Interest in UFOs Ramping Up

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

21 hours ago, zugzwang said:

 

It's probably a bunch of different stuff, tbh. De-orbiting space junk, spy satellites and drones, space weather; even false images generated by the electronics. I'm intrigued by the possibility of high energy radar generating plasma artefacts in the Earth's magnetosphere. That would be very exciting.

Little Green Men? Close Encounters is one of my favourite films... but why do they only occasionally let themselves be seen? The parallel rumour you sometimes hear about the possible detection of extra-solar life seems more credible. Only a small number of scientists would know initially making the news easy to suppress if it was deemed unsafe to disclose to the rest of humanity.

So if they think it is this "bunch of stuff" I'm sure that they will be more than happy to put that in the report.

De-orbiting space junk doesn't hover.

Spy satellites are visible all the time.

Drones, I guess possibly, but as people say, the flight parameters are very strange, with the objects doing near instantaneous changes in direction and speed.

False images generated by the electronics, this seems a realistic possibility. Not sure how this explains formations of these things being detected by multiple sensor types though.

Radar generating plasma artefacts, sounds pretty much as bonkers as LGM to me as a physicist.

Maybe the reason they only occassionally let themselves be seen is that maybe we are only rarely in a position to see them. After all, the only reason they seem to be interested in them now is that they have irrefuteable evidence from the improved sensing technology the military are using over the past 20 years. Everything previously could be explained away as mis interpretation by eye witnesses or too blurry photos. Or maybe they want to be seen to prove a point.

I think for these things to be LGMs you only need one hypothesis, that intersteller travel over long distances is possible, to be true. That's the only thing you are assuming. And since there is a lot about physics that we still don't currently know, I don't see that completely ruling out the possibility of things like faster than light travel is a particularly smart idea.

[zugzwang]

1 minute ago, Gigantic Purple Slug said:

So if they think it is this "bunch of stuff" I'm sure that they will be more than happy to put that in the report.

De-orbiting space junk doesn't hover.

Spy satellites are visible all the time.

Drones, I guess possibly, but as people say, the flight parameters are very strange, with the objects doing near instantaneous changes in direction and speed.

False images generated by the electronics, this seems a realistic possibility. Not sure how this explains formations of these things being detected by multiple sensor types though.

Radar generating plasma artefacts, sounds pretty much as bonkers as LGM to me as a physicist.

Maybe the reason they only occassionally let themselves be seen is that maybe we are only rarely in a position to see them. After all, the only reason they seem to be interested in them now is that they have irrefuteable evidence from the improved sensing technology the military are using over the past 20 years. Everything previously could be explained away as mis interpretation by eye witnesses or too blurry photos. Or maybe they want to be seen to prove a point.

I think for these things to be LGMs you only need one hypothesis, that intersteller travel over long distances is possible, to be true. That's the only thing you are assuming. And since there is a lot about physics that we still don't currently know, I don't see that completely ruling out the possibility of things like faster than light travel is a particularly smart idea.

 

Lots of different things appear to have been imaged. There could be a variety of explanations for them.

Mylar films are known to exhibit complex and surprising orbital dynamics.

Spy satellites will have been stealthified like all military hardware over the last thirty years though it will be decades before we discover how.

Those near instantaneous changes of direction suggest auroral or plasma phenomena not the kinematics of a rigid body. There's a lot about space weather we still don't understand.

 

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9668977/Former-Pentagon-official-says-UFOs-repeatedly-meddled-U-S-nuclear-capabilities.html

More UFO information prior to report release.

[zugzwang]

On 10/06/2021 at 10:49, Gigantic Purple Slug said:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9668977/Former-Pentagon-official-says-UFOs-repeatedly-meddled-U-S-nuclear-capabilities.html

More UFO information prior to report release.

 

Where do UFOs come from? Outer space... the future... China?

Try the nearest airport.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/11/i-study-ufos-and-i-dont-believe-the-alien-hype-heres-why

In 2017 I helped solve a UFO case. Using a hi-tech infrared camera, the Chilean navy had recorded video of a mysterious object in the distance. The black-and-white footage showed a bizarre black shape flying across the sky, and at one point it seemed to emit plumes of hot gases. A special group was formed of military personnel, scientists and other experts. Over two years they carefully studied the case, eliminated all mundane possibilities, and finally concluded that this object was a “genuine unknown”. A real UFO, certified by a national military.

The research group released their conclusions and published the enigmatic video. The writer Leslie Kean wrote an effusive article in the Huffington Post lauding the development as a “groundbreaking” and “exceptional” discovery based on video and accounts from, her Chilean government sources said, “highly trained professionals with many years experience” and the “full participation” of academia and the armed forces. The UFO community rejoiced.

Three days later I, and others, identified the plane as Iberia flight 6830, departing Santiago airport. The “hot gases” were just contrails, and the odd movement was the result of a low viewing angle and a powerful zoom factor on the infrared camera. The glare from the engines obscured the plane and created the unusual shape. Radar data confirmed that the exact location of the plane matched the UFO. Case closed. UFO enthusiasts were annoyed.

 

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

On 11/06/2021 at 22:44, zugzwang said:

 

Where do UFOs come from? Outer space... the future... China?

Try the nearest airport.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/11/i-study-ufos-and-i-dont-believe-the-alien-hype-heres-why

In 2017 I helped solve a UFO case. Using a hi-tech infrared camera, the Chilean navy had recorded video of a mysterious object in the distance. The black-and-white footage showed a bizarre black shape flying across the sky, and at one point it seemed to emit plumes of hot gases. A special group was formed of military personnel, scientists and other experts. Over two years they carefully studied the case, eliminated all mundane possibilities, and finally concluded that this object was a “genuine unknown”. A real UFO, certified by a national military.

The research group released their conclusions and published the enigmatic video. The writer Leslie Kean wrote an effusive article in the Huffington Post lauding the development as a “groundbreaking” and “exceptional” discovery based on video and accounts from, her Chilean government sources said, “highly trained professionals with many years experience” and the “full participation” of academia and the armed forces. The UFO community rejoiced.

Three days later I, and others, identified the plane as Iberia flight 6830, departing Santiago airport. The “hot gases” were just contrails, and the odd movement was the result of a low viewing angle and a powerful zoom factor on the infrared camera. The glare from the engines obscured the plane and created the unusual shape. Radar data confirmed that the exact location of the plane matched the UFO. Case closed. UFO enthusiasts were annoyed.

 

Yes, I am sure a lot of UFO sightings become IFO sightings, or can become IFO sightings if the right sort of analysis is performed.

It doesn't change the fact though that there are some sightings that are a lot more difficult to explain.

I have more confidence in the US navy getting tracks from multiple state of the art sensor types and objects observed from chasing planes that I do in the Chilean navy filming something, under criteria that are not specified.

Re the above report, if it is the same one, this article tells a very different story :

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/groundbreaking-ufo-video-just-released-from-chilean_b_586d37bce4b014e7c72ee56b

Extract :

"The French analysts proposed that the object was a “medium-haul aircraft” coming in for a landing into the Santiago airport, and “the effluent trail observed on two occasions probably results from dumping some cabin waste water, forming a plume oriented along the local wind blowing from the west.” They based this on their calculation that the distance between the two hot spots was “consistent with the standard distance between the two jet engines of a medium-haul aircraft.”

Chilean experts knew that this would have been impossible, for a number of reasons: This plane would have been seen on primary radar; it would have had to be cleared for landing in Santiago or at another airport; it would likely have responded to radio communications. Airplanes do not throw out water when landing. In fact, in Chile a plane wishing to eject any material must request permission from the DGAC before doing so; that regulation is widely known and respected. And, it seems unlikely that this experienced pilot would not have recognized this as an airplane, or at least kept that option open afterwards if it were a possibility."

[zugzwang]

25 minutes ago, Gigantic Purple Slug said:

Yes, I am sure a lot of UFO sightings become IFO sightings, or can become IFO sightings if the right sort of analysis is performed.

It doesn't change the fact though that there are some sightings that are a lot more difficult to explain.

I have more confidence in the US navy getting tracks from multiple state of the art sensor types and objects observed from chasing planes that I do in the Chilean navy filming something, under criteria that are not specified.

Re the above report, if it is the same one, this article tells a very different story :

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/groundbreaking-ufo-video-just-released-from-chilean_b_586d37bce4b014e7c72ee56b

Extract :

"The French analysts proposed that the object was a “medium-haul aircraft” coming in for a landing into the Santiago airport, and “the effluent trail observed on two occasions probably results from dumping some cabin waste water, forming a plume oriented along the local wind blowing from the west.” They based this on their calculation that the distance between the two hot spots was “consistent with the standard distance between the two jet engines of a medium-haul aircraft.”

Chilean experts knew that this would have been impossible, for a number of reasons: This plane would have been seen on primary radar; it would have had to be cleared for landing in Santiago or at another airport; it would likely have responded to radio communications. Airplanes do not throw out water when landing. In fact, in Chile a plane wishing to eject any material must request permission from the DGAC before doing so; that regulation is widely known and respected. And, it seems unlikely that this experienced pilot would not have recognized this as an airplane, or at least kept that option open afterwards if it were a possibility."

They dumped the dunny. Case closed.

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

27 minutes ago, zugzwang said:

They dumped the dunny. Case closed.

Well if they did, which AFAICT is in indispute, then it's still only one case out of many.

My guess is probably 90% or more of sightings can be quite simply explained. That still leaves a lot that aren't.

[Riedquat]

8 minutes ago, Gigantic Purple Slug said:

Well if they did, which AFAICT is in indispute, then it's still only one case out of many.

My guess is probably 90% or more of sightings can be quite simply explained. That still leaves a lot that aren't.

Which still doesn't make aliens a likely explanation.

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

7 minutes ago, Riedquat said:

Which still doesn't make aliens a likely explanation.

No, but I'm not arguing that aliens is a likely explanation  (although I've pointed out before that it wouldn't really take much for it to be one). Simply that these things are unidentified and that is one possibility, all be it an unlikely one. The more these things defy explanation, the more likely it is that the final explanation is something outside of our current experience.

The real issue with all these sorts of things is people tend to get pretty polarised on both sides of the argument, and that polarisation affects their interpretation of the evidence. I try to remain in the middle. I wouldn't draw conclusions from the evidence I have seen so far that there is any sort of evidence of alien activity, just that there is plenty of activity that defies explanation and aliens are one possible explanation to account for them. I'm "reasonably* convinced that the forthcoming report will be mostly pretty boring, but will come to similar conclusions.

[Riedquat]

18 minutes ago, Gigantic Purple Slug said:

No, but I'm not arguing that aliens is a likely explanation  (although I've pointed out before that it wouldn't really take much for it to be one). Simply that these things are unidentified and that is one possibility, all be it an unlikely one. The more these things defy explanation, the more likely it is that the final explanation is something outside of our current experience.

The real issue with all these sorts of things is people tend to get pretty polarised on both sides of the argument, and that polarisation affects their interpretation of the evidence. I try to remain in the middle. I wouldn't draw conclusions from the evidence I have seen so far that there is any sort of evidence of alien activity, just that there is plenty of activity that defies explanation and aliens are one possible explanation to account for them. I'm "reasonably* convinced that the forthcoming report will be mostly pretty boring, but will come to similar conclusions.

The problem with "aliens" is that it fails the Occam's Razor principle. Whilst it can't be 100% ruled out everything we know suggests that it's extremely unlikely, and usually the only counter-argument to that is the fallacy of appealing to ignorance. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and personally I'd extend that to even raising it to the level of a possibility worth considering.

Remaining in the middle isn't always a neutral position, it depends on the balance of likelihoods to either extreme.

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

19 minutes ago, Riedquat said:

The problem with "aliens" is that it fails the Occam's Razor principle. Whilst it can't be 100% ruled out everything we know suggests that it's extremely unlikely, and usually the only counter-argument to that is the fallacy of appealing to ignorance. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and personally I'd extend that to even raising it to the level of a possibility worth considering.

Remaining in the middle isn't always a neutral position, it depends on the balance of likelihoods to either extreme.

I think the fallacy here is firstly assuming we know everything (which we clearly don't) and secondly looking at activities that aliens might undertake in the terms of our limited timescales.

For example, we are already sending semi autonomous robots to explore Mars. We first left the planet what, 50 years ago ?

Where are we going to be in 1,000 or 10,000 years ? What sort of knowledge will we have, and what sort of activities might we want to undertake ? Is it realistic that we could be sending space probes to other star systems in 1000 years time, even if we are limited by the laws of physics as we know them currently, to say nothing of what we might be able to do if they turn out to be different and allow such things as easy interstellar travel ?

 

[Riedquat]

1 hour ago, Gigantic Purple Slug said:

I think the fallacy here is firstly assuming we know everything (which we clearly don't) and secondly looking at activities that aliens might undertake in the terms of our limited timescales.

For example, we are already sending semi autonomous robots to explore Mars. We first left the planet what, 50 years ago ?

Where are we going to be in 1,000 or 10,000 years ? What sort of knowledge will we have, and what sort of activities might we want to undertake ? Is it realistic that we could be sending space probes to other star systems in 1000 years time, even if we are limited by the laws of physics as we know them currently, to say nothing of what we might be able to do if they turn out to be different and allow such things as easy interstellar travel ?

 

We don't know everything but using that to appeal to the opposite is the appeal to ignorance fallacy.

Whilst we don't know everything we don't know nothing either, so the right position is to assume a non-zero but extremely low probability, because that's the most plausible one the evidence supports. It's different from going back to when an evidence and science-based approach wasn't the way people judged such things, so isn't comparable to "people thought the Earth was the centre of the universe."

As knowledge has started to be built based on a scientific approach the evidence for the plausibility of alien visitations has decreased rather than increased (alien existence, somewhere, on the other hand, has probably increased, as we're discovering that planets around other stars are very common).

[zugzwang]

8 hours ago, Gigantic Purple Slug said:

I think the fallacy here is firstly assuming we know everything (which we clearly don't) and secondly looking at activities that aliens might undertake in the terms of our limited timescales.

For example, we are already sending semi autonomous robots to explore Mars. We first left the planet what, 50 years ago ?

Where are we going to be in 1,000 or 10,000 years ? What sort of knowledge will we have, and what sort of activities might we want to undertake ? Is it realistic that we could be sending space probes to other star systems in 1000 years time, even if we are limited by the laws of physics as we know them currently, to say nothing of what we might be able to do if they turn out to be different and allow such things as easy interstellar travel ?

 

 

Leslie Kean, the woman who forced the US govt to take UFOs seriously.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/14/leslie-kean-ufo-reporter-us-government-report

When she first approached editors, she avoided using the word UFO due to the stigma surrounding the topic. She hedged around it, referring to a report out of France about “unusual aerial phenomenon” (UAPs). It took her six months to find an outlet willing to work with her, and she finally found one in the Boston Globe, although the piece was “heavily edited” with “quirky, jokey things”.

Still, from then on she was hooked.

“This is like no other topic. This has a transcendent quality for me. And how many journalists are going to take on UFOs? Not many.”

Today, the hypothetical situation Kean extrapolated from the French report – of US military and government leaders speaking openly about sightings of inexplicable flying objects – has arrived.

By 25 June, the Department of Defense’s director of national intelligence is expected to release an unclassified report to Congress, detailing the accounts of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) sightings by military pilots, making it the government’s most transparent and substantive release of such information ever made public.

[PeanutButter]

10 days until the report. 👽

 

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

15 hours ago, PeanutButter said:

10 days until the report. 👽

 

Very much doubt it will say anything interesting, beyond the fact that they have seen this stuff and don't know what it is.

There may be some interesting analysis of what that might mean for national security, but my guess is that all that will be redacted.

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9726829/U-S-report-Pentagon-documented-UFOs-leaves-sightings-unexplained.html

Well ... sorry to be proved pretty much correct.

Executive summary :

While the assessment says that available reporting on UAP is “largely inconclusive,” it nonetheless concludes:

• There is currently no evidence that any of the objects are related to a secret U.S. weapons program or were developed by foreign adversaries.
• The clustering of sightings near U.S. military bases may just be the result of several kinds of collection bias.
• Most of the UAP probably were physical objects, since most were detected in multiple ways, including via “radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation.” In addition, there are probably multiple types of UAP.
• Objects exhibiting unusual flight characteristics (like the ones which appeared to demonstrate advanced technological capabilities) could also “be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception” and “require additional rigorous analysis.”
• Regarding whether or not these objects represent a threat, the report says that UAP “clearly pose” a risk to flight safety in the increasingly crowded skies, and “may pose a challenge” to national security, particularly if the UAP were developed by foreign adversaries and indicate “a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or disruptive technology.”
• The U.S. needs to collect and analyze more information, consolidate reporting, develop a more efficient way of screening and processing the reports.

From :

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/pentagon-ufo-report-what-we-know.html

[PeanutButter]

So disappointing. 

[MancTom]

22 hours ago, PeanutButter said:

So disappointing. 

what were you expecting? That they'd announce they captured an alien and had definitive proof?!

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

Wasn't any more or less that I was expecting really. The "highlights" for me are that they think they are real objects and it appears that they are improving their reporting mechanisms and systems.

I think the best hope we can have from this is that more funding will be made available to try to study these things better and really find out what they actually are.

[PeanutButter]

9 hours ago, MancTom said:

what were you expecting? That they'd announce they captured an alien and had definitive proof?!