Azaran on 6/4/2022 at 15:30
So the US government released a (
https://www.livescience.com/ufo-report-human-biological-injuries) report on supposed effects of UFO encounters on humans.
Quote:
The report describes 42 cases from medical files and 300 "unpublished" cases where humans sustained injuries after alleged encounters with "anomalous vehicles," which include UFOs. In some cases, humans showed burn injuries or other conditions related to electromagnetic radiation, the report said — some of them appearing to have been inflicted by "energy related propulsion systems." The report also noted cases of brain damage, nerve damage, heart palpitations and headaches related to anomalous vehicle encounters.
It is unclear what kind of vetting process, if any, the AATIP used to investigate these alleged cases. The Sun has yet to share the full contents of the requested reports.
The report also includes a list of alleged biological effects of UFO sightings on human observers between 1873 and 1994, compiled by the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) — a civilian non-profit group that studies reported UFO sightings. The reported effects of UFO encounters include "unaccounted for pregnancy," "apparent abduction," paralysis, and experiences of perceived telepathy, teleportation and levitation.
The report concludes that there is sufficient evidence "to support a hypothesis that some advanced systems are already deployed, and opaque to full US understandings."
I think it's possible we're dealing with secret government projects, going as far as advanced space technology they haven't yet divulged to the public. NASA is notorious for cutting their Space Station live feed whenever (
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/nation-now/2016/07/14/nasa-space-international-space-station-ufo-live-feed-cut-internet-theories/87070452/) something unusual shows up (they claim the cameras simply lost signal, but I'm not buying it. I think they know more than they let on).
Then again, the universe is infinite, and there could indeed be advanced civilizations out there.
So what's your opinion on the small percentage of UFO sightings or encounters that can't be explained? Secret government technology, aliens, or something else?
faetal on 6/4/2022 at 15:38
I always like to link this when I come up against the issue of UFOs and such: (
https://xkcd.com/1235/)
I think that in the absence of incontrovertible evidence, then I'd err on the side of extraordinary claims needing extraordinary evidence.
Add in a dash of Ockham's razor - what is more likely, that flawed human observation and memory are attributed to an existing cultural phenomenon (alien visitors), or that there are regular alien visitors who for some reason are immune to standards of evidence collection?
Unless something compelling shows up, I think I'll defer to the former by default. Ditto ghosts and bigfoot.
This isn't to say that there aren't secret military projects out there, or that the government wouldn't be happy for people to conflate sightings of military hardware tests with the ramblings of alien abductees...
demagogue on 6/4/2022 at 17:07
On the one hand, the fact that so many data points have come up with UFO and not identified alien flying object is pretty damning, statistically speaking.
On the other hand, there are some gobstopping ideas that respected physicists are giving serious credence to like the multiverse, parallel universes, and the holographic principle that are unimaginably weirder than anybody could have, um, imagined if they weren't backed into it by just as many data points supporting them. For that matter even vanilla quantum theory is still pretty nuts 100 years since its discovery.
Take the multiverse (part of inflation, which already has a lot of support; more than parallel universes): It implies that the entire history of this universe will (if it hasn't already) play out an infinite number of times, as well as every conceivable variation at the quantum level. If you can imagine some possibility that's physically possible to arrive at from a Big Bang, then the pidgeon hole principle alone assures that it must be manifested somewhere. And the writing on the wall is also that the multiverses are as "nearby" to us as objects in our own universe.
On that note, I listened to Lenny Susskind, top-shelf physics guy, say recently that the closer you look at particles (originally he was talking about particles smeared out on the event horizon of black holes, but I believe he ended up talking about any particles anywhere), the larger they become until they engulf the entire universe across its boundary infinitely far away. Somebody was trying to correct him, as if he meant to say they engulfed the entire event horizon, but he clarified that he meant engulf the entire universe. You didn't really need the holographic principle for that though. Vanilla quantum mechanics already told us a century ago that the wave function for a single particle fills the space of the entire universe. People still haven't come to terms with the reality of that. They also didn't come to terms with the math telling them that things like black holes and anti-matter were real, but then we discovered them and the math was right all along.
I think what it means is that, if particles are all strings, one for each field, and not only for our universe but all universes, they're all vibrating right on top of each other, and will get around to every conceivable possibility eventually.
I don't know. It feels like those are pretty incredible conclusions to discover, and chairs of physics departments at Ivy League schools say things like they're more likely true than not. That's why I find quantum mysticism or the kind of mysticism around UFOs kind of funny. Aside from their empirical basis being kind of shaky, they're often kind of bland theories compared to what's probably actually true about our universe. It's like missing the crazy forest for the duller trees.
More to the major punchline though, I think the first other intelligent species that humans will come into contact with will be AI, I have a feeling it's coming sooner than people think, like (I'm speculating) in our lifetimes; and I think it will have an impact on humanity that will be just as big and paradigm shattering as contact with aliens would be. I know there's a history of over-optimism on this, and you could say this will be another flop... but computers have already reached a level that's changing the world in other ways (like photo realism is common now). And if you've looked into some of the recent output of AI, it doesn't feel all that irresponsible to be particularly optimistic this time.
So I think we do have that to look forward to. It may as well be like UFOs being real. The impact will be just as big.
Pyrian on 6/4/2022 at 17:35
Quote:
According to The Sun...
Welp. I'm out.
faetal on 7/4/2022 at 08:25
If it can be seen with the eyes, then it can be photographed or filmed.
We have evidence of moving objects, which cannot be definitively identified. Mapping that to alien visitors without specific evidence of that, is just cultural anchoring.
All of the speculation about UFOs re multiverses etc should be more of an exercise of matching verified UFO evidence (photos, videos, radar signals, etc.) against specific multiverse hypotheses.
Else it's just a different branch of mapping the unknown to a preferred idea, via specious reasoning.
Even the military projects explanation needs something a bit more than "we know UFOs exist and we know secret military projects exist so that's probably it".
With the prevalence of high-quality cameras and video recorders on mobile devices, we should now be able to take a consistent set of photos/videos that clearly show the same thing and map it to a military project or two.
The fact that after so many years, we still just have blurry photos & videos, speculation, and anecdotes says a lot.
Cipheron on 7/4/2022 at 11:11
Quote Posted by faetal
Add in a dash of Ockham's razor - what is more likely, that flawed human observation and memory are attributed to an existing cultural phenomenon (alien visitors), or that there are regular alien visitors who for some reason are immune to standards of evidence collection?
I remember seeing a documentary once, where they said that for rare events the was some chance of not capturing it on camera with an excuse such as "I left the lens cap on" but for claimed UFO sightings this jumped up to be 20 times as likely per event. I'm not sure of the source of that but you could see how many UFO sightings there are per year, find some equally infrequent event, then see how many good photos we have of the other event vs UFOs.
It really does suggest that at least 95% of all UFO claims are BS to start with.
bassoferrol on 8/4/2022 at 09:56
UFO design seems to parallel our own.
To see a 1950s-style UFO today would be very funny and not very credible.
demagogue on 8/4/2022 at 10:32
I could add to my last (too long) post that some of the most interesting questions I think we could ask about aliens are in astrobiology, what we know they must be like given the kinds of environments they could come from. They almost certainly exist somewhere, which I don't think is even a controversial claim anymore. Some of them I believe would figure out using electromagnetic waves for communication, which have an infinite range at a falloff of 1/distance^2. And I don't think there's too much difference between an alien signal & a literal alien craft visiting the earth. I think it's worth talking about things like that.
As for UFO reports themselves, filling in an uncertain experience with the most extreme/salient data point is a well known cognitive bias, and I think the statistics speak for themselves. After more than a century: all UFOs & no KAFOs. But like I said, it just means you're not looking at the most important things to get at the heart of the thing. An alien signal is just as radical as a craft sighting.
Edit: I remember some science show too. I wish I could remember the name of it. What I liked about it is that it didn't just dismiss crackpot theories out of hand. It would actually treat them like valid scientific hypotheses and walk through how you'd actually run experiments, where you could get data, etc. I recall a few of them investigated UFO sightings, abductions, and the like. I liked that approach because you'd get to entertain really out-there ideas and still feel like you were learning legit science while you were at it.
Stefan_Key on 8/4/2022 at 13:08
The truth is out there, people.
[video=youtube;IABsBprJJPo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IABsBprJJPo[/video]
