Timely, given the "lights in the sky" fever.
The scientific term is collective hysteria or mass-hysteria.
Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
41–50 of 325 posts
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get why someone would see lights in the sky and jump to anything other than "domestic/commercial aircraft". Why would aliens or foreign powers light their vehicles up for easy spotting? I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.
Most people don't know what airplanes really look like or what lights they have on them. To most people, any flying object is unidentified and any aerial phenomenon is unexplained. We use pennies more regularly than we see airplanes, but how many can pick the right penny from this lineup? https://human-factors.arc.nasa.gov/groups/cognition/tutorial... It gets easier to believe when supposed trustworthy sources: news…
i have not used a penny in at least 5 years, i see planes on the daily - but get your point.
pennies are useless junk, straight to the recycling bin for me. really epitomizes our dysfunction that we are unable to stop making them
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. And this is why "conspiracy" theories exist. I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories, as I fee that is a more accurate name. I am do not intend to pass judgement on this commentor or on people who believe in these theories; in fact, I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE l…
> I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories If you called them Low Information Excessive Satisfaction theories instead you'd end up with a much more satisfying acronym! :)
Stories Pushing Imaginary Nonsence
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get why someone would see lights in the sky and jump to anything other than "domestic/commercial aircraft". Why would aliens or foreign powers light their vehicles up for easy spotting? I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.
The Governor of Maryland posted a video of lights in the sky that were very clearly not any kind of aircraft. Because they were stars. Naturally, this dimwit took the opportunity to blame the feds for failing to act. Apparently there are a lot of people out there who ordinarily just never look up in their daily lives. And instead of thinking “I’m not familiar with this stuff so I don’t know what I’m seeing,” they man…
Even 30 years ago, if you had a clear sky in countryside, you could see the occasional satellite. Very tiny, much tinier than airplane lights, and surprisingly fast. Today, there are a lot more.
And of course there have always been plenty of airplane lights.
Not to mention Venus, which more than one fighter pilot has tried to shoot down.
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#45The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. A not yet explained phenomenon or even something as far fetched as "aliens" would have been a more comforting answer than "essentially we can all start losing our mind at once, and it takes very little to trigger it".
> The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. And this is why "conspiracy" theories exist. I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories, as I fee that is a more accurate name. I am do not intend to pass judgement on this commentor or on people who believe in these theories; in fact, I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE l…
I was always down with Edgar Allan: “Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see”
But now I think he was vastly over-optimistic.
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#46Since we all know what this is actually commenting on, I'll answer that directly. The noise on the UFO topic has reached a massed hysteria pitch. When that happens, the overall signal to noise ratio of internet sourced sightings goes from "very poor" to "nearly invisible." I blame a lot of that on the recent congressional hearings bringing stories to the public's front of mind.
But. And I think its a very very important but, these sightings of phenomena go back decades, and just because the public at large is not a reliable reporter, does mean there are not many, many kernels of truth of an unexplained, repeated phenomena.
And otherwise you can always, always be skeptical, but at what point does skepticism stretch into denial?
IR cameras recording rocket impacts aren't mass hysteria. 2011 https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1gsdwl6/full_10_minut...
^ maybe those are targeting drones and the rocket missed. but then why are they dripping?
2 days ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/InterdimensionalNHI/comments/1hfkcg...
^ maybe those are targeting flares, and thats why they're dripping, but if they're flares why does the second one seem to fly away when the first is struck?
meanwhile 7 days ago https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1hcfaqw/glowing_orb_f...
^ maybe thats just a commercial drone modified to be super bright. But why fly it there, as a hoax? (so, so many orb videos to repeat this logic with, you get the idea.)
If you're interested in finding more, you need to get very used to seeing lots of balloons, planes, commercial drones, planets, stars, satellites, flares, skydivers, lens flare, insects and birds and there's common examples of all of them. The ones we should be interested in are usually uniformly luminous, follow non linear flight paths, exhibit extraordinary acceleration (for which you need size to estimate distance which is tough with only one camera), and/or exhibit extraordinary altitude. Whether they're controlled by a non-human intelligence or some government, they do exist and are super interesting to watch. You're just gonna have to wade through an absolute mountain of bullshit.
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get why someone would see lights in the sky and jump to anything other than "domestic/commercial aircraft". Why would aliens or foreign powers light their vehicles up for easy spotting? I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.
There are without a doubt large drones with nav lights flying around multiple states at night now. There are a lot of people seeing drones where they aren’t, too, and it would be odd if that weren’t happening. But to take that and say “nothing to see here” is ignoring the mass of solid video and official non-statement evidence to the contrary. I myself saw a drone, and tried to paint it as a plane or helicopter at fi…
You can't gauge the airspeed of an airplane from the ground. What you are observing is the ground speed, which is affected by winds. So a small Cessna flying into a heavy headwind can appear to move very, very slowly relative to the ground.
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. And this is why "conspiracy" theories exist. I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories, as I fee that is a more accurate name. I am do not intend to pass judgement on this commentor or on people who believe in these theories; in fact, I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE l…
> I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories If you called them Low Information Excessive Satisfaction theories instead you'd end up with a much more satisfying acronym! :)
I was about to recommend "Satisfaction High, Information Tenuous"
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. And this is why "conspiracy" theories exist. I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories, as I fee that is a more accurate name. I am do not intend to pass judgement on this commentor or on people who believe in these theories; in fact, I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE l…
> I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories If you called them Low Information Excessive Satisfaction theories instead you'd end up with a much more satisfying acronym! :)
Ooh, I like that.
However, I think the original thinking behind the term "meme" is probably still the definitive discourse on the subject: in analogy to genes, ideas undergo natural selection for survival/reproduction and the attributes that promote this specific kind of fitness (ease of spread, satisfaction, advantage obtained by spreading) will be selected for in the course of social interaction. Qualities we might like to encourage (accuracy, completeness) will not be selected for except insofar as we can connect them back to the actual selection mechanism.
That said, "meme" really doesn't quite put as sharp of a point on the problem as "LIES."
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#50Timely, given the "lights in the sky" fever.
I don't get why someone would see lights in the sky and jump to anything other than "domestic/commercial aircraft". Why would aliens or foreign powers light their vehicles up for easy spotting? I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.
It's also clear that some more recent reports are trolls flying their Costco drones around. Amazingly, as documented on the news and YouTube, there are now people flying their personal drones at night in an effort to find and follow the 'original' drones (!) I assume they are now all following each other around, creating new reports of "Mysterious Drone Swarm Sighted". :-)
Of course, not all "Lights in the Sky" are airplanes, helicopters, drones, stars, satellites or reflections of ground-based lights. There was an interesting sighting in Arizona two weeks ago analyzed and explained by the indefatigable Mick West (2 min video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V00KT4PCd-0.