"The absolute, honest truth about UFOs"

[Gord_in_Toronto]

http://www.stylist.co.uk/life/20-famous-ufo-extra-terrestrial-and-alien-sightings

List of reported UFO sightings
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is a partial list of alleged UFO sightings, including supposed cases of reported close encounters and abductions.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reported_UFO_sightings
Contents

1 Classical antiquity
2 16th - 17th centuries
3 19th century
4 20th century
5 21st century
6 By location
7 See also
8 Notes and references

List number one includes a some cases I know very well:

Roswell -- it was a balloon.
Kenneth Arnold case -- high flying pelicans on their annual Southerly migration.
The Hill Abduction -- there was no lost time and they misinterpreted a huge light on a tower on a mountain on their route as chasing them as they drove some really windy roads at night.
Rendlesham Forest Lights -- lightship
Lonnie Zamora UFO sighting -- an early hot air balloon
Jimmy Carter sighting -- it was Venus

and I'm really surprised it misses The Phoenix Lights.

The vast majority of the reports in list two can in no way be analyzed. There are tales and tale tales. A huge number sound like religious visions so buyer beware. Besides it misses Ezekiel's Wheel.

Give me one single instance of a number of simultaneous pictures taken by different people of a unknown object during daylight that isn't fuzzy, and we can talk some more.

 

[Donn]

I can see how it helps progress the discussion, but, OK.

She's got it; yeah baby, she's got it.

 

[jakesteele]

Pretty much. Do you have an exception?

There's many photos of objects which have multiple witness's that are clearly showing some kind of craft or a something that isn't a flicked cigarette, a smoldering pipe or leaves rustling on the ground any of the ''standard" attempts at debunking. Just ride the google train until your spidey senses start to tingle.

 

[RoboTimbo]

Which ones have been confirmed alien spaceships?

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

There's many photos of objects which have multiple witness's that are clearly showing some kind of craft or a something that isn't a flicked cigarette, a smoldering pipe or leaves rustling on the ground any of the ''standard" attempts at debunking. Just ride the google train until your spidey senses start to tingle.

So you don't have one then?

 

[jakesteele]

reply to thread

Where did I say an amateur astronomer should be the decision maker?

"The people who should be seeing these UFOs are not - Amateur astronomers". Okay, not the ultimate deciders but they are the ones that should be seeing UFOs and they are not seeing them. Again, what I said fits in perfectly with the rest of my post.

Anyway, if they did see one it probably was anecdotal evidence unless they had film rolling. If they did, an open minded critical would apply the same standards they you demand from your woo friends.

Amateur astronomers would be lucky to spend 50% of their observing time at the eyepiece

Well, there you go. If its only 50 percent of the time they why do you say they should be the ones seeing these UFOs. Compare this with the link I have provided that shows how many planes are in the air at once.(this takes a while to load) Planes are in the air 24/7 and are in a much better position with a much higher chance of seeing something like a UFO.

Do they now have a course for alien craft identification as part of their certification.

They are taught to identify different silhouettes of enemy and friendly aircraft. When they encounter something that doesn't even remotely match any known aircraft then it bears investigating.

You do realize the most miss reported object in the sky is Venus. Which if I remember correctly is not an atmospheric effect, but a planet orbiting our sun

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have seen Venus since I was a child and not once did I think it was a UFO. My dad flew for NorthWest Airlines for 32 years and he nor any of his friends or any other pilots ever mistook Venus for a UFO.(side note: that doesn't necessarily that a pilot was fooled and was too afraid to speak for fear of loosing his job.)

I have the same ability with the turn of my neck.

How is that supposed to debunk anything.

With over 1000 UFO sightings a month world wide, my point was, given the huge variables faced by researchers, how can they even begin to filter the tiny number of reports that might be real.

There are plenty of UFO hunters that go through a large portion if not all of these reports. These guys have all sorts of good vids many with clear views of alleged UFO sightings

I have no idea, if they want to say hi, they will when they are ready. I do know this though I have seen pretty much every UFO known to man in my time on this planet, including two huge delta shaped objects in sky. Sadly to date none of them have been an alien drive by.

But you said earlier, "With over 1000 UFO sightings a month world wide, my point was, given the huge variables faced by researchers, how can they even begin to filter the tiny number of reports that might be real."

How on earth can you see a thousand UFO reports a month unless you're retired or an invalid with nothing better to do. The people, like Third Phase of the moon, who do this for a living don't go through all of those.

 

[Son of Inigo]

But you said earlier, "With over 1000 UFO sightings a month world wide, my point was, given the huge variables faced by researchers, how can they even begin to filter the tiny number of reports that might be real."

How on earth can you see a thousand UFO reports a month unless you're retired or an invalid with nothing better to do. The people, like Third Phase of the moon, who do this for a living don't go through all of those.

The hilited bit is your answer. Always follow the money. They wouldn't make money if UFO's aren't ET craft. Same with Bigfoot researchers. They won't make any money if he isn't real.

 

[Donn]

So you don't have one then?

That's what it sounded like to me.

 

[jakesteele]

List number one includes a some cases I know very well:

Roswell -- it was a balloon.
Kenneth Arnold case -- high flying pelicans on their annual Southerly migration.
The Hill Abduction -- there was no lost time and they misinterpreted a huge light on a tower on a mountain on their route as chasing them as they drove some really windy roads at night.
Rendlesham Forest Lights -- lightship
Lonnie Zamora UFO sighting -- an early hot air balloon
Jimmy Carter sighting -- it was Venus

and I'm really surprised it misses The Phoenix Lights.

The vast majority of the reports in list two can in no way be analyzed. There are tales and tale tales. A huge number sound like religious visions so buyer beware. Besides it misses Ezekiel's Wheel.

Give me one single instance of a number of simultaneous pictures taken by different people of a unknown object during daylight that isn't fuzzy, and we can talk some more.

Do it your self. It's out there and you know it, just look. I'm not going to bother spending time on something that the herd mentality will just move the goal posts.

 

[jakesteele]

List number one includes a some cases I know very well:

Roswell -- it was a balloon.
Kenneth Arnold case -- high flying pelicans on their annual Southerly migration.
The Hill Abduction -- there was no lost time and they misinterpreted a huge light on a tower on a mountain on their route as chasing them as they drove some really windy roads at night.
Rendlesham Forest Lights -- lightship
Lonnie Zamora UFO sighting -- an early hot air balloon
Jimmy Carter sighting -- it was Venus

and I'm really surprised it misses The Phoenix Lights.

The vast majority of the reports in list two can in no way be analyzed. There are tales and tale tales. A huge number sound like religious visions so buyer beware. Besides it misses Ezekiel's Wheel.

Give me one single instance of a number of simultaneous pictures taken by different people of a unknown object during daylight that isn't fuzzy, and we can talk some more.

Rendlesham Forest Lights -- lightship What is a lightship.

The rest of your explanations are nothing more than the Official Story which a person like yourself with a high need for cognitive closure automatically gravitates toward. All safe answers but not really disproven.

 

[jakesteele]

The hilited bit is your answer. Always follow the money. They wouldn't make money if UFO's aren't ET craft. Same with Bigfoot researchers. They won't make any money if he isn't real.

Follow the money. JREF wouldn't make money if the UFO reports which you can't really disprove, so you just come up with a safe answer that doesn't disrupt your herd mentality.

 

[Son of Inigo]

Follow the money. JREF wouldn't make money if the UFO reports which you can't really disprove, so you just come up with a safe answer that doesn't disrupt your herd mentality.

I have nothing to do with JREF, either as a volunteer, or as a paid member of staff. I make no money from using these forums, which by the way, no longer have anything to do with JREF.

Have you seen any UFO's, jakesteele? I have. Twice in my life I saw something in the sky I could not identify straight away. The first one, turned out to be the Metlife blimp, internally illuminated, but without it's branding. It suddenly disappeared. It looked like the classic cigar shaped UFO. I didn't discover what it was until the next day, and only then by chance I read an article in the paper about how the blimp had landed at an airfield just miles from where I saw it.

Second was a ball of light streaking through the early morning sky, moving West to East. To slow to be a meteor, to fast to be an airplane. Again, the news saved me, as I heard a report that the Space Shuttle had just returned to orbit and landed at the Cape.

Both times I saw an Unidentified Flying Object. I never for a moment thought either was an alien space craft. I will admit that for a while, I didn't know what they were, but figured there was a RATIONAL explanation. And both times I was correct.

Also, I lived for 18 months 300 meters from an active combat runway, in the middle of a war zone. I spent a lot of time outside after dark looking up at the sky while smoking. I saw every 'lights in the sky' UFO phenomenon presented. Every one of them. Unless Baghdad International Airport is an intergalactic space port, I am pretty dang sure it was just plain, ordinary, aircraft.

I don't gain anything by "the herd" mentality. I have everything to gain by rational thinking.

 

[RoboTimbo]

Rendlesham Forest Lights -- lightship What is a lightship.

The rest of your explanations are nothing more than the Official Story which a person like yourself with a high need for cognitive closure automatically gravitates toward. All safe answers but not really disproven.

You haven't answered. Which ones were confirmed to be alien space ships?

 

[davefoc]

Hi jakesteele,
My views are identical to the views expressed by several of the people in this thread.

A reasonable question about this kind of thing is: Doesn't the existing evidence make it more likely that the phenomena exists than if there was no evidence? I think this is more or less the question that you are asking.

The answer for me is that it may not. Do you think all the UFO reports are about real sightings of extraterrestrial crafts or beings? I'm going to guess that you don't. That means you are acknowledging that some of the reports are fraudulent, mistaken or misinterpretations. So how do you tell that they all aren't. I think the answer is that you can't. It is in the nature of humans to make up stories and misinterpret their observations. And it is also in the nature of human being that to make observations for which we have no explanation.

This means that for any particular widely known speculative phenomena there will be humans lying about it, humans mistaken about it and humans that misinterpret reports by other people to fit their preconceptions. The bottom line here for truth seekers is that the quality of evidence needs to rise to a level that it can't be explained just by the routine noise that humans generate about almost anything before it is useful in establishing the existence of a particular phenomena.


Clearly most of us participating in this thread don't think there is evidence like that for extraterrestrial beings any more than we think fuzzy pictures allegedly of Bigfoot or generations of anecdotal reports of the Loch Ness monster means that there is substantive evidence for these phenomena.

But show us a single piece of evidence that does seem to rise above the routine level of noise that accompanies these kind of phenomena and we would change our views in an instant. That is a very different approach than the legions of folks take who form unfalsifiable beliefs about these kind of things. Vast amounts of contrary data doesn't affect their beliefs.


ETA: Normally if I particularly agree with a post I try to acknowledge it by quoting it. Because I particularly agreed with almost everybody that has posted in this thread I just made a list of to keep my post to a reasonable size. If you don't happen to be on it and you're not jakesteele I probably agreed with you as well but you got left off the list by mistake.

MG1962
Gawdzilla Sama
skeptichaggis
JohnG*
Jrrarglblarg
Gord_in_Toronto
barehl
Delvo**
Aepervius
George 152
Shemp**
stanfr
EHocking**
Son of Inigo
Donn
CynicalSkeptic

* post that particularly resonated with my view of all this
** humorous and/or sarcastic post consistent with my general view of all this

 

[CynicalSkeptic]

So basically, you're saying that every sighting from the earliest dawn of man up to and including the present and into the future until one actually lands on the White House lawn for tea and crumpets are all just mistaken identity, fraud, etc.

Sightings of UFOs are correctly described as Unidentified Flying Objects. Many, if not most are later identified by experts to be known objects either naturally occurring or man made. Some remain unidentified. None are known to be extraterrestrial craft.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Rendlesham Forest Lights -- lightship What is a lightship.

The rest of your explanations are nothing more than the Official Story which a person like yourself with a high need for cognitive closure automatically gravitates toward. All safe answers but not really disproven.

Oh. Oh. The nasty old OFFICIAL STORY. Wooow. Wooow.

I started off something like 55 years ago "believing" in flying saucers.

A "lightship"? Does Wikipedia not work in your World? "lightship, is a ship which acts as a lighthouse. They are used in waters that are too deep or otherwise unsuitable for lighthouse construction." You know just like the one (Orford Ness) moored off the coast from the Bentwaters air base at the time of the "sighting"?

Try reading the original accounts, where they exist, before the stories Grow like Topsy in their retelling.

 

[SezMe]

Pilots fly at or near the height of most ufo reports.

I have a perfectly natural explanation for that. Care to guess what it is?

Haven't a clue.

Because that is the height where pilots spend most of their time. If flight levels were typically between 100K - 110K feet then that's where most UFO reports would come from. A weak analogy would be repeated sightings of trees by loggers: that's where loggers spend most of their time. It's a poor analogy because trees are real while alien craft are not.

 

[Donn]

"lightship, is a ship which acts as a lighthouse. They are used in waters that are too deep or otherwise unsuitable for lighthouse construction"

I didn't know this either, very neat. Last I read of Rendlesham, it was a proper lighthouse, but that was a while back.

 

[SezMe]

Follow the money. JREF wouldn't make money if the UFO reports which you can't really disprove, so you just come up with a safe answer that doesn't disrupt your herd mentality.

You've got it bassackwards. Your claim; your burden of proof. Or, at least your burden of providing evidence.

 

[Donn]

Pilots fly at or near the height of most ufo reports. They have the ability to have a 360 degree of vision with a turn of the stick.

This seems off. I could be wrong, but turning the stick to flip a plane around to cover a large slice of the sky would be something out of a World War Two dog fight; I can't see pilots doing dangerous, unplanned manoeuvres just to look for a bogey.

i.e. They see straight ahead mostly and the UFOs they see are other planes within sight.