There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical. This includes scientists and other professionals who ought to know better.
Obviously it's unscientific to jump to conclusions and assume that anything that doesn't make sense must be aliens or magic or whatever but at the same time, it's also unscientific to ignore physical observations just because they seem like something that might support what fringe idiots believe.
The close-minded approach is to accept someone’s fantastical claim because you want to, or just because the claim is being made, when the claim is contrary to mountains and centuries of evidence. The open-minded take incorporates all the possible evidence to reach the most likely conclusion. And the conclusion is never, so far, either aliens or magic. It’s just silly to conclude that an observation that has no immediate natural explanation will not be explained naturally and is, instead, the work of aliens or magic. Especially in light of the fact that everything we have explained, thus far, has had a natural explanation.
I don’t think aliens and magic belong in the same category though.
Magic/supernatural by definition is contrary to physical laws and scientific understanding.
But the existence of aliens would in no way contradict any physical laws or scientific consensus. It would be a shock, obviously, just like it was a shock when we discovered that other galaxies exist, or black holes, or that nuclear fission is possible.
If intelligent aliens do exist and are close enough to us to be detected (or to detect us), which is certainly possible and maybe even probable, then we’re likely going to find out about them someday. Is that what’s happening now with these UAP? It seems that we don’t know yet, but it’s as unscientific to throw out the aliens hypothesis a priori as to insist it’s definitely aliens and no other explanation is possible.
>But the existence of aliens would in no way contradict any physical laws or scientific consensus.
The existence of aliens, sure. But the presence of aliens on Earth pretty much does. There's no reason to think FTL travel is possible, and it's economically unreasonable to think some species is going to invest in generation ships to cross the great interstellar gulfs just so that they can fuck around with pilots and anally probe hayseeds.
That would probably depend on the scale.
I'm pretty sure, to the extent they could imagine anything, ants would find it unimaginable and economically absurd for any creature to spend monstrous (to them) amounts of energy just to fuck around with them 10 minutes and then leave.
We don't have to 'imagine' aliens though. We can deduce from the size of the galaxy/universe and the fact that we ourselves exist that they are at least reasonably likely to exist, and some of them are reasonably likely to be more advanced than us.
There is no similar chain of logical deduction based on empirically observed facts that can lead you to the existence of gods or ghosts or demons.
Aliens are not like 'gods', they are like black holes after we realized they probably exist but before we found physical evidence for them.
There is absolutely zero data on the presence of life in the universe. You are imagining that life out there. Which is fine! I sometimes imagine it too. It's fun to imagine, but we are just filling in gaps with imagination. As an example, note that people imagined life on Mars based on "evidence". Life with canals and everything. [1] But once our telescopes got better, those same alien civilizations got pushed back just out of their range.
A process strikingly similar to what religious people do with gods, angels, etc. There's also no real data on where the universe comes from, so they can imagine that it is due to god(s). God used to be on a high mountain, or just above the sky. But like the Martians, He has had to up sticks and move to loftier realms.
I'll also note that some of the alien-imaginers use exactly your reasoning to derive gods. Statistically, aliens must exist, and they must have existed long before us, and they must therefore be so technologically advanced that UFOs are real and we can't prove it just because they are so superior. Or, alternatively, that those aliens caused us in one way or another, from shaping our evolution to seeding our planet to creating the universe.
According to your reasoning, black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves were also like gods and angels before we found physical evidence for them. This is a weak argument.
You can doubt the existence of intelligent aliens. But they obviously aren’t in the same category as religious beliefs. On the other hand, assuming we are somehow special and must be the only intelligent life is quite in line with religious thinking.
We do have data on life in the universe: earth. Very few natural phenomena occur a single time and never again. Apart from early universe events like the big bang and expansion, I can’t think of an example.
> According to your reasoning, black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves were also like gods and angels before we found physical evidence for them. This is a weak argument.
Nah. All of those were things that there were specific reason to believe based on theory and evidence. But it can be a fine line. Look at how quickly quantum mechanics went from abstruse high theory to being used to support absolute woo. [1] Or look at how black holes went from interesting mathematical concept to magic plot device. [2]
Do I grant the theoretical possibility of intelligent life somewhere? Sure, and I never said otherwise. Do I believe it's a lock? Not at all. If we somehow survey the universe and discover we are alone, then our theories will adjust just fine. There is no evidence to the contrary to be overcome.
So yes, in terms of an explanatory device for phenomena observed on earth, aliens and gods are in exactly the same category of "unevidenced anthropomorphic agents that people have been inappropriately using as explanations for millennia". Because people are like that.
Again, according to your argument, because some people employ quantum physics in pseudoscience and woo, that makes quantum physics like religion.
Sorry, you’re just wrong. The possibility of intelligent aliens is on firm scientific ground, which is why we have projects like SETI running. Aliens aren’t like gods or angels, regardless of how many times you repeat it. Certain people might treat them that way, just like people abuse all kinds of scientific concepts. That doesn’t merit a categorical dismissal.
You really don't seem to be getting my argument. Indeed, you don't seem to be trying.
I never said the possibility of aliens somewhere in the universe and somewhere in time was scientifically impossible. Indeed, I've said the opposite, something you seem dedicated to missing if you're still acting otherwise.
I am specifically saying that there's no scientific justification for using aliens as an explanatory device for things that are happening right here on earth. That's just fantasy.
I obviously don't think quantum mechanics is like religion when it's in the hands of Paul Dirac. But I do think it's effectively religion in the hands of Deepak Chopra. Similarly, I don't think the SETI folks are religious kooks, but I do think UFO cultists are.
What you are doing is rejecting a valid hypothesis based on emotion and bias rather than evidence. Aliens could be causing the UAP that have been extensively documented by the US military. You have put forth nothing to rule it out. You can’t, because no conclusive evidence has been found so far (or at least made public) that rules it out.
We know intelligent aliens might exist. We know that if they did visit earth, it would mean that they have technology that far exceeds our own. We have extensive documentation of events that, naively, look like some kind of extremely advanced technology that is far beyond human capabilities. So far, we have found no natural explanation, no explanation involving instrument malfunction, and no explanation involving human actors. That doesn’t mean it’s aliens, but it does mean it could be. If you think they should be crossed off the list, you’ll have to do better than making assertions.
Sure. Gods could also be causing the UAP. I can't rule that out either.
But my point is that there is exactly the same level of evidence for gods and aliens being behind these. I'm not saying either one's inconceivable. I'm just saying that I'm going to treat them both with the same level of seriousness. That is, approximately none.
I'm going to treat unexplained, poorly documented phenomena as unexplained, poorly documented phenomena. Does that mean I'm missing out on the Virgin Mary or aliens or ghosts or whatever? Possibly. But as a practical matter, a century's worth of paranormal hoohah shows I could waste my entire life on this stuff and never get anywhere. I am content that there are enough devoted skeptics out there that if any of the paranormal brigade comes up with some clear and repeatable evidence, I'll hear about it. Until then it goes in the bucket with dowsing and spirit guides and whatnot.
"Gods could also be causing the UAP. I can't rule that out either."
You can rule it out because we've never found evidence of gods existing in the universe, and there's never been a scientific theory put forward for how they could exist that is consistent with our understanding of biology, astronomy, and physics. This obviously doesn't apply to intelligent life, but something tells me you aren't going to concede that. Thanks for the discussion.
There is no evidence of aliens existing in the universe either. None!
Indeed, the god-believers have a lot more "evidence" than the alien-believers do, even if I think it's all pretty specious. And I'll note that the god-believers don't have to prove consistency with biology, etc, in that in their view, that's god-created. Plus, there are things that the god hypothesis explains that the alien hypothesis doesn't, like why we have universe at all.
Again, I think it's all claptrap. I get that you're mad that I see them as the same. Most religious people would be insulted in the opposite direction. But from my perspective, religious people are like that. So yes, you're very welcome for the discussion, and I hope you find it helpful down the road.
until there is a theory of everything i don't think its reasonable to rule out the possibility of FTL travel. even physicists got all worked up few years ago when they detected FTL neutrinos at CERN (which turned out to be a sensor malfunction but still)
> There's no reason to think FTL travel is possible
This seems like fairly closed thinking. We’ve observed strange behavior at the quantum level. We have plausible theories of wormholes and multiverses. It’s conceivable that some civilization has assembled FTL travel from these and other natural phenomena yet unknown.
> it's economically unreasonable to think some species is going to invest in generation ships
We’re working on AI and we can sequence DNA. A sufficiently advanced civilization could send a ship that can synthesize its crew upon arrival.
We have observed quantum entanglement. Perhaps information can travel faster than light and all you need to send physically is the equivalent of a quantum modem attached to a Star Trek replicator.
This is exactly how the spiritualists sounded in their day. They had facially plausible theories of the phenomena they claimed to observe with no actual evidence described in ways that fit in with the gaps in understanding of the moment.
I too consume a lot of science fiction, but it's important to remember that it's just writers making shit up. Perhaps FTL is possible. Perhaps angel are real. Both are things people want to believe in, and both have facially plausible literary explanations, but they have equally good scientific evidence at the moment.
Did you happen to notice the phrases “it’s conceivable” and “perhaps” in my reply? I’m not making any categorical assertions. I think people who make categorical assertions in the negative regarding other life in the universe and its potential capabilities are engaging in scientism.
Lots of things are conceivable. Gods are conceivable, as are angels and demons. It's conceivable that you are the only sentient being in existence besides me and that I am a vast superintelligence controlling everything you see and hear, posting little reminders of the truth like this just to fuck with you.
However, I doubt you're going to spend much time on that, and I'm not going to spend much time on other things that are merely conceivable.
The fact that there is no way to know means that at most we should say "no idea". It is also the least knowledge we should pretend to have on the subject.
Take gods. Even most theists don't believe in most gods. An atheist, as the saying goes, is just a person who disbelieves in one more god than average.
In theory, everybody has to admit that all gods are possible. Does Zeus exist? No idea. Does Bast exist? No idea. Does Yahweh exist? No idea. It's not like we can prove that they aren't out there somewhere.
But what we do know is that a lot humans have made up a lot of gods. We know that people make up and believe in all sorts of things with no evidence at all. So if something fits the same pattern, then we actually have reasonable evidence that it's just another one of those things.
So in a world of people who will take "no idea" as permission to rant more about their theory of chemtrails or ZOG or how the true Messiah lives in a heavily fortified compound outside of Waco, TX, I think an honest and accurate "no idea" isn't enough. Would that it were.
The trouble with the aliens is that it’s too good an explanation. Inscrutable beings with tech we don’t don’t understand works as an explanation of just about anything, so if we allow that in our explanatory toolbox we’ll end up crying “aliens” for all sorts of hard-to-explain phenomena. In most of those cases we’d have found a mundane explanation if we looked longer and thought harder. Non-falsifiable, broad spectrum theories like aliens and magic need to go last on the list, down below “we don’t know yet, let’s gather more data,” or we’ll end up fooling ourselves.
If there really are aliens, eventually we should have enough evidence that we can build specific, falsifiable theories about particular, well-defined entities with at least rough bounds on capabilities. But we’re not close to that point yet.
Aliens isn't being thrown out a priori, because the hypothesis isn't just "it's aliens".
The hypothesis, to fit the evidence is: "it's aliens, using technology advanced enough that it can do things nothing else on Earth can do, without generating the normally expected physical effects, and are also mostly but not entirely undetectable".
Given what we’ve learned about the challenges of interstellar travel, it’s safe to assume that any civilization capable of visiting us would be thousands of years beyond our current understanding of physics.
If you compare our current understanding of physics to what humans knew thousands of years ago, it’s logical that the technology of an interstellar civilization would be as far beyond our understanding as a nuclear reactor would have been to the ancient Romans.
If I met a wizard, he'd obviously be way better at magic than I am, and it'd be way beyond my understanding of physics. Those safe assumptions don't make magic exist
You said you don't think aliens and magic should be the same category, but now argue that they'd be so advanced that, would it even be differentiable from magic?
It would be differentiable in the same way any more advanced technology than what we have now would be. It will have been created through scientific research and engineering, just like our own technology. Not understanding how something works doesn’t make it magic.
> It will have been created through scientific research and engineering, just like our own technology.
It seems a touch hubristic to assume that an advanced civilization with technological capabilities far exceeding our own would have used our processes and techniques to get there.
They’d have their own processes and techniques, but on some level they’d have to be discovering the properties of reality, then using that knowledge to create vessels that could travel between stars, slow down to visit planets, and do various other tricks that seem to defy physics as we know it (based on UAP observations). To me that’s still science and engineering even if it was done in completely different ways.
This is not remotely a safe assumption. We know interstellar travel is resource intensive, but it's within the capabilities of todays technology. It was probably doable with some effort with 1960s technology.
This is the same basic error of reasoning where people say because the moon landing happened, faking the moon landing was also possible (it wasn't: video editing technology of sufficient capability did not exist - space flight and CGI are two entirely separate lines of technical problem solving).
It’s not within today’s technology to actually visit an extrasolar planet. We could possibly do a flyby with a solar sail but we don’t have a way to slow down and enter the planet’s atmosphere. And even that only gets us to the relatively small number of stars that are in our immediate vicinity in any kind of human-civilization-scale timeframe.
Magic/ supernatural isn't unscientific by definition. We don't believe in it because there isn't anyone able to do those things for all of us to see. Science is defined by the scientific method and our curiosity to apply it not by our scepticism.
Quantum effects, like those used by the LEDs on your computer, used to be "supernatural" until someone figured out the physics behind them and invented devices capable of exploiting these effects. If you could bring an LED back in time to the year 1500 and show it to people then (with a power source and current driver of course), they would surely call it "supernatural".
They were never supernatural. They were just not known or not understood. Physics is by some definition the study of the natural world. There is a lot we don't know about the natural world, but what we know and don't know aren't what make something "supernatural".
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke
LEDs were absolutely supernatural. As I said, go back in time with one and show it to Medieval serfs and see what they say. Supernatural is anything that you can't explain given your understanding of the universe.
Breaking Special Relativity is not some 15th century "oh, there's some lovely dirt down here" impressionable pleb. We have machines that can confirm SR to within ridiculous level.
> Something CAN be real and beyond current scientific understanding
I think you're reading that wrong. "Beyond scientific understanding" doesn't mean "beyond current scientific understanding", it actually means, "beyond any possible scientific understanding". So a supernatural phenomenon would defeat any possible attempt at characterizing it scientifically.
Have you considered that you're interpreting it wrong? Go back in time with self-replicating, able to construct themselves to predefined structures, nanobots and you'll have supernatural powers that "violate" scientific understanding of the time. Doesn't mean it can't be explained.
It is true hubris and actually kind of sad to think we know all laws of nature and nothing new could stump us and our cherished laws of nature.
Also, read my other comments. Science is about explaining the previously unexplainable. So nothing, no phenomena you sense with your senses, is beyond science.
The definition of "supernatural" has nothing to do with scientific understanding at any particular time, it's about whether a scientific understanding is possible even in principle. Deities and souls are not amenable to scientific understanding even in principle, that's why they're considered supernatural. Observed phenomena that defy current understanding don't qualify.
Let's look at the root word. "Natural" does not mean "familiar" or "understood". It just means that it's a part of the physical world we inhabit. Conversely, the "supernatural" is what exists beyond the physical world we inhabit: it's not real by definition.
This is all a semantic disagreement and not a question of hubris or overconfidence or of how advanced our knowledge really is.
> The Professor turned and looked down at him, dismissive as usual. "Oh, come now, Harry. Really, magic? I thought you'd know better than to take this seriously, son, even if you're only ten. Magic is just about the most unscientific thing there is!"
...
> "Mum," Harry said. "If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There's a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um... off the top of my head I can't think of where to find something about how it's an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of arguments -"
The observed behaviors do appear to contradict physical laws.
My point is if we’re looking for an explanation, it’s either some natural phenomenon or illusion that we don’t understand, human technology, or alien technology.
In either of the latter two options, we are either talking about new physics or very advanced spoofing tech that looks like new physics but isn’t really.
For human tech, we’ve never seen anything resembling a leap like that being accomplished by a government in total secrecy. It’s hard to imagine. I think this holds even if it’s just crazy advanced spoofing, given the details of the various encounters.
But for alien tech: if intelligent aliens do exist and they did visit us, it would follow that their technology and scientific understanding are far beyond our own. It’s basically impossible that they wouldn’t have knowledge of new physics that we have no current inkling of, just as a scientist from a thousand years ago could have no inkling of relativity or black holes. In this sense, strange inexplicable phenomena that break the laws of physics (as we currently understand them) are consistent with aliens.
So to me, the real question is whether we can figure out a natural phenomenon to explain this. If it is something natural, it seems like it has to be something pretty weird. If it’s not, aliens seem like a valid candidate, pending further evidence.
The reverse of that is assuming our instruments (which eyes totally are) are perfect and therefore if they saw something it must be the first guess and not just an error or misinterpretation.
You're basically saying "alien tech is un-understandable however we can still easily tell it is alien and not measurement error"
Measurement artifacts or malfunction (and mistaken eyewitness accounts from multiple credible observers) are another possibility, but they're difficult to square with the data. There's just too much signal, measured in too many different ways, to handwave it away like that.
You're sayihg that not only do aliens exist, but that the second law of thermodynamics is wrong? Or the universe is non local, and these aliens have developed ftl teleportation?
In order to get here, aliens have to have traveled here, and while traveling, and alive, they'll give off heat -- glowing brightly if they have to turn or accelerate to avoid crashing really hard into the earth.
An alien arriving before they traveled breaks a lot of things, and makes them much closer to magic than some single cell equivalents on a distant moon
Magic that works isn't called magic, so magic not working is basically tautological. Inscribing intricate patterns on crystals to summon non-human intelligence you can converse with? That's not magic, that's computer engineering and science. It's not magic, because it works. Magic is whatever hasn't been demonstrated to work. Transmuting lead into gold? That was magic until we figured out nuclear physics, then it became not magic.
Aliens haven't yet been demonstrated to exist, so they're in the same domain as fantastic claims that haven't yet been demonstrated to work. Magic.
Aliens haven’t been demonstrated to exist, but we have seen that life exists in the only solar system we’re capable of closely observing.
We humans have a long history of erroneously assuming that we’re the special case.
Magic implies we have no idea of how a phenomenon is possible, but we know perfectly well that the existence of aliens is possible. They’re like black holes or gravitational waves before we found physical evidence for them, not magic.
There's a whole lot of seemingly rational and well grounded theorizing about why aliens should exist. But there's no evidence for it, despite many years of looking.
At a certain point, when you can't reconcile observed reality with your beautiful theory, you've got to question the theory. That's the essence of science, discarding theories that cannot be reconciled with observed reality. It may be the case that advanced life capable of sending radio signals or traveling the stars is so exceedingly unlikely to form that even life on earth was a freak fluke of luck. Remember that life on earth got stuck in the mono-cellular stage for billions of years. There was no assurance it would ever get past that stage. And the number of stars in the universe is a weak rebuttal to this line of thinking, since it only takes a handful of independent "one in a million" chances to create a a probability so stupidly small that it makes the number of stars in the entire observable universe seem mundane.
There’s “no evidence” only if you ignore what has been happening on our skies for the past 70+ years. To be sure SETI has found nothing, nor has Hubble, nor JWT, nor Sloan nor Voyager nor Opportunity.
Yet something keeps showing up in our skies, year after year, decade after decade, and that something is widely and roundly ignored.
Because 'aliens might exist' is a theory and 'there is stuff that happens in the sky that has not been formally explained' is a fact, why should we connect the two as evidence of one another?
'Cockroaches taste like jellybeans' is a theory. 'Many people waking up in the middle of the night, having heard a rustling, without being able to see put something in their mouth that tastes like a jellybean, living near and employed at a jellybean factory' is not evidence of this theory.
“Conclusions so far” based on what? This is exactly what this is about. Nobody is asking for a leap-of-faith belief in aliens, but allowing science to happen.
Let videos of whatever weird phenomenona be released and studied. Add more sensors or whatever is needed to explain what pilots see. Maybe send a scientist or two up there to figure out what’s going on.
The closed-minded approach is to say we know definitely that you're right/wrong.
The open-minded approach is to say: maybe we don't know everything, we shouldn't jump to conclusions, rather we should wait for more evidence so that we understand the situation better.
It doesn't matter whether it's aliens, magic, or new scientific discoveries.
It's US chauvinism that leads people here assume that any advanced tech beyond our capabilities must be magic or aliens. The US isn't the only country with secret military research projects.
To be clear the advanced tech doesn't actually have to be manoeuvering in amazing ways. It could be an electronic warfare system that messes with sensors to make it appear so.
My worst fear is simply an advanced technology that provides a means to remotely trigger action potentials at will. At that point anything is possible.
Every time one of those fantastic items gets explained, it's always mundane and boring, and never dampens the enthusiasm for the next one.
I recall one about B+W photographs of "wood elves" taken around 1910 or so by a couple girls. The girls insisted it was genuine. Photographic experts declared the photos were genuine and could not have been faked.
When the girls were in their 80's, they finally confessed that the "wood elves" were drawn on paper, cut out, and propped up with sticks. They took photos of it with a brownie camera. They laughed with glee at the credulous people who took it seriously (because they so wanted to believe in wood elves).
Quite a bizarre strawman [1] that doesn't prove your point at all. Here we have multiple professional pilots reporting similar events, with recorded evidence from the tracking systems on their fighter planes. And enough evidence that even Congress has authorised to look into it further. It probably is all some natural thing happening, but it's not some hoax by teenager girls in the 1920s.
>Here we have multiple professional pilots reporting similar events, with recorded evidence from the tracking systems on their fighter planes.
to be clear : multiple professionals from the same government, similar cultures and professional background, using similar equipment, tactics, sensor arrays, and vehicles, in a similar geographical region.
Maybe i'm jaded, but 'multiple professionals' means absolutely nothing to me if every one of those professionals is a cog in the same propaganda mill.
I'll be more likely to buy into any of these stories once we have agreeing reports from groups of people that aren't coordinated to play-nice with one another.
That objection only works because the people on the ship had an expectation of what the fault could be. Presumably fighter pilots have expectations of what other aircraft, balloons and birds could be, and these phenomena defy those characteristics. These just don't seem comparable.
The first 4 photographs look quite obviously like paper cutouts to me, not sure why the examiners believed they must be real.
Also interesting, both of the sisters claimed that they were the one who took the final photograph with Elsie saying it was a fake and Frances claiming that that one was real. Perhaps a false memory?
* Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes was one of the boosters of the photograph. This sounds weird but there's about an Arthur Conan Doyle book that relates to reality in messy detail. There's generally no deducible explanation of random events, they're just random. And so the method of "excluding all other explanation" is generally worthless in trying to look at single events - actually "shit happens".
* I would claim that virtually anyone looking at the elf/fairy pictures today will see ... cardboard cutouts. Their two dimensionality is obvious when I look at them. But they fooled the people of their day because photography was quite new and people's visual processing had not adjusted to it.
> I would claim that virtually anyone looking at the elf/fairy pictures today will see ... cardboard cutouts.
And this is such an important point. The UFO evidence is always the latest thing that can't be easily explained. But our skill at explaining keeps growing. There will always be things we can't explain yet. And some people insist on filling those gaps with aliens, gods, and monsters.
One tell for me here is that the paranormal/supernatural/space alien incidents don't get more confirmed over time. E.g., if there were an artifact like the Antikythera mechanism [1] that continued to become more exotic as science advanced, that'd be interesting to me.
Read Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World with this fairy incident in mind and the character of Professor Challenger will make a lot of sense. tl;dr: man mocked by the scientific majority gets completely vindicated.
> There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical.
Is there? I doubt it.
Think about the time and money costs of all the "seems fantastical" stuff that turned out to be bunk. Then compare it with the losses from "seems fantastical" stuff dismissed too soon. I'd bet the former is orders of magnitude larger.
Or just think about it from an individual perspective. People have lives to lead, things to do. I could spend the rest of my life looking at reports of psychic phenomena, for example. Or I could look back at the literal century of people investigating the claims and finding nothing but charlatans and fools, say, "good enough", and get on with my life. If the kooks actually find something good, I say it's their job to demonstrate it clearly, not mine to debunk all their failures.
Should society devote some small fraction of its energies to investigating fringe stuff? Sure. You never know when you'll strike gold. But I'm happy to argue that time and money sucked up by it currently is well over any sort of demonstrable ROI.
Yeah, exactly. Galileo was persecuted for stating the earth revolves around the sun. Anything fantastical is immediately seen as taboo and this still happens today.
I personally find UAPs/UFOs fascinating. There's some unexplained phenomema going on and no one knows what it is. There's a massive taboo around claiming aliens/intelligent life, which makes it a subject few will admit to or investigate seriously. Then you have things like Fermi's paradox, a thought experiment that shows it is unlikely for the universe to only have 1 intelligent species in it.
Most likely there is some natural phenomena behind all of this, but I really hope it's something more interesting.
For the longest time we didn't know the lightning event we now call sprites occurred. Pilots had said they saw such things bit without evidence at the time no one had any idea if they were real or not. Probably plenty of other explainable events that we've not captured yet out there.
> There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical.
Two things:
1. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; and
2. The burden of proof belongs to the one making the claim, not on the other side to refute the claim.
Anything in the realm of "new physics" (eg claims such objects defy inertia and accelerate at a rate that would kill any person) or extraterrestial origin is certainly an extraodinary claim.
Extraterrestial origin is the easiest to dismiss because of just how extraorindary such claims are. An awful lot of hand-waving happens when you point out the fundamental problems and timelines with interstellar travel just because people want it to be true. Claims like "we once thought it impossible to go to the Moon" are no argument at all.
I've seen nothing that comes close to the standard of extraordinary evidence.
I am not making any claims about whether or not these phenomena are extraterrestrial, I truly have no idea. But suppose that there is a civilization that is dramatically more advanced than ours. Perhaps they have uncovered deeper laws of physics that allows them to develop technologies orders of magnitude more powerful than our own. To such a civilization, our technology might seem as rudimentary as stone age tools seem to us. We could say less about their technology than our distant ancestors could have said about ours.
This civilization could be so advanced that they have the means to communicate with us without our being able to measure it with our present technologies, but they could nevertheless influence people's thoughts much as the gravitational pull of the moon creates the tides. If this were true, their influence would likely be felt long before we had the technology to detect it. But once we did detect it, we would realize we have been under their influence for a long time (perhaps predating the formation of our civilization). We would also immediately feel silly for having hubristically assumed that we are the peak of intelligence.
We have these fantasies of colonizing mars and beyond and yet we fail to have the imagination to consider that perhaps it's all already been colonized. We could be the children of our interstellar ancestors. Perhaps much like we fantasize about sending some kind of seed of humanity to a terraformable planet, our ancestors already figured this out and we are the fruit of the seeds they sent out from their home eons ago.
I am not claiming that this is the truth (in fact I am sure what I wrote is wrong in some important ways that are beyond me) but it is just as extraordinary to me to assume that there isn't anything out there wildly more intelligent than us (or the most powerful ai we can dream up) as it is to assume that there isn't.
Have you ever been unable to find your keys? Did you consider it reasonable to explore the possibility that you might have small elves living in your walls who stole them? Why not?
The observed phenomenon is literally being referred to as "possibly aliens or magic". Obviously something was observed, and obviously you can (and people certainly do) analyze them to come to a rational conclusions. But to even mention the possibility of aliens or magic as within the realm of possibilities to be considered is an extraordinary claim.
So we have a handful of barely confirmable observations with no repeatability. I’ll file it under “case open, but nothing to do about it for now.” Happy?
My dad did accident investigation for the Air Force for a time. One time there was a crash into the sea, amply witnessed by many on board a Navy ship, including pilots. They all said the wings came off the airplane before it hit the water. (The airplane had a reputation for wings coming off.) These people honestly believed that's what they saw.
Except for one Navy seaman, on his first trip on a boat. He said the wings were on when it hit the water.
So they pulled the airplane up from the bottom, and lo, the wings were on when it hit. One the seaman saw the truth, because he was not predisposed to attribute the crash to a known fault in the airplane.
This is really key. Eyewitness accounts are reliably dismal in evidentiary value, even by people with relevant knowledge. Our brains lie to us all the time.
I remember a case long ago where a woman was cruelly raped. She was face-to-face with her attacker. She identified him in a lineup, he was convicted, and sent to prison.
He always insisted on his innocence, but people just laughed at him. She was face to face with him, and identified him. But decades later, as DNA testing became available, a testing was done and he was not a match! But a known sex offender was a match, and had died in prison some years earlier. They dug up a picture of him, and he looked just like the wrongfully accused man.
The woman apologized to him as best she could, but her mistake was an honest one, and the falsely convicted man did not blame her. The jury did the right thing based on the evidence. It was just a horrible coincidence.
Eyewitness testimony is the gold standard in court. But I'm skeptical of it. I'd like to see hard evidence if I was on a jury. Fortunately, hard evidence is a lot more easily obtained than it used to be.
This is a case of a single witness during a single traumatizing event.
You're trying to compare this to a situation where we have thousands of witnesses across time across hundreds of events, with a few events having multiple witnesses.
This is one example using a minor observational discrepancy. Put it this way- All the observers agreed with the reality that the plane did hit the water.
You're basically using this 1 example to prove that 10, 100, 1000 people all saying that the plane hit the water (with or without wings) is not evidence of anything hitting the water (assuming no aircraft was found).
The question in THIS case is not whether "the wings fell off before or after hitting the water, if at all", but whether "there was a plane hitting the water at all" or "whether there even was a plane" (also a plane that was caught on multiple radars).
It's simply not a good comparison. The Navy pilots say they see bogies on radar (not just visually) every day. Watch the "60 Minutes" broadcast I linked elsewhere (which is only 13 minutes long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY). The USG has already admitted these things are real but have an unknown source. To continue to maintain extreme skepticism at this point is to bury one's head in the sand.
If the radar system exhibited other types of "steady anomalies identifying nonexistent objects in space" that didn't happen to fit the "UFO expectation", we would be hearing of those too, no? Have we? Since the whole point of a radar system is identifying friend, foe or possible collision courses, it would seem to be extremely important that this basic function of a radar be extremely reliable, no?
Also, what are the chances that both the radar AND the person's eyesight (which saw the object in the first place) are failing in the exact same way and with the exact same concordance? That has to be absolutely astronomical.
So, no. You didn't compute your probabilities correctly in this case. Try again.
It's like when people trivially dismiss eyewitness observers for "seeing things" every single time. I just Googled, and US citizens drive 3.2 trillion miles each year on US roads, which most of the time have two-way traffic with NO divider in between. If observers were as inaccurate as dismissals suggest, we should also be seeing FAR more accidents, head-on collisions etc. The error rate of the human visual system (if not the memory system which is admittedly often faultier) has to be extremely low to see the RELATIVELY low number of accidents we see. It's fundamental to survival for the human visual system to be as precise and accurate as possible.
I've been hearing my whole life about the "it can only be aliens" explanation. Many, many of these have been debunked, but it never dampens the enthusiasm "yeah, but this one must be aliens!"
Why has nobody ever taken a photo of these alleged aliens?
It's up to the proponents to provide convincing evidence. "But I saw it with my own eyes!" is completely unconvincing. Anyone who claims to have never misinterpreted anything they saw is just not credible. Optical illusions affect everyone.
Sane drivers know this and take it into account when driving, that's why it doesn't cause (many) accidents, and is so ordinary nobody bothers to report it.
The human visual system is full of compromises and kludges that just happen to work well enough. Did you know that your eyes have a blind spot that your brain fills in for you? By guessing? That magicians rely on all kinds of errors your brain makes in perception?
I hear you on the "it must be aliens!" argument. Really, I do. And until at least the concept of the "Alcubierre drive" came out, one could simply claim "there's no possible way for any being to physically come here from any galactic-level distance because of the amount of time it would take at sub-light speeds" and that would be the end of the story. (Even then, my response was usually "no way that we can think of"...)
I am well aware of all of your other arguments, as I was a Psych major who specialized in perception.
I'm of the government's stance on this currently: I think it's a real phenomenon, I trust most qualified eyewitnesses especially if it is in concordance with radar data, and I refuse to concretely claim anything further. And it is a mystery.
But I AM free to speculate.
I could claim something like "assuming there IS some alien intelligence controlling these hyper-performing craft... if another intelligence was advanced enough to even make it here in the first place, ostensibly they also have fairly full control over all elements of the interactions with us, which includes not showing themselves outside their craft", but this is also the Conspiracy Fallacy. Two thoughts on that though: The Conspiracy Fallacy does not disprove conspiracies (which is why I am openly stating this is speculative). And secondly, this also means that (if this claim is at all true), they are likely voluntarily showing themselves at some "pace" as to not overly upset us. Why that? Well, perhaps you've heard of systematic desensitization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization) as a treatment for phobias? That might be going on here. And it's apparently working, since nothing crazy's happened since the USG openly admitted this is real. This is a far cry from the Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast days.
So, no. I can't say it's aliens, at least rationally. But I do speculate that. ;) And honestly, I think it's fun to think that not only might we be not alone (wouldn't that be amazing??) but that we're kind of in a galactic kindergarten. ;)
The number is infinity. There is a reason that data is not the plural of anecdote.
Once scrutinized, these phenomena are almost always explained by humans misinterpreting their instruments (either machine readout, or their own eyes).
Honestly, you wouldn't believe how many people report _the moon_ as a UFO because it shows up in an odd place, gets distorted by unique atmospheric conditions, and can appear in different shapes and sizes (moon phase and proximity to Earth).
These people aren't idiots. Their brains evolved to recognize patterns as a survival mechanism. Arguably their pattern recognition is stronger than everybody else's. But when you factor in lack of familiarity with the scientific method, or inclination towards spirituality, or a simple willingness to believe in extraterrestrial life, it's not uncommon to hear stories about ghosts, angels, and aliens.
These stories do not stand up to inquiry. They have been tested time and time again and always fall apart under scrutiny. The reason that Bigfoot photos are always blurry isn't because he's camera shy - it's because when the photos are not blurry, we can clearly see it's not Bigfoot.
NB: I have no problem with believing in alien life in terms of say the Drake equation (statistically, it's probable!). I just find it highly unlikely of such a visitor reaching Earth.
> Honestly, you wouldn't believe how many people report _the moon_ as a UFO because it shows up in an odd place, gets distorted by unique atmospheric conditions, and can appear in different shapes and sizes (moon phase and proximity to Earth).
A disturbing number of people think that the Moon only comes out at night, opposite of the Sun. Probably because cartoons and video games depict it that way, but it's still a real head scratcher how some people never notice the moon in the sky during the day, which it is for roughly half of each and every month.
Also the other essential problem: you never stop being afraid of the dark.
This is evolutionarily sensible: we're a tribal species with a group-collective survival strategy, but few natural defenses: no fur, poor night vision. We're almost entirely dependent on tool-using to exist in the wild, it's our edge but it makes us very vulnerable.
UFO reports disproportionately occur at night, and also from relatively isolated people. It doesn't matter how smart you are, it's almost impossible to turn off those primitive senses which tell you "you're in danger, you need to be aware". Being afraid of something which is not there and avoiding it is a vastly preferable strategy if it also means you're afraid of something which is there.
But if I were an alien trying to monitor earth from space ships, and I had some sort of radar stealth technology, I'd also fly at night to avoid visual detection.
If you were an alien with the technology to cross the vast distances between the stars why in the hell would you need to monitor Earth from within the atmosphere flying your spaceship around? Earth technology exists to read a license plate from orbit. You can somehow build the technology for interstellar travel but can't manage to build telescopes?
For the quarter the cost of Twitter you could build a pretty sweet Earth monitoring station on the surface of the Moon. It makes zero sense that aliens with essentially magic space travel technology couldn't do the same and go completely undetected by people on Earth.
You're assuming that interstellar travel is so difficult that if it can be done, anything else can be done too. It's a fallacy a bit like someone from the 1500s assuming that any civilization that can put a man on the moon must have also cured all disease.
If you can build a spaceship that can effectively travel to another star system you have the exact technology needed to build a fucking telescope when you get there. The very ship you use for the trip likely has a very capable telescope as it would be needed to avoid interstellar debris en route.
The scale and scope of "building a telescope" and "building an interstellar spacecraft" are not just comparable but directly related. I'd also assume such a civilization would have a good handle on diseases, at least have a strong understanding of them.
It turns out that the civilization on Earth that landed on the Moon also had a pretty decent understanding of disease. By the time of the Moon landing many diseases that wracked the world in the 1500s were well under control in the first world. Some were even eliminated.
Telescopes are great but aren't going to tell you much about the exact radar capabilities of a nuclear aircraft carrier, nor what tactics it would use if it did see a craft, nor submarines (one of the incident reports claimed the tictac went underwater). And monitoring Earth is a very general thing, it can even include getting up close with the native wildlife, it isn't restricted as a concept to viewing from a great distance.
Venus is even "worse" than the moon for blowing people's minds. It's less frequent, and gets very bright - the 3rd brightest natural object in the sky- able to cast faint shadows, and even visible in daylight. Reportedly, the US Navy once tried to shoot it down:
https://m.facebook.com/NavalInstitute/posts/1015948215350217...
Depends on whether physical evidence is obtainable.
I.e. If you come out of a room and tell me you saw something in there, ok, let's consider it.
If you come out of a room and say you saw something there, but the security camera placed there doesn't show it, you have no photos on the iPhone you had at the ready, nobody else saw it, etc... Yeah the number of such reports needed climbs quite high.
There are mountains of evidence and billions of "eyewitness" accounts of Santa, including "NORAD is tracking him". The iconography, imagery, and tales are ubiquitous to the point of it being nearly an independent religion. Yet exactly 100.000...000% of those observations, photos, images are insubstantial.
I want to believe as much as anyone that there are technically advanced aliens nearby who are could and would help us advance.
But all I've seen so far is a lot of interesting and a bit overly credulous accounts, and some fuzzy evidence. And much of it can be accounted for by observer or instrument error. Maybe the classified material has something clear and unequivocal; that'd be nice.
Until we have something clear and revealing, lets investigate by all means. But until then, let's not jump to conclusions either way.
Without being taught or gathering evidence, the first conclusion that every human would come to on their own is that they live on a flat plane. Yet this is patently untrue. The human perspective is often fundamentally flawed, and only after conducting actual science can you arrive at something even slightly representing the truth.
How many eyewitness accounts of mermaids devoid of physical evidence have there been?
I don’t think there’s any amount of eyewitness accounts of aliens that I would consider credible evidence without having something verifiable to corrobate them.
OK so assuming all the witnesses' accounts are in reasonable concordance (the broad strokes are fairly identical in account), what is that number?
I had a funny showerthought the other day- Imagine that orgasms never existed, but a human had one one day and had to explain to others what it was and that it was real and how it felt. This person would be ENTIRELY not believed. Now let's assume this 1 person became 10, 100, 1000. At what point do you reasonably have to start to wonder if orgasms are, in fact, real?
> There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical. This includes scientists and other professionals who ought to know better.
The thing is, in science, as Sagan so succinctly put it- Extraordinary Claims require Extraordinary Evidence.
One landing in a public area, now that would be evidence hard to ignore.
I am not. However, I do not accept a closed-minded alien. The alien is interested in particular US military installations but not in me? Okay, maybe not me, but wouldn't the pyramids be more interesting?
This makes it boils down to 1. sensors artifacts, 2. US military program not shared with all pilots or 3. another country collecting data on US.
I mean, I GN an adult Dungeons and Dragons centered on multiple worlds and I love considering different worlds and how they might work. But the people who extrapolate the unexplained to a claim that there's some fantastical things that science is suppressing seem so starved for "the fantastical" that they're distorting the entire situation. Science isn't there to squash your fun. Science doesn't deny that uncertainty is a constant part of ordinary human experience - scientifically established positions are merely a reliable tip of an iceberg of uncertainty.
The claim in the article is stronger than just "lights". He used the word "objects" which suggests these UAP are being detected on multiple modalities.
Obviously it's unscientific to jump to conclusions and assume that anything that doesn't make sense must be aliens or magic or whatever but at the same time, it's also unscientific to ignore physical observations just because they seem like something that might support what fringe idiots believe.