"The absolute, honest truth about UFOs"

[JohnG]

If there is no evidence for or against a proposition, one must be agnostic.

Do I need to be an agnostic regarding the possibility that you're supermodel Kate Upton? Or is it safe to assume that you aren't? I just want to know if I should be nicer to you, that's all.

 

[MG1962]

As sure as we can be. If FTL travel is possible then so is time travel, and any number of other 'impossible' things that violate the laws of physics. Once you open that door the only limit is your imagination. But the more important question to ask is:- why do you want FTL travel to be possible? Because then you can have your 'advanced alien craft' flitting around the sky causing UFO sightings. IOW, your investment in a silly fantasy is such that you are willing to hand-wave away one of the fundamental laws of the Universe.

But even if FTL travel was possible, it still wouldn't change the fact that people are 'seeing' alien craft where mundane explanations are far more likely. They see them because in our modern world that's the kind of technology we expect to see. 200 years ago there were no UFO sightings because aircraft were not a thing - now it's the only thing we think of when we see a moving 'object' in the sky. So even though flying machines don't violate the laws of physics, if 200 years ago someone claimed to see a jet airliner flying across the sky they would rightly be laughed at.

This whole thing gets stranger when you start to break down the numbers. On average there are about 1000 UFO sightings a month world wide. If we run with the figure of 10% being real as per out erstwhile UFOlogists. That gives us a 100 events a month, or 3 visitations per day. Every day of the year, year after year.


For this to be true I need to know what the hell is so interesting around here!!!

 

[Fudbucker]

Do I need to be an agnostic regarding the possibility that you're supermodel Kate Upton? Or is it safe to assume that you aren't? I just want to know if I should be nicer to you, that's all.

You can conclude I'm not Kate Upton for the same reason you can conclude the lottery ticket you just bought isn't a jackpot winner.

I don't see similar long odds at work with regard to aliens. With the recent discovery of exoplanets in seemingly habitable zones, quite the opposite is true. I do see people arguing that advanced alien civs are the equivalent of leprechauns and if there's no evidence for something (or something is undetectable) then we should assume it doesn't exist.

I shouldn't have to point out that these are ridiculous claims.

 

[jakesteele]

I assume you mean the faint ground level light seen before the ships arrived at Guanahani? Bartolomé de las Casas explained that over five hundred years ago, it was a burning torch used by one of the locals.

Yes, but it was at first a UFO sighting that ended with a mundane explanation similar to the Rendlesham Forest incident, which it is claimed by debunkers to be a lighthouse, I believe it was.

 

[jakesteele]

Where do pilots go to get their eyeballs calibrated so they see better than the rest of us.

It's called training coupled with years of experience(commercial and military). It's just like an experienced hunter and tracker. He is going to consistently get more animals as opposed to a rank amateur on his first hunt alone. He hasn't got enough experience to read the subtler signs that he will learn in time.

 

[JohnG]

You can conclude I'm not Kate Upton for the same reason you can conclude the lottery ticket you just bought isn't a jackpot winner.

I never buy lottery tickets.

I don't see similar long odds at work with regard to aliens. With the recent discovery of exoplanets in seemingly habitable zones, quite the opposite is true. I do see people arguing that advanced alien civs are the equivalent of leprechauns and if there's no evidence for something (or something is undetectable) then we should assume it doesn't exist.

I shouldn't have to point out that these are ridiculous claims.

I don't see anyone here disagreeing that there probably is alien life of some kind. Hell, I'm even onboard with the idea of alien life within the solar system. What people are arguing is that the evidence for aliens visiting Earth is unconvincing.

Alien life vs. intelligent alien life visiting Earth in spaceships; two very different propositions. Compare it to life on Earth visiting the moon. There's been lots of "life" on Earth in its long history, but only one species out of untold millions evolved to the point where they could leave Earth and travel to the moon and that happened just a few decades ago, a blink of an eye in cosmic terms.

 

[RoboTimbo]

You can conclude I'm not Kate Upton for the same reason you can conclude the lottery ticket you just bought isn't a jackpot winner.

We know Kate Upton and lottery winners exist.

I don't see similar long odds at work with regard to aliens.

Quite the opposite, in fact. You are more likely to be Kate Upton and just won the lottery than you are to be an alien from a different solar system.

With the recent discovery of exoplanets in seemingly habitable zones, quite the opposite is true.

Quite the opposite of the opposite is true. How far away are those planets?

I do see people arguing that advanced alien civs are the equivalent of leprechauns and if there's no evidence for something (or something is undetectable) then we should assume it doesn't exist.

Actually, people are pointing out that advanced alien civs visiting the earth is the equivalent of leprechauns. I think the point was that if they are undetectable, they may as well not exist. Just like the aether. After all, leprechauns exist, they just aren't detectable.

I shouldn't have to point out that these are ridiculous claims.

No, I wouldn't either.

 

[RoboTimbo]

It's called training coupled with years of experience(commercial and military). It's just like an experienced hunter and tracker. He is going to consistently get more animals as opposed to a rank amateur on his first hunt alone. He hasn't got enough experience to read the subtler signs that he will learn in time.

Just like the military pilots (trained observers) at Campeche. You haven't addressed that yet.

 

[Fudbucker]

We know Kate Upton and lottery winners exist.


Quite the opposite, in fact. You are more likely to be Kate Upton and just won the lottery than you are to be an alien from a different solar system.


Quite the opposite of the opposite is true. How far away are those planets?


Actually, people are pointing out that advanced alien civs visiting the earth is the equivalent of leprechauns. I think the point was that if they are undetectable, they may as well not exist. Just like the aether. After all, leprechauns exist, they just aren't detectable.


No, I wouldn't either.

Magic doesn't exist. To claim that aliens that can cross interstellar distances (or build probes that do the same) are in the same category as magical elves...

I remember now why I don't post in this sub-forum too often. The "skeptics" are just as bad as the woo promoters.

 

[RoboTimbo]

Magic doesn't exist. To claim that aliens that can cross interstellar distances (or build probes that do the same) are in the same category as magical elves...

Magic like FTL drive?

I remember now why I don't post in this sub-forum too often. The "skeptics" are just as bad as the woo promoters.

Is that easier than addressing arguments?

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

ISTR that "Jimmy Carter saw a UFO" was trotted out as an example of a True UFO sighting earlier in this thread (I really can't be bother to check if was) but what he saw was the planet Venus low on the horizon at sunset. He did not do a very good job of documenting exactly when he saw it but what he described is exactly how Venus looks in such circumstances.

The Top Ten Best UFO Sightings lists contain sightings that are all very dubious (either fully explained) or too poorly documented to draw a definitive conclusion and the Top Ten Best UFO Pictures lists are all uniformly fuzzy or poorly documented. I have been interested in this topic for more than 60 years. As a child I was a believer as an adult I know better.

 

[Fudbucker]

Magic like FTL drive?

You don't need FTL travel to cross interstellar distances (or send probes to do the same)

Is that easier than addressing arguments?

What, like your claim that FTL travel is required to travel to other stars? Yeah, I'm not too impressed with that, or the other "arguments" I've seen so far. if it's undetectable, it doesn't exist, am I right? Which I guess will include me, because I'm done with this thread.

Poof.

 

[MG1962]

It's called training coupled with years of experience(commercial and military). It's just like an experienced hunter and tracker. He is going to consistently get more animals as opposed to a rank amateur on his first hunt alone. He hasn't got enough experience to read the subtler signs that he will learn in time.

But apparently amateur astronomers dont gain this experience

 

[RoboTimbo]

You don't need FTL travel to cross interstellar distances (or send probes to do the same)

Would you share your evidence that some alien civilization did cross slowly?

What, like your claim that FTL travel is required to travel to other stars? Yeah, I'm not too impressed with that, or the other "arguments" I've seen so far. if it's undetectable, it doesn't exist, am I right?

No, you've deliberately misunderstood again. If it's undetectable, it may as well not exist, like aether, or leprechauns.

Which I guess will include me, because I'm done with this thread.

Poof.

Which is also easier than addressing arguments.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Magic doesn't exist. To claim that aliens that can cross interstellar distances (or build probes that do the same) are in the same category as magical elves...

The Voyager 1 space probe (722-kilogram) was launched by NASA on September 5, 1977. It is stll communicating with us and continue to do so until around 2025, when its radioisotope thermoelectric generators will no longer supply enough power to operate any of its scientific instruments. Though it is not heading towards any particular star, in about 40,000 years, it will pass within 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445. (Facts and figure courtesy of Wikipedia). You want to tell me that in a hundred years we will not be able to much better and in a thousand years even better yet again? What a failure of imagination.

I remember now why I don't post in this sub-forum too often. The "skeptics" are just as bad as the woo promoters.

In 1835, Auguste Comte, a prominent French philosopher, stated with great authority that “humans would never be able to understand the chemical composition of stars.” In 1859, Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen made "a totally unexpected discovery" and had identified the cause of the dark lines seen in the solar spectra by Fraunhofer. When certain chemicals were heated in Bunsen's burner, characteristic bright lines appeared. In some cases these were at exactly the same points in the spectrum as Fraunhofer's dark lines. The bright lines were light coming from a hot gas, whereas the dark lines showed absorption of light in the cooler gas above the Sun's surface. Throughout the 1860s, Kirchoff managed to identify some 16 different chemical elements among the hundreds of lines he recorded in the sun's spectrum. (Facts and figure courtesy of Wikipedia).

Are you the reincarnation of Auguste Comte?

 

[Donn]

.. because I'm done with this thread.

That was easy.

 

[Donn]

I have no evidence that you're playing chess right now. That doesn't mean it's fantastical to suppose you might be playing chess as I type this. Correct?

Chess is a fact. Sentient Intergalactic Aliens are not.
Chess being played now is contemporary. It's not certain that I'm playing it now, but it's more likely than chess being played in the Jurassic.

Without evidence, however, you cannot know if I'm playing chess right now - so it is a fantasy, yes.

There's no reason to think there aren't, either. If there is no evidence for or against a proposition, one must be agnostic.

Sure, but why do these hypothetical aliens always share our present? There have been billions of years in which we may have missed one another. Your "agnostic" sounds more like an excuse to keep on the same-old.

LOL, what? Are you claiming that if X is currently undetectable, X should be considered non-existent? That leads to the ridiculous claim that the Higgs Boson should have been considered non-existent, before we figured out how to detect it.

Yes. The only reason we found the Higgs was because it became visible. At first it was revealed by math and hypothesis, and later through actual experiment.

Remember, I did say "from our point of view". Many things exist that we do not detect, but we cannot speak usefully about them.

 

[catsmate]

Yes, but it was at first a UFO sighting that ended with a mundane explanation similar to the Rendlesham Forest incident, which it is claimed by debunkers to be a lighthouse, I believe it was.

No it was never a "UFO incident". It was a light seen at ground level that suggested the presence of land and was interpreted as such. A few loons who want to believe in alien visitation regurgitate it on occasion and distort its significance.

 

[John Nowak]

It's called training coupled with years of experience(commercial and military).

Not very convincing. A pilot is probably more prone to mistake a light for another aircraft, since he's trained to avoid accidents. While driving a car at night I once confused the moon for an obstacle in the road, long enough to lift my foot from the accelerator but not long enough to hit the brake. I don't believe I would have made the same mistake while walking, but I was driving and looking for things that might cause an accident.

 

[davefoc]

Not very convincing. A pilot is probably more prone to mistake a light for another aircraft, since he's trained to avoid accidents. While driving a car at night I once confused the moon for an obstacle in the road, long enough to lift my foot from the accelerator but not long enough to hit the brake. I don't believe I would have made the same mistake while walking, but I was driving and looking for things that might cause an accident.

I once experienced something much scarier along the same lines. I was driving along a road in Death Valley on a very dark night. The road wasn't quite straight so the lights of the oncoming traffic would disappear and re-appear. I had been focused on a set of headlights coming towards us for quite awhile. It was very difficult to see how far away they were. At some point I judged them to be much nearer to us than they actually were and I thought they were in our lane. It was dark and very difficult to determine what if any shoulder existed to my right and I needed to make a split second decision or so I thought. I maneuvered the car sharply to the right (which scared the hell out of my wife). I was braking and turning wildly has I tried to decide how far to the right I needed to be to avoid the oncoming car in my lane while still trying not to go crashing into something on the right I couldn't see.

Alas the oncoming car was quite far from us and I had completely misjudged where he was and he passed quite routinely to left us when he finally reached us. I think there was an element of tunnel vision going on here. I had become quite fixated on the oncoming car as I tried to determine how far he was from us and perhaps all I was seeing was the oncoming lights without setting them in the proper context. I am not sure what happened exactly, but it was scary and it is easily possible I could have driven off the road and killed us both and no one would have ever had a clue as to why I did that.

Of course, the other possibility is that it was an alien having a good old time maneuvering his space ship so as to freak out the dumb earthlings by imitating an oncoming car in their lane. I'll bet his mom wasn't a happy camper when he got home and she found out what he'd been doing.