be attributed to similar terrestrial origins with experimental aircraft and using the 'extra-terrestrial' card is just a convenient way of covering that up.
EDIT - I should add I saw it because it was I think the night SpaceX launched and landed a reusable rocket maybe for first time? Or perhaps it was reused rocket with reused dragon cargo capsule to ISS. The path I think was going to take it over the UK anyway, so I was out to see if it would be visible, having watched the launch a little earlier in the evening.
Note to Royal Air Force - don't land the slightly secret plane when many people is likely to be looking up!
Not to put a downer on speculation but probably military jets that lit the afterburners and zoomed away. My first thought was F-111s, but since it seems they were radar quiet, maybe stealth planes.
Isn't the most likely explanation for these sightings secret military aircraft testing/missions?
There's been a number of credible UFO sightings lately, some even by military pilots and captured on video.
If you consider how long it's been since there's been a major breakthrough publicized in the air superiority department, and how advanced technology in general has become since the days of the SR-71, we're long overdue for some next-level aircraft likely to be kept under wraps until required to win a conflict.
Why all these sightings are never accompanied with sonic booms? If something is moving that fast through the atmosphere, there must be a sonic boom. Or is there any way to suppress this? At least theoretically?
Separating a pocket of space-time from itself, then moving that. Which would also effect inertia.
I suspect that moving space-time around itself would introduce totally different shearing effects but maybe those could be mitigated using special non-physical(or physical) geometry, like aerodynamics but for space-time.
For anyone fascinated with the hype around UFO sightings, "The Resonance of Unseen Things" [1] is an interesting read focusing on the structure of the stories and their connection to people's social and economic lives. It approaches the UFO believers subculture from a sympathetic viewpoint and tries to understand. Great ethnography.
Carl Jung wrote about UFOs as something of a collective hallucination, a mass psycho-spiritual phenomenon. Not in the sense that they are "unreal", but in that they tap into an extraordinary dimension of our collective awareness.
I suggest checking out "Flying Saucers: a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky."
I saw the Black Triangle UFO [1] in Duluth, MN about 10 years go. It went from a low altitude hover to a slow glide across the night sky. I was standing almost directly under it in a parking lot. I thought it was a strange pattern of new streetlights for a few moments until it started gliding. Always wondered what that was.
Misjudging distance seems to be a very frequent suspect in tales of the unexplained. "The light moved at an extraordinary speed" - it moved at an ordinary speed, close to you. Likewise "through the distant moors it stalked - a panther!" - a pet cat.
Perhaps it'd be more interesting for both casual observers and conspiracy theorists alike to assume modern UFOs are not extraterrestrial spacecraft, but clandestine earthly government aircraft.
Maybe they turn on the bright lights to pretend to be aliens, to throw off the scent.
Popular ideas in UFO circles are that there was a crash, the govs have the tech, and the craft we usually see are replication vehicles attempting to test out what we gathered from the real one that crashed years ago.
I saw 1 meteor over Dublin this weekend. It was on Sunday at about 23:30 and I was looking towards Ursa Major. I've seen a few by now to know that it was just that, a meteor. White and bright, moving fast and disappearing.
Well this lends some credibility to a comment I posted just about a week ago. It got a lot of push-back understandably but being an eye witness myself. I know the phenomenon is true. It was in no way a meteor because it moved in erratic directions, up, down, left, right, and figure 8's. Is this from outer space though? It's been happening for at least 25 years.
Probably because of
>During the incident, two Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantom II jet interceptors reported losing instrumentation and communications as they approached the object. These were restored upon withdrawal.
>One of the aircraft also reported a temporary weapons systems failure while the crew was preparing to open fire.
These were explained away in the wikipedia article, but who knows the truth... Hidden away in another language.
A couple of years ago, I heard of a case where a guy was flying a small plane over James Bay in Québec in around 1978 and he saw what he thought were 5 fuel tanks on the ground, around 60' in diameters each. This was strange since this is in the middle of nowhere and these weren't even there a couple of days before and no road is leading to this place.
As he approached the location, the "fuel tanks" started moving in formation and flew upward at an impossible speed. They looked like fuel tank from above, but they were circular crafts.
Keep in mind, 5 objects of this size, moving at this speed would have displaced a lot or air, but there was no disruption, no noise.
There's some big hydro electric dams in this place and apparently these crafts are often seen hovering above the power lines.
I'll also put my tinfoil hat on, since I've had a long fascination with anamolous phenomenon. I still think the jury's out on what exactly is going on, but one thing that's consistent worldwide is that balls of light are associated with UFOs, bigfoot, poltergeists, etc.
My rational mind doesn't really believe in all of this, but if it did, I think I'd take Jacques Vallee's theory seriously. Jacques Vallee is an astronomer and computer scientist (involved in early ARPANET) who's studied the phenomenon since at least the 70s. Here's a fun paper:
https://www.scientificexploration.org/docs/4/jse_04_1_vallee...
He essentially argues that the UFO phenomenon is neither extra terrestrials nor merely misidentified aerial craft. It's something even stranger!
Also, if you find that paper interesting, here's one of this books (one of the most well-known in the anomalous phenomenon field):
https://www.amazon.com/Passport-Magonia-Folklore-Flying-Sauc...
I like the Zoo hypothesis. We do that to North Sentinel Island[1]. It is populated by 50-400 stone age tribes people. India does not prosecute them for murdering anyone who happens to land on their island. Previous contacts with these people led to them rapidly dying of diseases they didn't have immunity to, so staying uncontacted is literally a life or death issue for them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island
I think it's bizarre that the fact that we have absolutely zero evidence for aliens actually gives a little weight to things like the zoo hypothesis.
Technically every hypothesis that fits our data should get a little weight, plus our best available models of the universe show there should be billions of planets as habitable as ours.
That is evidence in the abstract sense and we currently lack the technology to observe these candidate planets in enough detail to test the models further.
We're like a person sitting in the desert at night with nothing but a candle concluding that the planet is completely deserted because they can't see anyone else.
I don't think I've ever been in a desert where just by waiting a short time, visual evidence of an advanced civilization wasn't available (or in most cases, immediately).
If there's type II civilizations in our galaxy, we don't need to observe things in any more detail than we are now. If type III civilizations exist in other galaxies, we should be able to detect them as well.
There's also the Dark Forest Theory. Any civ advanced enough knows better than to broadcast information that could potentially help other advanced civs spot their location.
Yup, a number of possible solutions. Dark Forest doesn't lead to the likelyhood of us seeing UFOs in Ireland tho.
What about the Dyson dilemma? We've indeed detected "voids", but we're unable to confirm their origin.
If you have a dyson sphere, it glows very brightly in lower wavelengths, such as IR. We don't see that in voids. Additionally, looking back into cosmic history, we can see the formation of voids in the very early universe and their expected expansion.
I find the assumption that any advanced civilization is going to emit external electromagnetic radiation and/or be warm quite curious. Most quantum computing work is at low temperatures, and work on photonics (for example : http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6397/57 )is coming along nicely. If we assume an extropian approach of uploading into a more advanced substrate, I find it more likely that they would be quite cold in nature.
ok, fine, then they are blazing in the microwave region. The Dyson sphere will always output the same amount of energy as the original star, just at a lower frequency. Otherwise the temperature would increase continuously.
Pretty difficult to beat the laws of thermodynamics.
QC is a meme.
Honestly if you were put on a random desert on a random world you'd be more often right than not about how many people were on the rest of the world.
> Technically every hypothesis that fits our data should get a little weight
This sounds superficially right, but unfortunately there are too infinitely many possibilities to assign more than 0 weight to them just because they're compatible with the data. It's the same fallacy as "the sun either will rise tomorrow, or it won't. Two possibilities mean a 50-50 chance."
A more practical approach will only assign weight to possibilities that might influence your decisions about what to do.
The problem is that we have basically no data, in general people (including pilots) are horrible bad at observing and recounting a situation like these and we have no other types of evidence either...
One gloriously eldritch way to look at that issue is: can an ant see us? Are they aware of our existence?
Not really the same unless ants have mapped out their universe with little left out. Unless it's just that we can't see far enough or into dark matter.
Looking at the wiki page, it seems the population on the island is decreasing. Hopefully they will either all die, thus relieving us of the ethical dilemma, or India will come to its senses and stop the abuse of these poor people and actually help them. Its criminal that they are allowed to carry on without access to any of the modern world's technology or services. And of course the islanders that killed those fishermen should also be forcibly removed and punished - murder is murder, and the fact that someone is pretending they are still in the stone age has never been a recognised defense...
On the punishment for murder end of things, they neither know or accept Indian sovereignty, so applying Indian law on them doesn't make sense. As far as the Sentinelese are concerned they're being invaded. This is more similar to a case where a soldier that doesn't know the war is over kills someone. It doesn't make sense and isn't fair to prosecute them because they're working on old information that would make the murder they committed okay legally.
I completely disagree that it's wrong to not introduce them to modern technology. To do that it would require one of us to go visit them which would probably kill them because of our diseases. I would argue it's more wrong to kill them than to not give them access to modern technology.
As far as the Sentinelese are concerned, war is not over. Every time someone visits them, the invasion begins anew.
Meanwhile, we do have the technology to contact them without giving them lethal diseases. It doesn't have to be like the Americas all over again. We can screen potential visitors for a wide range of pathogens, make them wear protective suits, vaccinate the local population, and treat them if they get ill nonetheless. The problem is that they want none of it, so any attempt to vaccinate or treat them will end up being forceful.
The time travel argument I've always found to be far more compelling than the extra terrestrial argument.
For example, similarity of physical form (with exaggerated evolutionary aspects relating to modern society, such as bigger eyes/brains, and diminished aspects that would be obsolete, such as weakened physical strength).
And in a universe where different systems could be billions of years different in age, the UFOs have always seemed closer to a few thousands of years off from current technology at best.
And yet there's zero evidence of even life, let alone advanced life, in our near proximity. Wouldn't it make more sense that the advanced species that's in near physical proximity to ourselves (i.e. humans) would be responsible for flying objects very similar to our own flying objects and supposedly operated by bipeds looking very similar to ourselves?
And the physical rules bring broken to enable time travel are roughly the same rules that would need to be broken for faster than light travel, so the scientific likelihood for time traveling UFOs is roughly the same as for extra-terrestrial UFOs, but the former makes a lot more sense in other regards than the latter.
> And in a universe where different systems could be billions of years different in age, the UFOs have always seemed closer to a few thousands of years off from current technology at best.
I think this is something that doesn't get enough attention; in a universe like our's, almost all first contact events will consist of relativisticly expanding spheres of von Neumann machines impacting planets populated solely by nonsapient life. (Say three billion years before humans evolved versus a generous million years of human 'civilization' gives a three thousand to one ratio.) We should not expect to see anything remotely near our point in the developmental timeline.
(If "relativisticly expanding spheres of von Neumann machines" sounds unlikely, let me remind you that every star in the sky is a massive pile of valuable raw materials that has unfortunately caught fire and needs to be extinguished as soon as possible.)
"in a universe like ours, almost all first contact events will consist of relativistically expanding spheres of von Neumann machines impacting planets populated solely by nonsapient life."
You talk as if that's a certain fact. (Even estimating a probability) I'm no expert in the area, but why? Is that justified? What's that based on? (Not to mention the last sentence 'reminding me' of another odd 'fact'.)
I think it's like a big-o type argument about rates of growth of approximately spherical areas in 3d space
That combined with the aforementioned thousands-to-one odds that a life form that hasn't yet developed into a relativistically expanding sphere also hasn't developed sapience. (I'm not using the mathematical definition of "almost all" of course.)
There would (probably) also be a significant number of cases where two spheres run into each other, but it's debatable whether most of those count as first contact events (light speed lag versus "it's all the same civilization"). The main point was the enormous unlikelyhood of a nearby alien civilization being within a thousand years or so (out of multiple billion) of our developmental level.
The Fermi paradox is more a question of "Why hasn't anything eaten every star in the sky yet?".
I feel like I was given many more strange assumptions, without any of the things I was asking about being addressed. Your "of course", which I didn't understand, in a few different ways, makes me think I'm talking to experts. I understood almost nothing you wrote. But well, like I said, I don't buy all these assumptions. Reading this is like reading those unhelpful wikipedia pages that only make sense if you already understand what it's saying. And your way of talking as if it's all obviously true, (e.g. "let me remind you") raises my suspicions that it's not.
Can you time travel without being able to alter your location in space? I mean, the earth is moving pretty fast, if you popped back a few hours, wouldn’t you land in empty space?
Yes, you would need to adjust for that. Might be the explanation for why the guys from the future shows up in spaceships. I guess it would be dangerous calculating slightly wrong and instead end up inside earth or inside a building's wall.
Better to appear some distance out into space and then fly the last few hundred miles to earth.
The galaxy is rotating and moving through space. All estimated speeds are in relation to other objects.
I think relativity makes this impossible; you're essentially saying there's a particular trajectory that has an absolute velocity of zero. Relativity is founded on the idea that there's no such thing; any trajectory has an equal claim to be the zero velocity.
Maybe time travel would stay in the same reference frame, so if you're on the Earth's surface you end up in the same position on the Earth. On the other hand if you're on an object that experiences non-gravitational directional changes in the span of your time travel, you might be in trouble.
that presumes something like 'time teleportation'. Time travel based on changing / reversing your 'speed of time' doesn't have that.
Kind of like the difference between wormhole based FTL and warp drive based FTL. In one, you just teleport, in the other, you still travel in a continuous line.
This is how I've always imagined a fictional time machine working. You build the thing, it creates a field inside itself, and you can use it to move whoever/whatever is inside that field to other points in the timeline of the machine's existence.
Vallee is a serious person worth paying attention to, a rarity in that field. Spielberg used him as the model for that French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Another good book of his is "Messengers of Deception", expands greatly on the non-extraterrestrial idea.
Interesting. A possible explanation for some strange and poorly understood phenomenon accompanied by bright lights could be "earthquake lights", bright lights that appear in the sky around the time of an earthquake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIEwKrvepH8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKMTSDzU1Z4
Not to say that it applies to this particular case. Just goes to show that there is much to this natural world we don't understand yet.
Does anyone actually take the 'evidence' in those videos seriously?
At 1:50 in that first video, the 'light' occurs and then amazingly the electricity goes off.
What a coincidence that is.
Also coincidentally the 'light' has similar colour characteristics to the arc flash of a high voltage electrical line/transformer shorting out.
And coincidentally at 4:40 the same scenario repeats!
It would have repeated again in the first minute if they'd been closer to the electrical circuit that faulted out.
The rest of the videos appear as borderline CGI (floodlights washed out in truck area)or some video of clouds.
I have been through several earthquakes and have seen power pole transformers spark and explode as the oil inside splashes about and is ignited by the electricty. This could be a possible explanation for "earthquake lights".
This is the most plausible explanation. I’ve seen this effect during ice storms.
Huh. I've seen this exact blue/purple light in my hometown when I was a small kid (like 15 years ago). It was late night, we were in the patio with my family, eating nuts and talking, just a normal summer evening. We saw this light, and it deeply spooked us children. For years I was wondering what the hell was that. But since an earthquake didn't hit us that night (thanks god) I suppose it likely was something else.
Man, the comments on those videos... just wow. Thanks for the entertainment.
I've been developing a theory about abduction stories overlapping with MK Ultra-type experimentation. There seem to be a fair number of parallels in the type of activities done to subjects of the MK projects (allegedly) and casting the alien abduction story on the victims makes deniability straight forward.
I haven't thought much about UFO sightings. I always find the ones with video, especially from arial sources interesting.
Abduction stories fit very well within suggestibility + sleep paralysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis), before aliens it was demons or other things. When I've suffered from it I've had my dog ripping my face off and intruders entering the house, no alien probes yet but apart from that the experience sounds identical.
This is my conclusion as well. I grew up in a very religious household and so all of my sleep paralysis episodes revolved around some sort of demon entering my space and attempting to do something to me. Sleep paralysis is connected with lucid dreaming and so the dreams are incredibly lifelike. I could see someone dreaming about being abducted.
Once I moved out of the house, became a bit more secular, and did some research online about sleep paralysis, any rare episodes I had I knew weren't demons or anything of the sort.
Now that everybody has a cellphone camera there are fewer UFO sitings instead of more, so it seems.
Now everyone has a smartphone maybe they're looking down instead of up.
But people still capture things in the sky if there's something to see. Plenty of footage exists of low flying aircraft and meteors, for instance. People aren't looking down at their smartphones all the time, completely blind to the peripheral universe around them. And there are also dashcams, security cameras, etc, to consider.
Then the dashcams would capture it. Just like they did for that Russian meteorite.
In what way does it seem like that? There are many, many more _sightings_ in the current decade than the last, with a repeating pattern for about 50 to 70 years or so. Cellphone cameras are partially responsible for that, but unfortunately camera quality of most phones kinda sucks. That represents a different set of problems.
> but unfortunately camera quality of most phones kinda sucks.
This excuse died years ago. Cell phone cameras are on par with regular mainline digital cameras these days. Sometimes far superior.
It wouldn't be a conspiracy talk without someone bringing up MK Ultra...
We can tick off the flowchart as the conversation progresses. - https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NUv7tx-DOTQ/UXKqqtaZ7CI/AAAAAAAAE...
For good reason. We know that the CIA dosed people with LSD without their knowledge, which alone would explain most bizarre phenomena, and we know that the CIA claim to have destroyed most of their records of what they did in the program. Pretty easy to link anything to the program, and it's often one of the least strange options.
We also know that MK ULTRA and programs very similar to it, have been continued to present day.
> We also know that MK ULTRA and programs very similar to it, have been continued to present day.
Do we though?
People assume so, because it fits a paranoid narrative that allows them to "mind control" people, but I'm not aware of any actual proof that MK ULTRA or "programs very similar to it" continue to the present day. As far as I know the program was a failure, like experiments in remote viewing and attempts to surgically implant microphones into stray cats hoping they would wander next to the Soviets.
On the other hand, it would be naive to assume that an agency that once performed such experiments would have compunctions about performing similar experiments today.
Though I won't support the claim you're replying too, we know that as of ten years ago there were still projects with a similar end goal as MK ULTRA, broadly developing "enhanced interrogation techniques." Not as easy to connect to any unexplained phenomena though.
Source?
That theory doesn’t seem compatible with the apparent existence of similar UFO reports from before the 20th century, unless there were other similar programs.
>My rational mind doesn't really believe in all of this, but if it did, I think I'd take Jacques Vallee's theory seriously.
I read through that and it immediately reminded me of Miller's flying saucer theory from Repo-Man - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRJ5cCP0ZPE
Thanks, reading the paper now. I liked how, when describing possible alien visitation to earth he wrote: "sophisticated interaction with the human and animal lifeforms present on the planet."
That paper was quite a fascinating read. Thank you for the recommendation.
Transcribing the interesting bits from 18:15
Man A (ATC?): There's nothing showing on either primary or secondary
Woman A: Ok, it was moving so fast. [Inaudible]
Man A: Alongside you?
Woman A: Yes, it was rapidly [inaudible] bright light and then it just disappeared at a very high speed. I am still wondering. Didn't think it was likely collision course. Wondering what sort it could be.
Man B: Meteor or another object. Some kind of re-entry. Seem to be multiple objects following the same sort of trajectory. Very bright where we were
Woman B (ATC?): Ok, that's copy, so what's the direction it was going in.
Man B: Virgin 76 [inaudible] saw that NRS 11-o'clock position two bright lights.
Woman B: Roger that's copy, thank you.
Man C: So that wasn't just me?
Man B: No. Yeah, very interesting, that one.
Man B: Virgin 76. I saw two bright lights 11 o'clock. Seem to bank over to the right and then climb away. Speed at least Mach [inaudible]
Woman B: Okay, we're passing that on, thank you.
Man D (or is it Man A?): [inaudible] 94 Shannon.
Man D: Just to let you know that other aircrafts in the area have also reported the same thing. So we're going to have a look and see.
Man E: Speed was astronomical. It was like Mach 2.
Man D: Roger, OK. Thank you.
I know meteors seems to be a common theory, but do they normally travel that fast?
I don’t think you can trust their assessment of its speed. There’s no way to reliably determine the speed of an unknown object of unknown size and distance.
I was watching a meteor shower once, and after a few hours, the angle seemed to change. Instead of streaking across the sky, they appeared as a circle that got brighter and bigger before winking out....they were coming right at me. This could explain the light in this video if it were a fairly large meteorite, maybe.
Mach 2? Yes. Far in excess of it.
They enter at orbital velocity or higher, so yes. Mach 20 or 30 would be on the low end. Of course depending on their shape and mass they lose a lot of it on the way down...
And all the light the aircrews reported was kinetic energy before hitting the atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_speed
The relevant regime for astronomical entities is in above the 'high-hypersonic' and into 're-entry speeds' (uber-sonic?). These are above Mach 25.
At these speeds, not only is the air no-longer considered an ideal gas, nor a two-temperature ideal gas, nor a dissociated gas (O2 and N2 become O and N along the wings), nor an ionized gas (electron temperature must now be considered), but rather a radiation dominated gas. Modeling these radiation dominant gases is very hard. As you increase the number of volumes to model, the computation load grows exponentially.
What I want to know is, do they tend to "bank and climb away"
Far more likely that the observer interpreted it the wrong way, happens all the time.
If they go straight thru the atmosphere and out then yes, that is exactly as they would appear.
Do meteors ever dip into the atmosphere, light up, and skip away? Like a skipping stone?
Basically, yes. Here's one famous example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Great_Daylight_Fireball
http://www.phys.ncku.edu.tw/~astrolab/mirrors/apod_e/image/0...
It's very unlikely but definitely possible. If the meteor is fast enough and targets outer earth atmosphere, it an enter outer atmosphere, slow down, light up due to friction, then escape earth atmosphere vertically. The only problem with this scenario is that meteor has to be much faster than Mach 2, unlike what pilots reported. But it's easily possible they saw a Mach 12 meteor and thought it's Mach 2.
If the meteor has a shape that could generate lift in some way, I can definitely imagine this happening.
Earth moves at ~100,000 kph around the Sun.
would be interesting to know the relative trajectory – would help determine if it was a known satellite reentry or on a typical orbit of debris (lots of periodic comets have well known debris trails, they form most of the "meteor showers" that happen yearly.)
The transcript above refers to the object banking and climbing. That sounds a lot more like a secret military vehicle than falling space debris.
Could be one skipping off the atmosphere. Aero breaking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobraking) if you want to stick with the spacecraft theory.
I'm not an astronomer but it seems unlikely to me a meteor skipping off atmosphere would be as slow as Mach 2 and not hot enough to shine red.
What if it was perceptually at Mach 2 / distance X yet really was at Mach 20 / distance 10 * X ? (Bullshitting numbers here, but you get the point)
Angular speed across FoV is a function of distance from the object and the only thing that makes us understand that high altitude airplanes are nowhere close to a standstill is that we can infer distance from the intrinsic knowledge of the airplane size.
If all observers are close enough together we'd be unable to uncover the illusion, as that would require a widespread enough configuration.
Additionally, I question the "astronomical" attribute, especially with planes cruising at ~800kph, Mach 2 is at most 2.5 their typical speed. Concorde is hardly astronomical, and although jet fighters are not chasing for top speed anymore some of them are still able to go to such Mach factors. Now, Mach 12, that would be closing in to being astronomical (entering the order of magnitude of an ICBM descent speed).
I believe they call such a thing a 'bolide'
Could be outgassing.
Or plain lift. If the object is flat when it hits the atmosphere, it may get some lift and bounce back to space.
Maybe it's something from the recent Rocket Lab launch?
Seems extremely unlikely air traffic control wouldn't know of it, since it's potentially a >200-casualty mistake if it hits a commercial airline.
The rocket lab launch was south from New Zealand - and there aren't many planes flying around down there as far as I know.
I'm guessing only the final stage would still be airborne/in space once it orbited around to populated areas. And the second/final stage should be deliberately de-orbited for exactly this reason, right?
It was either Swamp Gas or Weather balloons. Everyone knows that.
Actual link to the tweet that has all the actual content:
https://twitter.com/IrishAero/status/1061669444093730820
Direct link to the audio:
http://archive-server.liveatc.net/einn/EINN-High-Nov-09-2018...
Side note; including a screenshot of a tweet with out a link to it, is pretty lame.
Relevant portion of the audio is within the 18-21 minute range.
Starts at 17:51
Marine here. Sounds like a perfect description of a missile.
Since we don't usually get UFO threads on Hacker News, I may as well brush the dust off my tinfoil hat...
What's always puzzled me about UFO sightings is the preponderance of "bright lights" being what people report seeing. If some extraterrestrial being came to visit, why make itself known? And in such an obviously unnatural way, too?
One immediate counterargument I can think of is that it's good camouflage. Who needs difficult shit like invisibility when we can just pound the earthlings' pupils with light so they can't see us well! Nevertheless, has always made the skeptic in me raise my eyebrows recursively.
Even if we assume that "UFO" means "space alien", it doesn't seem puzzling to me.
Answer 1: selection bias. Obviously the only ones that people see at night are those which have lights. We aren't going to hear about the ones that people don't see because they're dark.
Answer 2: alien apathy. You've flown a million light years to spy on some great apes who aren't even sure you exist. Who cares if a few of them get flashed with bright lights, while you're looking around? They don't even have flying saucers yet, so it's not like they could chase you.
From a rational standpoint, I generally subscribe to the selection bias you (and Scriptor in a separate reply) raise as #1. However, for the sake of discussion, let's operate under the assumption these sightings are legitimate/noteworthy.
Personally, I grew out of bothering ant hills when I was about twelve. Nowadays, I pleasantly observe from high above. So why wouldn't aliens do the same?
In this case, your second theory fills in the gaps. But, one would assume some species capable of this technology would also have cultural norms about not interfering with less developed groups. Much the same way we (generally) try not to interfere with primitive tribes around the world.
I suppose, then, that the comparison could be made to the Sentinelese firing arrows at aircraft out of fear and suspicion. The aliens (in my opinion rightly) assume we would do the same to them because they are so foreign to us.
> one would assume some species capable of this technology would also have cultural norms about not interfering with less developed groups
I would assume nothing of the sort. It's not as if humans even really conform to that norm. It's a pretty recent trend, at best. With aliens of unknown evolution/history, all bets are off.
Very faint point which I predicted the keen HN audience would be quick to contend. My reasoning to assume so is a wholly intuitive instinct that all ultra-high technology societies converge in their moral and ethical norms to a common limit. That to have survived the gamble of existence long enough to reach such a point, this civilization almost certainly needed to adopt a set of values wherein the "Prime Directive" incidentally coincides. Though I concede that it betrays my personal beliefs more than any tangible insight.
For example, my hippie confidence does nothing to explain the likes of the Zerg or Tyranids, that's for sure. :)
Human ethics vary amongst groups and cultures - even highly advanced ones. I don't see any evidence to suggest a convergence on a "one true" moral code. For a brief period western values seemed to take over due to the west's influence, but that is waning today rather than increasing in momentum.
>My reasoning to assume so is a wholly intuitive instinct that all ultra-high technology societies converge in their moral and ethical norms to a common limit.
We don't know that. We also don't know if the prime directive of aliens is the same as ours. By that I mean that whatever aliens may be visiting us may not be competitive whatsoever. Maybe their planet didn't have the same explosion with life that ours did so it's relatively empty of competition. In this case cooperating with others to expand as an instinct would be much more beneficial than competing. There is also no tangible evidence of the cosmos swarming with life, on planets or traveling so it might also be that -given how long it takes for planets to form stable orbits and how long it took on Earth for humans to appear and develop instruments to observe the universe- the universe is for the time being relatively empty of life. Some people revisited the drake equation and approached it as a coin flip: Sure there is a 50/50 chance but it's either/or, so based on their calculations the most likely scenario is for 0-2 times life forming on our galaxy. And FTL is still science fiction so it might be that the only species that can visit us are coming from other galaxies and have evolved to survive for billions of years. At the same time thanks to kepler we now know that planets with the characterists of earth are rather rare as are solar systems like ours. But there are a myriad of other planets with conditions too hard for humans but good enough for life found on Earth. In this case it might have been that some sort of life exists in the cosmos but it evolves much more slowly compared to us and thus needs a few extra billion years to reach space travel. So maybe the universe is experiencing it's first explosion of life and we are one of the first multi-cell organisms or step out of the water. Who knows.
Also we don't know how technology would have evolved should it be that Earth had a different composition. Like for example metals are fairly rare on the crust but yet they are fundamental to our function. Maybe a planet that has a 10% metal crust would have evolved towards electricity much faster than us. Or a planet with lower gravity and lower or no magnetosphere could mean that whatever species developed there could have achieved space travel much faster and easier thus increasing the incentive( in human terms) of developing ftl. Right now ftl is sci-fi for us but remember that yes, it was the military who developed the internet but all the applications and the development of the science behind it came once more people could toy with it.
fair not faint as I hope most readers surmised -- for some reason I did not realize this error until it was too late to edit
I take it you don't do a lot of walking. People in cars are routinely assholes to pedestrians, presumably because they feel invulnerable.
Why wouldn't folks on space ships visiting a primitive planet-bound race not be 10,000 times worse about fucking with the locals for kicks?
What a bizarre comparison, albeit a novel rebuttal! I do think your argument rests too much on the typical assumptions/biases a human brings to the table given our experience in this specific time and place. See my reply to andrewflnr for a nuanced response.
Also, I do walk a lot! About 4 miles daily in fact. People in cars also happen to be assholes to each other. And to wildlife. Heck, they can even be assholes to others in the same vehicle!
You seem to assume folks in spaceships would be scientists or part of a Star Trek like organized fleet. But what if some of them are tourists?
Americans in cars aren't part of some elite professional military or scientific service. Most Americans have cars. It's the norm here. And being a driver of a car in no way guarantees they are well educated, sophisticated, civilized types. There are even people driving illegally, without a license or insurance or whatever. That's part of why they can be such dicks to people they perceive as less powerful -- because they don't feel particularly powerful, etc. themselves.
4chan on holiday.
^
He understands me.
> I grew out of bothering ant hills when I was about twelve. Nowadays, I pleasantly observe from high above. So why wouldn't aliens do the same?
Simple: the aliens that mess with us are delinquent eleven year olds joyriding their parents' saucer
I knew I wasn't the only one who watched Explorers in the 80s.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089114
And 3: the light is a unavoidable side effect of their propulsion system.
You ever see those guys that put neon lights under their Hondas?
What if it's just the cosmic version of that?
Genuinely can't tell which one of us is applying Occam's Razor here...
LOL, you have a point. What kind of individuals would volunteer for a possibly one-way mission that gets them in a stasis pod for a century?
Operating warp drives in atmospheres can cause a lot of Cherenkov radiation at the bubble border. One must be careful not to overheat the external hull.
Sorry. Couldn't resist adding one more speculative cherry to the top of this very tall tale.
Or small malfunctions of their propulsion or cloaking system, like an engine misfire.
You can generalize answer 1 even further. For all you know, there are hundreds of UFOs all around you that just have very advanced cloaking technology and only a few that don't. :)
Yeah, but they're here to watch the ones without cloaking. :-)
They all stop in Wakanda to fuel up and see the sights.
>Answer 2: alien apathy. You've flown a million light years to spy on some great apes who aren't even sure you exist. Who cares if a few of them get flashed with bright lights, while you're looking around? They don't even have flying saucers yet, so it's not like they could chase you.
I just read your reply and so I deleted mine which was similar, but a bit stronger; its not like we could possibly hurt them.
3. Human cruise ships (and airplanes) have bright lights too. What if it's just an "alien" cruiseship entertaining a bunch of interterrestial holiday makers?
Jack McDewitt's 'ECHO' comes to mind. Let's hope it's not a bunch of ill-behaved interstellar tourists. :)
Clearly they don't care much about the prime directive
I could also imagine aliens that might see in different light spectrums and our visible light spectrum is 'dark' to them, like how we would perceive infrared, microwaves, or radio waves without giving a second thought as to whether or not something unknown might be able to sense that random spectrum emissions. Maybe they see in microwave range, maybe they use the light spectrum much like we use our radio spectrum and just blindly broadcast it in mass quantity as line-of-sight communication technology. Maybe it is used as a scanner/detector beam source, like how we might x-ray rock samples or something to determine composition.
But beyond something crazy like that, yeah it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to be spewing light as an alien visitor.
NASA-engineer Paul R. Hill has written about "UFO-illumination":
http://orbwatch.com/paulrhill.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Hill
Probably some sampling bias there. If there wasn't a bright light (whatever caused it), then chances are a person wouldn't have seen it at all.
I don't personally give much thought to what ants think as I tromp around the lawn.
I tend to think a species advanced enough to get here may find us similarly unimportant.
But wouldn't an intelligent species capable of inter-galactic travel have some of the Federation style rules to obey? Don't interfere with a less intelligent civilization for fear of disruption or whatever?
I'm not sure they would consider "us" unimportant. There's clearly some sort of "intelligence" with all of the radio energy emanating from this rock. If they sat back and observed for quite a bit of time, they would at some point be curious and want to study. Hence the probing. What's this hole for, let's find out. Plus, you'd want to dissect a couple of specimens to study it. After that, you start messing with the subject to see how it behaves/reacts.
>But wouldn't an intelligent species capable of inter-galactic travel have some of the Federation style rules to obey? Don't interfere with a less intelligent civilization for fear of disruption or whatever?
Even in the fictional universe of Star Trek, most intelligent civilizations couldn't care less about the prime directive, and even the Federation disregards it when it's convenient.
There's no reason to assume that aliens in real life should necessarily conform to a modern human moral ideal about "non-interference with primitive cultures" just because they're intelligent.
For all we know, they subscribe to the Rules of Acquisition rather than the Prime Directive.
1) "crash" a flying saucer in Roswell, New Mexico
2) secretly cultivate a pop cultural mythology around aliens and alien contact. Buzz around their aircraft and flash lights at them now and then just to keep them interested, but not too interested because you know how humans can get when they're too interested.
3) infiltrate human society with shapeshifting reptoids and own the rights to numerous sci-fi properties like Star Wars, Star Trek and Men in Black, to condition humans to be comfortable with the premise of alien contact and to build brand identity and loyalty.
4) build some Star Wars and Star Trek themed casinos out in deep space.
5) show up one day and offer to loan them a warp drive, but the warp drive just happens to always fail near a casino planet.
?) PROFIT.
Just like Spain didn’t interfere in South America, or Britain in Africa. Why would there be non interference when even Star Trek doesn’t have it half the time (Borg, dominion, ferengi, etc)
That's a familiar argument, but I just realized that it mistakes scale for evolution. I imagine that if there are aliens, they are closer to the scale of a human than an ant.
Alternative explanation: they're everywhere and all around us, but once in a while, they forget to turn the headlights off
I've seen planes travel long distances above me with their front lights on, then switch them off once they realize they forgot. Same thing.
Devil's advocate: the aliens may simply not care about being seen, or they may be aware that they can operate "in the open" with plausible deniability from a skeptical public and governments being unwilling to admit their existence.
This makes the most sense to me. Do you get worried that the ants will see you and freak out when you're hiking through the woods?
Ants no, but ticks are habitual hitchhikers.
Was it Douglas Adam's theory that said UFO sightings were the equivalent to space teenagers just screwing around with the primitive life forms?
My question, is why do they only buzz the trailer parks and the 'very highly educated folks'?
They’re anti-collision lights. They have to be really bright to be effective at interstellar speeds.
Interstellar speeds certainly must be in excess of the speed of light (or those creatures are chill with cruising for thousands of years), so they wouldn't do much good. :)
There's always time dilation...
Wouldn’t an FTL spacecraft appear to be traveling in reverse and exhibit extreme redshifting to an observer on Earth?
Probably not within the atmosphere.
I can't imagine that a ship traveling faster than light through an atmosphere would do great things for said atmosphere.
Maybe the alien version of anthropomorphism? If they and most galactic species eyesight was in the infra-red red range then the might not think of hiding light in our visible spectrum. Imagine if exhaust from our cars gave off visible light? We'd want to change that pretty quickly.
So long as we're brushing off tinfoil hats, my pet theory is the bright lights are necessary symptoms of whatever is powering those thing. Such immense power would naturally give off lots of light.
> why make itself known?
Do you try to hide your existence from ants? Or flowers?
Can't report the invisible ones if we can't see them
Cosmic radiation have been known to cause bright flashes for astronauts. Maybe this? This could also explain why several people see it too.
Can cameras pick up cosmic radiation?
Most UFOs aren’t don’t turn out to be alien spacecraft, so it stands to reason that most UFO sightings won’t behave like alien spacecraft.
>>If some extraterrestrial being came to visit, why make itself known? And in such an obviously unnatural way, too?
Playing the devils advocate. If the Zoo hypothesis is correct. They are probably thinking the same about us.
Like.
"We get so close to them, and they sometimes see us too. Just imagine how stupid they must be to not notice us or become aware of our presence."
>>One immediate counterargument I can think of is that it's good camouflage.
No one I know who ever went to Safari in Africa wore a camouflage. Why should they do it?
at least two common things fall into this bucket
1. Reflections and other visual phenomenon 2. Space debris burning up on reentry (natural or unnatural)
yeah, why aren't there more sightings of invisible stuff?
Or what about the CIA picking a pop singer to disclose their top secrets? "Space invasion" might be the next big psyop!
Well, if our the earth hasn’t already been irreversibly destroyed already, it will be extremely soon. Now might be a good time to end observation.
Life on earth survived the KT boundary asteroid impact. Life on earth isn't going to end from our activity, it will only end from our inactivity in protecting the earth and the sun from major cosmic impacts. We need to get out shit together and stop feeling guilty about burning all the oil. We need to do whatever it takes to get established in space and the moon, ready to deflect and close call objects. We are natures best design yet to protect itself from the dangers of space, we are one people, one planet, one sun, and we need to stand together against the cosmos, or nature will find a new guardian or perish trying.
I’m a little less worried about “life” and more worried about “human life”.
> We need to get out shit together and stop feeling guilty about burning all the oil.
It’s the results that concern me.... anyway, this attitude is disgusting. A) there’s no reason our carbon output isn’t manageable and B) there’s no reason we can’t pursue the care of the earth and spreading the human population at the same time.
> Life on earth isn't going to end from our activity
Although unlikely, I can envision a plausible pessimistic runaway scenario where we turn Earth into a Venus-like world due to sheer collective stupidity over a sufficiently large timescale. Maybe not completely sterile but having only some hardened bacteria survive is hardly a hopeful outcome for "life".
While I agree about a run away scenario, o do not think were anywhere close to that. The more we look, the more redundant systems we find on the earth for maintaining balance. Nature is very resiliant, more so then we think, and it isn't going to go down without a fight. We think our pollution is bad... natures recovered from worse. We think nuclear war would end life... natures recovered from worse.
Fear is the mindkiller, and the powers that are instilling fear into our civilization have another agenda. Eyes open, no fear. Nature needs us to come together and protect the earth and sun from cosmic impacts, we need to act now. Nature can handle the co2, we need to handle the comets and asteroids that are the true threat to life on the planet and in this solar system.
A few months ago I was walking alone in the park when I saw a bright light moving in strange patterns in the sky. It scared the pants off of me.
For about a day my mind was nothing but paranoid thoughts. I had fear that I had seen something that I shouldn't have. That not only extraterrestrial life was real, but that they knew of my existence and would be coming for me. Or perhaps they were coming for all of us. I was a mess.
And sure, it was probably a drone. Or a plane. Or a shooting star, etc. But was it? I couldn't shake the thought that it wasn't.
It sounds hilariously silly now, but at the time it really screwed with my mental state.
Once this happened to me with a friend. We were staring at the sky when suddenly a progression of lights started moving quickly across the sky. At first I thought it might be a shower of large meteors about to hit us.
Later on discovered someone had just released a bunch of sky lanterns, something I'd never seen before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_lantern
It can be tricky to judge the distance, speed and size of objects in the sky.
I second this.
Sky lanterns definitely look other worldly under the right conditions.
A similar thing happened to me a few weeks ago, I was so freaked out by it that I downloaded and paid for an app that showed satellite positions. Turns out...my rational side was right, it was indeed a satellite in low orbit, giving it the appearance of a fast speed and a very bright disposition. It was still a weird experience. There were two satellite actually.
As for what this was? Honestly it sounds like people may have seen an air force drill of some military (possibly Russian or US.)
Here's a good one that I think a lot of the 2 or 3 (Triangle) ufo sightings come from.
The NOSS satellites commonly can be seen in a double or triple configuration.
Here is an example image https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7XAxIsInxSM/maxresdefault.jpg
China also launched triple satellite configurations into an almost identical orbit.
http://www.satobs.org/noss.html
Had that same feeling years ago. Went out to a dark place to see the stars. Ended up seeing a light jumping around on the horizon. Then there was a bright white flash that lit up the whole field and forest, but not like lightning. No shadows, no source of light. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, no thunder. It wasn't lightning.
Pretty scared, I kept watching the jumping light on the horizon. A few minutes later the white flash again. I ran back to my car.
I had the same ridiculous thoughts as you. "what if they know I saw?"
It freaked me out for a long time. The way the light was moving.... Too fast to see the movement even, it was here, then there. I watched it bounce around for at least a full half hour, it wasn't a satellite or a meteor.
Similar lights in the Australian desert appear related to inversion layers refracting headlights over the horizon (http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s818193.htm)
Interesting. I suppose that's possible. It was a single light and it was changing colors. Its movement tended to stay within a specific range.
Do you have any thoughts on the white flashes? They were the scary part. Everything was perfectly daytime for a split second, and there was no fading of the light like with lightning. It was immediately all white then immediately dark again. It creeps me out thinking about it.
The light on the horizon seemed 50 miles away, but the flash was right on us, extremely bright, and blanketed everything evenly.
That's what the Men in Black would say.
Or in this case (if you check the researcher's surname), the Ministry of Magic.
Saw a similar light when I was a child, my brothers saw it too. But this one was right above our heads in the sky, and there was no flash when it disappeared. Bounced from one place to another, and it was really far away, so we are talking hundreds of kilometers in a second. Never forgot about it.
Dang. That's scary.
While I was watching I started out in awe feeling like "holy crap, I'm looking at a UFO!" But after staring at it for a long time and then having the white flashes I quickly changed to "oh fuck, I'm near a UFO".
I was with someone, they were very scared, too.
Was about 10 years old, and the thing was just a bit brighter than the stars. Wasn't scary, it was exciting to see at the moment.
Check out "Iridium flares" - they sound a lot like you've described, including coming in pairs.
Got a good video of one? I watched one and it wasn't similar to what I saw.
Not at all. They don't jump around and are not extremely bright.
Sounds like the Marfa lights in the west Texas high desert:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights
this is pretty crazy: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yglJYW244Fo
Interesting. A little more info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_flash
Since we're all giving our UFO encounters I'll chip in with mine.
About 25yrs ago as a teenager and utterly obsessed with the supernatural and the unexplained, my family were on a fly drive holiday on the west coast of the US.
One night in a roadside motel in the Nevada desert, I was woken up by a strange, loud, rythmic, droning sound outside. Absolutely convinced that it was a UFO landing and terrified that if I moved or made a noise I'd be abducted, I laid still, sweating with my heart racing for hours until the sun came up.
Turned out to be a dodgy air conditioning unit.
Similar story here. As a kid I was laying in bed staring at a bright disk floating in the sky at night. Totally sure it was a UFO. Turned out to be a reflection of a street light in the window.
Using this thread to add my own:
I was around 14 and also obsessed with aliens and the supernatural. I was living out in the boonies on a road that had just started to be developed (one long road with a smaller road splitting off down to a cul-de-sac with a few houses a mile or so off the main road).
I was walking the dog one evening, headed down the main road and turned off to walk down the side road to the cul-de-sac. It was dark and cold but as I turned down the side road, I could see a bright rectangular light floating above the ground down where the side road ended a mile away.
I was pretty freaked out and stood there squinting at it for a while, psyching myself up to go check it out. In the end, I decided that I would never forgive myself if I didn't go witness what was clearly an alien craft hovering over the road on my dark little street.
So, I walked down toward the end of the side road (with the dog to protect me of course) until about halfway down, I got one of those perspective shifts that made me laugh. In the dark (no street lights, only a few houses set a good way back from the road) I could only see the glowing light but as I got closer, I could clearly see that this was a small bus with the light from inside spilling out through the windshield.
It turns out, the local library had started a "Bookmobile" route out to our little country neighborhood so locals could check out books without driving into the city. The bus was so lit up inside and the surrounding area was so dark that from a mile away, all I could see was the bright glowing rectangle of the windshield.
Needless to say I stopped inside the bus and checked out a book or two. Probably some ridiculous fluff from Whitley Strieber or Stephen King ;)
I was on a beach off the eastern coast of Sri Lanka late in the night. I saw what seemed like a star dart around in the sky. I figured it was just an aircraft, but it moved extremely fast in a near zig-zag fashion, making sharp angled turns - something no aircraft can do.
I've been on a UFO binge lately, prompted by all the news about Oumuamua. So many credible and fascinating reports.
I've also seen less resistance to the idea of UFOs than there used to be. People claiming to have seen a UFO aren't outright dismissed as cuckoo anymore.
What makes you guess it wasn’t a drone?
Probably because it was too high up, and probably because I went a few years ago when commercial drones weren't well developed or even widely available
A more rational explanation is that the region is hotly contested by a number of world powers, and that was probably some experimental military aircraft
My dad told me of seeing some fighter jets following a light in the sky near Lemore airforce base just a few years ago. He figured it was another jet, but then the light did, what seemed to him, an impossible turn, then took off north at an incredible speed. The fighter jets followed, but not even close to the same speed, as the light was no longer visible a few seconds after it turned direction due to its apparent speed. What to make of it? Who knows.
A few years back I saw a plane that was behaving very strangely, so I tried to take a photo. My phone shut itself off. Afterwards I tried to turn it back on and it was back to 20%. I’ve since wondered if our phones come with remote shutdowns.
Your battery was wearing out. The camera draws a lot of power and if a degraded battery can't output enough then a protection circuit will shut down the device below a voltage threshold.
Have you considered seeking therapy to work on your fears?
A lot of people typically have a "Where's the proof?" wrt UFOs. However, there is Dr Steven Greer who in 2001 fronted a 'Disclosure Project' in which many people from positions of authority (eg FAA chiefs, Tower operators, Military pilots, etc) stated quite clearly on National Press Club in Washington their testimony on UFO's. [0]
Since then, he's been often quoted as saying that there's such an abundance of proof that it's embarrassing. He has video and other testimonies from world leaders, and often sits down with heads of state advising them, and now has hundreds of testimonies from verifiable people in the military industrial complex testifying to the authenticity of their existence, as well as the massive deliberate misinformation systems put into place to control the UFO 'story'. [1]
I'd recommend watching his documentaries, Sirius and Unacknowledged [2][2b]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClhNHIEPCKE
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJVg1HBlWA4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShZMgbXNSBs
[2] http://siriusdisclosure.com/
[2b] Sirius: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C_-HLD21hA
edit: better links
That's all just circumstantial evidence subject to interpretation, not proof.
I can't disagree, but at what point can sworn testimonies be allowed? 100, 200, 500? What about their 'respectability'? To dismiss such a mountain of evidence is unwise, I feel.
There are also hundreds of government documents on his website, discussing various et issues.
Most of the testimonies talk about how there is a systemic coverup going on. What if they can provide proof, but due to high classification, it can't be provided, except to Congress? This was ultimately what the disclosure project was about in 2001. Most of the testimonies attest to that fact.
What specifically is unwise? I don't see any negative consequences of being skeptical.
And the notion of some grand government conspiracy is just ludicrous on the face of it. No secret could be kept that long by so many people without some more reliable evidence leaking out.
Appeals to authority in terms of the respectability of various witnesses are meaningless. A more plausible explanation is that they simply misinterpreted what they experienced, possibly primed by the ubiquity of aliens and spacecraft in popular fiction going back almost a century. Look how many people have been wrongfully convicted of crimes based on sincere but faulty eyewitness testimony.
Skepticism is all well and good, but it can go too far if it's just a blanket denial. Dr Greer himself states that he's skeptical of 95% of what he's seen, but still states:
"we have 3500 cases where ET vehicles have landed and have left physical traces. We have 4000 cases where they have been tracked on radar and seen by pilots" ~ Unacknowledged doco.
> A more plausible explanation is that they simply misinterpreted what they experienced
If you watch 'Unacknowledged' you will see:
- multiple US Presidents hint at, or directly acknowledge their existence.
- Men who've walked on the moon, testifying.
- Top US government officials, air force pilots, etc, etc who've actually interacted with them, and and seen them stored in bases in the US.
- There was even a British Lord in there.
- Various government records (also available online).
> the notion of some grand government conspiracy is just ludicrous on the face of it
Yes it is, but doesn't mean it isn't happening. Apparently $100M dollars a day is spent on US military. $25B is unaccounted for each year. (The actual numbers may be out of date, but the scale of them is correct, from memory).
> No secret could be kept that long by so many people without some more reliable evidence leaking out.
This statement is directly addressed in 'Unacknowledged'
Call me not convinced.
https://xkcd.com/1235/
Fair enough, but you can't really trust what's posted as video/photo evidence these days:
https://youtu.be/Fm8FJ8la2VU
I'd go for sworn affidavits with independently verifiable credentials for things like this. Dr Greer has collected thousands of data points on this topic, however.
(Perhaps you haven't watched the 3rd link posted above, which is >1.5hr interview with a Richard Doty from OSI whose job it was to discredit/cover up/investigate all of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShZMgbXNSBs
Also, the news wouldn't get out anyway:
"So, every news agency, every television and radio station in the Albuquerque and Santa-Fe area had our snitches in there... we paid them good money" 1:24)
edit: added relevant quote from doco.
This stuff is very hard to wade through, especially Greer's documentary. I just picked out something to follow up on on Google scholar, the Atacama skeleton, and it immediately falls apart. I'm not saying all of this is necessarily false, it just seems to have a pro-extraterrestrial bias that he's trying to gather evidence for, rather than just analysing evidence without foregone conclusions. I've never seen material on extraterestrials that didn't fall into that trap.
And for all these characters being interviewed, how do you know they aren't just payed actors? Has anyone followed their references? The way it looks to me it's all just a bunch of people with trumped up or vague relationships to US government, including Greer himself having "briefed" intelligence officials (which he later corrects as a talk during a dinner party, who knows whether that's true). Just a personal note as someone who's done a PhD: I've come to the conclusion that if someone introduces himself with "Dr. XYZ", it's probably a person trying to trump up their importance. I've come to get skeptical immediately when someone is doing that.
Yeah, the atacama skeleton is tough to swallow. Ironically, Dr Greer makes no claim about what it is, other than to say (he's actually a trauma physician originally) that it's not human. He goes into details on why (and documented proof and papers by recognised DNA experts). He's also directly 'calling out' the papers you've seen and the journals that have published them, as far as I'm aware.
I'd still recommend watching Unacknowledged
>> payed actors
paid actors
Do any airlines have high-def video cameras on planes? Seems like something that would be financially feasible with modern technology and would provide very useful data for unexplained phenomena like this. I imagine I'm not the only one who would pay to subscribe for a streaming service for airline footage, even when there aren't UFO sightings to examine.
Actually, yes, some newer aircraft have high-def video cameras mounted on the tail and on the belly of the aircraft, and the video stream is streamed into the aircraft so that passengers can see the "outside view" on in-flight entertainment systems. The only thing is I believe the the cameras often get turned off in the middle of the flight when the boring part is going on..
Here's a YouTube example of a tail camera on takeoff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeBcZXjSfkE
"High-def" they are not.
I'm pretty sure they are high-definition. On my last A380 flight the exterior video looked at least 720P.
Many long distance flights have cameras on the tail + nose that you can watch on your entertainment system. I wouldn't expect them to stream it to the public though.
Can you imagine that it is very boring most of the time?
You might be surprised at the popularity of "Slow Television" [0], which televises the long journeys of trains, cruise ships, etc. It is apparently quite popular in Norway and growing elsewhere. Add some potential UFOs to the mix, and who knows where it might go?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_television
I remember in the 90s tuning into "space night" on a German satellite channel when I got home from the pub. Just continuous video feeds from low earth orbit with electronica/chillout playing over the top. Was really relaxing to have on in the background.
I can imagine working from home with something like that on in the background and occasionally looking up to "see where we are now" - would give me some sense of travelling and seeing something new, rather than just feeling like I've been stuck at home coding in front of my laptop all day.
that sounds awesome! I wonder if there's anything like that available now. Anybody have any links?
I’m a big fan too, so here are a couple of links:
https://youtu.be/5rmjunOOseQ
Official BR video library (not sure if it works from abroad: https://www.br.de/mediathek/sendung/space-night-av:584f4cc13...
And wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Night
Re: Space Night, there are some clips on YT, like in this list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRhLbAy-ujs&list=PLCDF7A13D5...
This is a good one. Goes up to (Youtube quality) 4K as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjs6fnpPWy4
NASA has some.
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/live-iss-stream
This channel on Pluto tv is very relaxing indeed, showing the norwegian trains through the countryside.
Just like my dash cam footage probably. You wouldn't go back and watch it unless something interesting happened.
Or just very relaxing. You can already tune into air-traffic control for white noise.
It it were aliens, they are probably making contact with the cephalopod population under the sea to see if they have developed technology yet, and in this planets case they've found another monkey hominid infestation in one of those rare millennia before its civilizations manage to collectively off themselves.
Maybe the aliens want to communicate with the cephalopods anyway simply because their brains and consciousness are more interesting than ours.
I mean, maybe. I don't know. Could be. I've never talked to one.
The cephs are better suited to space travel owing to their ability to survive cryogenisis, replication of their memories and intelligence throughout their bodies, no need for gravity, ability to breed i large numbers and transmit information to offspring. Hominids are a peculiarity of adapting to a given planet, where the cepholopods are adaptable to more common environments in the universe.
That’s exactly what a cephalopod would say...
Audio: http://archive-server.liveatc.net/einn/EINN-High-Nov-09-2018... (skip to 17min40s)
Would love a transcript if anyone happens to find one. I have a very difficult time making out what is said, I'm not sure how they understand each other.
Yup, just did it. I had to run over it a few times and transcribe it to catch what they were saying. Even then, there are still some bits I could not comprehend though. Wonder if Amazon/Google Transcribe can do a better job?
VASaviation YouTube channel just released a video on the event. Starts about half way through:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv7x4dRye3U
"Glad it wasn't just me" made me laugh.
Are the archives just really low quality or do ATCs and pilots possess superhuman abilities to understand super low quality audio
As someone who operated marine VHF ("bridge-to-bridge") professionally for years, I'll say that these recordings sound perfectly intelligible. I imagine ATCs and pilots have a similar culture of "get the point across as fast as possible, but not so fast that it is no longer unambiguous." Especially airband, where everyone in each area tends to guard and use a single frequency.
US Air Traffic Controller here. We have what we call "phraseology". The FAA Order 7110.65 prescribes how to say what we say.
It makes for safe and efficient transmissions. If there's a set way of saying something, then pilots don't have to guess what we mean if every controller says it in a different way.
This is all captured by civilian equipment on the ground. The stuff the ATCs themselves have access to is much better.
You do need a bit of time for your brain to get used to it.
It reminds me my favorite pilot story https://youtu.be/ILop3Kn3JO8
Did we listen to the same recording? It was perfectly clear for me...
It's a 16kbps MP3 file, and MP3 doesn't work well at such a low bitrate. I found it very difficult to make out the speech over the compression artifacts. I frequently watch videos at 2x speed, so I don't think I have unusually bad audio comprehension skill.
Uh, so... I don't have precise enough times to do this, but my first question is, "Is this an Iridium Flare event?" If you have never seen "Iridium Flares", grab your phone and download an Iridium Flare app. They're confusing, spectacular, and they actually happen pretty often.
Because this sounds an awful lot like an iridium flare. And they're a kind of persistent source of "inexplicable aircraft" reports because they're SO bright you assume they have to be close by.
I never knew this was a thing, this definitely explains my experience with a satellite passing by I posted to this thread earlier.
Iridium flares are extremely brief — they last just a couple of seconds. The pilot said "the object had come up along the left side of the aircraft". No pilot is going to describe an Iridium flare like that.
They are brief, but they can be longer than 2 seconds. They can easily last 7 seconds. Some even longer. Also, they can migrate across a huge swath of the sky and when you confuse a person's visual system, they have to interpret it.
Obviously, I don't know for sure. But I checked and there was one in the area with a pretty long duration depending on where you are.
It looks like an Iridium passed over the ocean between Ireland and Iceland around 6:30Z, around 15 minutes before the radio conversation. However it doesn't quite line up with where I'm assuming the aircraft were
Would looking at it through a lens of clouds make it appear in a different spot to an observer?
I saw one not too long ago. Two white lights in the sky spaced close enough and moving so as to be obviously 'connected' to each other.
It was perfectly still night in the UK. I outstretched my hand and finger and, I forget the details exactly, but the finger just about blocked out the pair of lights I think.
A quick call to my father in law (pilot) and some info on joining the landing pattern at Boscombe Down, added to the lack of red/green lights so not normally a craft expecting to interact with other traffic, and a little investigative intuition seeing as the lights were moving so slow as to almost be gliding - and I find the Zephyr high altitude long endurance surveillance aircraft.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/mod-buys-third-record-bre...
A bit of trigonometry showed with a wingspan of 35m (I think that was it) and the angle of my finger outstretched, put the craft at about the height it should be for following the standard approach path into Boscombe Down.
So with a little knowledge it was possibly to determine with a high degree of likelihood what this 'UFO' was.
I suspect that virtually all reports can be attributed to similar terrestrial origins with experimental aircraft and using the 'extra-terrestrial' card is just a convenient way of covering that up.
EDIT - I should add I saw it because it was I think the night SpaceX launched and landed a reusable rocket maybe for first time? Or perhaps it was reused rocket with reused dragon cargo capsule to ISS. The path I think was going to take it over the UK anyway, so I was out to see if it would be visible, having watched the launch a little earlier in the evening.
Note to Royal Air Force - don't land the slightly secret plane when many people is likely to be looking up!
Not to put a downer on speculation but probably military jets that lit the afterburners and zoomed away. My first thought was F-111s, but since it seems they were radar quiet, maybe stealth planes.
No more F-111s in service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-111_Aardvar...
Even if the Dump & Burn was spectacular
https://youtu.be/BXmnr6_jKuw
I think you mean F-117 nighthawk, which was decommissioned.
'decommissioned' means different things to different people
https://www.businessinsider.com/air-force-f117-nighthawk-ste...
The F-117 doesn't have afterburners. goes against the whole stealth thing
Isn't the most likely explanation for these sightings secret military aircraft testing/missions?
There's been a number of credible UFO sightings lately, some even by military pilots and captured on video.
If you consider how long it's been since there's been a major breakthrough publicized in the air superiority department, and how advanced technology in general has become since the days of the SR-71, we're long overdue for some next-level aircraft likely to be kept under wraps until required to win a conflict.
Why all these sightings are never accompanied with sonic booms? If something is moving that fast through the atmosphere, there must be a sonic boom. Or is there any way to suppress this? At least theoretically?
I do remember reading about an airframe designed to produce two sonic booms that cancelled each other out.
NASA is actually working on this, if I remember correctly. They want it to be a "low boom," apparently it's still a work in progress.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/nov/6/nasa-quiet-s...
Yea, looks like it's possible to some extent.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/270969/is-it- possible-to-noise-cancel-a-sonic-boom
Separating a pocket of space-time from itself, then moving that. Which would also effect inertia. I suspect that moving space-time around itself would introduce totally different shearing effects but maybe those could be mitigated using special non-physical(or physical) geometry, like aerodynamics but for space-time.
For anyone fascinated with the hype around UFO sightings, "The Resonance of Unseen Things" [1] is an interesting read focusing on the structure of the stories and their connection to people's social and economic lives. It approaches the UFO believers subculture from a sympathetic viewpoint and tries to understand. Great ethnography.
[1]https://www.press.umich.edu/8373560/resonance_of_unseen_thin...
Carl Jung wrote about UFOs as something of a collective hallucination, a mass psycho-spiritual phenomenon. Not in the sense that they are "unreal", but in that they tap into an extraordinary dimension of our collective awareness.
I suggest checking out "Flying Saucers: a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky."
There is also a possibility of these bright balls of light actually being terrestrial lifeforms of some sort.
I saw the Black Triangle UFO [1] in Duluth, MN about 10 years go. It went from a low altitude hover to a slow glide across the night sky. I was standing almost directly under it in a parking lot. I thought it was a strange pattern of new streetlights for a few moments until it started gliding. Always wondered what that was.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_triangle_(UFO)
Ball lightning? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
https://youtu.be/hxiDA3tVjRA
https://youtu.be/hF-kuB9pBT0
https://youtu.be/6ioN-3UWYrY
https://youtu.be/7n79gnbab_o
https://youtu.be/WlX-cEsnILc
Two of those were obviously insects, probably fireflies. One even goes in front of the tree in the parking lot. The others were just a blurred mess.
This one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlX-cEsnILc&feature=youtu.be
...isn't ball lightning, it's that weird ice crystal thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ0laC2FksA
I'd love to see an actual ball lightning example if anyone has one though, it would be amazing to see!
This is something else https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5cqazajP1Q
Misjudging distance seems to be a very frequent suspect in tales of the unexplained. "The light moved at an extraordinary speed" - it moved at an ordinary speed, close to you. Likewise "through the distant moors it stalked - a panther!" - a pet cat.
Perhaps it'd be more interesting for both casual observers and conspiracy theorists alike to assume modern UFOs are not extraterrestrial spacecraft, but clandestine earthly government aircraft.
Maybe they turn on the bright lights to pretend to be aliens, to throw off the scent.
Popular ideas in UFO circles are that there was a crash, the govs have the tech, and the craft we usually see are replication vehicles attempting to test out what we gathered from the real one that crashed years ago.
this is probably pretty close to the truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuSLYh6ypiw
I saw 1 meteor over Dublin this weekend. It was on Sunday at about 23:30 and I was looking towards Ursa Major. I've seen a few by now to know that it was just that, a meteor. White and bright, moving fast and disappearing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter historical perspective
I haven't read/heard any comments about possible sound (sonic boom or other) from these lights, whatever they were. Anybody know differently?
A more down-to-earth explanation for the lights could be spherical lightning bolts or spherical clouds or a combination of these two things.
Well this lends some credibility to a comment I posted just about a week ago. It got a lot of push-back understandably but being an eye witness myself. I know the phenomenon is true. It was in no way a meteor because it moved in erratic directions, up, down, left, right, and figure 8's. Is this from outer space though? It's been happening for at least 25 years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18367198
Bright lights moving at "Mach 2" and no reports of hearing a sonic boom?
I still feel like if UFOs really were able to one: fly here and two: mess with us, they would just kill us off and take our planet. Or enslave us.
It's what we would probably end up doing.
could be the USAF's unmanmed high orbit XB drone
Russians probing NATO airspace along the Atlantic?
We're here for your Lucky Charms!
TR3B
We're here for your Lucky Charms
These sightings are all most all the time reported in the United States which probably means this is some sort of advanced military aircraft testing.
The reason why none of the incidents can see the thing clearly is that because when seen clearly its just another plane and nobody reports that.
I am guessing most people browsing this are suddenly intrigued by the topic. This is the most interesting incident ever, by far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Tehran_UFO_incident
Phoenix Lights [1] is another potentially interesting one but accounts are pretty inconsistent.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights
What makes it so interesting?
Probably because of >During the incident, two Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantom II jet interceptors reported losing instrumentation and communications as they approached the object. These were restored upon withdrawal.
>One of the aircraft also reported a temporary weapons systems failure while the crew was preparing to open fire.
These were explained away in the wikipedia article, but who knows the truth... Hidden away in another language.
> Military sighting
> Multiple points of observation from reliable sources. Visual AND radar observation
> "Natural" sources ruled out
> Military equipment going out on three occasions
> American military investigators
> US military satellite saw an IR anomaly at the same time on its own
Could be the angels, demons, djinn of most folklore.
A couple of years ago, I heard of a case where a guy was flying a small plane over James Bay in Québec in around 1978 and he saw what he thought were 5 fuel tanks on the ground, around 60' in diameters each. This was strange since this is in the middle of nowhere and these weren't even there a couple of days before and no road is leading to this place.
As he approached the location, the "fuel tanks" started moving in formation and flew upward at an impossible speed. They looked like fuel tank from above, but they were circular crafts.
Keep in mind, 5 objects of this size, moving at this speed would have displaced a lot or air, but there was no disruption, no noise.
There's some big hydro electric dams in this place and apparently these crafts are often seen hovering above the power lines.
It's all nice and cute we're wearing our tin foils in this thread sharing interesting stories and papers. But
> I heard of a case where a guy
seems maybe a bit too shallow. Not trying to be an asshole but I do wonder what's the credibility of this guy.