ID:2686904
 
Just thought I'd leave this bowl of crow here for you all to enjoy. The Pentagon is going to release a report detailing everything they know about the phenomena. They've already admitted they have been chasing them for decades. Anyone who denies their existence is now in the nutter's corner. How's them apples?

Told you so.

~X
Probably drones, I doubt aliens spy on us.
What a weird timeline we're in where we hear that UFOs are actually real and people's responses are like, "Eh, whatever."
Saying "We've documented stuff we can't explain" is a lot different from "Aliens have visited." I expect the report to be pretty dry and uninteresting, except as fodder for a bunch of Vsauce videos.
mmm Vsauce...

I'm not surprised if there *are* aliens. Big fancy science-y math from as far back as the 60's (google the Drake Equation if you have a spare afternoon) has often stated that "we can't possibly be alone in our galaxy with all those potential habitable worlds out there".

I think it's very telling that after a few thousand years of indications of outer-space visitors, they still won't just come park in the middle of some neutral territory and say "hi folks! welcome to the neighborhood!" because we just haven't matured enough as a species yet.

And I can't really blame them. Until we get our heads out of our butts and stop doing stupid greedy stuff like wars and anal politics and self-serving interests, any sane space-faring intelligence probably just looks at us like an under-cooked microwave dinner: "<ding!> meh, it ain't ready yet - needs another 100-200 years".
They live.
Xooxer wrote:
How's them apples?

Reminder that "UFO" means "unidentified flying object". Obviously the Pentagon is going to be tracking flying objects that it can't identify. If they have no idea what it is, they rightly should assume the worst and take it to be a massive national security risk.

But there's still literally no reason to assume that it's aliens.
We use the term: "Unidentified aerial phenomena" now, because UFO gives people the impression that it's some kind of a spacecraft.

The reality is that the vast majority of the reports the pentagon documents are blips on radar, unconfirmed drone sightings, and strange disturbances that never get better than a blurry, shaky video recording.

The main problem with these reports, is that they are just that: Reports of what people have seen during an operation. Taking them as anything more than what they are: First hand attestations by ground, air, and radar crew of unknown phenomena is as of yet unwarranted. Sensationalism has already gotten away with these reports, and they are nothing new. Back in 2010, military brass started coming out and saying that UAPs were widespread. We've had reports of them coming from trained flight officers since the 1930s. Nothing new has happened. None of this is novel, and the only reason that people are running with the story is to meme.

I'm not saying it's definitively not aliens. I'm just saying there's no reason to think it is. The Jury's still out on whether Ted Cruz is an alien, though. I want to believe.
It's aliens. There's far more than blurry video and radar blips. There's up-close encounters of objects. There's video available clear enough to make out body shapes in windows. To make out faces. You know this. I posted it here over a decade ago. You dismissed it as outright phoney, because UFOs -and I will be calling them UFOs, modern insecurities be damned- aren't real. Well guess what sugar.

They're real.

They're not Chinese drones, or Russian spy craft. They're not weather baloons or misidentified aeroplanes, rocket launches, or drones.

They're alien.

You used this argument against me before. I wield it like an angry god now.

Occam's Razor.

No other explaination is simpler than aliens. None.


Off Off-Topic: Nice to see you guys again.
In response to Xooxer
Xooxer wrote:
You used this argument against me before. I wield it like an angry god now.

You inspire me, I BELIEVEEE!
I appreciate your conviction, Xoox. Welcome back.

EDIT: I also don't believe we've ever talked about aliens. I remember the bigfoot and 9/11 thread. I remember the one about the moderators being nazis. I do not recall the alien thread at all.
In response to Xooxer
Personally if I saw a video claiming to show an alien craft well enough to see windows in it, and see body shapes in those windows, I'd be combing through Captain Disillusion archives to figure out if any obvious video trickery was used and if I didn't find any I'd just ask him about it.
In response to Xooxer
Xooxer wrote:

Off Off-Topic: Nice to see you guys again.

You as well sir!

In response to Xooxer
Xooxer wrote:
I posted it here over a decade ago. You dismissed it as outright phoney, because UFOs -and I will be calling them UFOs, modern insecurities be damned- aren't real. Well guess what sugar.

When *you* say "UFO" you mean "alien spacecraft". Those aren't real (in the sense that with near certainty no alien spacecraft has ever visited earth). When the Pentagon says "UFO" they mean "an object in flight which we are unable to identify". It's extremely unsurprising those would be real and most people would expect it.

That's why you say we changed our stance on UFOs. We're using the same term to talk about two conceptually very distinct things, and the evaluation of whether one of those ideas is real differs quite a bit from the other usage.
If aliens were going to travel from some faraway planet, I'd assume that it's less likely they figured out faster-than-light travel and more likely they had a clean nuclear fusion-powered vessel and some form of cryostasis.

In which case to travel thousands or millions of light years would almost certainly be an act of desperation due to their own resource depletion, dying star, etc. They would have viewed our planet as it was thousands or millions of years ago before charting a course and, on arrival, would be greatly disappointed with the state it's in now. Worse, we would treat them as unwelcome, and they would view us as competition.

So not to tout the tired sci-fi "aliens destroying everything," but I'd be pretty sure they would want to wipe out humans and/or relegate us to some concentration camps or similar so they could be the top of the food chain here.

The UFOs are probably the octopuses. Those are obviously an alien species and by now we've certainly littered the oceans well enough for them to build aircraft. Probably out of plastic, given how horribly metal corrodes in salt water. I'm sure they pop up every now and then to see if we've completely wiped ourselves out or if they need to stay in the oceans a little longer. /shrug
For me, it's all a matter of presentation of evidence, authoritative sourcing, precision of language, objectivity of findings, and chain of custody of evidence.

First hand attestations are inherently not objective. First hand accounts are good when they contain information on reproducible phenomena. Unfortunately, UAP reports by their very nature are not reproducible.

The other issue I have, is that the groups putting out reports that have fantastic evidence on this topic are always lacking in the credibility, authority, precision, or objectivity department. That could one day be hyperbole. I could even be wrong. But unfortunately, the existence of fraud on a topic gives all things that come after require that much more care for how they are presented.

I think the key misunderstanding about skepticism is that what we're saying is basically just: "These things don't exist", when in reality, skepticism is merely the position that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence in order to be justifiable.

If clear videos of spacecraft existed where we could see into the ships and see non-human pilots and crew, I can't help but think anyone making this claim would understand just how unbelievable the claim would be to anyone who hadn't seen the footage for themselves, and would make every effort to share this footage alongside their claim, as well as show a clear chain of custody and authority supporting the veracity of the footage. I would also think any rational person would, lacking the supporting evidence, understand that sharing the claim without the supporting evidence would damage their credibility to a degree that is irreparable. So you'd really have to consider for a minute, the kind of person who would willfully make those claims without any concern or respect for their own credibility, or the faculties of others. Is it a good-faith lack of ability to understand this, is it a difference in values, or is it a bad faith manipulation technique?

It doesn't matter if you are right if you don't show your work. Chains of reasoning aren't evidence. Asking other people to suspend their disbelief isn't evidence. Like with the 9/11 truther thread, like with the bigfoot thread, like with DC pizza restaurant theories, like with flat earth theory, like with any other alternative idea about how the world works, it's not about whether you can convince other people that your ideas are true. It's about whether you can be exhaustively, objectively, precisely certain that your ideas are not resting on a foundation of fraud, leaps of logic, disproven hoaxes, con artist lies, gish-gallop post hoc kettle logic, and bad reality fanfiction.

I think every time we have one of these discussions, we only establish that one party is convinced, while the others assert the price of admission to those ideas has not been met for the rest of the audience.


I'm not against the idea of life elsewhere in the universe. It's basically a mathematical certainty. I'm not against the notion of exotic physics that would violate general relativity --I'm actually suspicious that general relativity is a fundamentally flawed theory, though I don't have the evidence to say with certainty that it absolutely is. I'm not even against the notion that extra-dimensional travel is possible, or time travel is possible. I just don't believe there's sufficient evidence to assert that it is, and there's currently more reason to believe that it isn't, despite the certainty of our understanding of reality being woefully incomplete and in many places wrong.

I guess the key takeaway is that nobody here is gonna come out and say: "You are irrevocably wrong, Xooxer. Aliens don't exist and have never visted earth." I think they are just going to say that what we've seen doesn't yet convince us to join team close encounters.
#TeamProbed
The takeaway here is that unexplained phenomena exist and happen all the time, and that's what the government is basically saying. Those unexplained phenomena can be, and by Occam's razor must be, a lot of unrelated things. It's possible alien visitation could be one of those things, in the sense that we don't know what we don't know and have no way of gauging how possible it actually is. But the alien theory requires a lot of underlying things to be true and is such an extraordinary leap that it requires extraordinary amounts of supporting evidence (including, as Ter mentioned, strict attention to chain of custody).

A better way to look at all this is that if a lot of data were to get dumped on the public, some really smart people could look at maybe 10-20% of the cases and figure out highly plausible explanations within established science. Bear in mind ball lightning is still mostly unsolved and that falls into the same category of unexplained phenomena. There's still a lot we don't know, though it's possible we can learn a lot from data that, for understandable security reasons, has hitherto been kept under wraps.

And by security reasons, I mean stuff like: Support group 1443 was running operations at specific coordinates, and the video they captured can't be shared because it might show important information about tactical capabilities or where they were or what we know about hostile actors and their activities. Where OpSec is involved it's safer to redact or classify the crap out of everything.
Unless the threat to national security outweighs the threat to our ego and credibility, we won't know much about UAPs or UFOs. By the time we find out what the potential threat is, it may be too late to do something about it. This could be analogous to the Manhattan Project, in which the level of destruction achieved was greater than almost anyone thought was possible. Nuclear weapons, like some very specific examples of UAPs, could be described as a form of technological leapfrogging. When such technological leapfrogging takes on the form of a military project, the results can be truly devastating.

At this time, we simply don't have enough information to identify or determine the origin of those UAPs that could represent a potential threat. We could be looking at a variety of different unmarked, unidentified vehicles with a wide variety of different capabilities. What we can do is speculate on the behavior and intentions of these specific types of UAPs.

Again, the following is just speculation, and I don't claim to have sufficient evidence to support this, but in the context of it being a potential threat, this is still worth discussing. Unfortunately, the lack of a more specific term or classification than UAP makes this difficult to discuss. For example, what would you even call a "vehicle" that can fly at hypersonic speeds, but is also submersible? Further, could some of these be single-stage-to-orbit, submersible spaceplanes? It's far more likely that these are unique cases being falsely linked together. These "vehicles" tend to behave as an adversary would, testing their own capabilities against the capabilities of whoever happens to be in control of that particular airspace at the time. You could almost say that the "vehicles" are maneuvering to assert their dominance and superiority, if not for the fact that they are unmarked and nobody has claimed ownership. While it makes for an impressive display of technology, it's also somewhat cowardly. Perhaps the country of origin has made great strides in this one area, but lacks the power to back it up in a real conflict. This could represent a technological leap in guerrilla warfare that is unlike anything we have seen before. This makes more sense when you consider the reports of electromagnetic interference associated with these "vehicles".

Still, the origin is more likely to be a global superpower than not. The problem is that all possible answers are going to be strange and unusual. That's just the nature of what we are dealing with. I don't believe that there is any evidence to suggest that the Earth or any part of the Solar System has ever been explored by extrasolar beings in any way shape or form. The threatening UAPs that seem to be vehicles are almost certainly the very dangerous products of very real, human adversaries. The behavior is just far too obsessive to realistically be anything other than human. That isn't to say that there is no sufficiently advanced civilization of extrasolar beings out there. There is almost certainly a number of them within the Milky Way and many other galaxies. They probably don't even know that our civilization exists, or if they do, they might not wish to expend the energy necessary to even try communicating with us. I just hope that human civilization gets the opportunity to make contact before going extinct, so that maybe someone out there could tell our story, and all of the lessons that come with it.

Here is a drone that seems like it could have evolved into something like these unidentified vehicles, especially since it's described as having a very similar use case:

Perhaps some of these UAPs could be a more advanced version of it, launched from some form of submarine aircraft carrier. I could also see it being scaled up to something more powerful, like a submersible spaceplane. Of course that still wouldn't explain the ability to stop and hover like a helicopter, unless three very different vehicles are being combined into one. The lack of any sound or contrail is also very difficult to explain.

There actually have been attempts at submersible planes. Here is an example, but it was really underwhelming and was never completed:
ability to stop and hover like a helicopter

Multiverse, check out the Martin VBAT. Multi-role turboprops are old tech that's not even under the military secret umbrella.

Long-stare drones were sort of the wave of the future back in the early 2000s. Everybody and their mother was developing them in secret, and back then nobody even really knew that they existed. The "Beast of Kandahar" was a closely guarded secret at the time, and was reported as a UFO hundreds of times during its lifetime... And then we crashed one in Iran and the whole drone program suddenly 'materialized' out of that diplomatic incident.
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