UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

Please show me where that happened. If I've misunderstood you, I'd love to understand.

Do you expect everyone to perfectly understand you at all times?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Given our history of engagement this thread, I see another such round just going in recriminatory circles with nothing gained at the end. Instead, here's my 'position statement' on UFO phenomena:

Everyone agrees the great majority of UFO reports have natural explanations. Nature of the 5% to 10% or so (estimates vary) of unexplained cases is the question. A large number of the unexplained incidents involve highly trained and responsible personnel. For instance police officers, commercial airline pilots/co-pilots & other flight-crew, military personnel especially flight-crew of strategic bombers or fighter aircraft. Or crew/security personnel at strategic missile installations - where bizarre, temporary malfunctions crippling the sites functioning and coinciding with visually confirmed UFO visitations are too common to have been fluke coincidences. Also many naval crew on both surface craft and submarines. Moreover, as per that 1952 Washington DC 'flap', or 2004 Nimitz incident(s), joint visual and confirmed reliable radar detection - both ground-based and aboard military aircraft, is frequently involved. Or sonar in the case of logged submarine incidents. In many other instances a UFO or multiple of such is witnessed and independently reported by hundreds of ordinary folk, sometimes spanning a wide geographical area and time-span, later shown to correspond to a consistent flight path. Other more close-encounter 'landing and disembarking' incidents are on record but abundance of the purely arial (or undersea) ones is enough.
MR could cite various other phenomena relating to 'physical effects' e.g. electrical failures that self-remedy once an encounter has ended. I will leave the list as above.

Recall all such fall under the '5%' unexplained category. Nothing one could sensibly ascribe to hoax, delusion/delirium/mass-hallucination/hysteria, or ordinary physical phenomena e.g. clouds, Venus, meteors etc. Doesn't take devoting a good proportion of one's life to studying UFO encounters, to reasonably conclude that many decidedly unnatural events really happened.

Official responses to such have a track record of proven disinfo, or story-changing in reaction to challenges by independent investigators. And according to testimony of many retired military personnel, commercial aviation pilots, and similar, there is a consistent pattern of coercion - to keep quiet under pain of thinly veiled threats of 'severe consequences' if going public. 1980 Rendlesham Forest incidents and aftermath an (in)famous example of both an implausible official 'explanation', and coercion of personnel involved to keep quiet. Outside of such direct threats, self-censoring occurs among ordinary witnesses - aware of a prior pattern of public ridicule and ostracizing.
Hence the true number of witnessed events is likely much greater than the official estimates.

Regardless of the true figure, the accumulated sheer numbers of on-the-record reliably reported incidents leaves me in no doubt they are on the whole real not imagined.

What strikes just as much is the bizarre diversity - already remarked on in e.g. #1134. So much weird and wonderful diversity in appearance and behavior, the notion these could be physical, alien-piloted space-faring craft from some other planetary system is imo just not tenable. Quite apart from other problems associated with actual space-travel between the stars. Especially the multi-colored flashing light sightings come across as carnival attractions in the sky. Intentionally so imo. The one common characteristic running through all such descriptions is the effect on human witnesses. Awe, fear, bemusement and so on - generating in turn a host of diverse and conflicting opinions and reactions in the greater population.
Just the kind of results entities with a mischievous or at best inquisitive streak could be expected to generate. Prod diverse members the 'Earth colony' in various ways and closely monitor results. And imo these same mischievous entities are behind other '5% unexplained' category 'supernatural' phenomena such as hauntings, 'past lives experiences' (implanted false memories), 'things raining from the sky', some but not all 'mystery lights' etc. As stated in earlier posts/threads, I make no claim to understand who/what such entities/beings are, other than likely not 'material' as we understand it.

That's my considered position. For those with a committed materialist position, only official 'scientific explanations' will suffice. However silly such are when examined closely. The one 'rational' alternative one could cook up is that most if not every such '5%' incident is really part of an ongoing covert government campaign designed to test effectiveness of mass-disinformation. Hence lots of credible sounding disinfo agents out there. That prospect puts most UFO debunkers in a bind, since for them hand-in-glove with UFO debunking is debunking of any and all 'conspiracy theories'. Hence the need at all costs to resort to typically thin and implausible 'natural' explanations.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

And where did I intentionally distort any of that? I just said it wasn't compelling of space alien origins. It's less compelling of some undefined entity.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Not interested in raking over the embers. Like I said - prior experience tells me it will go nowhere useful. Best to just move on. As for the last bit, believe whatever makes sense to you.

 

I don't think that I'd go that far. Presumably whatever is behind the truly mysterious subset of UFO cases conforms to the principles that seemingly govern this universe, physics and logic. (I don't literally know that, but it's my working assumption.) I'm not a 'materialist' in the narrow sense since I accept the reality of abstract entities like numbers. But I guess that I would classify myself as a 'physicalist' in the broad sense. (And no, I can't explain where physics and logic come from or why they seem to hold true in this universe.)

I don't have a lot of problem with that. The thing that the self-styled "skeptics" seem to often miss is that the fact that a 'official scientific explanation' is currently lacking doesn't imply that the phenomenon to be explained can't exist. It just implies that we can't currently explain it.

The lack of an 'official scientific explanation' doesn't call for ridicule, anger and dismissal. The biggest problem with the self-styled "skeptics" is how they turn an epistemological problem at the edges of the philosophy of science into a misguided moral crusade. Those who disagree with them somehow become 'evil', something to be suppressed and silenced in the name of saving rationality.

The problem with that one is that UFOs have been reported in the skies since ancient times. The Romans used to see what they described as glowing shields up there. The ancient Roman emperors lacked the technology to pull that kind of thing off, unless they somehow recruited the assistance of their gods. I don't think that the technology currently exists to reproduce the behavior of some of the contemporary UFO sightings either.

So I feel reasonably confident in saying that something physical is happening in some small subset of cases, and that it isn't human beings doing it. As to what is doing it, I have no idea.

One theory I like is time-travelers. Of course that's just a science-fiction speculation and I can't really justify it as anything more than that. It would explain their curious reluctance to announce themselves or to make themselves better known, since doing so might alter their own past and destroy their own world. But presumably they know about the UFO phenomenon in our time and are safe as long as they conform to it (since they are the ones whose time-visits created it). It would also answer the common question: if time-travel is possible, where are the time-travelers?

 

This is an excerpt from an interview with reknowned ufo researcher Jacques Vallee. It highlights the subtlety and complexity of the ufo phenomenon..

Jacques Vallee:"In truth, I think we are dealing with something that is both technological and psychic, and seems to be able to manipulate other dimensions.

This is neither wishful thinking nor personal speculation on my part. It’s a conclusion that comes from interviewing critical witnesses, and then listening to what they have to say. And what they have to say is not that they’ve seen space craft coming down from the sky and then returning to the sky. More often, what they have reported is that they have seen something appear on the spot, take on a physical shape, sometimes even changing shape, and then disappear, sometimes faster than the eye can trace. On occasion, it will disappear in a closed space by either becoming transparent and then vanishing or by concentrating into a single point. An example that’s often given is like turning off a television set; the image goes “zoom!” to a single point.

I don’t have a good explanation for the question of why the technology seems to appear in a form that uses images from our own unconscious. I’d be kidding if I said that I understand that. There are cases of repeated observations where the phenomenon begins by being amorphous and then starts matching the expectations of the witnesses. There are two ways to deal intellectually with that: One is to say it’s a phenomenon of the brain which is very good at reading recognizable images in amorphous things like clouds and ink blots. So, perhaps the witnesses are getting used to this phenomenon and are starting to read things into it. But that’s not the only explanation. It may be that the phenomenon itself is using our reactions to it in order to turn into something that we expect or understand. We may be carrying a matrix of imagery that it somehow picks up. A good example of that is Fatima. The apparitions witnessed at Fatima did not start in 1917. They started two years before. Some of the same kids were involved, and there were also other witnesses. What they saw was a globe of light. Then they saw a globe of light with some type of being inside. Then they started calling the being an angel, and then the angel started communicating with them and gave them a prayer. It developed in stages, and culminated in 1917, but even then the virgin Mary wasn’t seen by everyone who was present.

In contemporary UFO cases, you also have objects that are seen by part of the crowd but not by others. I was doing a radio program about a year ago, and somebody called from Sacramento and gave me exactly that type of report. He had been near a lake with his family, and he witnessed an object come over the lake and there were people around him that saw it, and there were people that just couldn’t see it. What we’re dealing with is a very interesting phenomenon that has both psychic aspects and physical aspects...

Interviewer:Why did you decide to concentrate on so many case studies? We have thousands of case studies. What good is a hundred more going to do?

Jacques Vallee: I think that’s a fair question. Number one, I didn’t publish all the case studies. I just published selected ones that illustrate certain points. What I wanted to do was to start gradually from the physical side by focusing on cases that involved physical traces. What I wanted to do was to go back to basics, proceed step-by-step, and find out what we know about the phenomenon. To do this, I concentrated on cases that no scientist can refute. The first case in the body of the book is a case in which there were two French submarines anchored in the harbor at Martinique. The submarine tender and all the sailors and officers saw an object that came over the harbor and made three large loops before vanishing from the spot only to reappear five-minutes later. It then did the whole thing in reverse and went away. There were something like two hundred and fifty witnesses. I’ve had several personal conversations with one of the witnesses who was the first helmsman of the French fleet of the Mediterranean. He was somebody who had very good eyesight, and was a darn good observer. Not only did he see this, but he had time to go up to the tower and come back with six pairs of binoculars that he gave to his fellow officers. All of them watched the thing through binoculars. There is also a weather observatory on the hill overlooking the harbor, and all the people in the weather observatory saw it. You can’t say that this didn’t happen. You can’t say that it was a meteor or a comet or any of that. I’m trying to use cases like that to establish the physical reality of a phenomenon, and then continue from there.

I also selected cases where I went to the site expecting to find something that would be easy to dismiss only to find a complex set of circumstances that ultimately led me to the conclusion that it was a real UFO case after all. I also included cases where I expected to find evidence pointing to a real UFO and found, instead, a trivial explanation. And, finally, there are cases where, frankly, I don’t know what happened.."

---https://www.ourstrangeplanet.com/the-san-luis-valley/guest-editorials/jacques-vallee-interview/

 

So you can't or won't support your own accusation. Thanks. That tells me how fruitful a conversation with you is likely to be.

 

What were the accusations?

Attacks? "Oo oo oo Banana" or something doesn't seem very cordial itself.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

My view is there is some other mode of reality, and intelligences occupying it, outside of or 'parallel' to and likely encompassing our universe as a subset. Of course it will be governed by physical laws but ones different. at least in some aspects, to ours. It is necessarily speculative but best fits imo in explaining the whole swathe of paranormal phenomena that defy conventional explanations. OTOH it's conceivable we are the hapless subjects of material beings from afar who have mastered cloaking technology perfectly and so on. But I think that avenue leads to a dead end for other reasons I won't go into here.

I quite agree and threw it up merely as a conjectured 'logical' preserving 'natural explanations' in a sense. But is unacceptable as an out that for those debunkers who are boxed in, owing to their parallel commitment to disparaging the idea governments and their agencies can consistently lie i.e. engage in conspiratorial/underhanded behavior as a matter of continued policy.

I reject that option for several reasons. Even if GR were correct - and I have pointed elsewhere to why it is not, the consensus among GR folks is that it does not permit time travel in practice, despite unrealistic solutions to EFE's allowing 'wormhole travel' and the like.

But at rock bottom, the so-called grandfather paradox and endless variants present imo and of many others an impenetrable logical barrier to time travel by any means whatsoever. There are some physicists that will offer a simple example of two or three particles that can in principle self-interact in such a way that a 'time loop' can occur without creating paradox. Every such example I'm aware of assumes things never demonstrated to happen, and never offers a way to extend the scenario beyond the few particle regime.

 

Well, the usual response around here seems to be calling people stupid. Think I'll stick with my onomatopoeia.

 

Well, if you were called "stupid" by certain participants, you'd have a point.

But, I can't say I've seen it as I don't read certain peoples posts anyway.

 

Here's a third video just released by the Pentagon showing an oval shaped object being tracked by the camera of a Navy F/A 18 jet in 2015. Note the excitement of the pilots as they react to it:

https://www.express.co.uk/news/weir...r-mysterious-oval-US-military-Pentagon-aliens

 

A better one - where you get to relive it again and again and again:
Hypersonic seagull?

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

It's the planet Venus in speedy retrograde.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Interesting theory. It's a hard scientific fact there are no swamps out in the ocean - so I guess that rules out a certain gas as explanation.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

repiticious cycles of replicable outcomes...

 

Seventy years, no evidence.

 

A subtle and incorrect change from the parrot-bot repetition "Seventy years, no proof."
Of course one's standard of what constitutes acceptable evidence may be more, or less, reasonable.
To rephrase yet again: No amount of evidence will ever suffice if it goes against a hardened and contrary ideological commitment.

 

Yeah, but the UFOers still keep trying.

 

260 compelling ufo cases says otherwise:

http://www.ufoevidence.org/Cases/CaseView.asp?section=StandardCase

Then there's these photos: