UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

Great article! Effectively demolishes the tired old weather balloon canard of the skeptics. Once again it shows how skeptics cherry pick a few traits of the object while wholly ignoring others. In this case the high speed velocity, abrupt direction changes, and sudden counter maneuvers of the "tic tac." No weather balloon can move like that..

 

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Well except there's no mention of "high speed velocity" or "abrupt direction changes" in that article.
Pretty hypocritical (but typical) to drag skeptics for cherry-picking while you're busy trying to rewrite the narrative.

 

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Keep up with the thread. All these traits of the tic tac object were mentioned in the pilots' accounts.

 

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This article did not do what you said it did. You misrepresented it. In a post where you're accusing others of misrepresenting things. That's hypocrisy right there.

 

I never said the article mentioned those traits. I said they were traits of the tic tac object. And they are. Nuff said on this. Go nit pic somebody else's post for imagined flaws.

 

Yes you did.

No you didn't.

"Great article! Effectively demolishes the tired old weather balloon canard of the skeptics.
Once again it shows how skeptics cherry pick a few traits of the object while wholly ignoring others.
In this case the high speed velocity, abrupt direction changes..."

 

Yeah anyone reading with an objective mindset can't come away thinking "Mick was right all along". He flunked it badly. A key passage:

"The key here is that David Fravor states the incident lasted around five minutes. All four air-men and -women present were specifically trained to intercept and identify enemy aircraft. It would be extremely improbable for all of them, one being a veteran commander and STFI program graduate, to pursue a weather balloon or slow-moving drone at length, never overtake it, never identify it and, most notably, fail to gain a positional advantage against it for five minutes. For some of these same individuals to describe the maneuvers of a balloon to be beyond current technology compounds that extreme improbability."

I also like the first comment below the actual article:

pharao_nasty10p
"What kind of idiot thinks a commander that’s been flying his whole life mistakes a balloon for a intelligent moving craft. Fucking hell mate you think that’s how America wins wars with commanders that have been flying there whole life that can’t tell what a fucking balloon is. You got to be quicker then that pa"

Indeed. The one thing lacking was omission of the tic tac's subsequent ultra fast 'vanishing trick' recounted by both pilots. And it's astonishing reappearance at the prearranged CAP point some sixty miles away. Way ahead of the dumbfounded aircrew. Additionally, the Princeton radar operator who alerted them ("you won't believe this...") of it's presence there 'in real time'.

 

'' UFOs ARE craft of unknown origin and nature.''
That it seems is the view of a certain ''popular culture''
Here's Your own link provided by you (Magical Realist). Hands up those who spot the words ufos ARE craft in the first sentence of MR's own link.

''popular culture to refer more specifically to supposed observations of craft of extraterrestrial origin''.
ufo ARE craft = Supposed observations of craft.

 

I think that many people embrace and value the idea that the universe is still mysterious at its core, that it still has the power to surprise us. I most definitely feel that way myself. It's what's motivated my lifelong interest in philosophy. It's the idea that we don't currently understand every aspect of the reality around us and opposition to the idea that everything that exists (or that can possibly exist) already has its own little conceptual box into which it can be dismissed and made safe by those who imagine that they have everything figured out and themselves to be masters (at least conceptually) of all that is and all that can possibly be.

I'm not convinced that there is a single "science community" that adopts a single opinion on things like this. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists out there (or however many there are) and I'd expect a wide variety of views. One problem with these latest "UAP" data (the 144 cases or the 80 of them that were observed by multiple media) is that almost all of the details are classified. They have a lot of data that has never leaked and that they aren't releasing. About all that outsiders like us have to go on is the preliminary assessment that they released publicly. And their preliminary 'conclusion' is essentially what I was arguing for earlier in the thread regarding the tic-tacs: That something appears to have been there and they don't know what it was. (Amazing how much resistance that rather innocuous idea has received.)

Yes, that's an objection to the simplistic school-book descriptions of scientific method that require repeatable controlled experiments. Some sorts of phenomena don't lend themselves to that kind of approach. They are unique events, one-offs that can't be reproduced on demand in a laboratory. About all that science can do is observe them on their schedule whenever they do decide to happen. So what we get are observation reports along with whatever instrumental data might have been brought to bear.

Yes, that's why I've more or less checked out of this thread. It's going in circles and is just repeating things said 50 pages ago. It is a fascinating topic though, on so many levels, so I keep looking in.

I prefer not to use the word "proof". Proofs are only found in mathematics and logic. And there, only in tremendously simplified abstract situations where the truth of premises is assumed and rules of inference explicitly defined. Very artificial. Real life is far more complex.

What eye-witness testimonies are is evidence. Eye-witness testimony is probably the most common kind of evidence introduced in legal trials.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre

Precisely because they are evidence. But they aren't proof. There's no suggestion that what the witness says must necessarily be true. But it's presumably true unless it is rebutted somehow, by contradictory evidence of some kind. Then it's up to the jury to decide what they find most credible.

In this thread we have Fravor's account, some leaked video, and the UAP Preliminary Assessment. And we have a whole lot of attempts to rebut that rather fragmentary body of evidence. Almost all of the rebuttals are merely speculations, assertions that this or that aspect might have been due to this or that. We haven't seen any convincing evidence that those aspects were in fact those alternative explanations (perceptual errors, cavorting whales, flocks of birds, radar glitches, untrained operators...) only that in the imaginations of some people, they might have been. Apart from JamesR's rather weak statistical argument, I haven't seen any attempt to explain how all of these (purely speculative) faults came together and cohered (the "comedy of errors" theory) in such a way as to create the false impression that something was there that really wasn't.

I think that a good part of the "skeptics" motivation in this thread is the underlying (false) idea that UFO/UAP means 'alien spaceship', combined with the a-priori assumption that 'alien spaceship' is such an outlandish idea that it can't be true. So q.e.d., UFO/UAP's can't be real. And that in turn seems to justify the idea that the mere speculative possibility of any alternative explanation, regardless of whether there is any evidence for it, and regardless of the consilience objection, must be more likely than the idea that the UFO/UAP was real.

 

I sense from this that you are more in the camp of 'it's presumed to be something exotic unless it can be shown to be mundane.


Don't you think the more rational approach is 'it's presumed to be mundane (though still unidentified ) unless it can be shown to be exotic'?

No. Not can't be true.

Cavorting whales, flocks of birds, radar glitches, untrained operators are - we all grant - outlandish ideas - but they're orders of magnitude less outlandish than alien spaceships.

Even UFO enthusiasts know for a fact that operators do make mistakes, that radar glitches do happen, that flocks of birds do show up on radar, that whales do cavort. None of these things individually are contested by UFO enthusiasts, just that's it's outlandish that, in a few rare circumstances, they combine to result in a UAP sighting.

Skeptics agree it's outlandish. But they simply point out that an entire space faring civilization and/or technology having to be invented to explain the same thing is - again - orders of magnitude more outlandish.

I think UFO enthusiasts are deceived by a perceptual error of large numbers. A one-in-a-billion likelihood is hard to tell from a one-in-a-trillion likelihood. The one-in-a-trillion likelihood has been ingrained by popularity over more than a half century than it seems much more plausible subjectively than it is objectively.

 

Is the idea that there could be alien life capable of such technology that makes it all seem outlandish, or that there's just no plausible way if such a civilization does exist, that its inhabitants could travel this far? I'm kind of in the latter group - I don't think it's outrageous to believe that super advanced technology exists (created by aliens, should such an advanced colony exist), I'm just skeptical that here on Earth, we would be able to detect it.

 

I think what seems outlandish to one is a result of what one's worldview is. Yazata summed it up nicely:

Being in the former group myself, and given the fact that there are literally thousands of reports of ufos over a stretch of 70 years, I don't see it as so outlandish that ufos have to be axiomatically denied in favor of flocks of birds. radar glitches, weather balloons, and pilot errors. There's no question in my mind that, based on the overwhelming evidence, we live in the kind of reality where such things can and do occur, even if they undermine our common sense of what is probable. Afterall, we live in a universe where conscious amd ingenius brains exist that have discovered science and mathematics. What is more outlandish and wooish than that? Perhaps our own worldview is in desperate need of updating.

 

It's the "skeptics" idea, so they will have to answer.

As for me, I'm inclined to agree with you. I think that life is so incredibly complex (an absolute masterpiece of nanotechnology on the atomic and molecular scale) that it's probably a rare occurrance out there in the universe. While I think that abiogenesis is possible, I'm inclined to think that it's so fortuitous that it doesn't happen all that often. Obviously this isn't something that I can say I know, it's merely my reaction to the complexities of cell and molecular biology.

Then look at the history of life on Earth. Life seems to have first appeared some 3.5-4 billion years ago. The Earth is only about 4.5 billion years old, so the relative suddenness of the appearance of life on Earth is a problem that still remains to be solved. But my point here is that from 3.5 billion years ago or so, till about 600 million years ago, life on Earth was entirely microorganisms. It's still a mystery why multicellular organisms appeared so suddenly and how most of the extant phyla (arthropods, chordates, molluscs...) were already in existence by 500 million years ago. Obviously some big event happened in the history of life and not only do we not know what it was, we don't know how likely it is that it will happen elsewhere too. We do know that life did perfectly well for some 3 billion years before it happened, so it isn't some kind of inevitability.

Once we had animals up and running some 500 million years ago, they did perfectly well without developing language or human-style intelligence until maybe something like a million years ago. Anatomically modern hominins are maybe 150,000 years old, not much more. So human beings are comparatively recent arrivals on the scene.

Then consider that most of human existence was spent as paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Agriculture and animal husbandry is only about 10,000 years old, cities only about 5,000, and the industrial revolution only about 250 years ago.

So... given this extended preface, I want to say

I think that the great majority of exoplanets are probably sterile. Ones with life (or something functionally analogous to life) are probably few and far between.

Of the exoplanets with life, I expect that most of them only possess microorganisms analogous to bacteria here.

Of the exoplanets with more complex life, I expect most of them won't have intelligent life.

And of the exceedingly rare exoplanet with intelligent life, few will host space travelling civilizations.

In other words, even given the billions of stars in this galaxy alone, I expect that there are only a handful of space traveling civilizations in our galaxy. And they are probably separated from each other by tens of thousands of light years so that they are unlikely to ever contact each other.

I want to emphasize that none of this is something that I know for a fact. It's all just my speculation. But it does shape what I do and don't expect.

 

I can't make it any more plain than I have:

Cavorting whales: Fact. Even UFO enthusiasts acknowledge this.
Flocks of birds: Fact. Even UFO enthusiasts acknowledge this.
Radar glitches: Fact. Even UFO enthusiasts acknowledge this.
Untrained operators: Fact. Even UFO enthusiasts acknowledge this.
The list is extensive.

The only thing that requires even the slightest iota of speculation is several of these things happening simultaneously.

Whereas alien / other-dimensional / time-travelling pilots, etc. None of these things are fact. Furthermore they require a supposition of pre-existence of an entire civilization to support them as an explanation.

So I have to ask: if you can stretch your imagination to encompass something as vast as an entire civilization we don't know about, and consider that plausible - why can't you seem to stretch your brain to encompass a couple of things - things we already know do exist - to happen at the same time?

It's analogous to saying I can't accept that five white cars could all pull up at the same traffic light; but I'm happy to bet my paycheque that fifty eleven-wheeled motorcycles could pull up next to me.

That's called wishful thinking. And it's irrational.

 

Considering the “tic tac” video as having the potential to be more convincing (to me) over other random sightings, that doesn’t mean one subscribes to any and all ideas about alien life. I’m admittedly skeptical but it’s not entirely fair to lump all claims of alien UFO sightings into a bucket labeled “anything goes.”

No one here is suggesting that whatever notion someone has about alien life, it’s totally fine to accept it as plausible. lol There are limits.

 

But, if even a single account were enough to have one conclude that the culprits are "probably" alien, then surely it would stand to reason that so many other accounts could be explained by the same aliens, would it not?
It's kind of an 'in for a penny, in for a pound' thing, isn't it?

In my eleven-wheeled motorcycle example, you would be concluding that you really did see one eleven-wheel motorcycle, so assuming a second or third one might out there has just become way, way more plausible.

 

That's certainly the idea.
But we need facts in order to update it.
Updating our world view before we had the facts - that's what led to superstition and religion in the first place.
Hopefully, we've learned that lesson by now.

 

We have no idea of how fast or slow our Human Intellect Evolution is . We have no other beings that are our equal to compare ourselves with .

They can detect it . Radar etc. You just don't know that they can , until now .

 

Tired old strawman: '' assumption that 'alien spaceship' is such an outlandish idea that it can't be true.''
What's ''argued'' on this thread is the offered ''evidence'' , and not that such ideas are ''outlandish'' and can't be true.

 

Because the account the eyewitness gives is frequently backed up with corroborating evidence

Still does not understand what evidence is

But at least narrowed down to craft. No one appears to wonder about the small size. But when size does come up the come back is "They are from the Mother Ship"

Any resources being put into looking for the Mother Ship? Thought so none

** Of topic. Been getting back to Darwin after my enforced 18 months Bali holiday*

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