Cont: UFOs: The Research, the Evidence

[theprestige]

We take away the cheap thrills, the carnival games, the B- movies, the jump scares, and the fart jokes. We revel in an endlessly fascinating reality that minds to shallow to pay attention never see.

If there's one thing I've learned from watching Jenny Nicholson videos, it's that it is possible to maintain a childlike innocence and a fully accepting sense of wonder, and still be skeptical and critical when criticism is called for.

 

[Apathia]

If there's one thing I've learned from watching Jenny Nicholson videos, it's that it is possible to maintain a childlike innocence and a fully accepting sense of wonder, and still be skeptical and critical when criticism is called for.

Or the music of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.

 

[JayUtah]

For the record, I don't oppose fart jokes or B-movies. The worst movie in the world (Troll 2) was filmed in my state.

 

[Apathia]

A Hong Kong horror flick, Centipede Curse (1982), was filmed in part on the grounds of a small college I was teaching at in Singapore.

(I could have gotten a bit part as a centipede!)

Of course, lets not forget the entertainment value of popular culture and all kinds of woo-woo.
I write wretched, unpublishable trash with with all kinds of spooks and space aliens in it. That's why I don't need the History Channel.

 

[JayUtah]

I did a History Channel pilot before they went all Bigfoot and Luftwaffe on us. And my good friend played Drew in Troll 2. My avatar is me working hard to create worlds of make-believe. One of my data centers is typically used as the "high-tech" set in several TV shows. And they let me grab snacks from the craft services table.

As for Jenny Nicholson, she properly skewers Evermore (which mercifully closed this year). A couple of my theatrical designer friends begged me to come join the design team way back in the day. I balked, because at the time I was kiester-deep in helping to rescue the Boeing 787 wing design from its unflyable first iteration. But I acquiesced and took a meeting with their creative and management team. It smelled bad from Day One, so I did not delve into that specific world of childlike wonder. I've seen conspiracy theories that were better baked than that park idea. Jenny is good people.

I was also an extra in Independence Day (1996). My commitment to creating a sense of childlike wonder involving aliens extends to sweating out in the desert around the former Wendover Air Force Base. I have absolutely no problem with telling stories of aliens, ghosts, and fairies in order to amuse and entertain people. But I don't think anyone should be approaching Congressional hearings with a sense of childlike wonder and then trying to scold the skeptics for their allegedly deficient thinking about it.

 

[xterra]

(I could have gotten a bit part as a centipede!)

You could have gotten your foot in the film-industry door!

 

[Apathia]

You could have gotten your foot in the film-industry door!

All one hundred of them.

 

[Checkmite]

Not skeptics, killjoys. We make the world a duller, more mundane place.

I've always felt that this particular criticism was dishonest, and I've become more and more sure of that in the last 20 years or so. I find myself running into fewer and fewer people who clearly like UFO stories just because it's a fun or recreationally scary concept. Most of the time when people are upset at debunkers and skeptics it's because there's an actual worldview at stake. There's a lot more politics explicitly involved as well.

 

[Apathia]

I've always felt that this particular criticism was dishonest, and I've become more and more sure of that in the last 20 years or so. I find myself running into fewer and fewer people who clearly like UFO stories just because it's a fun or recreationally scary concept. Most of the time when people are upset at debunkers and skeptics it's because there's an actual worldview at stake. There's a lot more politics explicitly involved as well.

I have a friend for whom it's taking religious trappings with UFOs not being physical extraterrestrials, but spiritual beings here to teach us the next level of consciousness.

 

[Axxman300]

I've always felt that this particular criticism was dishonest, and I've become more and more sure of that in the last 20 years or so. I find myself running into fewer and fewer people who clearly like UFO stories just because it's a fun or recreationally scary concept. Most of the time when people are upset at debunkers and skeptics it's because there's an actual worldview at stake. There's a lot more politics explicitly involved as well.

I agree 100%.

Speaking as an ex-UFO believer this current pop-culture phase is particularly sad and ugly. The UAP junta aren't even trying to prove their case any more. Instead they work from the position that it's all but proven to be real. Social media is flooded with hundreds of really bad videos claiming to be alien craft, but all of them are easily debunked with minimum effort. They're hounding Congress and the Senate to pass laws forcing the military to reveal everything they have on UAPs in spite of the fact that so far there has been nothing from the Pentagon that hasn't been explained rationally as misidentified objects.

The UAP crowd continues to cling to long debunked UFO lore while ignoring some old cases that should have a closer look. I'm not saying these will prove UFOs are aliens, but a case like the Lonnie Zamora incident incident in 1964 could reveal the workings of classified projects conducted in New Mexico. And provides a date, a witness, and starting point to track the USAF's Blue Book investigation, and learn if there was something really cool being tested out there. Then there's the case of Astronaut Gordon Cooper, who claimed on camera that he filmed a UFO land while he was at Edwards AFB. Maybe Gordo is just having fun at people's expense, but it's easy to track down when he was there, and if he was part of a film crew at the time. From there investigators have a fixed location, and system they can search. If he filmed something, that film went somewhere, and it's sitting in a can somewhere today.

But no, we get party balloons, Starlink, and garbage bags.

The UAP crowd isn't asking for the big stuff. They assert the US government is in possession of recovered alien craft, but they won't tell us where these craft are stored. They won't tell us who has been working on back-engineering them (and it would be a short list). We live in an era of Wikileaks and people posting classified documents on video game message boards. WHERE ARE THE DOCUMENTS? WHERE ARE THE PHOTOS? WHERE ARE THE GOVERNMENT VIDEOS?

The UAP crowd has NOTHING. And worse still they won't name their sources while condemning government secrecy. This is a clown show, and the mainstream media is covering the story as if we will see alien bodies any day. How long before the next Heaven's Gate and Marshall Applewhite? But instead of committing suicide on a ranch, they strap on explosive vests, and walk into a mall, or airport somewhere in the name of "The Truth About UAPs"?

This isn't funny any more.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

I agree 100%.

Speaking as an ex-UFO believer this current pop-culture phase is particularly sad and ugly. The UAP junta aren't even trying to prove their case any more. Instead they work from the position that it's all but proven to be real. Social media is flooded with hundreds of really bad videos claiming to be alien craft, but all of them are easily debunked with minimum effort. They're hounding Congress and the Senate to pass laws forcing the military to reveal everything they have on UAPs in spite of the fact that so far there has been nothing from the Pentagon that hasn't been explained rationally as misidentified objects.

The UAP crowd continues to cling to long debunked UFO lore while ignoring some old cases that should have a closer look. I'm not saying these will prove UFOs are aliens, but a case like the Lonnie Zamora incident incident in 1964 could reveal the workings of classified projects conducted in New Mexico. And provides a date, a witness, and starting point to track the USAF's Blue Book investigation, and learn if there was something really cool being tested out there. Then there's the case of Astronaut Gordon Cooper, who claimed on camera that he filmed a UFO land while he was at Edwards AFB. Maybe Gordo is just having fun at people's expense, but it's easy to track down when he was there, and if he was part of a film crew at the time. From there investigators have a fixed location, and system they can search. If he filmed something, that film went somewhere, and it's sitting in a can somewhere today.

But no, we get party balloons, Starlink, and garbage bags.

The UAP crowd isn't asking for the big stuff. They assert the US government is in possession of recovered alien craft, but they won't tell us where these craft are stored. They won't tell us who has been working on back-engineering them (and it would be a short list). We live in an era of Wikileaks and people posting classified documents on video game message boards. WHERE ARE THE DOCUMENTS? WHERE ARE THE PHOTOS? WHERE ARE THE GOVERNMENT VIDEOS?

The UAP crowd has NOTHING. And worse still they won't name their sources while condemning government secrecy. This is a clown show, and the mainstream media is covering the story as if we will see alien bodies any day. How long before the next Heaven's Gate and Marshall Applewhite? But instead of committing suicide on a ranch, they strap on explosive vests, and walk into a mall, or airport somewhere in the name of "The Truth About UAPs"?

This isn't funny any more.

Exactly. If there was a p[enny spent for every $100 wasted on the believer nonsense, actul progress in understanding might just be possible. In the Zamora Incident it's about 99% certain he say an experimental propane hot air balloon. His description fits what he saw and reported. About the only thing he got wrong was the distance (it's the desert) and the direction of he flame on tack off (you would expect it to point down). The records might still exist.

In Cooper's case, let's talk to the other purported witnesses.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Latest sighting.

UFO Spotted Over Colorado Concert

"I was working at Red Rocks Amphitheater last night when one of our coworkers suddenly said to us, 'Hey, what is that over there? It looks like a spaceship,'" the employee said in the report. "We all turned to look in the direction he was pointing and sure enough, there was a UFO hovering about a half a mile to a mile north of red rocks," they continued. "A dozen of us saw it. We all kept asking each other, 'Are you seeing this too?' It was a resounding 'yes' from everyone in the group.""]"I was working at Red Rocks Amphitheater last night when one of our coworkers suddenly said to us, 'Hey, what is that over there? It looks like a spaceship,'" the employee said in the report. "We all turned to look in the direction he was pointing and sure enough, there was a UFO hovering about a half a mile to a mile north of red rocks," they continued. "A dozen of us saw it. We all kept asking each other, 'Are you seeing this too?' It was a resounding 'yes' from everyone in the group."

But nobody took a picture.

 

[Axxman300]

Exactly. If there was a p[enny spent for every $100 wasted on the believer nonsense, actul progress in understanding might just be possible. In the Zamora Incident it's about 99% certain he say an experimental propane hot air balloon. His description fits what he saw and reported. About the only thing he got wrong was the distance (it's the desert) and the direction of he flame on tack off (you would expect it to point down). The records might still exist.

In Cooper's case, let's talk to the other purported witnesses.

Okay, so why not release the films of the balloon tests to show how it landed, and how the crew was dressed? It would cross the incident off the books with a hard close like the Project Mogul footage and still photos that match the descriptions of the Roswell wreckage. Sixty years have passed, why sit on old classified projects that were shelved decades ago? We're talking balloons and NASA lunar landing demo craft. Some we know all about, but others remain out of public view, and this leads to questions, which feeds paranoid UFO types.

And again, the UAP morons aren't even pushing the more complex historical cases which makes me wonder how serious they really are about learning anything of substance.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Okay, so why not release the films of the balloon tests to show how it landed, and how the crew was dressed? It would cross the incident off the books with a hard close like the Project Mogul footage and still photos that match the descriptions of the Roswell wreckage. Sixty years have passed, why sit on old classified projects that were shelved decades ago? We're talking balloons and NASA lunar landing demo craft. Some we know all about, but others remain out of public view, and this leads to questions, which feeds paranoid UFO types.

And again, the UAP morons aren't even pushing the more complex historical cases which makes me wonder how serious they really are about learning anything of substance.

From the evidence available it was not a secret NASA project but just two guys in a primitive propane "powered" balloon. It would only take a researcher a bit of time to definitively put the pieces together. I have some of them but do not have any research tools except Google. A couple of thousand dollars might just cover it. But that's not where the glory and the money lie.

 

[theprestige]

Okay, so why not release the films of the balloon tests to show how it landed, and how the crew was dressed?

Because it's never been about the evidence.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

I've always felt that this particular criticism was dishonest, and I've become more and more sure of that in the last 20 years or so. I find myself running into fewer and fewer people who clearly like UFO stories just because it's a fun or recreationally scary concept. Most of the time when people are upset at debunkers and skeptics it's because there's an actual worldview at stake. There's a lot more politics explicitly involved as well.

No, it's bang on.

How did they arrive at that 'worldview'? Science fiction.

Psychosocial UFO hypothesis

Science fiction aspects of the UFO mythos

Bertrand Méheust, a French sociologist, began a study of the science fiction parallels to ufo mythology when he stumbled upon a copy of the 1908 novel The Lightning Wheel by Jean de la Hire in his family's attic. He opened it and began reading how the central characters find themselves being lifted up by a ray into a flying disc that hums and glows with a halo of light. The discovery stimulated a search for parallels between ufo experience narratives and pre-1947 science fiction literature. Meheust found dozens of them, many of the more impressive including such wondrous effects as invisible force-fields, mesmeric mental effects, materializations and dematerializations, teleportation, traveling through walls, levitating entities, and engine-stopping rays. One could also find humanoids visiting earth for a range of motives that parallel later UFO thought: wanting to spy on humans, experiment on us, breed with us, create a multi-generational program to shape humanity, deal with their dying world, invade our world, and teach us lessons about cosmic history and the need for peace. While some of this can be relegated to coincidences driven by similar reasoning and expectations about the future, often these wonders are more reminiscent of supernatural and old occult mythology than what is really reasonably expected to be created using future technology.

As for the 'flying saucer' part:-

The saucer rumor

In 1988, Martin Kottmeyer... began gathering together what writings he could find about the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting in 1947, typically pointed to as the start of the modern ufo phenomenon. One of the first things he turned to was a memoir given as a speech before the First International UFO Congress in 1977. His eye soon fell on a statement by Arnold that the objects he sighted "were not circular". Arnold also complained the flying saucer label arose because of a "great deal of misunderstanding" on the part of the reporter who wrote the story up for the Associated Press. Bill Bequette asked him how the objects flew and Arnold answered that, "Well, they flew erratic, like a saucer if you skip it across the water." The intent of the metaphor was to describe the motion of the objects not their shape. Bill Bequette would later insist the fault was not with him, but Arnold himself but, ultimately it does not matter who is to blame for it. The only salient fact is that a mistake was definitely made somewhere. Any doubt about this is eliminated by turning to the first document written by Kenneth Arnold, the report he wrote and sent to Air Force mere days after his sighting nine mystery objects speeding across the face of Mount Rainier. It includes a drawing of the shapes made by one of the objects. It certainly confirms the memoir. It isn't circular or round as a saucer properly ought to be. Shoe heel or beetle might better express the awkwardly inelegant form...

"The implications of this journalistic error are staggering in the extreme. Not only does it unambiguously point to a cultural origin of the whole flying saucer phenomenon, it erects a first-order paradox into any attempt to interpret the phenomenon in extraterrestrial terms: Why would extraterrestrials redesign their craft to conform to Bequette's error?"

Aliens visiting us from another world in their fantastic craft with advanced technology is far more exciting that a boring balloon, cloud formation or light reflection. Once you let that magical thought in any debunking is seriously deflating. As the poster in Mulder's office in the X-Files said "I want to believe".

People want to believe there is more to life than mundane reality. They want something out of the ordinary, something magical that defies normality and makes it special. They will resist any attempt to crush that sense of excitement. If a skeptic tries to explain a UFO sighting, they are being a killjoy. If the authorities explain it they are hiding something. We are trying to take their Kodachrome away.

 

[gabeygoat]

No, it's bang on.

How did they arrive at that 'worldview'? Science fiction.

Psychosocial UFO hypothesis


As for the 'flying saucer' part:-



Aliens visiting us from another world in their fantastic craft with advanced technology is far more exciting that a boring balloon, cloud formation or light reflection. Once you let that magical thought in any debunking is seriously deflating. As the poster in Mulder's office in the X-Files said "I want to believe".

People want to believe there is more to life than mundane reality. They want something out of the ordinary, something magical that defies normality and makes it special. They will resist any attempt to crush that sense of excitement. If a skeptic tries to explain a UFO sighting, they are being a killjoy. If the authorities explain it they are hiding something. We are trying to take their Kodachrome away.

Reality is NOT MUNDANE

 

[arthwollipot]

I can't remember who said "Isn't it enough to know that the garden is beautiful, without imagining that there are fairies at the bottom of it?"

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

I can't remember who said "Isn't it enough to know that the garden is beautiful, without imagining that there are fairies at the bottom of it?"

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. According to Goggle.

My guess was Harry Houdini.

 

[EHocking]

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. According to Goggle.

My guess was Harry Houdini.

It certainly wasn’t Sir Conan Doyle.