[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57734614
Edit: really curious if any of the downvoters could mention their rationale.
Unless Elon tweets about this or VCs start funding UFO startups, average programmer is gonna say BS on anything that challenges the status quo especially in ideology department.
First of all, if aliens did visit this planet, why here? There have to be many more interesting planets to go look at than Earth. If they stumbled on this planet by accident at some point, why would they bother to come back? Even if there aren't more interesting places, what's the probability that an alien being could even breathe the air here? I'm not willing to go full on Signs and speculate that contact with water might be deadly to them, but it's pretty reasonable to guess that aliens would have evolved in places with significantly different atmospheres than Earth has.
And, of course, none of this even touches on the vast distances in interstellar space and the level of technology that it would take to come here. It's certainly conceivable that aliens who are 5 million years ahead of us in societal development might have such technology, but how probable is it? And if they had that level of technology, why not just send a stealthy probe with the alien equivalent of a Really Damn Big Telescope(tm) and park it somewhere out in the asteroid belt if they're that interested in the antics of 7.7 billion primitive bipeds? Nothing really seems to add up for me in the direction of "aliens visit the Earth frequently and UFOs are evidence of those visitations."
Not downvoting, but I used to be a huge "UFO fan" around the ages of 8-11. I read book after book, all breathlessly outlining the "reams of evidence" available. I watched documentaries on television, saw UFO topics covered in the newspaper, and I had a shelf full of books all in agreement. Must be true, right?
Except that even as young child I started noticing that all of the photos were blurry. All of them. Focus dispels UFOs just like turning on the light dispels the monster in the bedroom.[0]
Years later I read a book by a "UFO fan" who remained a fan into his adulthood, and got the opportunity to research them as his day job. He was looking into crop circles and cattle mutilation specifically around the time of their peak popularity[1] but as a result of his investigations he rapidly converted from a life-long believer to a sceptic.
Why?
Because he noticed that that evidence of UFO visitations respected state borders. Specifically, there are state-level laws[2] in the USA related to things such as insurance claims related to dead livestock. Cows are stupid, eat poisonous or dangerous things all the time and die. One dead cow represent a loss of hundreds to thousands of dollars. Many dead cows could be a serious financial problem, so there is insurance available for lifestock. The policies apply differently in different jurisdictions, and some would cover "unexplained external causes" such as little green men anally probing cattle for mysterious reasons, and in some areas the policies would not cover this. Unsurprisingly, cattle mutilations and the associated evidence like crop circles would only turn up in areas where the insurance covered it, and never in areas where it wouldn't, even if that was across the road in a paddock owned by the same farmer. Odd huh?
One theory -- that sells books -- is that little green or grey men visit our planet across interstellar distances and amuse themselves by cutting holes into cattle. But not low-value livestock like chickens. Just the high-value ones, like cattle.
The other theory is that selling books and making insurance claims is the only reason anyone talks about any of this seriously. That people see a dozen dead cows, have nothing they can legitimately put on an insurance claim, and are staring down the barrel of financial ruin. What to do? Just drive the tractor in circles over still green crops, bending them down, call Janice from the local news, claim that the circle is impossible, and point at the dead cows you cut a few times with a sharp box cutter a few hours before the news crew turned up. Suddenly, there's "evidence" that you can put on an insurance claim and your farm will survive until the next year.
> many official and declassified sources
The word "declassified" makes UFO fans excited because it's got all the elements of an official secret that they uncovered through their intelligence and sleuthing. It's the same addictive narrative that made QAnon popular.
Most (all?) military observations of potential enemy aircraft are classified! That means nothing. The value of these observations isn't particularly higher than anyone else's either. If one young pilot sees a splotch on the IR feed that "moves oddly", people run off with that and claim that "government has evidence of UFOs!" This recent one is the best example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_M0hLlJ-Q
At first blush that looks exactly like an optical effect such as Glory [3] that appears to move only because the observer is moving with respect to nearby clouds. The background is moving, and Glory remains stationary relative to the observer because the Sun doesn't move in the sky like the clouds do. It "accelerates away" because the IR camera is on a gimbal on the tip of a Javeline missile and reached its limit. It stops tracking the "target" which then seems to "shoot away" in the picture.
This and similar "evidence" is about as good as it gets. I've never seen anything even remotely convincing. Nonetheless, book after book just collates and rehashes the same evidence, including pictures long since discredited[0] as clear fakes. The authors get paid and can feed their families. The readers get to be entertained just like I was when I was a kid.
Everyone gets something, but we don't get to invite visiting alien dignitaries to speak at a UN convention in much the same way that Air Traffic Control doesn't schedule flights differently on Christmas Eve to avoid hitting Santa.
[0] Several famous UFO photos that adorned book covers published by legitimate print houses turned out to be chandeliers that the photographer had thrown into the sky like a frisbee and then quickly snapped an out-of-focus picture of. On commission for the print house.
[1] Speaking of which, isn't that odd all by itself? Crop circles weren't a "thing" until they were. And then vanished again. While they were popular, like a meme on Reddit, there were all sorts of interesting variations. Similarly, the aliens themselves evolve just like bad Fifty Shades of Grey fan art. Some traits are never mentioned by any "witnesses" until after a particular story, and then it's a common trait many people claim to have seen.
[2] I read this over 15 years ago so I might be confusing a legal boundary with a corporate "coverage area" boundary in a contract, but the gist of the story is the same either way.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(optical_phenomenon)
1. They don't exactly agree with each other (which is to be expected since eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable, it would be more suspicious if they id)
2. Many of these people repeat the story years after the incident, as grown adults. As far as I know, they haven't received a single cent for their troubles.
3. It's not like these kids had much exposure to the pop culture idea of UFOs - yet their drawings are very similar to what we think of when we think UFO.
[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_School_UFO_incident
Not exactly. Jacques Vallée and others have spent a lot of time addressing the question of why UFO photos are always blurry and out of focus. His ideas about it are fascinating. There’s also a lot of photos that aren’t blurry, such as the 1971 Cote UFO. It doesn’t mean they are alien, but there’s definitely something real getting photographed that’s still unidentified. I’ve also been interested in how writers like Arthur C. Clarke and Liu Cixin address the topic of how an advanced alien species could control physics, the noosphere, and the human mind itself.
The fascination around UAP has been around for decades and basically each decade there's new reporting and new pictures or even videos. And also, every decade, once actual scientists and debunkers get their hands on the material, those phenomena are readily explained. It takes a certain expertise and a Navy pilot simply doesn't have that.
These stories make great clickbait though.
Like climate deniers, debunkers gonna debunk.
It's strange that these people are trusted to handle and launch nukes, but apparently when squadrons of UAPs show up simultaneously on the most advanced sensor systems in the world they suddenly can't be trusted.
That the reason we're not seeing them is because we're looking for industry and megastructures, waste gasses, EM spectrum activity, etc., but that their needs are well beyond any of these things. That they don't have massive material or energy needs. And that maybe they've already been here, but consider us to be too primitive to acknowledge.
Or that maybe they're actively here now reconstructing our light cone to learn about us (ie. we've already all long since passed, and now we're all just holographic shadows of something that once happened long ago).
Or that maybe it's future us / Earth-AI doing that archeology.
Or a future AI "Space Jesus" is resurrecting our neural connectomes from non-lossy backwards projection of photons.
Or the same thing, except we'll all be put into museums or played with for sport. An outcome somewhat adjacent to Roko's Basilisk.
Of course this is all just mortal fantasy.
Dark forest is my other frequently thought about scenario, but that one scares me.
We would need for that civilization to not be a danger to us, not only from a technology angle, but from an ontological perspective. When you look at how insane other creatures in nature are and the biological economics of their survival, we wouldn't adopt them into our own societies, and the ones we do are cats and dogs and other pets. This is how much we can trust another being we can only share a small part of our experience with by keeping them confined or on leashes. We probably don't want rich aliens to breed us in captivity and buy us as pets for their kids to ride. So there's a bar we would need to meet to not become that.
The question I have would be, what would we as a species need to demonstrate to be allowed "off leash," in a community of other spacefaring civilizations? What consistent understanding would each person as a random human need to have to be able to be relied upon to interact safely with a spacefaring being?
What would we equip a civilization with to evolve with those tools before arranging to meet them without destroying the equillibrium of their societies as they compete for our favour and become dependent on us? Reciprocity of respect for life and the ability to apprehend some universal shared truth seems like the only thing that would separate an animal from another conscious being capable of reason.
I would wonder what that prerequisites or criteria for us as humans encountering a new civilization would be.
I think that Martin Luther King, Jr. answered this question in 1967:
> Modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance. We've learned to fly the air like birds, we've learned to swim the seas like fish. And yet we haven't learned to walk the earth like brothers and sisters.
If we worked together in true unison, we have enough riches/resources to feed, clothe and give a home to anyone who needs it. Just for a moment imagine if the military budgets didn’t need to be spend.
Note I am not advocating any ideology or political structure here, but just the basic observation that we are indeed underdeveloped savages.
We really are. I’ve been trying to improve myself, and I’ve been practicing a form of cultivating metta. If anyone reading this wants to experiment with their mind, this is a truly difficult practice. The next time someone wrongs you or hurts you, intentionally or unwittingly, try to show some compassion and understanding for them. That act goes against our very nature, and undermines our savagery at a very deep level. I did this last week to someone who accidentally wronged me at work, and it was an amazing experience. My anger completely disappeared and I felt terrible for this person once I began to understand what was going on inside their mind. I think that this and other practices hold the key to our uplift.
Would you adopt an alien creature capable of reasoning and and expressing its thoughts as a pet? Or would you consider that enslavement?
For the last 10 years (?) or so most everybody has a mobile phone with high-quality camera in it and most people carry their phone with them all the time.
Shouldn't that mean that the quality and quantity of UFO evidence should have exploded since about 10-15 years ago? But I haven't seen any articles about how much more and how much better quality UFO evidence we have now that anybody whose sees a UFO can take a snapshot or video of it. Further when a group of people see a UFO, they could each take their own video of it taken with their different cameras.
If I saw a UFO I would certainly try to take a video of it.
I feel like a small craft in the sky is hardly going to look good on even the best phone cameras. Ever try to take a photo of a plane. These cameras suck at anything past 2x zoom. The overall point though I think is sound, filmed incidence rates (even if still in crappy quality) should be plentiful and thus far I'm not aware of any footage that is remotely interesting (from amateurs at least)
Take your phone outside, find an airplane. Try to take a photo.
Or is it just that in the dark it is much harder to identify an object and therefore there are more un-identified objects at night?
They are not the best possible equipment for taking pictures of UFOs, but surely they are much much better than what average person had with them 20 years ago. So that means in my calculation that the quality and quantity evidence should be much better now. So really my question is, is there any evidence that the evidence about UFOs is much better now that it was 20 years ago?
So they are now calling them literal ships, not ufo or uap
Also, from their methodology and instrumentation (color cameras) it seems they could have done it in like 80s. Why coming out now?
I'm all for setting up something like this [1], it's just good science to have automated cameras recording the sky to keep an eye on things. In the very simplest straightforward business case, three synchronized cameras detecting a meteor can trace its path through the athmosphere and help locate anything that hits the ground. For more niche use cases include tracking aircraft flying around with their transponders turned off, just to keep everyone honest. After a few dozen more scientic use cases, then, maybe, some UFO tracking.
Sky Hub [2] tried it, combining recording with some ML detection, but they went bust last year.
[1] - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275829635_Project_f...
[2] - https://www.space.com/spotting-ufos-sky-hub-surveillance
Nothing in the eight pages screams "we believe in aliens", it's essentially about not yet catogorised observed phenomona high up in the troposphere.
With limited data on fast objects that appear in only a few frames they write about two classes of "things".
The earth, of course, sees an infall of roughly 48.5 tons of material per day of various sizes and composition, much of which never reaches the surface directly, instead breaking up and falling as dust.
The 80s were mostly about DSLR cameras with film (whether colour or black and white).
These three are currently focused on what can be determined from CMOS cameras using more recent techniques.
eg:
Meteor colorimetry with CMOS cameras
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.07403.pdf
treats digital captures as a limited range spectrogram in the visible spectrum normalises values and attempts to determine estimates for "the characteristics of meteors such as temperature, chemical composition, and others".
As this approach is based upon "new algorithms for estimating temperature, heat radiation emitted by a fireball, and spectra of meteors containing emission lines using a new approach based on colourimetry" it seems they are publishing now as they had neither the cameras nor the algorithm some 40 years ago, and perhaps were not yet born.
To me this sends up a couple of thoughts: (1) this sounds like a way to spy on Russia and (2) quite possibly could be technology from Russia (such as hypersonic missiles).
Then I read the speed:
> An object contrast makes it possible to estimate the distance using colourimetric methods. Phantoms are observed in the troposphere at distances up to 10 - 12 km. We estimate their size from 3 to 12 meters and speeds up to 15 km/s.
... that's 33,500 mph ... Re-entry speed from something out of the atmosphere is something like 8km/s; or 19,000 mph. Of course that generates an insane amount of heat and is still half the reportedly measured speed.
TBH it seems like a possible sampling error for the speed calculations. If we assume that to be the case, then it seems likely (if real) that these are some sort of hypersonic test craft / missile system.
Not many data points, but fig. 4 (page 3) is interesting: a linear relation between luminosity and speed. For meteors should be, as intuitively expected, proportional to kinetic energy, hence quadratic.
Does this relation holds for missiles too?
EDIT: they are not related to NASA, it's in the second sentence of the abstract (ops)
...The Main Astronomical Observatory of NAS of Ukraine conducts an independent study of UAP also...
That's over mach 40 and would allow you to circumnavigate the globe in 45 minutes.
There are flight vehicles that travel mach 20+, but 40 sounds insane. Mach also isn't the best numbers to use. The HTV-2 goes Mach 20+ but that's 5.7 km/s. Granted it is 2010 technology (first flight) but it would be insane to think we've doubled the speed and are testing these vehicles. It isn't like you can fly vehicles that fly that fast secretly. They make A LOT of noise.
Measurement errors sounds like a better explanation. Especially when we have such strong evidence of other things (like tic-tac) being measurement errors.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/760511/11204787-gabriel-green-the...
And it mentioned there was a flying saucer craze in 1947- Roswell wasn't even the most interesting story then.
It made me think, these myths and legends are highly historically and culturally contextual. Alien UFOs replaced phantom airships replaced fairies and so forth. Perhaps in just a century, the idea of anthropomorphic aliens will be as dated and quaint as changelings are to us now. Wonder what will be the future myth then? Simulation glitches?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/business/google-ai-engineer-f...
What's interesting to me is that the ce5 protocol meditation is almost identical to some Taoist meditation I learnt 20 years ago.
Of course there's also loads of bullshit too, but for me the UFO question was answered years ago. They're here.
The AATIP/UAP angle is a good one to rebrand the subject and make it more palatable to the mainstream after decades of mockery, allowing governments a way to research it seriously too.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Healing-Light-Tao-Foundational-Prac...
"We present a broad range of UAPs. We see them everywhere."
Everywhere? In the cupboard at home? In the local movie theatre?
Nowhere they discuss sources of error - it's a description of their setup, and then a straight dive into here's a taxonomy of all the UAPs. Plus, there's not enough there to reproduce their rig if indeed UAPs are "everywhere".
Is something being lost in translation? They can't literally mean that...
Just a day in the life. Watching for falling rocks and space invaders.
Mach1 is ~ 0.3 km/s (+/- 0.1 varies with altitude) Artillery is ~ 1 km/s Earth orbital escape velocity is ~ 11 km/s
6km high is 20,000 ft, around low regional turboprop aircraft. 10km high is 32,000 ft, around airliner cruise altitude. 15km high is 50,000 ft, where Elon Musks private jet sits. 20km high is more where U2 and SR71 start to operate and require space suits.
ISS orbit is ~ 400 km Elon's Starlink is 550km
