New UFO book getting a lot of attention

[Gary C]

I listened to skeptic Michael Shermer's weekly podcast last week where he interviewed the author. The book is a general history of the past 70 years of the UFO phenomena in the US including some discussion of known investigations by the US Gov't.
The author's personal views came across as described in this thread, he feels the unsolved edge cases deserve more study.

If you do a search for the author's name and "the Michael Shermer Show" you should find it easily enough along with quite a few other episodes dealing with UFOs and skepticism. I found this site after listening to Shermer's interview with Mick.

 

[Chunder]

That's typically not possible.
I think you are imagining that sensor A detects something in its LIZ, and then someone remembers sensor B, looks at its stored data, and identifies the phenomenon.
But the collective system of sensor A and B has a LIZ of its own, and there's nothing that can remove it without creating a new LIZ.
The characteristics of the LIZ change over time, but it won't go away.

Spoiler: xkcd cartoon

View attachment 64359
ALERT: Human 910-25J-1Q38 has created a Youtube channel. Increase erratic jerkiness of flying by 30% until safely out of range.
https://xkcd.com/2572/

I'm not explaining it correctly.

New systems / sensors - recalibration / redirection - immediate escalation / intervention are examples of where higher quality information could be gained of an anomalous future event, with the data obtained meaning it couldn't be said the event sat in the LIZ, whereas it would have done without the changes.

Such as the recalibration of aerial defence systems to pick up Chinese balloons that occurred recently.

In your example sensor B moved the event out of the LIZ. Sensor A and B will always have a LIZ but if either provide sufficient information to identify the phenomenon then the information didn't come from that zone and the event itself cannot be said to exist within the LIZ.

The cartoon example assumes the event remains in sensor A's LIZ but if the ship remained at the same distance it would be in the HIZ.

I am aware of the correlation between quality of data and likelihood of successfully identifying a prosaic explanation but to a certain extent that should be expected, it is the outliers (if any) that are of interest.

 

[JMartJr]

I am aware of the correlation between quality of data and likelihood of successfully identifying a prosaic explanation but to a certain extent that should be expected, it is the outliers (if any) that are of interest.

Would you agree, though, that IF there was a new/anomalous/non-prosaic explanation for a residue of cases, some of them should be expected to fall into the High Information Zone of current sensors? If that IS the case, then we should have good data already. If that is not the case, it seems to me that becomes very strong evidence that there is no "there" there*, and being able to look further away into the current LIZ is not going to change that.


*Unless one posits something like "they know where our LIZ is, and purposefully stay in it because they want us to detect them but don't want us to identify/characterize them, because reasons. And if you accept that sort of premise, then pushing out the LIZ does nothing for us, they'll know we did that and if they continue to want to tease us but not confirm anything, they'll just fly a bit further out to compensate -- and we start to have an unfalsifiable hypothesis on our hands!

 

[NorCal Dave]

I am aware of the correlation between quality of data and likelihood of successfully identifying a prosaic explanation but to a certain extent that should be expected, it is the outliers (if any) that are of interest.

Not piling on here Chunder, just following up on JMart's comment above. If the outliers are of interest, what constitutes an "outlier"? This seems to be gist of the argument.

If there is some new assortment or configuration of sensors that eliminates the LIZ, then all things are "identified" right? That means we would know what the "things" are. Balloons, stars, satellites, planes and other prosaic explanations. If something can't be identified because there is insufficient data, isn't it back in the LIZ? The other alternative seems to be something like "we've identified this as unidentifiable". Not sure how that works.

And if we are talking about NHI, then yes maybe they can stay in the LIZ for whatever reason. Mendel's cartoon (post#40), while humorous, can be considered a take on the serious claim by abductee researcher John Mack:

The intelligence that appears to be at work here simply does not operate that way. Despite its brutality, it is also subtle, inviting, reminding, permeating our culture from the bottom up as well as the top down, perhaps opening our consciousness in a way that avoids a conclusion, different from the ways of knowing we traditionally require. It is an intelligence that provides enough evidence that something profoundly important is at work, but it does not offer the kinds of proof that would satisfy an exclusively empirical, rationalistic way of knowing.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/36488.John_E_Mack

If "it" is beyond our way of knowing and operates outside of a scientific epistemological system, then no array of sensors and no amount of study will find it.

 

[Mendel]

If "it" is beyond our way of knowing and operates outside of a scientific epistemological system, then no array of sensors and no amount of study will find it.

Angels and time travelers have been mentioned before.
If you're willing to engage in wild speculations, lots of "explanations" are possible, albeit unfounded.

"different from the ways of knowing we traditionally require" is a red flag for bunk.

 

[jdog]

I'm reminded of Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM radio show back in the '90s. One night he might agreeably have a discussion with someone about how UFOs were visitors from another dimension. The next night it might someone else who believed they're solely from Arcturus. And later in the week they'd be a hyper-advanced species that's been living inside Jupiter all along. There was endless room for speculation, no evidence for any conclusion, and Art entertained them all seriously.

At some point these speculations should rule each other out -- the visitors can't be both secret lizard people from the hollow earth *and* time-traveling spirits of our future descendants.

 

[airbagmoments]

Graff is now on "Morning Joe" selling his book. (It's probably a repeat from before, since it's Christmas morning.)

 

[Scaramanga]

I haven't read the book, but the premise seems to be that while the vast majority of UFO/UAP claims are bunk, enough of them are mysterious to warrant serious research by scientists outside of the military and government agencies.

No....you really can't conduct scientific research on that basis.

And the reason why is that every time a 'best ever' case gets debunked, believers simply come up with ' oh, but we've still got this pile of mysterious stuff over here '. It's like a conveyor belt on which as fast as old stuff gets debunked, new 'mysterious stuff' gets added.

The problem is that sufficient older stuff has now been debunked to the extent that any rational person has to wonder whether there was ever anything to the 'mystery'. A lot of the 'two or three percent can't be explained' cases have been explained. Why should we now believe that some amazing new evidence is going to arise when it has had 75 years worth of 'best ever' cases that have failed.

Most scientific ideas that failed for that long would be abandoned by now. Even string theory, which has failed for half that time, is being seriously called into question.

 

[Slow Joe]

Article:

An astrophysicist in the country of Georgia recently put forward a thought-provoking theory that space may be filled with tiny alien probes that go undetected by those looking for signs of ET life. [...] In his paper, Osmanov suggests that perhaps scientists have been looking for the wrong signs of life and theorizes that ETs may rely on self-replicating spacecraft that are built on a nanoscale.

Source: https://www.coasttocoastam.com/article/astrophysicist-argues-that-aliens-could-be-exploring-space-via-nanoprobes/

I always thought that, among all the probabilities, nanoscale or smaller AI controlled exploration would be the more likely way for a civilization to explore space, due to the lower cost in resources. After all, an AI doesn't need a bubble containing a sample of the atmosphere in which that civilization evolved to be launched into space with tons of food and water stored, a working toilet, gym room, etc, etc.

The thing is, if this argument is anywhere near to being correct, that means the lights in the sky are not aliens, so the ufologists must really love this guy Osmanov from Tbilissi.

 

[AgentSculder]

Hi guys, I'm also new here.

I actually read this book and I really enjoyed it, burned through it a mile a minute. I had two minor complaints, both related to the title. The title of the book is "UFO", but it actually has pretty significant sections devoted to SETI and not UFOs, and the subtitle of the book is "Inside the Government's Search for Extraterrestrial Life Here - And Out There", but many of the searches the book describes are not government searches but in fact private or academic ones.

My major complaint is what the book does with Mick West and his work. He gets a blink-and-you-missed it mention in the section discussing the Navy "UAP" UFO videos, but all of his explanations are basically left out. I feel like it's kind of weird that Graffe is so credulous when it comes to David Fravor and the other modern military UFO witnesses since he seems to be of the mind that the "classic" UFO cases of the Gorman Dogfight and the Mantell Incident, both of which had military pilots as the witness, were explicable with simple weather balloons.

 

[airbagmoments]

The bottom line is that reporters choose to play footsie with debunked or otherwise flimsy UAP "evidence" in order to maximize engagement. It's not a great dynamic.