Cont: UFOs: The Research, the Evidence

Scorpion said:
I saw a weird thing at six in the morning the other day. It was still completely dark outside and was making a cup of tea in the kitchen. The kitchen has no curtains and I saw something with flashing red and green lights fly across my field of view. I thought it was a distant plane but then it stopped moving and began to descend vertically. It came down and disappeared behind a nearby tree, and I realized then it was not up in the sky but quite close by. It was completely silent and the only thing I can think it was is a drone. But what anyone would be flying a drone over the town at six in the morning for, I can't imagine.
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I can. We have an airport nearby and so a drone “no fly” zone - unless you get permission outside of airport operating time and complete any drone flights before the start of daily operations. Fairly confident that that window for drones closes at 6 or 6:30 AM, as a group I’m a member of got permission to fly a photo survey of the area and early morning was when we had to shut down.

Imagine that!
 
Scorpion said:
I saw a weird thing at six in the morning the other day. It was still completely dark outside and was making a cup of tea in the kitchen. The kitchen has no curtains and I saw something with flashing red and green lights fly across my field of view. I thought it was a distant plane but then it stopped moving and began to descend vertically. It came down and disappeared behind a nearby tree, and I realized then it was not up in the sky but quite close by. It was completely silent and the only thing I can think it was is a drone. But what anyone would be flying a drone over the town at six in the morning for, I can't imagine.
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It was a plane. It wasn't close by. It didn't descend, it turned so that it was flying directly away from you.

Let me guess - red light on the left and green on the right? Since there's a little bit of red port left in the bottle, the plane was flying away from you.
 
Scorpion said:
I saw a weird thing at six in the morning the other day. It was still completely dark outside and was making a cup of tea in the kitchen. The kitchen has no curtains and I saw something with flashing red and green lights fly across my field of view. I thought it was a distant plane but then it stopped moving and began to descend vertically. It came down and disappeared behind a nearby tree, and I realized then it was not up in the sky but quite close by. It was completely silent and the only thing I can think it was is a drone. But what anyone would be flying a drone over the town at six in the morning for, I can't imagine.
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Keep a phone or even a cheap digital camera nearby. It'd be nice to see what you're seeing. Even a blurry video is worth, oh maybe 500-600 words by my calculation.
 
zooterkin said:
There is something, but not a great deal. The actual info is very much what was presented by Dr David Clarke at QEDCon 2023.
The photo appears to be genuine, and was apparently suppressed by the authorities. What it's a photo of, and who took it, remain mysteries, but mainly due to lack of information. It was taken at the time of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, so it is possible it was an experimental aircraft being tested.

QED rewatch: UFOs, UAPs, and the Quest for Understanding (2023) | QED 2024

In an age of omnipresent camera technology coupled with advanced image and video manipulation tools, ufology has witnessed a renaissance. Last year even saw public hearings in Washington DC, airing the evidence (or lack thereof) for what are now often known as UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous...
qedcon.org qedcon.org
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How on earth did they come to that conclusion?
 
That's a good question.

The last time we discussed the Calvine photo here, this useful Metabunk post was linked, with a summary: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/claim-original-calvine-ufo-photo.12571/page-5#post-276815

The closest thing I can see about anyone "suppressing" anything is a screwup where the negatives got lost. The MOD says they were sent back to the Daily Record but nobody knows where they are.

I can't now un-see the photo as just a pic taken looking down into a lake, with the reflection of a Harrier jet passing over, and there's the corner of something (plastic sack? cardboard box?) sticking out of the water.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
That's a good question.

The last time we discussed the Calvine photo here, this useful Metabunk post was linked, with a summary: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/claim-original-calvine-ufo-photo.12571/page-5#post-276815

The closest thing I can see about anyone "suppressing" anything is a screwup where the negatives got lost. The MOD says they were sent back to the Daily Record but nobody knows where they are.

I can't now un-see the photo as just a pic taken looking down into a lake, with the reflection of a Harrier jet passing over, and there's the corner of something (plastic sack? cardboard box?) sticking out of the water.
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And there is the confusion about whether the secret UFO picture and this one are the same, the one in the RAF base was meant to be very clear and this one is very unclear. I looked at the best versions of this image (long since not been a photo) and it's very unclear, colour information long gone, compression artifacts and so on. Personally as far as I am concerned this is an image of a body of water with a small island in the distance and what amounts to a silhouette of someone in a small boat.
 
Darat said:
And there is the confusion about whether the secret UFO picture and this one are the same, the one in the RAF base was meant to be very clear and this one is very unclear. I looked at the best versions of this image (long since not been a photo) and it's very unclear, colour information long gone, compression artifacts and so on. Personally as far as I am concerned this is an image of a body of water with a small island in the distance and what amounts to a silhouette of someone in a small boat.
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That's my impression, too. Unfortunately without the other photographs, we have no idea how fast the jet/person-in-a-boat may have been moving. Indeed, absent of timestamps, which would not be in the pictures or the negatives, we could not know.
 
A thought occurred to me:

Does the Venn diagram of people who think that the moon landing was a hoax overlap with people who think that aliens have visited earth in spaceships?
 
Seems like they should contraindicate each other. But yeah, I'm pretty sure they do overlap because neither one is based on evidence or logic.
 
Puppycow said:
Seems like they should contraindicate each other. But yeah, I'm pretty sure they do overlap because neither one is based on evidence or logic.
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I don't see why they should contraindicate each other. Nothing about the hypothesis that the US didn't land on the moon in the 60s rules out other civilizations visiting other planets at other times.
 
Well, there are various reasons people give for their disbelief in the moon landings. If you think we can't fly into space because 'the firmament' is an impenetrable crystal dome above us then that would probably also preclude your believing in flying saucers coming the other way.
 
Puppycow said:
See if you can figure it out for yourself.
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I've already come up with two lines of reasoning you might have followed, both easily rebutted. Rather than throw strawmans at you, I'd rather just understand what your actual line of reasoning is.

What's obvious to me is that disparate tech levels are a thing, and that it's quite possible for one civilization to have technology that another does not possess and has to fake. For example, Russia faked a western tech level for decades.
 
theprestige said:
I've already come up with two lines of reasoning you might have followed, both easily rebutted. Rather than throw strawmans at you, I'd rather just understand what your actual line of reasoning is.

What's obvious to me is that disparate tech levels are a thing, and that it's quite possible for one civilization to have technology that another does not possess and has to fake. For example, Russia faked a western tech level for decades.
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Did Russia ever try to fake a moon landing?
 
Puppycow said:
Did Russia ever try to fake a moon landing?
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Not that I know of, but they did fake other activities during the Space Race.

Do you accept the premise that different societies and civilizations may have different tech levels, and therefore different technological capabilities, contemporaneously with each other?
 
theprestige said:
I've already come up with two lines of reasoning you might have followed, both easily rebutted. Rather than throw strawmans at you, I'd rather just understand what your actual line of reasoning is.

What's obvious to me is that disparate tech levels are a thing, and that it's quite possible for one civilization to have technology that another does not possess and has to fake. For example, Russia faked a western tech level for decades.
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I think you just thought about this question a whole lot more than any conspiracy theorist ever did.
 
Puppycow said:
A thought occurred to me:

Does the Venn diagram of people who think that the moon landing was a hoax overlap with people who think that aliens have visited earth in spaceships?
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Surprisingly yes. There are a number of people who believed the astronauts never landed on the Moon, but while they were there they saw evidence of alien visitation. It is baffling to try to understand such people. This was mostly a UK thing and centered around one or two pundits. I'd have to dig deep into my notes to remember who.
 
JayUtah said:
Surprisingly yes. There are a number of people who believed the astronauts never landed on the Moon, but while they were there they saw evidence of alien visitation. It is baffling to try to understand such people. This was mostly a UK thing and centered around one or two pundits. I'd have to dig deep into my notes to remember who.
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David Icke?
 
Conspiracy theorists always assume that everyone but us is far more intelligent and advanced than we will ever be, whether it be aliens, ancient Egyptians (who may or may not have been aliens) or lizard people (see the other parenthesis). So we are too stupid to ever be able to land on the moon, but every unspecified alien is way ahead of us in intelligence and technology. It makes perfect sense! For certain values of sense.

Oh, the conspiracy theorists are the exceptions of course; they are every bit as intelligent and advanced as the Egyptian lizard aliens, if not more.
 
If the reason for believing the moon landing was faked amounts to, space travel is physically impossible, then sure, that's rules out aliens visiting the earth. Otherwise, I agree with prestige. It's just different technology.

You could also have aliens from different dimensions even if space travel is impossible, I guess.
 
JayUtah said:
Surprisingly yes. There are a number of people who believed the astronauts never landed on the Moon, but while they were there they saw evidence of alien visitation. It is baffling to try to understand such people. This was mostly a UK thing and centered around one or two pundits. I'd have to dig deep into my notes to remember who.
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Merely anecdotal, but yes. I know a guy who is precisely like this. His conspiracy theory rants have no consistency or coherence.
Plus, he keeps falling for New Age scams and laughs it off when I've pointed out to him the obvious signs of it being bogus.
 
One of the many things I garnered from reading Eric Hoffer's The True Believer is that believers can believe any and all sorts of crap at the same time. Or at least sequentially.
 
Maybe things changed since my hardcore UFO days in the 1990s, but back then the big CT was the Apollo astronauts sent coded messages back to mission control about the presence of aliens on the moon.

Weird how stupidity evolves.
 
Axxman300 said:
Maybe things changed since my hardcore UFO days in the 1990s, but back then the big CT was the Apollo astronauts sent coded messages back to mission control about the presence of aliens on the moon.

Weird how stupidity evolves.
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Yep, from the book Above Top Secret. Creative misunderstanding of pilot jargon.
 
I had the thought about the Venn diagram after watching (or during) a stand-up comedy special: Jim Gaffigan: The Skinny, which is on Disney+. Quite good overall, imo. I would recommend if you like stand-up comedy. There was just this one joke he told (and it won't be funny in my retelling; it's mostly in the delivery) but he expressed skepticism that we are really going to send people to Mars and he said (paraphrasing): The last time we sent anyone to the Moon was 54 years ago, and we haven't sent anyone since. Why? Because we never sent anyone to the Moon. That was the punchline, and he immediately distanced himself from it by saying "I don't know anything. I'm just a big dumb clown, har har har" or something like that. But it did kind of get me thinking. Maybe there wouldn't be so many people who don't believe it if it had continued. If there had been more missions in the subsequent years and decades. After all, if we could do it in the 1960s and early 70s, why is so difficult now to do it again? Why has it been 54 years since the last man set foot on the Moon? And I know there are good answers: because what's the point now? What does it achieve that hasn't already been achieved? It's like being the 2,053rd person to climb Mt. Everest. All you are doing is risking your life for an expensive thrill so that you have something to brag about.

But there's all sorts of evidence to support that it actually happened, it's just that people dismiss the evidence and claim that it is fake. Meanwhile, there is zero credible evidence of alien visitation. But some people are willing to believe that without any good evidence, while dismissing all of the evidence of the moon landings as fakery.
 
Helen said:
Conspiracy theorists always assume that everyone but us is far more intelligent and advanced than we will ever be, whether it be aliens, ancient Egyptians (who may or may not have been aliens) or lizard people (see the other parenthesis). So we are too stupid to ever be able to land on the moon, but every unspecified alien is way ahead of us in intelligence and technology. It makes perfect sense! For certain values of sense.

Oh, the conspiracy theorists are the exceptions of course; they are every bit as intelligent and advanced as the Egyptian lizard aliens, if not more.
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Yeah fits in with the premise that humans are uniquely terrible and 'the real monsters'.
 
Okay, this is it.
1-The Earth is flat. So is the Moon.
2-Therefore we never went to the Moon. Because we stand on top of the Earth and look up at the Moon, so we see the bottom of the Moon, so if people tried to stand on it, they would fall off.
3-Flying saucers are flat. It is perfectly logical that aliens have visited Earth.

I plan to write a book and get the History Channel to do a twelve-part series in which I fully expound my theory, leading to step
4-PROFIT!

For I believe!

...in P.T.. Barnum, that is.
 
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