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More UFOs Than Ever Before

theparisreview.org

31–40 of 58 posts

Re: More UFOs Than Ever Before

#32

I’ve always assumed people were seeing vehicles like this one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar

Oh, that thing. It was a lemon. A cool looking lemon, but a lemon.[1]

There are three videos:

#1: Classified SECRET. It hasn't flown yet, but it's going to be really great. See this cool mockup!

#2: Classified OFFICIAL USE ONLY. It flies! Well, hovers about 1m off the ground in ground effect. Wobbles too much. But with our elaborate testing program, a NASA wind tunnel, and maybe with more powerful engines and active stabilization, it can work!

#3: UNCLASSIFIED. Well, here we are flying this thing around the back lot at NASA Ames as a hovercraft. Not too useful, but cool looking.

It's a nice video history of a failed project.

Meantime, the Army was also funding the UH-1, the "Huey" helicopter, which started flying around the same time and was far more useful. So the Army killed off the disc project and ordered a few thousand Hueys. The USAF, meanwhile, had figured out that swept back wings worked in high-speed flight, and didn't need to fool with discs.

[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/army_saucer/

Re: More UFOs Than Ever Before

#33
post #25

If UFOs are real, it's unlikely they started to appear only recently and most likely had Earth as their playground (vacation destination/ZOO), and maybe even originating life. Who knows, maybe this is some alien university project on how to make life on a distant planet from the scratch? We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more effic…

> We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design;

This totally misrepresents evolution. DNA isn’t programmed to adapt to local changes, but rather it’s not programmed to perfectly reproduce without errors. Some errors are useful and get passed on, most errors are either useless or harmful and don’t. And lots of small changes equals a large change — we don’t have to be able to leap a mountain in a single bound to reach the top, either literally or metaphorically, just make a lot of small steps.

Re: More UFOs Than Ever Before

#34
We're in an era where there's an arms race in the lightweight and unmanned aircraft space between the most powerful nations on Earth.

Of course there are going to be more UFO sightings domestically. Where else are we going to develop and test these things?

It's well known that the government is happy to feed conspiracy theorists disinformation in order to protect classified information[1], like the existence of secret weapons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men

Re: More UFOs Than Ever Before

#35
post #33
post #25

If UFOs are real, it's unlikely they started to appear only recently and most likely had Earth as their playground (vacation destination/ZOO), and maybe even originating life. Who knows, maybe this is some alien university project on how to make life on a distant planet from the scratch? We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more effic…

> We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design; This totally misrepresents evolution. DNA isn’t programmed to adapt to local changes, but rather it’s not programmed to perfectly reproduce without errors. Some errors are useful and get passed on, most errors are either useless or harmful and don’t. And lots of small chang…

The problem with this thinking is that it completely disregards the time complexity/probability of that happening. So having certain "bits flipped" in DNA in a certain sequence in multiple representatives of the same species in the same location for the change to propagate has too low probability, especially when the number of instances of biological species was usually quite low due to constant struggle for survival; the complexity of growing e.g. a new leg because you somehow need it is again unthinkable with our current computing power (we can't even model that properly with reinforcement learning on fastest supercomputers). So as a conclusion, theory of evolution is fitting for small adaptive changes but is either too optimistic or outright wrong for large jumps inside species; we are obviously missing something very important there. Listening to Dawkins I can agree with his local adaptations arguments but then he suddenly makes a jump and says "and this happens all over millions of years" and that somehow makes that happen, which is a position of faith and not science. Better would be if biologists finally admitted we have no clue about mechanism that allows these jumps; references to random sampling are laughable and fitting freshmen at a university and I am saddened this is accepted - we are likely going to miss some great discoveries because somebody will be insisting on this ridiculous hypothesis instead of figuring out the proper algorithm behind it.

Re: More UFOs Than Ever Before

#36
post #11
post #6

> Some suggest it was the first atomic bomb [that] sent a shock wave across the universe. It registered in distant solar systems as deep-sea earthquakes register with us. It was a clarion call. It said: DANGER! It meant the previously harmless human race had gotten ahold of matches that could immolate all of creation. ...or all of planet Earth, whichever comes first. Hint: it's not the former.

Assuming that UFO's are being controlled by an alien species and that they are in fact more frequent since the event of nuclear explosions on earth, then I think the safest assumption we can make is that the nuclear event sent a strong enough signal to notify them of our existence. If that's the case, I don't think we should speculate too quickly on how they would interpret the signal. However it does seem like there…

Well the problem with that is that they would need to be passing by only a few light years from earth to detect it, if it’s even detectable on astronomical scales.

It’s not that they came here centuries after the nuclear tests, because even if they have FTL that is the shortest time frame that makes sense unless a nuclear explosion causes some signals that some how move faster than light which both violates physics as we know it and would be really unlikely to go unnoticed based on just how much data we have from nuclear blasts and nuclear reactors.

Re: More UFOs Than Ever Before

#37
post #32

I’ve always assumed people were seeing vehicles like this one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar

Oh, that thing. It was a lemon. A cool looking lemon, but a lemon.[1] There are three videos: #1: Classified SECRET. It hasn't flown yet, but it's going to be really great. See this cool mockup! #2: Classified OFFICIAL USE ONLY. It flies! Well, hovers about 1m off the ground in ground effect. Wobbles too much. But with our elaborate testing program, a NASA wind tunnel, and maybe with more powerful engines and active…

Holy cow, the Hiller Flying Platform rocks!

Re: More UFOs Than Ever Before

#38
post #22

First thing I thought of is this: https://xkcd.com/1235/ I haven’t ever heard of a corresponding increase in UFO videos. It’s awfully convenient none of these suspected aliens buzz crowds full of people with 4k60Hz/40MP phone cameras.

Came here to post that exact link.

Cameras have never been better and in such widely available quantities, in just about every cell phone, and UFO pictures have never been worse.

Also Occam's Razor. Far more likely to be an Earth-bound phenomena.

Roswell: has technology to fly light years, but crashes in (possibly bad) Earth weather. Erm, ok.

Re: More UFOs Than Ever Before

#39

There are so, so many atmospheric phenomenon that can produce 'ufos'. Every time someone sees a jetliner compressed by humidity and heat into a row of dots (the windows) around a cigar shape, they're convinced its the first time anyone has ever seen such a thing. The burden of proof for a 'real' ufo is heavy, and nobody makes any real effort. Its reasonable to dismiss the entire topic as overheated descriptions of no…

> There are so, so many atmospheric phenomenon that can produce 'ufos'. Neil Degrasse Tyson commented on this by saying that the difference between a layperson seeing a UFO and an astronomer (or whatever) is that the latter knows what strange natural phenomenon they're looking at (or at least can conceive that its natural based on other similar things that they do know) while the layperson doesn't and therefore jumps…

There's also psychological research (IIRC) that shows that those who believe in the paranormal will likely think they've experienced something that matches their beliefs (UFOs exist), and skeptics (or rationalist, or whatever word you prefer), never experience anything they would describe as paranormal.

Essentially the same thing NDT said.

Re: More UFOs Than Ever Before

#40
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming that UFO's are being controlled by an alien species and that they are in fact more frequent since the event of nuclear explosions on earth, then I think the safest assumption we can make is that the nuclear event sent a strong enough signal to notify them of our existence. If that's the case, I don't think we should speculate too quickly on how they would interpret the signal. However it does seem like there…

Well the problem with that is that they would need to be passing by only a few light years from earth to detect it, if it’s even detectable on astronomical scales. It’s not that they came here centuries after the nuclear tests, because even if they have FTL that is the shortest time frame that makes sense unless a nuclear explosion causes some signals that some how move faster than light which both violates physics a…

yeah but you're also assuming that they're subject to the same dimensions of time and space as we are
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