Scientists aren't being insulted for what they don't choose to work on, they are being insulted for what they choose to work on if that choice has anything to do with possible ETI visiting us. Just look at what happened to some members of the NASA UAP team. They were harassed and ridiculed by their peers.
Tim Phillips lends credence to the existence of anomalous black triangle UFOs
- Thread starter beku-mant
- Start date
FatPhil
Senior Member.
Some UFOs are frisbeed hubcaps.
It remains on the table, as an option.
*However* - there is far more evidence for "UFO"s being frisbeed hubcaps than extraterrestrial vehicles. And therefore you *MUST* hold that as a more probable prior. If you don't, you are lying to yourself, and bullshitting to your audience.
You're asking for people to not try to communicate what they observed, or worse asking them to communicate a deliberately inaccurate mundane alternative. This is not going to help us better understand what people saw.
Mendel
Senior Member.
you missed my point entirely, please re-read my post
Maybe I misinterpreted. Sorry about that.
Eburacum
Senior Member.
I'm not going to say these cases are impossible, so they didn't happen; Brin and Circovic say the UFO hypothesis is still on the table, and I respect Brin and Circovic, so we should consider it.
However, what does seem impossible is the fact that, despite there being 'hundreds of cases', none of them have resulted in good photographs or videos that we can analyse. This is despite the (apparent) fact that these triangles are large, hovering objects that should be easy to capture on film using modern hand-held cameras. Much smaller, high-flying, fast triangles have been filmed, and seem likely to be real (mundane) aircraft. Small, high-flying, fast triangles seem to be a much more difficult target for the photographer.
Statistically, that is extremely unlikely, to say the least.
Tezcatlipoca
Senior Member.
JMart has interacted very nice here, no need for passive aggressiveness. Everyone is here to have the same discussion, framing parts of it like "this sounds like a troll" is exactly divisive side tracking.
I think your post here indicated part of why this sequence is the way it is. Others are trying to assess and discuss the materials we have while exercising two way communication. You're framing beyond that to promote a specific conclusion leveraging one way communication. When you begin to act divisively towards others and put down discussions of the materials themselves in the above context, you're further conducting it in a way that is called divisive and destructive. I mean this with no hate or offense either as this can happen unintentionally, but being able to recognize when it's happening is important cause it's no bueno when any of us do it (is also a tick harder for us to spot ourselves doing such).
This is also unfortunately because of the people, not really the thing. I think something that gets left out in these discussions is the people who face the stigma tend to be people who make it their identity, and not just their identity, but they tend to take up whackier parts as their identity. TLDR as some others have lightly framed, they're projecting stigma they get for being part of the whackier parts of the community, not for being around the topic itself, but they register this through ingroup-outgroup framing. Outgroup metaperceptions as such are negatively exaggerated 80%+ of the time even accounting for cultural and religious variables from audiences across the globe.
Michael Gold for example just using the Congressional hearing, there was the cases of him doing things like putting up the alien peace hand sign to the cameras.
That will get you hate, especially if you're blessed to be one of the people to speak to Congress in such cases *without* it being a negative inquiry. That was wildly unprofessional and made it seem like he was making a joke out of an event hundreds of people would die to be in his seat for. Not to mention him and some others are part of the infamous private network that's promoted actual whacky conspiracies, so, ends up as a reputational cycle.
Very few of the "legit" scientists ever get attention because they do the work, and you won't get as many clicks reporting on their work. It's also mostly mundane.
I use legit here in quotes also for a specific reason, going back to the outgroup metaperception point above. It's also unfortuntely common in our sides of the communities that we'll cast the whackier types as wholly out of bounds. In reality a lot of them are just as legitimate, but from a very different angle. Using Jacques Vallee for example, the reason some of him and his direct proponents come to the conclusions they do, are because they're Rosicrucian's - the elements that led to those conclusions are part of their worldview, just like every scientist has similar influences from any number of things. That in itself does not degrade their legitimacy, rather we have to look elsewhere, resting on the conclusions or associations alone hits that outgroup metaperception usually being negatively exaggerated point.
I apologize for the passive aggressive posts.
Valle and Nolan are being brought up, in view, mainly to serve as straw-men with respect to argument I am making. Nadia Drake who worked on the NASA UAP panel isn't even a UFO believer, far from it, and yet she got ridiculed and harassed for being on the panel. She even went out of her way to "flip the lunch tray" of people who do think some UAP could be ET vehicles, but still the "cool kids" ridiculed and harassed her. And that was 2023. The stigma and bullying that has been impeding unbiased scientific thinking on the ETI topic is getting better. It used to be much worse. But it's still alive and well, and absurd socio-cultural and ideological biases are still playing a major role in scientific gatekeeping. I still maintain we are in the dark ages on this topic.
And it's not just a problem in the scientific community, they also suffer harassment from the public. I was on a chess sub-reddit and made a dumb joke about the horse being better than the queen, and as a result a whole bunch of people glanced at my comment history, saw I commented in r/UFOs, and then started saying they hope I get mental health help.
I think most of you don't appreciate the damage that stigmatization does to not just science, but also individuals who happen to have seen something that they are unable to even admit they saw without it significantly altering the way the majority of the world thinks of you.
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Tezcatlipoca
Senior Member.
All good with me no apologies needed! I don't believe you were doing it intentionally either, just another human thing we all do from time to time.
I think focusing on folks like Nadia does service your point some, but I would offer she was surrounded by people who basically hit the stereotype the stigma roots from and IMO at least that association is likely what drove the issues she faced. Does anyone know the names of people working at NASA who already deal with unidentified things in space? This happens all the time with the programs tracking debris and etc, that piece of debris is unidentified until you can conclude so for sure. I admittedly also do not know the names of any of these people. Although we can both share the names of people on the specific UAP team that was purpose-made to service publicity *from* the stereotype folks the stigma orients around.
r/UFOs, as a community, is also tagged with this stereotype, so in your case for example, a lot of people who just know the stereotype and don't read it often may just assume you fit that box.
Now, I do partly agree with you that this presents a problem, but in the same hand the point about self-projection of the stigma is pretty true also. The middle we can find here where there are plenty of people doing it, even officially, who the stigma does not impact - the feature this group lacks on the others is those associations. The same is true for us on the flip side, anyone here who interacts as themselves directly with 'the other side' in this context, is automatically going to be tagged with "debunker" stigma. Similarly, there's a middle group there too that is able to criss-cross both just fine.
Just using myself as an example, I do not care much for the ET/UFO stuff itself. My angle of interest tends to be one that 'both sides' can understand and equally find interesting. While I do take steps to prevent certain reputational issues, I've never really been on the receiving end of "debunker" stigma, or any of the stigma related to my exact angle, and I know many others who share that experience.
It is very true that skeptics get bullied and harassed by many UFO believers, and there are a lot of them now days. Mick West is a perfect example, as he is routinely attacked just for demystifying or debunking some of the more clear cut mistaken sightings. Maybe some also disagree with his overall take on the topic, but we should be allowed to have our own opinions and disagreements. It's unfortunate.
Mendel
Senior Member.
Would you still side with the "scientists" if I replaced "possible ETI visiting us" with "Earth possibly being flat"? Why?
you assume this was because you posted in r/ufos.
I submit it may have been because of what you posted in r/ufos.
It also gets more complicated when you consider the younger Milky Way was possibly much less conducive to life, metal-poor (limited in elements for life as we know it, not just technology), and the most abundant type of star, red dwarves, have very narrow habitable zones. Though it's much-argued (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_habitable_zone); there's lot we don't know. One just can't make assumptions about how long ago life may have arisen in the galaxy or how abundantly, or whether the lifespan of another civilization would overlap ours.
(I don't put much stock in the Drake Equation for that and other reasons.)
NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
How are Vallee and Nolan Strawmen? Your claim is that scientists are afraid to work on UFOs due to stigma. We have provided examples of scientist who are working UFOs. In addition to Nolan, I referred to Dr. Knuth (PhD physics SUNY, UAPx), Dr. Szydagis (PhD physics SUNY, UAPx) and Dr Sturrock (PhD astrophysics, Stanford). Let's not forget Dr. Travis Taylor (multiple PhD and MS).
In addition, at the recent UAP Disclosure Fund conference with more congress people than any skeptic's conference has, there were a number of scientists working on UFOs, including Dr. Eric Davis (PhD physics) Dr. Anna Brady-Estevez (PhD Chemical and Environmental Engineering), Dr. Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet (PhD oceanography) and Dr Avi Loab (PhD astrophysics, Harvard). Link below.
I would argue that for most of these scientists, the extraterrestrial explanation for UAP/UAP is not just a possibility, it's the preferred one.
Next up is the authors page for the paper I mentioned up-thread, The New Science of UAP. Note the scientists openly working on UAP/UFOs. Yes, some listed authors are amateur investigators, like Dolan and the Tedescos, but there are plenty of scientists from assorted institutions signing on to this paper with the afore-mentioned Dr. Knuth the lead author:
It would appear that scientists that want to work on UFOs, due in fact work on UFOs. If there is a stigma attached, it's due to the lack of evidence to even study. One can't study what someone remembers seeing.
I will again encourage you to read the thread on the The New Science of UAP paper, or just read the paper itself. It's 195 pages, by 33 authors, of nothing. They (mostly Knuth it seems) rehash various sightings, government programs, private organizations, and long debunked claims. For example, Chapter 5 is titled "Physical Evidence":
This should be the single most important chapter in the entire paper. If one wants to study UFOs, one needs actual physical evidence, right? However, note that the first example is 5.1.1 The Ubatuba Incident. This is the best physical evidence presented?! The authors are referring to some bits of magnesium from a purported UFO crash, that were passed around between various groups and organizations for decades. The pieces have a scattered provenance and no known provenience. They were mailed to a newspaper with a never confirmed story about a UFO crash. Any testing done on these pieces is meaningless, as no one knows where they came from. And yet, it's the lead entry for "Physical evidence". This is indicative of UFO/UAP studies, because there is nothing to study.
As late as 2009-2010 the US government dolled out $22 million for Bigelow Advanced Aerospace Systems to study UFOs and the paranormal. Nothing came of it, aside from some paper on future tech and a book.
Honestly, I don't get this constant referencing juvenile lunch room behavior. Science is not Mean Girls, there is no Regina George stopping people from trying to study UFOs. I listed several above, and that's just off the top of my head.
If anything, the so-called "cool kids" are the UFO/ET people. It's the UFO/ET people that are presenting to Congress. Go look at any of the last hearings, see Mick West or Brian Dunning in the crowd? Not at all.
It's the UFO/ET guys that are running around in helicopters chasing after UFOs, or uncovering the mysteries of Skinwalker Ranch. The UFO/ET guys are making the festival and speaking circuit, often in private jets and going to private conferences with billionaire tech bros.
Here's 2 of the big names in the UFO/ET world, Elizondo and Corbel being about as "cool kids" as middle aged men can be:
If there is a "cool kids" table in the UFO/ET world, the skeptics aren't at it.
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/ua...ith-house-oversight-committee-may-2025.14218/
Mendel
Senior Member.
They've been playing the victim card forever, to cover up that they've got nothing.
I've come into debunking from Flat Earth, they do the same thing, it's just more obvious.
"Why is there no Flat Earth map?" — "It's because FE is suppressed!" — "Yeah, well, Mercator in his workshop in the year 1541 made a fairly decent globe, and he did not have a PC, graphics software, or access to the Internet, as you do."
"Why are there no UFOs to show?" — "Because the government has been keeping them secret for 80 years." — There is no secret on Earth that ever survived that long. It's a con.
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A caveat to this is that science relies on funding. It doesn't matter if a scientist wants to study UAPs if no one is willing to fund the research, which requires time, supplies, and usually support staff.
Which raises the question, "study what?" Youtube videos? Witness accounts? Distant lights at night?
And with what expertise?
Which raises the question, "study what?" Youtube videos? Witness accounts? Distant lights at night?
And with what expertise?
Edward Current
Senior Member.
This is just another echo-chamber narrative that happens within any community of evidence-challenged believers. And, like all echo-chamber narratives, it gets embellished and farther away from reality with each retelling.
That said, it's great that beku-mant is venturing outside of that echo chamber and being exposed to other perspectives. I wish more would.
Mauro
Senior Member.
Psychologists, sociologists and historians are very good candidates. The UFO phenomenon can be studied scientifically, and with the data at hand, just in a direction most 'UFO people' would not like...
MonkeeSage
Senior Member.
I should be noted that Ms. Drake was harassed because she said UFOs are not alien craft, not because she dared to look into the topic. It wasn't the skeptics or institutional scientists harassing her, it was the believers.
NASA UAP panel (01:56:14):
External Quote:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1B6A1BLYDJM&t=6973s
Drake discussing the harassment (41:43):
External Quote:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYK4Wf5V5ss&t=2502s
Edward Current
Senior Member.
The study of UFOs as physical objects in the atmosphere, clearly, would be a physical science. When UFO people say that stories and memories are evidence, I often ask them: Can you name a physical science where stories and memories come into play as data? They are usually flabbergasted — Well of course witness testimonials are data in the physical sciences! How can you be so ignorant? I ask for examples, and they typically throw up their hands, call me a biased and closed-minded deboonker, etc. And that's the end of that.
Again. People don't know how science works, what scientists do, and how they do it. They just assume what they want to be true and make up stuff instead.
NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
Yes, but Bigelow's company, BAASS, received $22M from the AAWSAP program, administered by the Department of Defense's DIA to study, among other things, UFOs. There is a supposed 10 month progress report from BAASS. While @MonkeeSage has raised some concerns about exactly when it was produced, the description of UFO investigative teams is consistent with the book about BAASS, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon.
https://www.metabunk.org/f/BAASS_TEN_MONTH_REPORT_2009.pdf
The report, if accurate, describes 7 cases where trained teams of UFO investigators go out to actually investigate UFO claims. Using funneled taxpayer money. Presumably, this is where evidence would be collected for the often asked for UFO studies. Briefly, and bearing in mind, this is UFO program executed by people that find the ET hypothesis the preferred one:
External Quote:
External Quote:
External Quote:
The other cases were equally unimpressive. A company with 47 full time employees including 16-20 investigators and government money procured exactly zero evidence for UFOs, aside from a few stories.External Quote:
The guys that wrote The New Science of UAP paper were aware of this:
pg:113External Quote:
However:
pg:115External Quote:
pg: 115External Quote:
Studying UFOs as a social or religious construct is wrong because it doesn't acknowledge the physical presence of ETs.
Ann K
Senior Member.
Psychologists and sociologists are in fields that study the PEOPLE who claim to see UFOs/UAPs. The ones in those fields, including historians as well, are in what is called the "soft sciences", where findings, depending as they do on human minds and memories, are often ambiguous and tentative. The best they might be able to tell us are which people believe their own stories, but that tells us nothing about the truth of those stories.
People in the "hard sciences" such as physics, chemistry, or metallurgy need something more concrete to study, and that is where UFOlogy gives them precious little to look at, some of it known to come from meteorites but none of it (at this time) verifiably from a genuine extraterrestrial craft.
The deeper advocates go into woo, the harder it is to be ecumenically open-minded about the possibilities.
Why can't the source be some immortal hypnotoad making people think they're seeing things? Or maybe there's some sinister organization that drugs people and puts them through involuntary virtual reality experiences?
There is another interview in which she essentially says it was both. And the UAP panel did address the stigma.
https://www.aip.org/fyi/nasa-panel-seeks-rigor-and-respect-for-anomalous-phenomena-studies
Nobody can be honest and knowledgeable and claim that the stigma doesn't exist, and hasn't prevent many scientists from being able to openly study the topic.
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When it comes to fields like SETI, people use scientific knowledge and thought experiments to come up with hypotheses, make predictions, and design experiments or data gathering methods to search for evidence.
We know intelligent life is a real thing, we exist. Just like we know microbes could be on Mars, because they exist on Earth, we know an ETI could have developed on other planets.
You don't really seem to know yourself how science works.
Tezcatlipoca
Senior Member.
Pretty much the same with "analysis" too which pains my heart that so much credence is given to people with said careers. It gets puffed up from that frame a lot but we see even the formers- that chime in, such as Elizondo and Grusch, applied absolutely 0 analytical craft towards anything they do. In turn when products are made using actual intelligence analysis techniques, such as McGowans recent article, it's immediately degraded as not being actual analysis or etc.
Much the same, these folks generally cannot expand upon what they mean by analysis. It's especially bad with deception related topics. Counterdeception has its own analytical field with special techniques, explicitly, because more generalized techniques can make you more vulnerable to intentional deception. It's so common for deception to be discussed using pop-culture understanding of it, then when actual CDA is done, it's always responses like "but connect the dots!" - CDA 101 is dropping the dot connecting analogies because a Deception Story seeks to lay out the dots for you to connect.
Here is an excerpt from NASAs UAP independent study report, for anyone still trying to gaslight us into thinking there is no stigma.
https://science.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/uap-independent-study-team-final-report.pdf
In another part of the report they note,
https://science.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/uap-independent-study-team-final-report.pdf
In another part of the report they note,
To anyone knowledgeable, this is so obvious that it ought to be surprising it even needed to be said.
Edward Current
Senior Member.
Then address my comment that you quoted, and explain to the class how the physical sciences use witness testimony as data.
And quote the member who said in this thread that there is no stigma. The argument, I believe, is that existing stigma (it exists for a reason, the same reason that there's a stigma about Bigfoot) does not prevent anyone from doing science. There's just no physical evidence to do physical science on.
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JMartJr
Senior Member.
To avoid getting sidetracked, I recommended picking one best case and starting a new thread to discuss it.
I have been polite to you, please return the favor. I am not a troll, I've been here contributing my mite for long enough for that to not hold water as an accusation.
I assure you, I am not aware of a black triangle case that meets the criteria of being high quality and having multiple observers and not having been debunked. I will freely admit that my definition of "high quality" may differ from yours I would not call any report "high quality" that was based SOLELY on witness testimony -- this is not a knock on anybody and their veracity, though people have made pretty amazing errors in perception in the past, and some people make up stories, but is due to the fact that without supporting evidence there is not much to analyze in an effort to figure out what is going on!
If there are no quality cases with supporting evidence, that's fine, and not your fault of course.
All I have seen from you is misinformation and mischaracterizations about how science works, what science produces, and what is or isn't possible or plausible, as well as stigma reinforcing toxicity. I don't think we will easily come to an agreement, because it seems you are so invested and entrenched that I doubt you will acknowledge you've gotten anything wrong even when face to face with it. You say there should be stigma and it doesn't hurt science, whatever you say guy who's main thing is reinforcing the stigma.
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jackfrostvc
Senior Member
Read the twitter response comments the two WSJ article authors got when they posted their article
www.x.com/joel_schectman/status/1931157487081648348
www.x.com/aviswanatha/status/1931320046506094960
www.x.com/joel_schectman/status/1931157487081648348
www.x.com/aviswanatha/status/1931320046506094960
John J.
Senior Member.
This has already been covered by @MonkeeSage's post #178, but I wanted to chip in:
Ms. Drake, quoted by @beku-mant:
(Personally, I think that's beyond doubt- including honestly-believed sightings of, even interactions with, aliens).
But Drake says she doesn't understand how people then think the explanation is down to extraterrestrials.
And she got a lot of nasty "feedback" from social media- not for being on the NASA panel, but for stating her informed belief that the extraterrestrial hypothesis is wrong.
I'd hope that we all agree that online harassment and expressions of hate are unacceptable, just as bullying generally should be.
As far as I understand it, NASA was asked to think about UAP, so I don't think people following that instruction should be vilified or ostracized.
(In passing, @beku-mant has been participating here on a forum where they knew- or will have rapidly noticed- many of us might have more sceptical views about Earth being visited by ETI at the present time or in the past. Maybe not quite Daniel in the lion's den, more like being in the goat enclosure with an unwrapped cheese sandwich, but discussing a viewpoint in a broadly critical environment takes some doing. And considering other POVs can be helpful to all of us- doesn't mean we have to agree, though!)
Enrico Fermi, Frank Drake and Carl Sagan were all respected scientists; all considered the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
Drake and Sagan actively worked on projects supporting CETI (communication with extraterrestrial intelligence).
I don't think their careers suffered. I'd guess Sagan is the most well-known astronomer of recent times by a long way.
Since Vikings 1 and 2 in 1976, there have been a number of (expensive) missions looking for signs of life on Mars; I don't think the scientists, engineers etc. who worked on them are an ostracized minority.
I'm a big supporter (from my armchair) of the search for technosignatures, and especially biosignatures, by astronomers.
We know the defence establishments of the USA and the UK did some research into UFOs over many years; both concluded that not all reports could be explained, but there was no evidence of ET involvement and no defence significance
(it's fair to say the latter conclusion is being re-evaluated in the USA in the context of RPVs, the Chinese balloon etc.)
It must be likely that China and Russia/the former USSR carried out some assessment of the UFO phenomenon, but whatever their conclusions, we haven't seen any paradigm-breaking technologies emerge from those nations, and they don't seem to have invested massively in SETI.
Studying reports of UAP and alien encounters can be interesting. So far, it has not given us any breakthroughs in physics, chemistry, aeronautics or engineering, apart from an understanding of how bright Starlink trains and flares might be.
There has been some realisation that some (rare) reported encounters are probably the result of altered states of consciousness in sleep disorders (see https://www.metabunk.org/threads/alien-dna-after-sexual-encounter.12070/) and epileptiform events
(https://www.metabunk.org/threads/scotland's-socorro-the-dechmont-robert-taylor-ufo-1979.13637/; IIRC author Jim Schnabel recounts in Dark White (1994) an Australian woman experiencing a "typical" alien abduction- while having a seizure, observed by her friends), so there are possible neurological/psychological reasons for a small number of anomalous experiences.
There are no UAP, if we take that term to mean alien flying craft, or good evidence of UAP (e.g. high quality photos from various angles, pieces, landing sites) to be studied.
Explained UAP are no longer UAP. No UAP (in the widest sense) has been demonstrated to be an alien artefact.
If more time is spent studying reports of UAP, and/or systematically looking for UAP we will find more, and then find explanations for many, but there will always be some that remain unexplained, because they will be at the limits of the systems looking for them- or perhaps some only ever existed in the perceptions or memories of the experiencer.
UAP seem to be cloaked by a conspiracy of fuzzy photos, ambiguous radar returns and human recollection without supporting evidence.
Sagan said "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"; we have many extraordinary claims but no real evidence.
Ms. Drake, quoted by @beku-mant:
I think that could be understood as Drake saying, people experience things they consider anomalous.External Quote:
(Personally, I think that's beyond doubt- including honestly-believed sightings of, even interactions with, aliens).
But Drake says she doesn't understand how people then think the explanation is down to extraterrestrials.
And she got a lot of nasty "feedback" from social media- not for being on the NASA panel, but for stating her informed belief that the extraterrestrial hypothesis is wrong.
If she's referring to @Mick West, she's implying he receives similar unpleasant comments on social media for finding plausible (sometimes likely) explanations for what some people would prefer to believe are anomalous phenomena- I think it supports @MonkeeSage's interpretation; the "harassment and hate"- and misogyny- she received was largely from supporters of ETH.External Quote:
-That isn't stated on the webpage you link to, and Nadia Drake wasn't a member of the panel in the NASA YouTube video that that webpage links to, though in fairness I wouldn't be surprised if another panel member said it.External Quote:
I'd hope that we all agree that online harassment and expressions of hate are unacceptable, just as bullying generally should be.
As far as I understand it, NASA was asked to think about UAP, so I don't think people following that instruction should be vilified or ostracized.
(In passing, @beku-mant has been participating here on a forum where they knew- or will have rapidly noticed- many of us might have more sceptical views about Earth being visited by ETI at the present time or in the past. Maybe not quite Daniel in the lion's den, more like being in the goat enclosure with an unwrapped cheese sandwich, but discussing a viewpoint in a broadly critical environment takes some doing. And considering other POVs can be helpful to all of us- doesn't mean we have to agree, though!)
Enrico Fermi, Frank Drake and Carl Sagan were all respected scientists; all considered the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
Drake and Sagan actively worked on projects supporting CETI (communication with extraterrestrial intelligence).
I don't think their careers suffered. I'd guess Sagan is the most well-known astronomer of recent times by a long way.
Since Vikings 1 and 2 in 1976, there have been a number of (expensive) missions looking for signs of life on Mars; I don't think the scientists, engineers etc. who worked on them are an ostracized minority.
I'm a big supporter (from my armchair) of the search for technosignatures, and especially biosignatures, by astronomers.
We know the defence establishments of the USA and the UK did some research into UFOs over many years; both concluded that not all reports could be explained, but there was no evidence of ET involvement and no defence significance
(it's fair to say the latter conclusion is being re-evaluated in the USA in the context of RPVs, the Chinese balloon etc.)
It must be likely that China and Russia/the former USSR carried out some assessment of the UFO phenomenon, but whatever their conclusions, we haven't seen any paradigm-breaking technologies emerge from those nations, and they don't seem to have invested massively in SETI.
Studying reports of UAP and alien encounters can be interesting. So far, it has not given us any breakthroughs in physics, chemistry, aeronautics or engineering, apart from an understanding of how bright Starlink trains and flares might be.
There has been some realisation that some (rare) reported encounters are probably the result of altered states of consciousness in sleep disorders (see https://www.metabunk.org/threads/alien-dna-after-sexual-encounter.12070/) and epileptiform events
(https://www.metabunk.org/threads/scotland's-socorro-the-dechmont-robert-taylor-ufo-1979.13637/; IIRC author Jim Schnabel recounts in Dark White (1994) an Australian woman experiencing a "typical" alien abduction- while having a seizure, observed by her friends), so there are possible neurological/psychological reasons for a small number of anomalous experiences.
There are no UAP, if we take that term to mean alien flying craft, or good evidence of UAP (e.g. high quality photos from various angles, pieces, landing sites) to be studied.
Explained UAP are no longer UAP. No UAP (in the widest sense) has been demonstrated to be an alien artefact.
If more time is spent studying reports of UAP, and/or systematically looking for UAP we will find more, and then find explanations for many, but there will always be some that remain unexplained, because they will be at the limits of the systems looking for them- or perhaps some only ever existed in the perceptions or memories of the experiencer.
UAP seem to be cloaked by a conspiracy of fuzzy photos, ambiguous radar returns and human recollection without supporting evidence.
Sagan said "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"; we have many extraordinary claims but no real evidence.
Nadia Drake spent a lot of time flipping lunch trays out of fear of damage to her reputation when she joined the panel. So it's not that surprising she got an especially bad reaction from those she might have insulted. Parts of the "UFO community" can be very toxic though, and that's unfortunate.
Sagan was flipping lunch trays like crazy trying to get mainstream public and scientific opinion to accept SETI. He deserves some credit for that, but his heavily compensated narrative was distorted for the purposes of being effective within the socio-cultural environment at the time. That distorted view should be obsolete by now.
Part of that was his excessive appeal to profundity when talking about possible contact with life outside our solar system. I think CETI is highly irresponsible, espcially without global consent. We should be level headed and rational when considering CETI, not drunk on motivational speaches, or perturbed by social forces.
NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
I think what he's saying is, sometimes stigmas exist for a reason and gives the example of Bigfoot.
Grover Krantz and maybe Jeff Meldrum in latter days, faced a bit of stigma in the Anthropology world. They contend that a 7'-10' bipedal hominid is roaming the forests of the US west coast. They contend that this hominid is a physical flesh and blood creature weighing in at 500#-1000#, makes nesting sites, possibly buries it's dead (suggesting a material culture) and conceals themselves.
The stigma arise from that fact that there is NO physical evidence for these hominids. There is no fossil record. There is no current species type. There are no bodies or skeletons. There is no evolutionary track for their existence. There is no DNA. The existence of Bigfoot is based entirely on eye witness testimony, misinterpretations, and hoaxes. An anthropologist can't study a hominid that there is no physical evidence for. Nevertheless, some tried too.
A lot like UFOs.
Ann K
Senior Member.
Could be and could have developed are things yet to be determined. In a few years we expect to get some actual samples back from Mars to be analyzed for microbial life, so after that has happened we can discuss the matter. I assume by "other planets" you mean ones from different solar systems, and as those are many years away from even the limited info we have from Mars, your suppositions are premature.
Ben Harris
Senior Member
An orb in stasis. Apparently @chrisramsay52 will be selling them. It's a Franz Harary illusion; one is in the Uri Geller Museum, the other in my collection of oddities.
John J.
Senior Member.
She's a science writer. And I'm not aware that she insulted anyone in connection with her work on the NASA panel.
Could you elaborate, please?
(1) Where is your evidence that there was ever public opinion against SETI? (As opposed to not prioritising it if polled on funding decisions).
Perhaps my earliest memory of a "serious" science TV program was seeing Sagan deliver the Royal Institution Christmas lectures in 1977. This was broadcast across the UK at a time when there were only 3 TV stations, during the school Christmas holidays.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbFq0I7YrYQ
"How Would We Communicate with Alien Life?", 8-minute extract, posted by the Royal Institution on YouTube
...And there's the TV series Cosmos, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage, also a Carl Sagan project
...which discussed SETI, and implied the possibility of a future meeting of humans and ETI (an animated scene where one colour showed the routes of ETI voyages from star to star, with another colour showing human voyages, spreading twig-like from the alien 'branches', IIRC).External Quote:
(2) Where is the evidence that there was ever broad scientific opinion against SETI?
Maybe you can find a reputable English-language science documentary / TV series from the 1960s or 1970s that concludes ETI is impossible? Or that SETI is pointless?
Or- more convincingly- published peer-reviewed academic papers that make those points?
(2) Carl Sagan deserves some credit for SETI and associated work? Some?!
(More info follows, archived at Wayback Machine).External Quote:
The Arecibo message?
The Pioneer plaques?
The Voyager Records?
What? How do you know his narrative was distorted? You've got his diaries?
I think there's plenty of evidence Sagan largely said exactly what he meant to say, including over matters that caused conflict with the US government- his outspoken views on nuclear disarmament, his concerns re. "nuclear winter". He was arrested, I think more than once, trying to stop underground nuclear tests.
Maybe Carl Sagan is no Elizondo (
), but I feel he's done more to promote SETI than many.Who are his current equals? The Tedesco brothers?
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Eburacum
Senior Member.
The only member of the NASA UAP panel that I have had any interaction with is David Grinspoon, a really nice chap who is Senior Scientist for Astrobiology Strategy at NASA, and was a student of Sagan at one point.
Grinspoon is actively involved with searching for possible lifebearing planets, and his work on the extent of the Habitable Zone is well-regarded. Grinspoon was pleased and honoured to be named as part of this panel, and there is no evidence that he experienced any stigma in doing so.
Here's Grinspoon's address to the UAP panel:
https://thedebrief.org/nasa-study-t...or-better-data-ending-harassment-and-stigmas/
Grinspoon is actively involved with searching for possible lifebearing planets, and his work on the extent of the Habitable Zone is well-regarded. Grinspoon was pleased and honoured to be named as part of this panel, and there is no evidence that he experienced any stigma in doing so.
Here's Grinspoon's address to the UAP panel:
https://thedebrief.org/nasa-study-t...or-better-data-ending-harassment-and-stigmas/
Grinspoon seems to have an open mind; if anyone is going to find extraterrestrial life in our galaxy, it is likely to be Grinspoon or one of his ilk.External Quote:
Mendel
Senior Member.
That's a straw man.
We agree that there are many people who mock UFO believers.
However, I'd like propose:
(a) the mockery does not substantially impact the ability of UFO believers to find evidence for non-human visitors;
(b) the mockery is well-deserved (as it is e.g. with Flat Earthers).
jackfrostvc
Senior Member
I've not listened to it yet, so cannot summarize it. But just a heads up, Timothy Phillips has done a new 1 1/2 hour podcast with "The UFO Podcast"
It can be found here:
Source: https://x.com/ufouapam/status/1934914133620576698
It can be found here:
Source: https://x.com/ufouapam/status/1934914133620576698
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Edward Current
Senior Member.
Stigma goes hand-in-hand with evidence-challenged beliefs, like smoke and fire.
Anytime there's a fringe belief that catches on in a substantial subset of the general population, usually by way of believers evangelizing and recruiting new believers, there's pushback from the rest of the population that considers the belief unfounded and ridiculous. That's stigma. Consider "pyramid power." It caught on in a corner of the general public, and others mocked it. For good reason, because there's no evidence that sitting inside a pyramid made of PVC tubing improves your health or whatever, or sharpens razor blades, etc.
There was a whole movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, about the stigma of creationism preventing it from entering into academia. That also happened for good reason. There's no evidence for creationism, motivated reasoning from incredulity notwithstanding. It's just more tedious victim-playing as an attempt to explain why a belief doesn't get more traction than it does, and for that, crying stigma serves a very useful purpose.
Anytime someone cries "stigma," I ask a question: Can you name a belief or proposition that was once stigmatized among the broad population, but which later turned out to be accepted as true by science?
There is one ready-made answer for that question: meteorites being rocks from space. As I think someone else mentioned in this thread, there were indeed a handful of years that this was a hypothesis unsupported by direct evidence, and during that time it got some grief from the lay public who thought that "rocks falling from the sky" was ridiculous.
It's a good example for the mid 1800s. It's not so good an example for the 21st century, when there are cameras and other sensors everywhere, and scientists and laypersons alike can connect with each other at hundreds of Mbps and share evidence, hone their explanations, and instantly publish preprints.
It's also the only example I've ever been given that fits the criterion of the belief being stigmatized among the broad population, but turning out to be true. There might be another example someday, but that seems less and less likely as information-sharing continues to get more efficient.
Stigma exists for a reason. Where there's smoke there's probably fire, and where there's stigma there's probably bullshit.
Anytime there's a fringe belief that catches on in a substantial subset of the general population, usually by way of believers evangelizing and recruiting new believers, there's pushback from the rest of the population that considers the belief unfounded and ridiculous. That's stigma. Consider "pyramid power." It caught on in a corner of the general public, and others mocked it. For good reason, because there's no evidence that sitting inside a pyramid made of PVC tubing improves your health or whatever, or sharpens razor blades, etc.
There was a whole movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, about the stigma of creationism preventing it from entering into academia. That also happened for good reason. There's no evidence for creationism, motivated reasoning from incredulity notwithstanding. It's just more tedious victim-playing as an attempt to explain why a belief doesn't get more traction than it does, and for that, crying stigma serves a very useful purpose.
Anytime someone cries "stigma," I ask a question: Can you name a belief or proposition that was once stigmatized among the broad population, but which later turned out to be accepted as true by science?
There is one ready-made answer for that question: meteorites being rocks from space. As I think someone else mentioned in this thread, there were indeed a handful of years that this was a hypothesis unsupported by direct evidence, and during that time it got some grief from the lay public who thought that "rocks falling from the sky" was ridiculous.
It's a good example for the mid 1800s. It's not so good an example for the 21st century, when there are cameras and other sensors everywhere, and scientists and laypersons alike can connect with each other at hundreds of Mbps and share evidence, hone their explanations, and instantly publish preprints.
It's also the only example I've ever been given that fits the criterion of the belief being stigmatized among the broad population, but turning out to be true. There might be another example someday, but that seems less and less likely as information-sharing continues to get more efficient.
Stigma exists for a reason. Where there's smoke there's probably fire, and where there's stigma there's probably bullshit.
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