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Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

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Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#91

Post by shreddit »

AlexandrB wrote: post #15
ggm wrote: post #3

Timely, 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.

Even then my first thought would be “military” or “idiot with a plane license” before worrying about “attack of the flying saucers”.

I worry more about things I can’t see…

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#92

Post by whimsicalism »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #86
whimsicalism wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have to keep making pennies to replace the ones you're throwing away! Don't destroy currency! I put mine in baggies and use them as weights

dealing with them in any other way is literally not economical to me if it takes more than like a quarter of a second of time.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#94

Post by mikepurvis »

thmsths wrote: post #9

The 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".

I think the vast majority of people are just astonishingly suggestible. That combined with a dash of main character syndrome and horrid sleep patterns and you’ve got millions driving home from work in the dark, ready to immediately assume that whatever is out their windshield is what they heard about on the radio that morning.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#95

Post by vasco »

j_timberlake wrote: post #78

This was literally my first thought for the anomalous drones like 2 weeks ago, and it was immediately obvious that the entire NJ police department should not be incompetent enough to fall for something so obvious. The mayors and governor should not be dumb enough to stake their reputations on this when the null hypothesis of "mass hysteria" is easier and safer. Even back then, we knew the sightings do not appear on f…

You can buy satellite pictures of almost anywhere on earth with pretty good definition and so I deduce that the US government with almost 100 StarShield satellites plus who knows how many ones with huge cameras probably can almost livestream any place on earth GTA top view style. So shouldn't be hard to see what it is and where it came from unless cloud cover is bad.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#96

Post by ceejayoz »

itsanaccount wrote: post #90
ceejayoz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe those are targeting drones and the rocket missed. but then why are they dripping? They're balloons carrying flares for target practice. You can see lots of falling embers in https://youtu.be/XHDXk9THJZM?si=CKSBB3AuslBizXxh&t=179 from a military flare. > if they're flares why does the second one seem to fly away when the first is struck? Because that's the maneuvering target drone (something like a QF-16, prob…

And what I'm saying is I understand that perspective. I think you can do that song and dance going back 80 years. You can watch all these people, all these witnesses, all these videos and pictures (and a complete and stunning absence of military radar data) and you can explain to them, each and every single one of them how they're wrong, how its swamp gas reflected off Venus, and in each individual case you might be…

Being competent in one thing doesn't make you competent in everything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

Each of the videos you linked to have extremely plausible, fairly mundane explanations other than "aliens". That fits the pattern. That you find them compelling as evidence of extraterrestrials is not a great sign.

> When the video gets too good you can blame it on computer generated graphics.

The corollary here is the unfortunate fact that as soon as everyone got a camera in their pocket, aliens stopped landing in random cornfields to say hi to lonely farmers.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#97

Post by willy_k »

lm28469 wrote: post #60
willy_k wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ignoring the mass of solid video 100% of the ones I looked into have been debunked, helicopters, planes, out of focus stars, fireworks, &c. > (seemed a few hundred feet up at most) At night you have absolutely no way to tell > And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish. My $300 dji can accomplish that, it's not a chinese super weapon nor an…

> 100% of the ones I looked into have been debunked, helicopters, planes, out of focus stars, fireworks

A lot of videos are bunk, I have seen at least one video that is certainly drones.

> At night you have absolutely no way to tell

I agree, but I’ve seen plenty of other aircraft at night and it appeared to be much closer than any of those. And you can get a rough guess based on apparent size of the lights, though of course that’s extremely rough unless you know the size of the aircraft.

> My $300 dji can accomplish that, it's not a chinese super weapon nor an alien craft

I know, I never claimed it was aliens or a Chinese super weapon, I claimed they were drones. It’s almost certain that they are military drones, and if I had to guess they’re searching for something that would cause real mass hysteria if told to the public.

> That's the definition of media induced mass hysteria, you notice a lot of weird things when you look at things you usually don't bother looking at. People in Los Angeles freaked the fuck out when they saw the milky way during an electricity outage in 1994

That certainly occurs, what I meant is more that I felt an odd sensation having the news cycle and what I observed collide, in the sense that it didn’t feel quite real. I would normally notice at an aircraft that appeared to be as close as it was, and I would definitely pay more attention to it when I noticed the lights and movement pattern, regardless of the news cycle. It actually took me a second to connect the two.

People in LA freaking out because they saw the Milky Way is normal, people noticed something new and reacted to it. I would wager that more people responded with awe than with freaking out, but they weren’t as interesting to the media. Regardless of whether they were freaked out or not (and I wasn’t freaked out so much as it was freaky), they still saw something real.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#98

Post by lxgr »

j_timberlake wrote: post #78

This was literally my first thought for the anomalous drones like 2 weeks ago, and it was immediately obvious that the entire NJ police department should not be incompetent enough to fall for something so obvious. The mayors and governor should not be dumb enough to stake their reputations on this when the null hypothesis of "mass hysteria" is easier and safer. Even back then, we knew the sightings do not appear on f…

> The mayors and governor should not be dumb enough to stake their reputations on this when the null hypothesis of "mass hysteria" is easier and safer.

I think they played this exactly right: Most people will never accept a null result (or something close to it, like "there were a couple of weird drones, but mostly it was people newly looking up at the night sky") or even follow this news story long enough for the actual resolution to matter. The only thing they'll remember was their mayor or governor staying silent when they were scared/angry vs. shouting at the feds to let them shoot down some drones.

> Also NJ police report the anomalous drones give off no heat signature like normal drones:

The only thing we can conclude from this is that the NJ police wasn't able to detect a heat signature, but not whether there really wasn't one.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#99

Post by binoct »

vehemenz wrote: post #55
kryogen1c wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that people, on the whole, vastly underestimate the degree to which humans are animals.

Maybe I'm more optimistic. Is it our animal nature? Or is it that science is hard, and most people don't have enough formal education in the relevant subjects to know they're out of their depth, let alone to understand these things.

I don’t take issue with the point of your last sentence, but rather the framing that “animal” is somehow a negative thing. Humans are animals, there’s no separate animal nature. We are animals, full stop. The scientific method is a skill we have developed to be more objective about complicated phenomena. Depth of knowledge and education certainly help an individual reason more carefully about cause and effect in various domains, but scientists and other highly educated people share the same set of biological behaviors as everyone else.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#100

Post by Vegenoid »

kryogen1c wrote: post #30
thmsths wrote: post #9

The 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".

I think that people, on the whole, vastly underestimate the degree to which humans are animals.

I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly when we have so much history we are taught that demonstrates it. History makes it abundantly clear that it is a regular occurrence for large groups of people to collectively believe things for which there is little evidence, and furthermore, to take extreme actions based on such beliefs.

This applies to you too, reader. Many would read the above and fully agree with it, but fail to apply it to themselves and the groups they identify with. It is even more important to critically consider your own beliefs than the beliefs of others.

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