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U.S. unable to explain more than 140 unidentified flying objects, but no aliens

washingtonpost.com

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Re: U.S. unable to explain more than 140 unidentified flying objects, but no aliens

#51

Post by staticassertion »

ALittleLight wrote: post #50
staticassertion wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all a really roundabout, long winded way of demonstrating confirmation bias. The idea that there are aliens among us is obscenely unlikely, with debunked after debunked case. Stacking up a whole bunch of fallacious arguments doesn't add up to a good one, or even an ok one, or even a "maybe". > For one thing, multiple observations by multiple witnesses and multiple sensor modalities in multiple instances acros…

Whether or not aliens are "obscenely unlikely" addresses only your prior belief before reading this report. Does the report change your beliefs about aliens at all? If so, in what direction, more or less likely? My point is that the observations of the report make me update towards aliens. The observations are consistent with the theory that alien craft operate in our atmosphere. Advanced technology that we don't und…

The report did nothing to change my views on aliens. There are some events that we have very little information on, and so we can not explain, and so the answers could be anything and therefor imply nothing.

The reports are also consistent with angels - angels fly around, have capabilities beyond our technological understanding, and so on.

Your argument is fallacious because it's based on cherry picked, weak accounts that are inherently low-information, and said "it fits the theory".

I believe that 'aliens' exist. It just seems statistically likely, given the size of the universe. But I don't believe that there's other space-fairing life in our solar system, and the nearest celestial bodies are insanely far away. Trying to guess at what that sort of life would be like, how it would behave, or what evidence to expect, is again pointless - we have no information, it's totally baseless guessing.

The entire thing is nonsense. A theory that is based on a complete lack of information and evidence that itself lacks information.

Not compelling.

Personally, I think it's a combination of various perfectly terrestrial events:

1. People lying for attention (the vast majority)

2. Unmanned foreign vehicles that are actually spying on us

3. Equipment or natural aberration (weather events, smudges on lenses, equipment malfunction, lens glares, etc)

Note that unlike the alien theories...

The evidence for (1) and (3) is factual - repeatedly we have found this to be the case. (2) is the most fanciful, but requires far less of a leap of faith and fits within a context that we know does exist ie: technology we know publicly is under pursuit.

(1) Has been repeatedly the case

(2) Doesn't involve any insane advances in technology to explain some of these events, and we can understand the motivations as our own

(3) We know happens as well, as we have with (1)

Re: U.S. unable to explain more than 140 unidentified flying objects, but no aliens

#52

Post by viraptor »

creamytaco wrote: post #49
viraptor wrote: post #15

There are two things that just don't seem plausible at all for me in those stories: 1. Previous article mentions "For some Navy pilots, UFO sightings were an ordinary event: ‘Every day for at least a couple years’" ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/05/17/ufo-sightin... ) Is DoD too cheap for a bunch of GoPros? If the incidents are that common and a potential security issue, why don't we have validated days…

1. Why do you assume that all the data that was made public is all the data there is? It's highly likely the government has additional classified information of much higher fidelity. 2. These phenomena are concentrated around military bases and other areas of "interest". Hardly places where you'd expect non-military flights to frequent.

1. "government has additional classified information" is basically "information doesn't exist" for us. It may also have classified information on Bigfoot or anything else.

2. The objects have to get to those places though. So either the assumption is that they're deployed right next to the base and the launch sites can't be detected, or it can travel in science-defying ways while avoiding all commercial air traffic, but can't avoid military aircraft and just taunts them. I still find both much less plausible than visual artefacts or people lying.

Re: U.S. unable to explain more than 140 unidentified flying objects, but no aliens

#53

Post by double0jimb0 »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #13
ALittleLight wrote: post #7

This is a poor title. What part of advanced technology and flying at considerable speed without discernable means of propulsion rules out aliens? Aliens weren't confirmed, or even mentioned, but my reading of the report is that aliens are more likely an explanation than I thought them to be yesterday, not less.

> What part of... rules out aliens? Because 1) Ruling _in_ aliens requires proof. Insisting that this specific scenario be ruled out is classic "shifting the burden of proof" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) The train of thought that "we don't know what we saw, so ... aliens!" is somewhere between wishful and nutty. Extra-ordinary claims require extra-ordinary proof. 2) claiming that it's _d…

Dude, the pentagon left the door wide open saying “we don’t have the technological capabilities to determine the origin of these phenomenon”. And that “we won’t be able to report the origin of these phenomenon until we have the technological capabilities to do so”. I mean what other answer is their besides “it’s aliens” (as in it’s non-human technology)

This report was an AP reading comprehension test.

Re: U.S. unable to explain more than 140 unidentified flying objects, but no aliens

#54

Post by [deleted] »

okareaman wrote: post #45
leesalminen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See Iraq, as just one example. Remember Colin Powell’s charade at the UN?

That was a dumb pretext. Scott Ritter and others had debunked the weapons of mass destruction claim prior. Everyone knew George W. Bush was going to invade Iraq because Saddam had threatened to kill his father. He was going to finish the job daddy had failed to complete.

[deleted]

Re: U.S. unable to explain more than 140 unidentified flying objects, but no aliens

#56

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

tyleo wrote: post #34
lurkmurk wrote: post #18

What is the goal of this campain to re-introduce aliens into the public discourse? Interestingly, it seems that the "smart" people are now falling for it (washington post, hn, certain subreddits and podcasts...).

I doubt that. The interesting part is that there _is_ a goal even if we don't know what it is: * US Government is telling the truth - goal may be to figure out what these are. * US Government is lying - goal may be to mislead an adversary. Those are just two examples. I find UFOs interesting because its hard to understand the government's intention here and fun to speculate.

Assuming that "US Government" has a single coherent goal is an event worse error than assuming the same of e.g. Microsoft (1)

Quite possibly: one faction in one branch of "US Government" is manoeuvring for power / money / status from another branch. Uncovering "truth" might be quite irrelevant to this goal; there's a lot of post-truth stuff happening there at present.

https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon...

Re: U.S. unable to explain more than 140 unidentified flying objects, but no aliens

#57

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

anonAndOn wrote: post #23
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What part of... rules out aliens? Because 1) Ruling _in_ aliens requires proof. Insisting that this specific scenario be ruled out is classic "shifting the burden of proof" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) The train of thought that "we don't know what we saw, so ... aliens!" is somewhere between wishful and nutty. Extra-ordinary claims require extra-ordinary proof. 2) claiming that it's _d…

re #2: what's odd is that it is equipment failure that's been occurring for decades . One would hope that JIRA ticket wouldn't keep getting pushed back to the next sprint for 40+ years.

If it's not sensor artefacts, why have the readings not become clear over the last few decades, when the quality and quantity of sensors in use have improved by orders of magnitude? Why is it still liminal? Has the visibility of these things gotten worse in lockstep with the improvement in sensors?

Or (Occam's razor time) it was never real readings to begin with.

And, I never assumed a single cause and neither should you, don't oversimplify.

Every sensor has limits. There will be noise and artefact at those limits. You can't change that fact, with or without a f'n Jira.

Re: U.S. unable to explain more than 140 unidentified flying objects, but no aliens

#58

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

ALittleLight wrote: post #36
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What part of... rules out aliens? Because 1) Ruling _in_ aliens requires proof. Insisting that this specific scenario be ruled out is classic "shifting the burden of proof" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) The train of thought that "we don't know what we saw, so ... aliens!" is somewhere between wishful and nutty. Extra-ordinary claims require extra-ordinary proof. 2) claiming that it's _d…

1. I am not saying that these UAP are definitely aliens. I am saying that the findings of the report make aliens a more likely explanation. The report found that physical objects exhibited behavior that suggests advanced technology - including flying at considerable speed without discernible means of propulsion. It's unfair to characterize this line of thinking as "We don't know what we saw, so aliens." Instead, what…

> I am saying that the findings of the report make aliens a more likely explanation.

> I don't know what evidence you would expect to see if alien technology was operating in our atmosphere, but the described observations seem consistent with that conclusion.

Could also be angels.

Or IMHO, what I want it to be is visitors from a parallel Earth where the dinosaurs never died out and instead developed a hyper-advanced civilisation. They're now crossing the multiverse (temporarily, that's why they vanish again) and looking at us in complete bemusement, much as we would look at a world where humanity dies out in a nuclear war, and rats evolve and civilise roughly to the level of ancient Egypt or Sumer.

The problem with "you cant rule it out", and "the facts fit the conclusion" thinking about such nebulous phenomena is that there are a vast or infinite number of things that "you can't rule out" and also "fit". It's true but it's a far weaker claim than it seems. What "I want" is just wishful: Your chosen scenario is vanishingly unlikely among them, and assembled out of scraps of pop culture anyway. That's why previous generations say witches, demons, angel's etc. Apophenia describes the person's inner world, as much as the external one. Isn't it convenient that its still such a such a nebulous phenomena?

This is why the burden of proof falls squarely on ruling it _in_.

Re: U.S. unable to explain more than 140 unidentified flying objects, but no aliens

#59

Post by ALittleLight »

staticassertion wrote: post #51
ALittleLight wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not aliens are "obscenely unlikely" addresses only your prior belief before reading this report. Does the report change your beliefs about aliens at all? If so, in what direction, more or less likely? My point is that the observations of the report make me update towards aliens. The observations are consistent with the theory that alien craft operate in our atmosphere. Advanced technology that we don't und…

The report did nothing to change my views on aliens. There are some events that we have very little information on, and so we can not explain, and so the answers could be anything and therefor imply nothing. The reports are also consistent with angels - angels fly around, have capabilities beyond our technological understanding, and so on. Your argument is fallacious because it's based on cherry picked, weak accounts…

Let me rephrase things a little bit. Consider two realities, Reality A (RA) and Reality B (RB). In RA there are no aliens operating craft in our atmosphere and the report was motivated by your 3 explanations or similar. In RB there are aliens operating in our atmosphere. In which reality, RA, or RB, is the DNI report more likely to be published? I think the answer is clearly RB. For one thing, RB has all the same reasons for a fake report as RA and it has the reason of alien craft being observed.

The DNI report should update your beliefs about aliens in proportion to the extent which you think the report is more likely to be authored in RB relative to RA.

Of the three explanations you offer 1 and 3 have serious problems. The events in question are reported by multiple witnesses and sensors. It's not reasonable to suspect that sensors, in multiple modalities, malfunction in the same way that coincidentally coincides with the reports of human witnesses.

It's similarly not reasonable to think that human witnesses are lying for attention. They are faking the sensor reports? So they can get the attention of reporting something that might discredit or embarrass them? They collude with other human witnesses to do this? It just doesn't seem very reasonable.

Explanation 2 is more coherent. I don't think it is a good explanation because we have no reason to think that significantly more advanced flying technology is in the hands of our competitors. If it were, they would likely not both keep it secret from us, and repeatedly fly it in front of our airmen and sensors in broad daylight.

Re: U.S. unable to explain more than 140 unidentified flying objects, but no aliens

#60

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

ALittleLight wrote: post #59
staticassertion wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The report did nothing to change my views on aliens. There are some events that we have very little information on, and so we can not explain, and so the answers could be anything and therefor imply nothing. The reports are also consistent with angels - angels fly around, have capabilities beyond our technological understanding, and so on. Your argument is fallacious because it's based on cherry picked, weak accounts…

Let me rephrase things a little bit. Consider two realities, Reality A (RA) and Reality B (RB). In RA there are no aliens operating craft in our atmosphere and the report was motivated by your 3 explanations or similar. In RB there are aliens operating in our atmosphere. In which reality, RA, or RB, is the DNI report more likely to be published? I think the answer is clearly RB. For one thing, RB has all the same rea…

> Consider two realities

We should not consider merely those two options, if you're speculating then there are a vast number of "possible" options that "cannot be ruled out". You're cherry picking, exhibiting confirmation bias etc. This is why there is a burden of proof on the hypothesis being proposed.

Disagree strongly with your "not reasonable" about sensors and people. A mish-mash of vague noisy readings cannot really be said to "coincide" much.

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