I do like this as a likely explanation for the majority of UFO events.
However, I'll continue to argue that the main evidence against extra terrestrial explanations for UFOs is how the creditability of sightings always seem to depend on first accepting that extra terrestrials are intergalactic trolls.
"It was playing with us that's why we couldn't get a good shot". "They have been interfering with technology at military bases for years". "They show up on our radar then they disappeared". "They lit up the night sky then sped off".
Yeah. These all seem like things a peer-ish human adversary might want to do - if only to see what they could get away with - rather than a vastly more sophisticated alien race capable of interstellar travel.
Yeah. And note that the military is heavily optimized (people, procedures, training, equipment, you name it) for dealing with peer-ish human adversaries, and things which such adversaries might try to get away with.
If your day job is at the nail factory, then you may not be the best judge of those pointy things growing on hawthorn trees.
Why trolls? Maybe they just want to learn about us. I don't see the reason to assume they have godlike sensors with unlimited range - they need to come closer to see detail.
Them being able to travel here doesn't imply they have significantly better technology than we do - it just means they had more time, perhaps their civilization is older than ours. 100k years older would be enough to send out a probe from some nearby stars. 1M years older would be enough to travel from thousands of not-so-nearby stars around.
I've been a UFO enthusiast since I was a kid, always excited to hear about the real, hidden truth which is surely just around the corner, about to be revealed. (I like the slightly sinister sense of mystery, I think). But I have to admit, it is suspicious that given the super high res. cameras we all carry around, every UFO video we see these days is just a few blurry pixels.
It's hard to get a good photo in the moment. If you tried to take a picture of a helicopter overhead before it got out of your view, I bet the photo would turn out like junk too. These things do turn up pretty well on certain cameras, like the ones on military jets trying to follow these objects.
Oddly long winded semantic argument about the literal definition of Unidentified Flying Objects. Yes, they're unidentified, yes, they're hard to see which is why they're unidentified.
Did we read the same post? That was not at all my takeaway. The post was actually about "cameras have a range of effective identification, UFOs 'just so happen' to be always just outside this range even after it has expanded, the likeliest explanation for this coincidence is that they are not alien spaceships."
Which means you cant identify them, which makes them unidentified, regardless of why.
Calling it a Low Information Zone doesn't really satisfy anything, outside of a new designation for something we can't identify. We've solved nothing outside of adding a semantic qualifier.
Yeah but more importantly the post suggests there are likely terrestrial explanations which obey the laws of physics as we understand them contrary to what's been depicted in the media recently.
I want to believe, but I agree with the author of the post that we need to see some evidence that's outside of the "Low Information Zone"
There's always been possible terrestrial explanations, but those explanations are as concerning (if not more concerning) than actual aliens, which is why these things remain so compelling.
I actually thought it was a very astute observation. Something could be very close and still be unknown, eg. a secret model of plane, or new weather phenomenon.
Reading between the lines, his point is that it's unlikely that ET only flys in people's LIZ.
This seems like a bad take. If aliens can traverse lightspeed distances with sufficient ease to stop here, it seems trivial they'd also be able to analyse comparatively primitive sensor technology and navigate out of range to avoid identification.
It's pretty obvious by now that UFOs have advanced ElectroMagnetic Warfare (EW) equipment capable of interfering with optical devices in such a way that all photos are low resolution.
Basically next-next-next-next generation of current car camouflage patterns (but active, not passive) or anti-surveillance streetwear.
One obvious solution is to fly a two seater plane, and put in the back seat a highly skilled fast pen artist so he can sketch a pen and paper detailed drawing of the UFO.
And the pictures where UFOs are clearly visible are rapidly dismissed as CGI. There is no picture that would convince a hardcore skeptic, and that is not necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to be clear to everyone.
Extraordinary disbelief calls for extraordinary evidence, and that likely means repeated observations by multiple credible observers -- credible to the person in question, that is. It is a tall order without systematic funding to collect that data a la Project Galileo.
I remain on the fence. On the one hand, the publicly-available data is entirely unconvincing, while on the other hand the testimonies from high ranking officials to pilots are intriguing.
I think the biggest argument against UFOs (or at least, against UFOs being aliens) is the set of claims that need to be true for it to hold up.
* Aliens (which in fairness, is the easy thing to accept here)
* Aliens that have the technology and means to travel vast distances to our solar system, and then on to earth
* (Alternatively) Aliens that have the technology and means to hide their presence in nearby solar systems and also still pretty good technology for traveling long distances
* A desire in these aliens to regularly and specifically visit earth (otherwise we wouldn't have sightings over such a long period of time)
* A desire to avoid being spotted by humans (otherwise we should surely expect far more of these sightings)
* A consistent inability in these aliens to avoid being spotted despite the aforementioned desire and technological capability (otherwise we would have no sightings at all)
* A very heterogenous set of equipment, vehicles, creatures, and patterns to account for the wide range of different reported sightings
* A desire by the government to keep this information hushed up (in fairness, this might not be required, but it seems insisted upon by every UFO believer I've ever heard)
* An inability by the government to keep this information hushed up
* A conscious choice by experts and the media to be sceptical of this story even when evidence is leaked or released
In fairness, all of this stuff could be true. If the evidence points to it, we should be willing to accept crazy claims like "this particle is actually also a wave" and "black holes exist". But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and repeated, consistent evidence. And that's what the whole "UFOs are aliens" lacks. There is a handful of circumstantial, fuzzy evidence from photos and videos that show wild things but aren't consistent with each other, and at best support one or two of the claims made above.
For me, that's the biggest issue here. It's not just accepting that some shiny ball of light might be an extraterrestrial vessel, it's also building a full theory out of that assumption that actually makes sense. Every interpretation I've seen requires so many crazy assumptions that it's very difficult to take the whole thing seriously at the end.
On the other hand, it might seem most likely that aliens should be here, given:
- the vastness of space
- the abundance of habitable worlds
- the age of the universe
- the speed with which tools like von Neumann probes could proliferate the galaxy
- the likelihood that somebody somewhere over millions of years would create a von Neumann probe (computer viruses didn't take long to make)
- the observation that we are here so why is no one else?
If we look around and see that we are alone, are we to assume no one else is there, or is it more likely they are and are hiding? There are good reasons to assume the group that comes to survive longest in the galaxy is also the one that is good at hiding. I think all these considerations more or less answer your first 5 points.
For some of the remaining points, maybe there are very few real alien sightings in the UFO reports but they are very few. The vast majority are hoaxes / confused. Government is not involved but maybe covering up the fact that they have detected some things they can't explain.
Not to mention that there has to be something they would get from visiting earth and flying around for decades that they couldn't get by passively observing or landing a few times centuries ago.
* Decade after decade of the aliens at-most flirting with small numbers of isolated observers, generally in situations (like flying) where humans senses are far from their best. And never, ever doing something really slow, close, and obvious - say, 20 feet above an Xmas Parade, at 20 miles an hour, lower hatch on their saucer open, and mooning the crowd. Maybe catching Santa in the face with a couple Saturnberry cream pies, too.
This right here is a huge issue. You get UFO believers who can't talk about UFOs without mentioning aliens.
But then you get disbelievers with the same problem! It's ridiculous and automatically calls into question individuals' claims of rationality or scientific intentions.
> And the pictures of UFOs that are clearly visible are rapidly dismissed as CGI.
The UFO hoaxers should probably spend some more time learning how to use Blender well. The most compelling videos are the real videos of LIZ objects. The videos which show anything clearly are uniformly laughably bad. I challenge you to link some videos that depict an apparent alien craft clearly which aren't obviously fake.
In general, if you are invested in believing something, you dismiss any evidence to the contrary with a variety of rationalizations. It's just how humans work psychologically and even scientists and other people who "should know better" can get caught up in this.
Mick West is perhaps the most popular UFO debunker, he is good faith but has a pretty large conflict of interest he has developed now given the stakes of any of these phenomena being shown to be non human created technology. That said, this is an old post, so less of an issue and it can probably stand on its own. (It's also written before the UAP reports that have come out, which influence the way you ought to think about the disclosures the government has made.)
My favorite post of his about these videos was when he simply worked the trigonometry shown on the FLIR display, and worked out that these things weren’t traveling nearly as fast as described.
The problem is there does seem to be a selection bias problem, where Mick gets a lot of distribution on these kinds of thing, and people do not hear the subsequent refutations from true experts about flaws in his analysis. He speaks very authoritatively, often over his skis imo. He also has a tendency to overemphasize forensics against things like video in a way that just ignores completely the surrounding context.
I read about how he met a prominent flat earther and had some really interesting takeaways from his conversation, namely saying, "She is not unintelligent." He seemed shockingly open-minded while fascinated more by the path of reasoning that leads to flat earth thinking. I wish I could find this again.
The author ignores what many find most compelling about those videos. Namely, the domain experts (navy pilots) who filmed the videos and discussed them at length[1].
I think you are referring to the "Trained Observer." I feel like this was already debunked that many trained observers have been discovered to be wrong about many sightings. I'm happy to be wrong though so please cite anything to correct me.
You are asking the op to prove a negative. You are making the claim that this is a "Trained Observer" which has been debunked, the burden of evidence has fallen to you to show that it has been debunked. Op can't exactly cite something saying that it has not been debunked. They cited a video with evidence and people who have some large authority on things in the air.
I've known a few Navy pilots. I absolutely defer to them in all questions regarding keeping a plane in the air, getting it safely on and off the ground, and denying those capabilities to others. On questions of what a weird thing they saw in the sky might be, I give their knowledge just about as much weight as anyone who sees a weird thing in the sky.
The first thing we teach pilots is that they have to get comfortable with the fact that their eyes play tricks on them in flight. Our visual perception wasn't tuned for high speeds, high altitudes, and truly three-dimensional relationship assessment, and they're as prone to misinterpretation of things they didn't train on as everyone else is. If they say "That blob is a fighter-jet near the horizon's edge," I believe them; but if they say "I think that blob is a space alien," I don't because nobody knows what a space alien looks like (and "That doesn't look like anything I know" still doesn't imply "space alien").
I don't think this is accurate - "navy pilots" are domain experts in operation of navy aircraft.
What you are maybe getting confused here is that the three examples in the article are actually part of several domains, each of which is very different from aviation expertise.
The domains we're talking about include topics such as optical physics, radar physics (transmitters & receivers), optical sensor technology (and attendant physics), and digital processing including chipset hardware and software stack (and implementation of specific physics). Each of these are their own 'domain', which is important here because faulty implementation in any one of them can lead to such anomalies.
In general, navy pilots do not have that expertise, though I would very much like to hear the opinions of a navy pilot that is indeed 'expert' with all of these 'domains'.
getting a degree in aeronautics is not like passing a driving exam or heavy machinery license.
though I reject analyses that lean towards LGM, i recognise that people flying these aircraft have necessarily demonstrated enough advanced math and physics competency to understand well the boundary between known vs inexplicable physical phenomena. they are either deliberately ignoring their own training or else have some undiagnosed amnesia, instigated by sudden exposure to celebrity status.
Not to mention that Nimitz/TicTac was detected and tracked by multiple different systems from different sources. Ship-based radar, aircraft-based radar (of multiple aircraft) as well as FLIR.
I'm not a true believer by any means, but the claims are much more compelling than this post gives them credit for.
I can confirm for anyone interested that pilots, Navy or otherwise, can also be cranks. They lie, misinterpret, and make mistakes at the same rate as the rest of the population. There is no special moral code issued to you in flight school.
I've seen pilots with their head down in the targeting system saying some really really silly things that were obviously wrong when they got their eyes up and got some SA.
Yeah pilots can totally be wrong. I was once an engineer in flight test, and pilots are your endusers and can speculate all sorts of weird stuff. They are not engineers. That said, in this particular case, the fact that the pilots admitted to joking around / pranks in the past adds credibility. If they were dishonest, they would have tried to conceal this in their past.
I would absolutely not consider them domain experts on anything that's not directly related to flying a jet.
People tend to fall back on these videos as "expert proof" as if military witnesses are more reliable in some way... but they're not at all experts on atmospheric phenomenon, optics, UFOs, or a multitude of other things that could potentially explain these. When it comes to what they're seeing here the expertise ends at "not a plane"
Well, in ten years when the cameras and radars are much improved, we'll be able to identify these things, right? Everybody in such a rush, why not just wait and see?
Whomever the witness, the fact remains; they are unidentified.
By definition there’s low information. Where I grew up there was a ton of 1980s UFO sightings, generating lots of speculation. Later, we learned they were test Tomahawk cruise missiles that used to develop their terrain navigation system.
Not just the navy pilots. USAF has files going back to 1946. My uncles were on the staff of the blue book project. General Joseph D Moore.
They are indeed real, UFOs, but that’s where it ends. We know of several different kinds, but we know not of their origin or how they work. Or at least that information is still sealed. The pentagon knows. Maybe not their communications department but the top brass knows, or at least has access to, the blue book files.
There are no UFOs in the sense of alien or off-world intelligence. UFOs are created by humans to describe things they can't identify in the moment.
The Joe Rogan Experience video is such speculation that I cannot take any of it as fact. He jumps around in speculative ideas, descriptions and theories. Using titles or rank as a means of factual integrity is thin. It's still hearsay.
People want to believe, but the fact remains there is zero undisputed evidence for off-world UFOs.
When they are unidentified and still discussed online, they constitute an information pothole on the information superhighway.
Such potholes are sometimes more like utility trenches, however. And, well-meaning folks occasionally attempt to fill them in, more out of personal frustration than accurate perception of the circumstances, and are later discovered to be kind of dumb for doing so.
Readit News
However, I'll continue to argue that the main evidence against extra terrestrial explanations for UFOs is how the creditability of sightings always seem to depend on first accepting that extra terrestrials are intergalactic trolls.
"It was playing with us that's why we couldn't get a good shot". "They have been interfering with technology at military bases for years". "They show up on our radar then they disappeared". "They lit up the night sky then sped off".
If your day job is at the nail factory, then you may not be the best judge of those pointy things growing on hawthorn trees.
Them being able to travel here doesn't imply they have significantly better technology than we do - it just means they had more time, perhaps their civilization is older than ours. 100k years older would be enough to send out a probe from some nearby stars. 1M years older would be enough to travel from thousands of not-so-nearby stars around.
Calling it a Low Information Zone doesn't really satisfy anything, outside of a new designation for something we can't identify. We've solved nothing outside of adding a semantic qualifier.
I want to believe, but I agree with the author of the post that we need to see some evidence that's outside of the "Low Information Zone"
Reading between the lines, his point is that it's unlikely that ET only flys in people's LIZ.
Deleted Comment
Basically next-next-next-next generation of current car camouflage patterns (but active, not passive) or anti-surveillance streetwear.
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/fords-new-car-camouflage-...
One obvious solution is to fly a two seater plane, and put in the back seat a highly skilled fast pen artist so he can sketch a pen and paper detailed drawing of the UFO.
Extraordinary disbelief calls for extraordinary evidence, and that likely means repeated observations by multiple credible observers -- credible to the person in question, that is. It is a tall order without systematic funding to collect that data a la Project Galileo.
I remain on the fence. On the one hand, the publicly-available data is entirely unconvincing, while on the other hand the testimonies from high ranking officials to pilots are intriguing.
* Aliens (which in fairness, is the easy thing to accept here)
* Aliens that have the technology and means to travel vast distances to our solar system, and then on to earth
* (Alternatively) Aliens that have the technology and means to hide their presence in nearby solar systems and also still pretty good technology for traveling long distances
* A desire in these aliens to regularly and specifically visit earth (otherwise we wouldn't have sightings over such a long period of time)
* A desire to avoid being spotted by humans (otherwise we should surely expect far more of these sightings)
* A consistent inability in these aliens to avoid being spotted despite the aforementioned desire and technological capability (otherwise we would have no sightings at all)
* A very heterogenous set of equipment, vehicles, creatures, and patterns to account for the wide range of different reported sightings
* A desire by the government to keep this information hushed up (in fairness, this might not be required, but it seems insisted upon by every UFO believer I've ever heard)
* An inability by the government to keep this information hushed up
* A conscious choice by experts and the media to be sceptical of this story even when evidence is leaked or released
In fairness, all of this stuff could be true. If the evidence points to it, we should be willing to accept crazy claims like "this particle is actually also a wave" and "black holes exist". But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and repeated, consistent evidence. And that's what the whole "UFOs are aliens" lacks. There is a handful of circumstantial, fuzzy evidence from photos and videos that show wild things but aren't consistent with each other, and at best support one or two of the claims made above.
For me, that's the biggest issue here. It's not just accepting that some shiny ball of light might be an extraterrestrial vessel, it's also building a full theory out of that assumption that actually makes sense. Every interpretation I've seen requires so many crazy assumptions that it's very difficult to take the whole thing seriously at the end.
- the vastness of space
- the abundance of habitable worlds
- the age of the universe
- the speed with which tools like von Neumann probes could proliferate the galaxy
- the likelihood that somebody somewhere over millions of years would create a von Neumann probe (computer viruses didn't take long to make)
- the observation that we are here so why is no one else?
If we look around and see that we are alone, are we to assume no one else is there, or is it more likely they are and are hiding? There are good reasons to assume the group that comes to survive longest in the galaxy is also the one that is good at hiding. I think all these considerations more or less answer your first 5 points.
For some of the remaining points, maybe there are very few real alien sightings in the UFO reports but they are very few. The vast majority are hoaxes / confused. Government is not involved but maybe covering up the fact that they have detected some things they can't explain.
This right here is a huge issue. You get UFO believers who can't talk about UFOs without mentioning aliens.
But then you get disbelievers with the same problem! It's ridiculous and automatically calls into question individuals' claims of rationality or scientific intentions.
The UFO hoaxers should probably spend some more time learning how to use Blender well. The most compelling videos are the real videos of LIZ objects. The videos which show anything clearly are uniformly laughably bad. I challenge you to link some videos that depict an apparent alien craft clearly which aren't obviously fake.
https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/video/Middle...
disclosed during the AARO public hearing
https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/hearings/to-receive-te...
on April 19th, 2023. Obviously not definitive proof, but high res footage of an anomalous craft with no visible means of propulsion.
Raw footage is linked there, too.
Dead Comment
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco2s3-0zsQ&t=5207s&pp=ygUWam9...
The first thing we teach pilots is that they have to get comfortable with the fact that their eyes play tricks on them in flight. Our visual perception wasn't tuned for high speeds, high altitudes, and truly three-dimensional relationship assessment, and they're as prone to misinterpretation of things they didn't train on as everyone else is. If they say "That blob is a fighter-jet near the horizon's edge," I believe them; but if they say "I think that blob is a space alien," I don't because nobody knows what a space alien looks like (and "That doesn't look like anything I know" still doesn't imply "space alien").
I don't think this is accurate - "navy pilots" are domain experts in operation of navy aircraft.
What you are maybe getting confused here is that the three examples in the article are actually part of several domains, each of which is very different from aviation expertise.
The domains we're talking about include topics such as optical physics, radar physics (transmitters & receivers), optical sensor technology (and attendant physics), and digital processing including chipset hardware and software stack (and implementation of specific physics). Each of these are their own 'domain', which is important here because faulty implementation in any one of them can lead to such anomalies.
In general, navy pilots do not have that expertise, though I would very much like to hear the opinions of a navy pilot that is indeed 'expert' with all of these 'domains'.
getting a degree in aeronautics is not like passing a driving exam or heavy machinery license.
though I reject analyses that lean towards LGM, i recognise that people flying these aircraft have necessarily demonstrated enough advanced math and physics competency to understand well the boundary between known vs inexplicable physical phenomena. they are either deliberately ignoring their own training or else have some undiagnosed amnesia, instigated by sudden exposure to celebrity status.
They are domain experts in what they saw with their own eyes in their domain (the sky). The videos are just corroborating evidence.
I'm not a true believer by any means, but the claims are much more compelling than this post gives them credit for.
I've seen pilots with their head down in the targeting system saying some really really silly things that were obviously wrong when they got their eyes up and got some SA.
People tend to fall back on these videos as "expert proof" as if military witnesses are more reliable in some way... but they're not at all experts on atmospheric phenomenon, optics, UFOs, or a multitude of other things that could potentially explain these. When it comes to what they're seeing here the expertise ends at "not a plane"
By definition there’s low information. Where I grew up there was a ton of 1980s UFO sightings, generating lots of speculation. Later, we learned they were test Tomahawk cruise missiles that used to develop their terrain navigation system.
They are indeed real, UFOs, but that’s where it ends. We know of several different kinds, but we know not of their origin or how they work. Or at least that information is still sealed. The pentagon knows. Maybe not their communications department but the top brass knows, or at least has access to, the blue book files.
The Joe Rogan Experience video is such speculation that I cannot take any of it as fact. He jumps around in speculative ideas, descriptions and theories. Using titles or rank as a means of factual integrity is thin. It's still hearsay.
People want to believe, but the fact remains there is zero undisputed evidence for off-world UFOs.
Such potholes are sometimes more like utility trenches, however. And, well-meaning folks occasionally attempt to fill them in, more out of personal frustration than accurate perception of the circumstances, and are later discovered to be kind of dumb for doing so.