Rare things that have been documented much better than UFOs
- Thread starter Edward Current
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JJB
Senior Member
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
Senior Member.
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
"No evidence" means they know nothing.External Quote:
JJB
Senior Member
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.
Ann K
Senior Member.
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
Senior Member
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.
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
Senior Member
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.
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Mendel
Senior Member.
Yeah. However.
- That was in the 1950s. Project Blue Book is Hillenkoeter's disclosure.
- Hillenkoeter has been spectacularly wrong in his career (soviet nukes, korean war).
Todd Feinman
Senior Member
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!
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Mendel
Senior Member.
Yes, and he got it.
Mauro
Senior Member.
And he's right on each point. They are called meteors.
JJB
Senior Member
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.
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.
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
Senior Member.
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
Senior Member
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….
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JJB
Senior Member
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.
Gary C
Senior Member.
This ^^^ is important and is what happens in the generally recognized scientific disciplines:
- The results from astronomy agree with those from geology
- The results from geology agree with those from chemistry
- The results from chemistry agree with those from condensed matter physics
Within each discipline, the laws of nature are measured to be consistent.
- Mass-Energy is conserved
- linear and angular momentum are conserved
- the laws of thermodynamics are obeyed
Documenting rare things and events demonstrates that it has been and continues to be done using already available technologies and techniques and anyone can do it. It demonstrates for a general audience the there isn't really much of a space at all for aliens to hide in.
IMO that makes it worth doing.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
I am trying to think of an instance where a series of UFO-style waves or flaps of reports of some purported unknown phenomenon was followed by the discovery of a new phenomenon. It has not happened to UFOs or bigfoot or sea/lake monsters or ghosts...
For less esoteric examples, it hasn't happened for surviving thylacines reported in Tasmania when interest goes up, it didn't happen with the Creepy Clowns of 2016, the recent Mystery Drone Flaps seem to be lacking anything in the way of drones -- these are known phenomena (thylacines were real, clowns do exist for some reason, drones are real) but the phenomenon does not seem to be a part of the flaps reporting sightings of them.
Gorillas were reported, mostly second hand, as in "our guide Ishimwe told us about these big hairy ape things that lived near the farm where he grew up." * The reports were treated skeptically until a type specimen was put into the process, then the world knew there were, in fact, gorillas -- but I don't get the sense that there was a previous flood of reports from excited "gorilla experiencers!" Rather local folks knew they were there and science didn't embrace them until the proof was supplied.
It is almost as if the excitement that generates a flap/wave phenomenon is contingent upon the thing being reported not existing, or at least not being involved in generating reports
*Popular boy's name in Rwanda, means "I thank/am thankful" or "gratitude."
That is amazing, if you happen to have the ability to share a copy, I'd love to have it.
Todd Feinman
Senior Member
I kick myself for not saving it somewhere. I know it was in one of the big newspaper databases. I might try to look for it again.
There is a cool old article from the end of 19th early 20th Century that raised the same questions about airships that are being raised about modern UFOs. I'll try to post it later. There was less clutter and crap and satellites and drones flying around back in the day.
Ann K
Senior Member.
Because congress members are in a sort of perpetual campaign to be seen and to be perceived as doing something useful. If a part of their voters are into UFOlogy (or they themselves are) then this sort of thing happens. It would be a mistake to think that congress only does the serious business necessary to keep the country going. These are the people who won a popularity contest to have their jobs, remember? Some of them have no other qualifications.
Can you elaborate on this?
Mendel
Senior Member.
Ball lightning is a recent example. Scientists found various methods to create it in the lab before it was documented by a science team (looking for something else), and it's still not well understood.
Meteorites (aka "rocks falling from the sky") is a historical example, where it took less than a decade from a collection of witness reports to physical evidence to a theory being established.
Mendel
Senior Member.
It's not necessary. If a "first contact" ever happened decades ago, where's the second and third contact? The more that photo stands alone, the less believable it becomes as time passes.
Discussed in https://www.metabunk.org/threads/what-evidence-of-aliens-would-convince-skeptics.12366/ with some good answers.
The short answer is that a photo needs context.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
Remember, though, we're not just talking about "things people reported seeing/experiencing before science figured out that they were real," I'm specifically thinking of instances where a "class" of reports generated flaps.
You may have a good case to make around meteors/meteorites, I recall a case with a town getting showered with pebbles, presumably after a larger meteor broke up at a low enough altitude that the "buckshot" did not spread too much. The multiple reports there might qualify as something that looked like a flap/wave, though there was only the one triggering event. (Otherwise, while there had been a steady trickle of reports, there was nothing flap-like, at least not of which I am aware.)
I can't recall any sort of ball lightning flaps/waves (where suddenly a lot of people in an area started seeing ball lightning and making excited ball lightning reports), which would not be expected to happen anyway as it is such a rare/isolated phenomenon. Last I looked, I was also not yet convinced it is a thing that happens "in the wild," though I have not looked into it much recently and my knowledge on the topic may be out of date! ^_^
Todd Feinman
Senior Member
Sure. If it was real and the military for example collected the Roswell debris, I'd think it would be considered at least as important as the atomic bomb, and not knowing where these objects were coming from, and seeing them around sensitive military sites, you aren't going for disclosure.
I'd expect over time things would fracture and some would come out with stories, if not evidence. Meanwhile the phenomenon continues.
Todd Feinman
Senior Member
Contact or surveillance might occur without ongoing photographic evidence.
Todd Feinman
Senior Member
I guess I'm just trying to say that I don't think a photo or even a number of similar photos would convince skeptical scientists. Certainly not Trump making some declaration. In fact I think it would take something like a crashed vehicle that was transparently analyzed by a number of countries. Peer review. Decades go by. Not good or bad, but I think this might be the case.
If data was uncovered about something that appeared to be under control and more advanced than what's known, it would just be set on a shelf as possibly adversaries' technology. You'd need a body or a vehicle.
If data was uncovered about something that appeared to be under control and more advanced than what's known, it would just be set on a shelf as possibly adversaries' technology. You'd need a body or a vehicle.
I agree that examples of rare events being photographed demonstrate that such events can be documented. But there's an important difference between showing that something is possible and establishing how probable it is.
My point is that we're looking at events selected precisely because they were documented, while knowing nothing about how many comparable events went undocumented. Without that information, it's difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions about the likelihood of rare events being captured on camera.
And even if we accept that everything that exists can, in principle, be documented, it doesn't follow that everything that hasn't been documented doesn't exist. The possibility of documentation is not the same as the expectation that it will actually occur.
I certainly agree that the lack of convincing photographic evidence for alien spacecraft is a serious problem for the ET hypothesis. I just don't think comparisons with other rare events add much to that argument.
I think the comparison with rare events is useful for specific arguments, such as "UFOs are really hard to video so that's why we only have blurry videos." This thread shows examples of how that's not a very good argument. The claim is that UFOs have been coming here relatively frequently for close to a century, possibly longer. That claim is discordant with the lack of good video/pictures.
I think comparisons with other events just demonstrate the reasoning well. So basically the second sentence provides examples for why we think the first sentence is true. Due to the selection bias inherent to the examples, we can't use these examples in an empirical (e.g. as evidence in Bayesian posterior probabilities) or decisive fashion though.
John J.
Senior Member.
I think you might be right. Maybe it's not people identified as skeptics who need to be convinced but a consensus of relevant scientists.
A single photo might not be convincing evidence in a context where quite a few such photos have been claimed to be firm evidence but have later been shown to be fakes. We know some people, for whatever reason, fake pictures of UFOs and want others to believe they are real alien spacecraft.
Adamski, Meier claimed their photos were real until the ends of their lives, some of their friends/ acquaintances corroborated their tales.
As far as I know their photos were not shown to have been faked solely from examination of the photos*, showing that this can be difficult. They share this with the Cottingley fairies.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies Wikipedia, Cottingley Fairies).External Quote:
"The Surgeon's Photograph" of the Loch Ness Monster was not shown to be a fake based on study of the photo
(Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loch_Ness_Monster#%22Surgeon's_photograph%22_(1934)).
Despite the unlikely claims made in all these cases, some people chose to believe the claimants and put great faith in the fact that "there were no signs of hoaxing", "no evidence of photographic manipulation", words to similar effect.
All the above hoaxes involved unmanipulated photographs of real scenes (though Adamski, Meier and surgeon Robert Wilson photographed small models in contexts where their size couldn't be judged).
Some people who claim to be involved in the serious study of UFO reports have accepted frankly rather silly photographs as possible evidence. They have not adequately tested that evidence; each new photo is presented as taking us closer to the truth even if a little consideration shows us they do not. These photos are sometimes eagerly (and initially uncritically) accepted by other UFO enthusiasts:
Crop of photo of Luis Elizondo's "Mothership" over Arad, Romania, 2022. Elizondo did not seem to wonder how a huge brightly-lit craft could be above a town of c. 145,000 people in broad daylight and not become a major news story- or why there was just one photo.
Romania, 2022 is not Romania in 1972.
Elizondo described it as a "mothership" (Threadreader website, 29 Oct 2024, John Greenwald Jr. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1851316332416966933.html?utm_campaign=topunroll), i.e. a large craft carrying smaller craft, something for which there is no indication whatsoever in the photo.
The first use of that term in Ufology (using the term loosely) may have been by George Adamski, describing a craft he claimed to have seen over Palomar Gardens in 1946 and 1947 (though he might not have mentioned it before 1949, by which time UFOs were in vogue).
The Ufological term "mothership" was massively popularized by Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977.
Elizondo adopts that fictional narrative: The UFO is apparently big, round, brightly-lit, so it's a mothership.
It is actually a reflection of a light fixture in an apartment window, thread Elizondo's Romanian Non-Human Mothership Photo [Reflection of a Light Fixture]. Elizondo accepted his mistake, but this is a guy who claims to have studied (and perhaps have classified info about) UFOs for years.
Ron James, MUFON's Director Of Media Relations publicized a photo purportedly showing US troops with a flying saucer that had been shot down over central Oregon in 1955, thread Ron James UFO crashed UFO pictures; cropped detail:
It didn't seem to occur to him that the troops (admittedly not very distinct) don't look like 1950s US soldiers. He didn't check.
Two wear jackboots (then practically a metaphor for oppressive regimes), two wear helmets with flared rears, nothing like the classic US M1 helmets of the era (portrayed in The Day The Earth Stood Still, MASH, ubiquitous in US Army/ USMC use from 1941-1985ish)
They're 1/35 "German Soldiers at Rest" figures, a 1984 kit of a WW2 subject from Japanese model producer Tamiya.
Leading figures on the UFO scene are sometimes persuaded of the reality of extraordinary things by remarkably poor evidence, and have been in the past, yet they ask others to draw important conclusions about reality, and our knowledge of the universe, based on this evidence.
In the OP, @Edward Current raised the example of the Chelyabinsk bolide of 2013.
No-one was expecting it, it was visible from any given location for maybe 20 seconds max**; it might have been frightening (even before its shockwave injured hundreds of people).
It was a rare event; "Russian meteor largest in a century", Nature, February 2025, Geoff Brumfiel https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.12438; researchers at Imperial College London estimated
(Wikipedia, Chelyabinsk meteor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor).External Quote:
Yet this 20-second, once-in-decades event was captured by multiple cameras.
In contrast, UFOs are reported on a daily basis and have been for the best part of 80 years.
The Center for UFO Studies, CUFOS https://cufos.org/cufos-publications-databases/ufocat/ has compiled UFOCAT,
(This is the database used by Villarroel and Bruehl, 2025, post #892 "Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey" thread.)
Let's say the majority of these are from 1947 on, 79 years (UFOCAT includes some pre-Arnold reports I think);
190,000 / 79 = approx. 2405 reports in an average year. Some will be reports by multiple people of the same thing, if we (rather generously) assume that the average sighting involves three people, all of whom report it, that's still over 800 individual events a year, more than 2 every day for 80 years.
But unlike the Chelyabinsk meteor, not one convincing UFO event has been captured by cameras from different viewpoints.
Cameras (on cellphones, various CCTV systems) have become much more widespread in the past 25 years, so maybe a lack of good photographic evidence from the 20th century is more understandable, but it's less so now.
Compelling evidence that extraterrestrial intelligence existed would be extraordinarily important. That it was visiting Earth even more so.
It is not unreasonable (I feel) to expect clear, testable evidence before concluding this.
A single photo might not be sufficient, particularly considering the long history of faked (and no demonstrably real) UFO pictures.
I guess there's the possibility that a real non-human artefact might visit Earth and be photographed by one person. But at the moment, it's hard to see how we could be sure that that one photograph was authentic. Doubt is the result of decades of fake photos and in some cases dishonest accounts, almost all of which have been championed by UFO enthusiasts. It's partly the fault of ufology, not some supposed scientific establishment, a military cover-up or skeptics.
I think that's hypothetically possible. We're not individually aware of reconnaissance satellites. An advanced ETI would presumably have better remote sensing, more miniaturised systems, better low-observable technologies.
The Duke of Wellington might not have been aware of a Canberra spyplane photographing Waterloo, but it's from his culture and only 140 years ahead. If an ETI had the ability to routinely visit Earth, and didn't want to be seen, maybe we wouldn't see it.
But if we can see huge flying triangles, craft with multiple bright lights and landed craft perched on legs in the fashion of Eagle, we can photograph them, and might expect them to be occasionally caught by chance by video cameras like the Chelyabinsk meteor was.
Contact, as in receiving e.g. a radio signal, might be more likely. It is relatively cheap, and humans have had the ability to send signals over interstellar distances at the speed of light for some decades. No photography necessary. So far we've heard nothing.
In terms of personal contact, I'm extremely skeptical of all such claims. It's a staple of science fiction and the fantasies of the contactees.
If it has happened, we have learned literally nothing useful from the ETI. No contactee or abductee has told us anything of practical use.
Some of what they have said damages public understanding of science (Adamski's Venusians) or is pernicious (Meier).
Barney and Betty Hill's complete account(s) is so bizarre that many retellings miss out pertinent details (rather dishonestly, I feel).
Broadly agree. There might be little reason to trust the (unsupported) declarations of certain politicians!
I'm not sure that evaluating factual evidence on complex topics is a strong point of the current president.
In the event of substantial evidence (e.g. a recovered craft or artefact of some kind) formal peer review might not be necessary if some appropriate exterior/ independent people could confirm the initial findings. Some fossils, archaeological artefacts, items of e.g. foreign military hardware are found/ acquired/ observed and their existence accepted before peer-reviewed papers describe them in greater detail.
*A large part of Adamski's Venusian scout ship has a strong resemblance to a gas lantern lid as per my avatar, but the photographs themselves were not manipulated.
**The smoke trail persisted for much longer.
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Agreed. A single photo or even multiple photos of the same event likely wouldn't be sufficient. There would need to be sufficient supporting data that was independently verified. E.g. a radio signal that was captured by independent scientists perhaps. Or something repeating and again independently verifiable. If images, videos, or some measurable record (e.g. radio) were shown to be recurring frequently and predictably so that independent researchers could also capture the data, that would likely be sufficient.
The only evidence that would be difficult to deny would be physical evidence, e.g. a craft or a body. Again, independently verified is a top concern.
Signals like the wow! signal but repeating at some interval or via some pattern that has no natural theoretical explanation would also be strong evidence. Not as strong as physical material but still could be very strong. Signals that are "inexplicable" by natural phenomena wouldn't be as conclusive as material evidence because there would always be a chance there's a natural explanation we just don't know yet.
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