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As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena

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Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena

#331

Post by danenania »

LarryMullins wrote: post #313
danenania wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inte…

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 bec…

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.

Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena

#332

Post by juskrey »

supernova87a wrote: post #147

In grad school in astronomy, there was a fellow grad student who was extremely excited after a night's observations that he'd discovered something remarkable -- it was a long hoped for distant galaxy that appeared in his images that night, and had all the right spectral signatures because it appeared in different filters, different exposures, and you could see it there in the image files, raw. Turned out, it was nois…

Throughout my already 20 year IT career, I can't even count how many times I've come across extremely paranoid explanations, often in the verge of insanity, of regular computer behavior like basic non obvious algos or glitches. From people otherwise normal. What is interesting, almost never I could change person's mind, once toxic explanation is in.

Recently, with all that internet marketing and real surveillance tech, this worsened a lot. Some humans are just wired differently.

Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena

#333

Post by scotty79 »

gfodor wrote: post #294
scotty79 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything is impossible until it is done. And some things just remain impossible. They laughed at Galileo but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. I think there's huge probabiliy that aliens really do exist. But they are nowhere close. And we don't have any resonable theories about FTL. They sound reasonable up to a point of "yeah, but you need negative mass to do that". So basically it's an artefact that equation…

You don't need FTL travel to reach Earth from somewhere else in the Milky Way, if you don't mind waiting a long time to arrive. Which unmanned probes would not. Your confidence in your assertions just demonstrates you haven't thought about explanations that are less likely but still coherent with non-human technology being present in Earth's atmosphere.

So those aliens traveled for thousands of years (probably in multigenerational spaceship or deep anabiosis) from a place that close relatively speaking but somehow still undetectable for us despite thousands of years of interstellar technology development there just to be blips on our radars and visual smudge here and there.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and "we don't know what's that" is not an extraordinary evidence.

Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena

#334

Post by twic »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #274
llamaLord wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't tell if being sarcastic or not... But the vast majority of us carry an at least 12 megapixel camera in our pocket literally everywhere we go now...

To be fair, you can't even get a decent picture of the moon with a camera phone.

Unless it's a Huawei: https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-co...

Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena

#335

Post by operatingthetan »

harimau777 wrote: post #73
mbnull wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do remember the comment thread on the 2017 time article here on hn. Opinions already have changed considerably in the last 5 years. It also appears as if the process of disseminating information still accelerates (with promis coming out as experiencers and so on). I can only advise everyone to consider C.G. Jung and read Jaques Vallee. This situation is very complicated, but not at all bad in the end. As far as I c…

Could you expand on how Jung is related? I think of him as a researcher in psychology which doesn't seem connected? I may be missing what you are getting at.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691018225/fl...

Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena

#336

Post by mdmglr »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #200
pmarreck wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how much some of these unidentified phenomena might be checked for some similar effects. come on, man. at some point, after enough of these reports, toeing the line you're toeing starts to look ludicrous. these are trained observers, pilots who know what to expect in the sky. and do not take lightly that there is still a certain amount of embarrassment (a social cost) to even coming forward, so to even mak…

Darn it, I hate predictability. Why is it always, always, always "just watch this 'short' hour-long video of random people talking with fake authority and undeserved confidence", and never "here just check out this Cochrane meta study and review data & evidence linked" (I made the mistake of clicking and now YouTube thinks I want to see "this man shows evidence usa possesses exotic matter", "real photos of JFK killer…

Well said. In another comment thread there are two people slinging links to YouTube videos and criticizing legitimacy of the others’ linked video. I’m looking at both of the videos and I don’t recognize any of the people talking as experts of anything.

Also 60 minutes has a lot of credibility issues. And is not generally looked upon as a rigorous journalism source.

People will downvote because they don’t have any leg to stand on and when someone doesn’t agree with them they feel personally attacked. So they result to downvoting as a way of winning.

Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena

#337

Post by twic »

m3kw9 wrote: post #285
3pac wrote: post #3

I saw a UFO maybe 12-13 years ago. It did not look like anything a human would design, even with advanced technology. It looked something like the oblong silver blob in The Flight of the Navigator, just hanging there, "much in the way that a brick doesn't." It must have been 5 km away so it would have been pretty large. It was a breezy overcast day with low clouds, and the moving clouds obscured but never completely…

Same here it’s always always like that as if the ufo has an earth camera detector, I fathom it may still be technically feasible if they are advanced enough. This would explain why nobody has had a clear picture taken of an UFO. /sarcasm

I've had this experience more times than i can count. Not with flying saucers, but with all manner of terrestrial things - animals, vehicles passing by, people doing things. You see it, you look at it for a bit, you think you should take a photo, and by the time you have your camera in hand and switched on, it's gone.

Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena

#338

Post by sega_sai »

I think there UAPs are either

* Atmospheric effects

* Debris from space launches, or other kind of debris in the atmosphere

* Artefacts in optics/radars

* Human illusions

* Secret flying devices from various countries

* Aliens

I think the top 4-5 possibilities are very likely. Realistically there are a plenty of cases where it's impossible to refute more interesting hypotheses, but since they are much less likely and there is no strong direct evidence for them, I personally don't consider those too seriously.

Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena

#339

Post by XorNot »

SquareWheel wrote: post #230
pmarreck wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly how many eyewitness accounts, devoid of good physical evidence, constitute "Evidence" with a capital "E"? If this number is "infinity" for you, that is unreasonable.

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 differen…

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.

Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena

#340

Post by willis936 »

krapp wrote: post #184
mach1ne wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the events happen mainly at altitudes, smartphones have a hard time capturing them. There’s also the argument that since these would be super-intelligent beings, they might aim for a level of exposure that they’re confident won’t make the grand public believe in their existence.

>There’s also the argument that since these would be super-intelligent beings, they might aim for a level of exposure that they’re confident won’t make the grand public believe in their existence. The public by and large, more or less, already believes in their existence. There are actual religions built around aliens, this has been been a part of pop culture since the 1940s. If they're trying to obey something like…

Imagine you're a strong military and you have a potential adversary. You want to control what force capabilities you advertise. Maybe you test an anti-satellite rocket, maybe you decide to not shoot down a spy balloon, etc.

Now imagine you're a galactic force where the minimum ante for any extra-societal interaction is the highest existential stakes possible. You're going to be very careful and methodical with your force projection.

I'm not saying that's what's going on here, but there are many different plausible explanations for behavior that seems strange, unlikely, or convenient at first blush.

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