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No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

thetimes.co.uk

171–180 of 229 posts

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, not in the truest mathematical sense of the word, no, but I can reasonably rule it out in most practical senses: a) You look like a human b) You write human language c) We have not seen any direct evidence for any kind of humanoid alien life, but we have seen lots of evidence for humans existing. d) If you were an alien spying on human culture, you wouldn't waste your time on Hacker News :). Does this fully "r…

You can just as safely "rule out" the possibility that these UFOs are aliens.

I don't disagree with that, hence why I made it clear from the get-go that I don't think they're aliens (I think it's probably most likely camera artifacts or experimental aircrafts or bad reporting, since we know all these things exists already).

I just feel like it's extremely reductive to say "can't prove a negative," for which I provided a counter example.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#172
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the way you are thinking about this, and you're a really solid skeptic! I hope we get more people questioning this the way you have, instead of saying it's clouds :)

Any of them is... terrifing. damn. i hope it's just nothing.

It's not nothing - time for us to grow up a little :)

(No pain no gain)

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We absolutely have evidence that Joe Biden is not a pod person (just not absolutely "proof"). No one has ever demonstrated the existence of pod people (assuming that by "pod person" you mean 1950's-esque scifi comics pod people), and we've seen lots of evidence that Joe Biden is a human. Since we know humans exist, but we don't have any reason to believe that pod people exists, that does serve as evidence that Joe Bi…

> I feel like you're purposefully conflating terms here. Not at all. But go ahead and believe those fuzzy blobs (pictures of UFOs are somehow always fuzzy blobs) are aliens if you like. Do you know why the UFO pictures are always fuzzy blobs? Because if they were clear pictures, we'd recognize they are birds/balloons/drones/Venus/whatever.

> But go ahead and believe those fuzzy blobs (pictures of UFOs are somehow always fuzzy blobs) are aliens if you like.

I think you might have gotten your usernames mixed up. I said I don't think they're aliens.

I don't disagree with you, I think every case of "alien" sightings are probably either camera artifacts or experimental aircrafts or people not knowing about how plane lights work.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with that and this is my thinking behind it. (1) The number of filters they've passed through without destroying themselves suggests that they've overcome tribalism. The late-stage species most prone to violence are also the ones most prone to self destruction before they developed the tech to traverse space and get to Earth. We don't have good predictions on the destructive potential of future tech, but supp…

While I think your points are certainly plausible, one way to overcome the filter could be removal of individuals or the concept of self which we experience. It's perhaps a bit of a lame TV trope, but something like a superintelligence could have a mind concept completely unimaginable to us. It's all in the realm of speculation of course, with any proposal having quite a risk of anthropocentric (terracentric?) biases…

It's an intriguing idea. There is something very civilizationally resilient (anti-fragile) about having heterogeneous agents upon which evolution can operate on, though. If there's only a single agent then it could plausibly get stuck in a pathological crevice in the fitness landscape which wouldn't happen in a multi-agent civilization. Although the flipside to that is a single agent won't have a tendency to exterminate itself through tribal conflict.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#175
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me wrong: I am baffled by some of the reports (especially, as you note, those that have multiple witnesses or multiple independent pieces of evidence). But of course alien civilizations—or (non-human?) co-terrestrial civilizations—are such an extraordinary hypothesis that I do not see why they should be treated as more plausible than (as you note) something like shared delusions. Let me expand upon that a b…

I wouldn't even go that far. We have to remember where this information is coming from. This is the U.S. Military. We don't have "pilot confirmation", we have files, transcripts, and audio that are allegedly pilot confirmation. Given the amount of evidence released so far, which seems more likely? - Alien civilization - Some other form of hyper-advanced technology - The U.S. Military and/or various U.S. intelligence…

Most of conspiracy theories narrative was being controlled by Russia in recent years and now USA wants some of that. Probably with nothing to gain but conspiracy theories is all i hear from boomers these days.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pilots in the tic tac video visually confirmed the physical objects, even talked about shape and color. That's certainly more than a shred of evidence.

> pilots in the tic tac video visually confirmed the physical objects, even talked about shape and color Visual confirmation is helpful. It doesn't rule out atmospheric effects. Radar is the missing piece. If we have a radar hit, something interesting is going on.

Multiple radar confirmations of the tic tac did exist. That’s why they went out there (and ended up seeing it visually, about 50 feet above the surface of the ocean, with the ocean churning beneath it).

That’s extremely interesting and frankly I cannot think of anything except for maybe sophon-level technology (fictional concept from the Three Body Problem trilogy) that could spoof both visual human sight while concurrently spoofing multiple sensors.

I’m skeptical as hell about stuff like this, but I’m really struggling to see how this could be anything that could have been produced/faked by human-level technology.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#177
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you should alert CNN to the fact that science hasn't yet ruled out the possibility that Joe Biden is a pod person.

Your snark is duly noted, thank you for your contributions.

You're welcome!

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#178

They seem associated with the ocean as well, many reports of the craft originating or disappearing into the ocean ("transmedium" vehicles). Is it possible that there's some form of life that originates in the ocean, has evolved intelligence that is in a totally different paradigm than us, and this is their equivalent of going to "space"? It makes sense in the macro-sense as well as we're very lucky to not be a water…

It's camera artefacts, dude.

Ah yes, camera artifacts make perfect sense - they totally explain visual sightings (tic tac) combined with multiple, independent radar system sightings of said tic tac.

Just amazing that camera artifacts can mess with human vision that much.

Oh wait, our eyes (and radar systems) aren’t cameras? Darn. There goes that idea.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's camera artefacts, dude Does the U.S. report take a view on this? I'm not particularly swung by the extraterrestrial hypothesis. But I am curious if this is a classified project, domestic or foreign, or just a series of similar artefacts.

It doesn't need to. It's easy enough to view the videos and confirm that this is, in fact, what they are.

That’s a pretty bold statement to make, especially when these objects were observed with multiple independent radar systems and multiple humans’ visual sight.

Amazing what camera artifacts can do, isn’t it?

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't need to. It's easy enough to view the videos and confirm So the U.S. government is going through the trouble of declassification to reveal the limits of its sensors to adversaries? From what we can tell, the reports categorise them as UFOs. That implies a non-artefact theory.

This could all be a feint to claim their sensors are weaker than they really are.

Doesn’t really pass the smell test. 80+ years of advancements in US gov’t radar tech, and these systems get fooled this easily? Hard to buy that IMO.
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