Cont: UFOs: The Research, the Evidence

[Carrot Flower King]

Sorry, Paul, but Epistemic Humility had a brief flirtation with fame in around 1974 (exact dates are unclear as everyone involved with the band were either permanently stoned or well deep in the "Om") when they tried to release a quadruple concept album based around the life and times of an old Celtic mystic whose exact name no-one could agree on and whose beliefs were so arcane that whole university philosophy departments would flee rather than contemplate them.

One lecturer at Sheffield, when I was there in the late '70s, would, if you purchased him several pints of Wards' bitter in the Red House, reveal a few eldritch details, but he stopped after a most peculiar incident involving the pater noster lift in the Arts Tower late one night.

The band themselves were long embroiled in arguments about instrumentaion, with several members insisting that if they accurately followed the philosophical strictures of the unnamed mystic then the instruments would play themselves, while others were convinced that they should hold the instruments facing west and chant the correct name of the mystic, completely ignoring the inconvenience of no-one agreeing on that name.

Richard Branson tried to sign them to Virgin, but he was rejected as he didn't speak any Goedelic variation of a Celtic language.

Half of the band were last seen rowing a couple of coracles west of Cape Clear Island, rumoured to be heading for Hy Breasil; the rest were rumoured to have turned into stone somewhere in the vicinity of Calanais in Eilean Leodhas.

So we will never know how this epic might have come to fruition...

 

[Paul2]

Sorry, Paul, but Epistemic Humility had a brief flirtation with fame in around 1974 (exact dates are unclear as everyone involved with the band were either permanently stoned or well deep in the "Om") when they tried to release a quadruple concept album based around the life and times of an old Celtic mystic whose exact name no-one could agree on and whose beliefs were so arcane that whole university philosophy departments would flee rather than contemplate them.

One lecturer at Sheffield, when I was there in the late '70s, would, if you purchased him several pints of Wards' bitter in the Red House, reveal a few eldritch details, but he stopped after a most peculiar incident involving the pater noster lift in the Arts Tower late one night.

The band themselves were long embroiled in arguments about instrumentaion, with several members insisting that if they accurately followed the philosophical strictures of the unnamed mystic then the instruments would play themselves, while others were convinced that they should hold the instruments facing west and chant the correct name of the mystic, completely ignoring the inconvenience of no-one agreeing on that name.

Richard Branson tried to sign them to Virgin, but he was rejected as he didn't speak any Goedelic variation of a Celtic language.

Half of the band were last seen rowing a couple of coracles west of Cape Clear Island, rumoured to be heading for Hy Breasil; the rest were rumoured to have turned into stone somewhere in the vicinity of Calanais in Eilean Leodhas.

So we will never know how this epic might have come to fruition...

I believe you!

 

[Puppycow]

My attention has been called to two other papers by the lead author:

The ultraterrestrial hypothesis: A case for scientific openness to an "interdimensional" explanation for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena [The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2023, 55(1), 43–98] November 2023, Author Tim Lomas of Harvard University.

The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis: A Case for Scientific Openness to an Interstellar Explanation for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena February 2024 [Philosophy and Cosmology 32:34-59] Author Tim Lomas of Harvard University.

Interesting that the one that was removed had multiple authors, but the ones that remain have a single author. They seem to be similar. The title of the most recent one was "The cryptoterrestrial hypothesis: A case for scientific openness to a concealed earthly explanation for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena" and had two co-authors besides Lomas. Brendan W Case of Harvard whose scholarly work seems to focus on Christian Theology, and Michael Masters of Montana Technological University. Under "Research interests" he offers:

Further research interests center on investigating hominin biocultural evolution, astrobiology, astronomy and the physics of time as they relate to the UFO phenomenon. My new book, Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon, cautiously examines the premise that “UFOs” and “Aliens” may simply be our distant human descendants, using the anthropological tool of time travel to visit and study us, as members of their own hominin evolutionary past. This text challenges readers to consider new possibilities while cultivating conversations about our ever-evolving understanding of time and time travel.

Time travelers.

 

[bigred]

I ker seeing a missing bit of the thread title every time I pop in here.

Research, evidence, but not results.
Typical crypto crap talk with " I seen lights I can't explain " or something equally profound.

When do we get a real, touchable flying saucer or alien?

That's pretty much it. And despite huge advances in photo/video-taking ability, still nothing but blurry dots, mysterious lights and the like that we've had since the 40s. I don't say there's no way some of these things are ETs or curious Vulcans or whatever, but not buying it until something better in terms of evidence comes along.

 

[arthwollipot]

Progressive sociopolitical woo.

That's the new name of my band!

 

[JayUtah]

My attention has been called to two other papers by the lead author...

Amazing how a Harvard-hosted brainiac writing for psychologists can't think of why politicians might be newly interested in UAPs while the scientific community remains skeptical. I doubt that psychologists, philosophers, and cosmologists are generally competent to evaluate Lomas' pseudo-empirical handwaving. At best it boils down to the standard, "But these are really credible people talking to really important people." But I can see some value in writing for psychologists etc. because these are fundamentally psychological phenomena. But Lomas doesn't seem to have any psychology chops either.

As usual, the rhetoric comes down to making a case that there must be some substance behind all the furor and handwaving, and those scientists are just poopyheads for demanding testable evidence. If they had any real scientific objectivity or insight, they'd give some thought to Lomas' increasingly speculative hypotheses for why there's no evidence. A real psychologist, however, might have some insight into why there's handwaving and furor despite the lack of credible evidence: especially when that handwaving occurs chiefly among politicians in a dysfunctional political system.

Harvard has really slipped below the bar.

 

[Puppycow]

My new book, Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon, cautiously examines the premise that “UFOs” and “Aliens” may simply be our distant human descendants, using the anthropological tool of time travel

How about cautiously examines the premise that “UFOs” and “Aliens” may simply be wayward party balloons, waterfowl, and occasionally aircraft that are very far away and out of focus. Or sometimes flying insects that are very close and out of focus. Can we cautiously examine that premise?

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Remember when Rods were a thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(optical_phenomenon)

They were all over the UFO believer sites and proof positive that something strange was going on.

And then they were not.

 

[JayUtah]

And despite huge advances in photo/video-taking ability, still nothing but blurry dots, mysterious lights and the like that we've had since the 40s. I don't say there's no way some of these things are ETs or curious Vulcans or whatever, but not buying it until something better in terms of evidence comes along.

That's an irreducible problem. There has been an explosion in the amount of imaging we have access to for any region and time period. Our ability to interpret these images and identify objects in them as increased too, but perhaps not as much. In any case, UAP advocacy will always focus on the percentage of imaging that eludes interpretation and identification for whatever reason. We will never be able to conclusively identify every object in every image. This is what makes the UAP phenomenon irreducible and thus unlikely to go away on the basis of the amount of evidence available.

The more instructive way to look at it is to see what our manifold increase in evidence and ability has produced. It has enhanced our ability to identify party balloons, lens artifacts, wildlife, etc. Nothing has been identified as an alien spaceship. When the refinement of analysis dumps evidence exclusively on one side of the hypothesis, there is little reason to justify the prospect that evidence will land on the other side if only we keep at it. And that's leaving along the glaring fact that the question is badly asked. All the evidence lands on one side of the hypothesis because the question is badly formed from a scientific perspective.

How about cautiously examines the premise that “UFOs” and “Aliens” may simply be wayward party balloons, waterfowl, and occasionally aircraft that are very far away and out of focus. Or sometimes flying insects that are very close and out of focus. Can we cautiously examine that premise?

That's where all the conclusive evidence lands, which is why science is unimpressed with, "But this guy's a credible and trained observer!" rhetoric proffered in its place.

Authors like Tim Lomas sound so very condescending to real scientists. Along with Loeb, they scold researchers for not keeping an open mind, when the epistemology is a lot more clear cut in why we must reject those claims. Where is your falsifiable hypothesis, you ivory-tower snobs? A duck I can falsify. A party balloon I can falsify. How would you go about falsifying alien spacecraft?

UAP busybodies can propose to do so only by affirmatively identifying the phenomenon as some other, already-known thing, thus reversing the burden of proof. In order to be scientifically tenable, you have to be able to say it's not an alien spacecraft without an affirmative counterclaim. I can falsify a duck: I can say, "I don't know what that is, but it's not a duck." You have to be able to say, "I don't know what that is, but it's not an alien spacecraft." Instead, the question is framed as, "I don't know what that is, therefore it's an alien spacecraft (or could be)." Dreamers such as Lomas are forever reminding us that it's bogus to try to falsify an alien technology by proposing limits on what it could be and then observing that the evidence defies those limits. We can't falsify something we can't characterize ahead of time, and it would be foolish and unscientific to simply speculate on what that characterization should be. I.e., magic.

Yeah, that's exactly the point. When science points out that if you can't propose a falsifiable hypothesis for something, then it is categorically untenable in science, this gets rewritten as scientists being too skeptical or too closed-minded for rejecting the magic. Good for us. That's science doing its job.

 

[JayUtah]

Time travelers.

The Amazon summary of Michael Masters' book makes the case for time traveling future-humans as follows :—

Moreover, these extratempestrials are ubiquitously described as bipedal, large-brained, hairless, human-like beings, who communicate with us in our own languages, and who possess technology advanced beyond, but clearly built upon, our own. These accounts, coupled with a thorough understanding of the past and modern human condition, point to the continuation of established biological and cultural trends here on Earth, long into the distant human future.

This amazingly uncritical approach may explain why he started out teaching at the Ohio State University, and is now teaching at essentially a community college in Butte. Can anyone think of an actual scientifically plausible reason why purported aliens are said to look like us, to communicate with us in our own languages, and possess technology that looks like an extrapolation of our own? Is that so hard a problem?

I wonder if Tim Lomas, the noted Harvard psychologist, can provide insight that includes why a number of sightings, encounters, abductions, and other UAP phenomenon have turned out to be hoaxes. I'm thinking principally of the obvious Billy Meier phenomenon, whose various photos of spacecraft and aliens were conclusively proven to have been models he made and photos he obtained from popular sources and doctored in order to create a UFO cult centered on himself.

In modern times we have UFO/UAP convention circuits which focus on the celebrity of various human claimants—a cast of fairly obvious grifters and fakers of which David Grusch is merely the latest darling. Given how strong the desire is to believe there is something going on, I find it amusing that a psychologist is taking entirely different kinds of notes on these observations.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Michael Shermer (I know, I know) interviews a UFO believer.

Robert Powell is a founding Board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU). He is a member of the Society for Scientific Exploration, the UFODATA project, and the National Space Society. Powell worked in engineering management in the semiconductor industry for nearly 30 years, and helped Advanced Micro Devices develop its first flash memory technology that is used in today’s flash cards for cameras, PCs, video cameras, and other products. His new book is UFOs: A Scientist Explains What We Know (And Don’t Know).

Not very convincing. He prefers witness statements over videos. And we all know how correct they can be.

Powell's understanding of evolutionary theory is pretty wonky but ehen he's no scientist.

Neither Shermer nor Powell can explain why Grusch cannot produce a single confirming name, report, or piece of physical evidence.

Shermer brings up "those blanking green triangles" Powell responds, "yeah that you know now that one Mick could be right on I I don't know I've uh we have not analyzed those". This is my litmus test for rationality. That blinking green triangle was a plane see out of focus through a night vision camera. Conclusively.

 

[8enotto]

Now this definitely deserves another decade or two of government funded study!
Surely that irrefutable physical evidence will be found and governments will fess up to hiding aliens away from the public.

But then that will demand even more studies to verify it all...

 

[Puppycow]

Yeah, that's exactly the point. When science points out that if you can't propose a falsifiable hypothesis for something, then it is categorically untenable in science, this gets rewritten as scientists being too skeptical or too closed-minded for rejecting the magic. Good for us. That's science doing its job.

I completely agree and don't have much to add.

A recent report from the AARO, which was the subject of another thread, gives a fairly comprehensive list of UAPs which were subsequently identified.

Note on “UAP” Nomenclature
Use of the UAP naming convention, while imperfect, is the best manner in which to characterize the multitude of unidentified reported sightings. AARO understands that the use of “UAP” to refer to all potential possibilities provides a false sense of commonality; such as their origins, identity, purpose, type, and threat they may pose. The only commonality that they all share, at least initially, is that they are each unidentified. Beyond initially being unidentified or misidentified, drones, balloons, aircraft, rockets, rocket exhaust plumes, satellites, infrared (IR) aberrations, sensor artifacts, birds, stars, planets, indistinct lights, vague radar returns, meteors, and optical effects—such as parallax—have nothing in common.

That's most of them. I would add flying insects to the list as they sometimes get misinterpreted as being much farther away, and hence larger, than they actually are. I have yet to see anything that wouldn't fall into one of the above categories, upon closer inspection. That leaves only unverifiable statements from people like Grusch, which can't be independently examined. You just have to take his word for it. Or not. There will always be some residue of objects that are too blurry, too far away to make out details that remain, but there is no reason no to assume that these too would turn out to also be common objects or phenomena if they could be positively identified.

 

[JayUtah]

Not very convincing. He prefers witness statements over videos. And we all know how correct they can be.

Witness statements are fairly useless for investigational purposes. Actual witnesses who can be interrogated are quite valuable. If a properly trained interviewer can extract observation from interpretation, we can often make major strides. Sadly that rarely occurs.

Powell's understanding of evolutionary theory is pretty wonky but ehen he's no scientist.

I can attest that 30 years of engineering management experience in no way qualifies someone to understand evolutionary theory.

Neither Shermer nor Powell can explain why Grusch cannot produce a single confirming name, report, or piece of physical evidence.

But he's a highly placed source! His colleagues speak very highly of him! He's very credible!

 

[JayUtah]

...there is no reason no to assume that these too would turn out to also be common objects or phenomena if they could be positively identified.

The charges of closed-mindedness disregard that there has been progress. Of a number of sightings previously unexplained, some have turned out to be ordinary objects. Some have turned out to be hoaxes. None has turned out to be an alien spacecraft or interdimensional time machine or anything else of the sort. The good Reverend Bayes provided us with a remarkably useful and predictive method of reasoning in such situations. It is far from improper to consider the various exotic hypotheses to be of diminishing likelihood and proceed accordingly.

 

[JayUtah]

Now this definitely deserves another decade or two of government funded study!

This is what amuses me most about the contention that we skeptics are just too skeptical when it comes to these attestations that seem to demand an exotic explanation. "Congress held hearings; the witnesses were testifying under oath, under penalty of perjury." As if anything they said can be proven false, or will even be questioned very hard. As the skeptics look into why Congress is holding hearings and evaluating the certain cui bono that attends such political antics, I marvel at the sense of almost childlike innocence with which these eminent authors accept the aftermath as some sort of scientifically cognizable evidence.

 

[arthwollipot]

They originally came here to try to investigate our chemtrail technology, and got increasingly frustrated when all their samples turned out to just be water ice with trace amounts of jet exhaust.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

This is what amuses me most about the contention that we skeptics are just too skeptical when it comes to these attestations that seem to demand an exotic explanation.

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

 

[arthwollipot]

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

Not that reality is boring. Reality is amazing!

 

[Apathia]

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

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 too shallow to pay attention never see.