What Is Going on with UFOs and the Department of Defense? • Hacker News Board

Re: What Is Going on with UFOs and the Department of Defense?

#171

Post by shadowprofile76 » Thu, May 09, 2019, 11:58 AM UTC

AgentME wrote: post #112

Spooky23 wrote: post #35

The last time this got a lot of publicity in the 80s, it was cover for tomahawk missile testing. The other possibility is some nut job in the administration has a pet project.

>missile testing This reminds me of something I saw that I never really talked about. Maybe about 7 years ago, I was out bicycling at around 10pm at night outside of Socorro NM (a small desert college town), and to the west I saw a light appear from behind some mountains steadily heading up and north in a slightly curved path. I thought it was a plane or a helicopter until it suddenly disappeared after about 30 secon…

Coincidentally, (as in literally, not that I think there's any relationship between what you saw and this), Socorro is the site of one of the more famous UFO incidents of the 20th Century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Zamora_incident

Re: What Is Going on with UFOs and the Department of Defense?

#172

Post by Zancarius » Thu, May 09, 2019, 8:53 PM UTC

api wrote: post #25

Zancarius wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the proliferation of mobile devices, you'd expect there to be an increase in footage of such sightings with an equivalent increase in quality. Yet virtually everything available is low quality, grainy rubbish. On the other hand, the accessibility of video editing software makes such claims dubious at best regardless of quality or presentation. I agree with others who've suggested this is either a counter intelli…

Try photographing a bird with a phone camera. Then try it with no advance notice, whipping it out and shooting as fast as you can. You'll get a blur, just like the crappy phone camera photos of "UFOs" all over the Internet. It's an extraordinary claim, sure, but it isn't impossible that some fraction of UFOs are someone else. "They are here but are not making overt contact" is one potential Fermi paradox answer. The…

There's also other solutions to the Fermi Paradox that don't require alien contact but likewise don't exclude the possibility for life. For one, it's possible FTL (or FTL-ish) travel isn't something that can be done in our universe. The other is to reflect on what we've done as a species. Consider the last time we sent manned probes to another world--then consider how many unmanned probes. I'm of the mind to believe that if we do encounter anything alien, it'll likely be autonomous or intelligent probes. It'll catalog us and move along.

I still stand by my point with cameras. Mobile devices, dash cams, etc., are all vastly prolific. While it's true they don't capture anything far away particularly well, the shear number of these devices ought to suggest that multiple sightings by large groups of people could be corroborated--even if the footage isn't particularly great. But, we're not seeing that.

It may not be impossible these UFOs are other intelligences, but it's exceedingly unlikely. More so when you consider that a non-trivial fraction of those same habitable worlds you mention are, at present, speculative at best and around stars that are unfriendly to life at worst. TRAPPIST-1 comes to mind as an example of worlds directly measured via the transit method: A large number of worlds in a habitable zone surrounding a red dwarf known to be a flare star.

Then there's another consideration. If life is common in our galaxy (or in the universe), far more intelligent beings may simply be uninterested in us--a relatively pedestrian world around a fairly ordinary star with intelligent primates that haven't yet figured out how to leave their home world with any degree of consistency.

Re: What Is Going on with UFOs and the Department of Defense?

#173

Post by Zancarius » Thu, May 09, 2019, 8:56 PM UTC

rockinghigh wrote: post #31

Zancarius wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the proliferation of mobile devices, you'd expect there to be an increase in footage of such sightings with an equivalent increase in quality. Yet virtually everything available is low quality, grainy rubbish. On the other hand, the accessibility of video editing software makes such claims dubious at best regardless of quality or presentation. I agree with others who've suggested this is either a counter intelli…

> With the proliferation of mobile devices, you'd expect there to be an increase in footage of such sightings with an equivalent increase in quality. Phones have lenses with wide focal lengths and tiny sensors. You need a very different device to capture small objects far away from you with high resolution.

That is true, but it doesn't exclude the possibility that if a particularly noteworthy event occurred, there should be at least one or more observers attempting to film it along with commentary.

Of course, your comment raises another interesting prospect. Anything of decent quality that claims to be a UFO sighting should be immediately suspect as it may be a professional production.