Rare things that have been documented much better than UFOs

[Fritzkquzerk]

Wow, lots of great replies!
I think one of the things that struck me and strikes many others who see these things at relatively close quarters is how different they seem from anything one knows of; that's why they are shocking. They appear to behave in ways that human devices can't. There is the possibility that it is not a natural phenomenon replicable in a lab, but a phenomenon under intelligent control. If that's the case, and it represents more advanced form of technology, perhaps from something far more advanced than humans, if it wants minimal detection, it could achieve it. None of that is prevented by science, in my understanding. In fact with more exoplanets discovered all the time, even a conventional understanding of how intelligence might arise, or life developing becomes even more likely.

The problem I have with this idea is that it could be said about anything.
The aliens could be here but also master incredible cloaking technology in order to not be detected.
Yet, they are often detected by random people more so than NASA does or any other space agency with sensors all around earth.
They should have a nearly perfect cloaking technique which also constantly fails with farmers from the 70s.
They should be real crazy to stay cloaked and operate on earth while also purposefully showing their ships sometimes in some rare occasions, and no one even took a single credible video, nevermind static images which are also much easier to fake (especially in the 60s and so on).
It's very difficult to believe, it's not that aliens coming here is impossible, but it should at least leave some traces?
All the "traces" we have in ufology are ambiguous circular spots where supposedly something landed and took off.
These cases are not super rare and occasional, almost any scientific UFO group report such instances and usually they come to the "no explanation" conclusion. Which isn't really a conclusion per se.
I don't think they're wasting time trying to document these occurrences, I'll stay interested and continue watching in case something interesting comes out, but I don't consider it likely to be space aliens.

Edit:
It could be also said about deities. They operate in a higher dimension of space-time, so they can do anything they want.
If there seems to be no logic in what is described in people sightings I can always say that gods do not follow human logic.
But are deities here? Do they exist in the first place? If I saw Thor tomorrow or Zeus, would it be reasonable to believe that there are gods in the sky?

 

[Todd Feinman]

It's interesting that civilians and folks in the military see them, by intention or not. So if they were aliens, I agree they don't stay cloaked. And it drags on without ever causing a tipping point. Interesting.

 

[Fritzkquzerk]

My last post has nothing to do with saying that experiences surely just saw Venus because they are bad observers, or that because they smoked a joint 5 days prior than they were hallucinating.
My point is, how can we take a human experience and say "it has no known explanation so it must be something yet to be discovered"?
A human experience that cannot be verified because it already happened cannot be really analyzed much, you can guess, look at which planes were flying that day in that direction, forward some hypothesis and try to build a reasonable alternative to extraordinary claims presented. But that's almost all we can do, and sometimes I must say that some "reasonable explanations" given for some specific cases do not really sound feasible in my opinion.
I sincerely do not believe that Lonnie Zamora was pranked with a balloon, I really doubt it.
But getting from "who knows what he really saw" to "oh well, it must have been ad advanced craft or an alien ship" is precisely the problem in 90% of ufology, or more.

 

[Fritzkquzerk]

It's interesting that civilians and folks in the military see them, by intention or not. So if they were aliens, I agree they don't stay cloaked. And it drags on without ever causing a tipping point. Interesting.

Yes but being seen vividly by people across the globe without ever slipping a bit and leaving a damn device somewhere?
Is it really probable?

 

[Todd Feinman]

But are deities here? Do they exist in the first place? If I saw Thor tomorrow or Zeus, would it be reasonable to believe that there are gods in the sky?

Interesting thing is, if I was an ancient person and saw what I did, I'd absolutely think I was seeing angels or demons or gods or spirits.

 

[Todd Feinman]

Yes but being seen vividly by people across the globe without ever slipping a bit and leaving a damn device somewhere?
Is it really probable?

I think the percentage of cases that could be anomalous is very small; much smaller now with all the stuff in the air and people reporting every light in the sky. Then you'd think physical evidence would be more rare than real photographic evidence.
I don't know about the reality of any "crashes". Perhaps some things are meant to be disposable.
I've not looked at the papers on tissue damage created by some UFO groups. Or reports of physical traces. Sometimes those can be ambiguous.
I'd like to think that if aliens managed to get here they could have something more powerful than our AI; and could have highly predictive abilities.

 

[JMartJr]

There might be little reason to trust the (unsupported) declarations of certain politicians!

And it would not matter anyway. Science does not establish new phenomena based on the declarations of politicians or anybody else, however trustworthy. Bring on the evidence!

 

[yoshy]

I don't want to go off topic, even if technically the Wow! signal qualifies as a 'rare phenomenon', so just a quick remark.

I guess you meant the limits of measurement were 'over 10 second and less than 72 seconds' I guess? This is what wikipedia says, and the minimum temporal resolution is easy to check: the signal was reported at 72 seconds long and it lasted 6 letters in the printout, so about 12 seconds each letter. In effect I don't think the 'less than 72 seconds' part is true, because the printout goes on and on with a letter every 10-12 seconds, so I think 72 seconds is just the recorded signal duration.

The 10 seconds minimum time resolution leaves open the possibility it actually was say a "1 beep 2 beeps 3 beeps 2 beeps 1 beep" sequence, but from the data we actually have it just looks a simple (and quite long) triangular pulse, weird but probably not extraordinary. The wikipedia article is scarce with explanations, so I ask myself if a terrestrial source or an equipment glitch (the latter of which could also explain the narrow bandwidth) were decisevely ruled out. I just don't know

Sorry, I'll clarify. I meant that, if a signal is modulating, the telescope wouldn't be able to measure the period of modulation if the period was under 10 seconds or if the period was over 72 seconds. I'm referring to this claim from wiki:

The signal itself appeared to be an unmodulated continuous wave, although any modulation with a period of less than 10 seconds or longer than 72 seconds would not have been detectable.

Note that the limitation is measuring the modulation of a signal, not measuring a signal itself. A period under 10 seconds and over 72 seconds couldn't be measured for differing reasons.
The sources explain it better but in short, the 10 second lower limit is a choice by the scientists. To help with noise, the software recorded rolling averages over the past 10 seconds. E.g., the first value in Wow! is a 6, meaning the signal strength over the past 10 seconds was a 6 on whatever their scale is. Q and U was the strength of the signal at its peak. Add 2 more seconds for processing, and you end up with a measurement every 12 seconds. So for a signal that is modulating with a period of, say, 2 seconds, the receiver would catch the signal but would not be able to determine a period of 2 seconds.

72 seconds was how long the telescope could listen to a given area. That is how long it takes for the telescope beam to travel across a given spot in the sky. A source that was emitting a signal at a constant strength would be measured as a signal that increases and decreases over 72 seconds as the beam travels across the source (i.e. constant strength signal would look like Wow!). Imagine a circle representing the source and another source representing the radio beam. Then think of a Venn diagram with one of the circles moving across the other, starting with barely any overlap, then more, then compete overlap (36 seconds, corresponding to the strongest measured signals Q and U), then decreasing, then gone. The signal might have been longer than 72 seconds, but we will never know since the telescope's beam was constantly moving across the sky. When they went back to where it was, they didn't find it ever again
I asked ChatGPT to summarize:

- 10 seconds: How frequently the system recorded an averaged measurement.
- 72 seconds: How long a fixed point in the sky remained within the telescope's observing beam.

A terrestrial source was definitely not ruled out. The telescope actually had 2 beams to measure the sky. The Wow! signal appeared in one and should have appeared in the second one 3 minutes later but did not appear in the second. This actually decreases the probability it's a true signal and increases the chance it was terrestrial interference of some kind or a malfunction. The other possibility is the aliens happened to turn off or reorient the signal away from Earth, at the exact time our telescope happened to be pointing their way.

To better inform my understanding, I checked with a few sources as well as ChatGPT.

SETI Sensitivity: Calibrating on a Wow! Signal
Skeptoid: Was the Wow! Signal Alien?
Could the "Wow" signal have originated from a stochastic repeating beacon? [PDF]
Interstellar Signal from the 70s Continues to Puzzle Researchers

 

[Fritzkquzerk]

The other possibility is the aliens happened to turn off or reorient the signal away from Earth, at the exact time our telescope happened to be pointing their way.

Maybe the aliens panicked and just moved the antenna a bit.

 

[JJB]

I don't want to go off topic, even if technically the Wow! signal qualifies as a 'rare phenomenon', so just a quick remark.

I guess you meant the limits of measurement were 'over 10 second and less than 72 seconds' I guess? This is what wikipedia says, and the minimum temporal resolution is easy to check: the signal was reported at 72 seconds long and it lasted 6 letters in the printout, so about 12 seconds each letter. In effect I don't think the 'less than 72 seconds' part is true, because the printout goes on and on with a letter every 10-12 seconds, so I think 72 seconds is just the recorded signal duration.

The 10 seconds minimum time resolution leaves open the possibility it actually was say a "1 beep 2 beeps 3 beeps 2 beeps 1 beep" sequence, but from the data we actually have it just looks a simple (and quite long) triangular pulse, weird but probably not extraordinary. The wikipedia article is scarce with explanations, so I ask myself if a terrestrial source or an equipment glitch (the latter of which could also explain the narrow bandwidth) were decisevely ruled out. I just don't know

The Wow! signal's 72-second duration was determined by the telescopes observing window, not by a precise measurement showing that the source transmitted continuously for exactly 72 seconds.

The six characters represent intensity measurements taken roughly 12 seconds apart, not separate pulses or a coded message. The signal's rise and fall was consistent with a source passing through the telescope's beam.

 

[Fin]

Maybe the aliens panicked and just moved the antenna a bit.

A bit like that time they bumped into a wind turbine?

 

[JMartJr]

On Sunday I went to see the beloved Carolina Panthers get their lunch money stolen, sand kicked in their faces and their collective girlfriends lured away by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. This is not a rare thing, sadly, though it was extremely well documented.

For the first time in my life, I had sideline passes to go down onto a corner for the field during warmups and just see what that was like. So not just rare, but unique! That is less well document than the outcome of the game, but still... I have a pass as a souvenir, the corroborating testimony of three witnesses in addition to my own (Dad's, my sister's and that of my wife Pat, and if anybody here wishes to cast asparagus on the veracity of any two of them, it will have to be a duel with straight razors in the cane brake at dawn. You may doubt any one of them for free, but upping it to two means we have to go a round... ) And I have pictures, including this one:

My plan was to document something even rarer -- other people have been on the sidelines before a game, but I imagine none of them have flown a kite. I had a kite ready to go, a miniature that I could pop up long enough for a picture! But being a complete clot-head I left it at home. So that has NOT been well documented because it did not happen. Absence of evidence in this case is the result, if not evidence of, absence.

I am reminded that I flew a miniature kite for a few seconds in the stands at Superb Owl XXXVIII in Houston in 2016. However, the picture was terrible, I don't think this is documented BETTER than UFOs...