Rare things that have been documented much better than UFOs

[Todd Feinman]

ource is incredibly, purposefully elusive to evidence capture

That's what I think. Also the number of truly anomalous sightings is very small, and there is a lot of human crap in the sky and flying around the Earth today.

 

[JJB]

Do you think anything will come of it? Or is it a big scam?

I think something could come of it, but I'm not expecting confirmation of extraterrestrial visitation anytime soon.

There's a legitimate scientific and national-security interest in identifying unexplained sightings, but ufology is also full of grifters, exaggerated claims, and people confusing speculation with evidence.

I wouldn't call the whole thing a scam, but I'd certainly say there's an industry built around keeping the mystery alive.

 

[Mendel]

AARO has also never said that there was nothing to work on, nothing to analyse or that the issue itself is meaningless.
Tim Phillips himself said during the interview with Mick West that there were interesting cases, but that he obviously couldn't give any details.
Now, "interesting" can mean many different things, of which "aliens" is the less probable, and I have no idea of what exactly he could mean, but same thing with Kosloski, I don't know if Kirkpatrick said anything along those lines, but I still consider this significant.
They might know a bit more than we do on specific cases, that's all I'm implying, but at the same time I wouldn't bet any money on them holding any alien life truths.

The question is, does the government know more about UFOs than we do?
https://www.space.com/pentagon-ufo-...-report-no-emprical-evidence-alien-technology

"AARO found no evidence that any USG [U.S. government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology,"

NASA's UAP study team reached similar conclusions in its first public report, which was published in September 2023. "The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don't know what these UAP are," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the time.

"No evidence" means they know nothing.

 

[JJB]

NASA's UAP study team reached similar conclusions in its first public report, which was published in September 2023. "The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don't know what these UAP are," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the time.

I don't really like how UAPs are often lumped together as if they're all part of the same phenomenon.

UAP is simply a label for things we haven't identified, encompassing everything from balloons, drones and satellites to sensor errors, atmospheric effects and genuinely unexplained observations. These cases may have nothing whatsoever to do with one another.

The fact that some remain unexplained doesn't mean they share a common cause, let alone that they point to extraterrestrial technology.

 

[Mendel]

The fact that some remain unexplained doesn't mean they share a common cause, let alone that they point to extraterrestrial technology.

"Pointing to extraterrestrial technology" would be an explanation.
The fact that they're unexplained means that they are not evidence of extraterrestrial technology.

 

[Ann K]

Also the number of truly anomalous sightings is very small, and there is a lot of human crap in the sky and flying around the Earth today.

Many of the sightings are of unidentified objects, some of them probably unidentifiable because they're in the LIZ. I'm not aware of ANY "truly anomalous" objects at all, and any anomalous sightings, such as your story, are only verbal and thus cannot provide anything else to study. They're dead ends, and we have no sure way to distinguish a factual statement from inventions, hoaxes, or hallucinations.

 

[Todd Feinman]

I think eyewitness reports are useful, especially if corroborative. All different kinds of reports, police reports for instance. A good way to transmit information, but physical evidence may not be present, or photos of what happened. Folks provide accounts here.. Usually Starlink.

 

[MapperGuy]

I suspect the biggest problem for the UFO community is that the people with the best tools and access to the most relevant data have yet to produce anything that settles the question. Instead, we keep getting told that the real evidence exists somewhere behind another layer of secrecy.

After decades of this, you have to wonder whether the mystery is being sustained more by what people imagine is being hidden than by anything that has actually been found.

But what could you FIND that would settle the question. When the answer is Nobody here but us Humans. It is the fact-of NOT FINDING things that is very hard to prove, without all that revelation of sources and methods. And if there are no aliens the answer will remain the same no matter how much sources and methods improve. Can't find what isn't here.

It is the people who are convinced things are being hidden that sustains the mystery.

 

[Todd Feinman]

It is the people who are convinced things are being hidden that sustains the mystery.

People have been convinced that things were being hidden from the public since the beginning of modern era of the phenomenon. Roscoe Hillenkoeter, was one, Keyhoe another.
What ultimately drives the periodic emergence into the public stage with various actors, is the phenomenon itself. Civilian and military pilots would report them back in the day; the "flaps" I prefer to call waves. Then witnesses start talking and folks start taking about it, and it starts all over again. The "airship" wave of the 19th Century had pretty much every feature of later events, complete with skeptics.

 

[Mendel]

People have been convinced that things were being hidden from the public since the beginning of modern era of the phenomenon. Roscoe Hillenkoeter, was one.

Yeah. However.

1. That was in the 1950s. Project Blue Book is Hillenkoeter's disclosure.
2. Hillenkoeter has been spectacularly wrong in his career (soviet nukes, korean war).

It's a different generation of UFO flap.

 

[Todd Feinman]

Yeah. However.

1. That was in the 1950s. Project Blue Book is Hillenkoeter's disclosure.
2. Hillenkoeter has been spectacularly wrong in his career (soviet nukes, korean war).

It's a different generation of UFO flap.

He joined NICAP, wanted congressional hearings and a probe.

People can be wrong about things sometimes. There is no shortage of it.

It's pretty clear looking at what was going on back in the day that UFOs were being taken seriously. Admiral Fahrney was another individual who also took UFOs seriously:

"Retired Rear Adm. Delmer S. Fahrney, once head of the Navy's guided missile program, said Wednesday reliable reports indicate thst "there are objects coming into our atmosphere at very high speeds. Fahrney told a news conference that "no agency in this country or Russia is able to duplcate at this time the speeds and accelerations which radar and observers indicate these flying objects are able to achieve."
He was NICAP's Chair.
http://www.nicap.org/jan16.htm

There was also apparently an "Estimate of the Situation" of which no copies have survived.

Of course there were also skeptics like yourself! I'm just saying that the situation and controversy has always existed around "UFOs", and had been incredibly similar from flap to flap.
When I was going through the old newspapers, I found a real gem! A group of ladies in Rhode Island were were excitedly looking through a little scope at what they thought was an airship; H.P. Lovecraft walked up to them and told them they were looking at Venus!

 

[Mendel]

He joined NICAP, wanted congressional hearings and a probe.

Yes, and he got it.

 

[Mauro]

"Retired Rear Adm. Delmer S. Fahrney, once head of the Navy's guided missile program, said Wednesday reliable reports indicate thst "there are objects coming into our atmosphere at very high speeds. Fahrney told a news conference that "no agency in this country or Russia is able to duplcate at this time the speeds and accelerations which radar and observers indicate these flying objects are able to achieve."

And he's right on each point. They are called meteors.

 

[JJB]

Yes, and he got it.

That is one thing I never could understand. Why elevate these stories to a congressional stage before establishing whether there's anything extraordinary behind them in the first place? It's embarrassing to see Congress give unsubstantiated claims about retrieved alien craft and bodies this level of attention, lending them credibility they haven't earned.

 

[Andreas]

To get back to the main point of this thread, I have a bit of a problem with the whole concept of "rare things that have been documented much better than UFOs". Sure, I understand the argument, and I think there's a valid point in there. But the fact that these particular rare events HAVE been documented doesn't really tell us much, since we have no idea how many equally rare or unusual events have gone completely undocumented.

If we select an event (a falling tree, a meteor, or whatever) precisely because it was captured on camera, we can't then use that same event as evidence of how unlikely it is for something rare to be documented. That's a form of selection bias. We're only looking at the successes while ignoring the potentially enormous number of events that nobody happened to photograph or film. Without knowing something about that larger pool, the comparison becomes rather meaningless.

That said, it's obviously a huge problem for proponents of the ET hypothesis that we still don't have a single clear, convincing photo or video of an alien spacecraft. The proliferation of smartphones hasn't changed that, and when it comes to clear daylight photographs, we're still left with the fake images from the golden age of flying saucers.

But I don't think we need to compare UFOs with other "rare events" to make that point. The lack of convincing photographic evidence for the ET hypothesis is a serious problem in its own right, regardless of how often falling trees, meteors, or other unusual events happen to be caught on camera.

 

[FatPhil]

To get back to the main point of this thread, I have a bit of a problem with the whole concept of "rare things that have been documented much better than UFOs". Sure, I understand the argument, and I think there's a valid point in there.

If some evidence causes an increase in the believability of the claim "everything that exists can be documented", then what has changed about the believability of the claim "everything that cannot be documented does not exist"? Do you not consider the former to changed positively by the contributions to this thread? If not, I'd like an explanation why it either stays the same or lowers.

 

[Todd Feinman]

said, it's obviously a huge problem for proponents of the ET hypothesis that we still don't have a single clear, convincing photo or video of an alien spacecraft. The proliferation of smartphones hasn't changed that, and when it comes to clear daylight photographs, we're still left with the fake images from the golden age of flying saucers.

I hear that point raised a lot, but is it possible to prove every old photo is a hoax?
Also, I don't think there would be "a" convincing photo for some skeptics. I think if it was clear, it would automatically not be accepted and considered a hoax, even if that could not be proven. And witnesses are always mistaken and Occam's Razor and stuff.. How do you get out of that box?
And now with AI….

 

[JJB]

I hear that point raised a lot, but is it possible to prove every old photo is a hoax?
Also, I don't think there would be "a" convincing photo for some skeptics. I think if it was clear, it would automatically not be accepted and considered a hoax, even if that could not be proven. And witnesses are always mistaken and Occam's Razor and stuff.. How do you get out of that box?
And now with AI….

The goal isn't to find one photo that nobody can argue against; it's to build a body of evidence that becomes increasingly difficult to explain through ordinary causes or fabrication.

I think the answer is multiple, independent lines of evidence: photographs or video, radar data, other sensors, reliable chain of custody, and independently documented observations that agree with one another.