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You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Military / UFOs Again

UFOs Again

by Cheryl Rofer|  April 28, 202012:55 pm| 106 Comments

This post is in: Military, Open Threads, Science & Technology

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The Air Force released three videos of UFOs taken by pilots in flight. At the moment, three blurry videos taken through sensors we don’t know how to interpret are not the most important news out there.

I’ll admit it – my best guess is that these are artifacts in the sensors. I can’t tell you what, but I’ve seen lights in the sky and funny stuff that I could have called UFOs until I looked more closely.

Last year, we had a lot of weather balloons in the area. They are coated with aluminum and reflect a nice bright light in morning or evening. Binoculars showed what they are. I even got a photo of one.

Conical-shaped light with basket beneath against blue sky. Red around the outside, yellow inside

I’ve seen lights moving in peculiar ways at night, usually through the window of a car. If I was able to try to reproduce angles and such, they turned out to be reflections. I’ve seen lights moving across the sky at night when I was looking at the stars, not through anything that could cause reflections. Those come closest to something I might declare UFOs when I don’t see the red and green wing lights. Although every time I’ve looked carefully or through binoculars, those wing lights were there.

There was a much greater flying saucer mystique when I was a kid. The reports turned out not to be spaceships. A few remained unidentified even after a few dedicated people scrutinized the largely verbal accounts. I read everything. I wanted to believe that they were really space ships. But by the time of ET, I had recognized that the likelihood of that was vanishingly small.

Dan Zak wrote an article two years ago about the people pushing this. Rich white boys again. They are probably acting in good faith. As for the military people pushing it, I’ve worked with one of the colonels involved in the “staring at goats” thing. He was not at all informed on science and didn’t learn easily. The military has its incompetents too, but it has lots of money to spread to crazy ideas.

I’m not against crazy ideas, but right now we have another priority. Let’s focus on making this world a safe place to live.

Open thread!

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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Reader Interactions

106Comments

  1. 1.

    bjacques

    April 28, 2020 at 12:59 pm

    But…but…UFOs!!

  2. 2.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    April 28, 2020 at 1:02 pm

    I want to believe… and I always figure that in this sprawling universe, it’s unlikely we’re the only planet that can produce (what is called) intelligent life, but like you say, priorities for sciency people, medicine and climate change.

  3. 3.

    David Evans

    April 28, 2020 at 1:03 pm

    “Rich white boys again”

    How is that relevant? I am familiar with some of the UK’s UFO community. They are not all white, mostly not rich and one of the best informed, Jenny Randles, is a woman.

    Agreed, UFOs are not our highest priority as of now. But neither are many other things that people occupy themselves with.

  4. 4.

    Baud

    April 28, 2020 at 1:04 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    it’s unlikely we’re the only planet that can produce (what is called) intelligent life,

    After 2016, I’m not sure we are.

  5. 5.

    DRickard

    April 28, 2020 at 1:04 pm

    Amazing how, with everyone in the world carrying cameras now, UFOs and cryptids have all disappeared, ain’t it?

  6. 6.

    gene108

    April 28, 2020 at 1:05 pm

    Apropos of nothing, young doctors in quarantine

    https://www.instagram.com/tv/B_ZEvwApVEm/

  7. 7.

    Cheryl Rofer

    April 28, 2020 at 1:06 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I have no problem thinking that there may be life somewhere else in the universe, but if you were them, would you want to visit us?

  8. 8.

    OSweetMrMath

    April 28, 2020 at 1:07 pm

    xkcd has a couple of comics on this topic:

    The first echoes DRickard’s comment above.

    https://xkcd.com/1235/

    The second is on the subject of weather balloons.

    https://xkcd.com/2156/

    (I dunno if it’s possible to directly embed the images in this comment.)

  9. 9.

    kindness

    April 28, 2020 at 1:08 pm

    Call me nuts (been called worse) but I believe in UFOs.  And there is a reason they aren’t landing and talking to us.  We’re nuts.  They can see that.

  10. 10.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    April 28, 2020 at 1:09 pm

    @Cheryl Rofer: IT’S A COOK BOOK!

  11. 11.

    Roger Moore

    April 28, 2020 at 1:10 pm

    The military has its incompetents too, but it has lots of money to spread to crazy ideas.

    This seems like a vital thing to keep in mind whenever reading about this stuff, or any of the oddball things the military has worked on.  And even without incompetent people, dealing with the unknown necessarily involves a lot of dead ends and wild goose chases.  The fact that someone has studied a hypothetical phenomenon should not be taken as evidence the phenomenon actually exists; it just means someone thought it might exist.

  12. 12.

    Amir Khalid

    April 28, 2020 at 1:10 pm

    Someone should call the FBI and demand they put Mulder and Scully on the case right away.

    Á propos of nothing, I have had a craving for spicy fried chicken for days now. But I have decided to deny myself for this Ramadhan.

  13. 13.

    lumpkin

    April 28, 2020 at 1:10 pm

    I once saw what appeared to be a large bright round object descend from the clouds in a thunderstorm. I was able to return later to the area where it appeared to hit the ground. There was no sign at all that anything happened.

    What I learned from this is that even skeptical, science minded individuals can be tricked into seeing things that almost certainly don’t exist.

  14. 14.

    Cheryl Rofer

    April 28, 2020 at 1:10 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: To Serve Man

    ETA: Even that might not be too appetizing now, though.

  15. 15.

    Feathers

    April 28, 2020 at 1:11 pm

    Talked with some youngs who had read Donna Tart’s The Secret History and didn’t like it because the character of the professor was completely unbelievable. I tried to convince them that, no, back during the Cold War, ex spies were retired via funded-off-the-books tenured positions in quiet departments at posh colleges and universities. I suspect the men looking at goats departments of the Pentagon are much the same.

    BTW read The Secret History if you haven’t.

  16. 16.

    Ruckus

    April 28, 2020 at 1:12 pm

    @kindness:

    And we broadcast the nuts.

    Hell, we sometimes elect those nuts.

  17. 17.

    Roger Moore

    April 28, 2020 at 1:12 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    it’s unlikely we’re the only planet that can produce (what is called) intelligent life

    There’s a huge gap between “we are not alone in the universe” and “extraterrestrials are visiting the Earth”.

  18. 18.

    pat

    April 28, 2020 at 1:13 pm

    So how many years, traveling at the speed of light, would it take for a UFO to get here from the nearest known planet?

  19. 19.

    Taken4Granite

    April 28, 2020 at 1:14 pm

    @kindness: “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”–Bill Watterson, 1989

    https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/11/08

  20. 20.

    Ruckus

    April 28, 2020 at 1:14 pm

    @Roger Moore:

    Or wanted to prove that it didn’t.

  21. 21.

    laura

    April 28, 2020 at 1:14 pm

    I went searching for signs of intelligent life and found this:

    https://youtu.be/VjvwB3McGnk

  22. 22.

    Baud

    April 28, 2020 at 1:15 pm

    @Cheryl Rofer:

    If you were an alien, would you want Trump a l’Orange?

  23. 23.

    ant

    April 28, 2020 at 1:15 pm

    I am one of those crazy people who think that Jesus was an alien.  I look at bible verses like Matthew 3:16, and feel like it’s the most logical explanation.

     

    I am also and over the road truck driver, so I am always looking out for weird stuff.

     

    Never once have I seen anything of note. Been looking for decades.

     

    I don’t know what to make of these videos. Not convinced these are space ships at all.

  24. 24.

    Ella in New Mexico

    April 28, 2020 at 1:16 pm

    I’ll admit it – my best guess is that these are artifacts in the sensors.

    To be fair, they’ve done some good work to show that they are not artifacts–whatever they really are, they really are.  Which doesn’t mean they’re alien.

    I had a thought that they were stealth-type experimental devices from another, more secret government program, being tested on our “regular” Navy to determine what “mainstream” military detection of them looks like.

    I won’t get specific but having several members of my family who worked on projects like that I can assure you we’ve things like that many times in our history.

  25. 25.

    Cheryl Rofer

    April 28, 2020 at 1:16 pm

    @Baud: And I was just going to make lunch…

  26. 26.

    Matt McIrvin

    April 28, 2020 at 1:17 pm

    Some of the most famous Soviet UFO sightings of the 1960s turned out to be treaty-violating ICBM tests–they were perfectly happy to let the press play up flying-saucer stories as a cover:

    https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a27888/the-secret-soviet-space-weapon-mistaken-for-a-ufo/

  27. 27.

    Roger Moore

    April 28, 2020 at 1:17 pm

    @Ruckus: 

    Or wanted to prove that it didn’t.

    This isn’t as meaningful a distinction as you think. We don’t try to disprove things we think couldn’t possibly be true; we try to disprove things that could be true but that we disbelieve for some reason.

  28. 28.

    Amir Khalid

    April 28, 2020 at 1:18 pm

    In some now long-forgotten work of science fiction, I came across the conjecture that the aliens who mysteriously appear here from time to time are really just bored extraterrestrial adolescents tormenting us for fun. I find this idea appealing.

  29. 29.

    Matt McIrvin

    April 28, 2020 at 1:19 pm

    Similarly, I think the US Army initially encouraged speculation about UFOs after the Roswell incident as a way of deflecting attention from what they were actually up to (Project Mogul, an effort to fly balloon-suspended microphones to detect Soviet nuclear-bomb tests).

  30. 30.

    Amir Khalid

    April 28, 2020 at 1:19 pm

    @pat:

    About four, assuming you’re not counting our solar system.

  31. 31.

    Roger Moore

    April 28, 2020 at 1:20 pm

    @Amir Khalid:

    In some now long-forgotten work of science fiction, I came across the conjecture that the aliens who mysteriously appear here from time to time are really just bored extraterrestrial adolescents tormenting us for fun.

    I thought there was something about that in one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, but I might be remembering wrong.

  32. 32.

    Matt McIrvin

    April 28, 2020 at 1:20 pm

    @Amir Khalid: I think Douglas Adams mentions that in an aside in one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books.

  33. 33.

    Tom Hamill

    April 28, 2020 at 1:22 pm

  34. 34.

    Hermann Fegelein

    April 28, 2020 at 1:23 pm

    My car got hit by a UFO once; it bounced off the windshield. Within a couple seconds my wife realized it was a rock, but at the exact instant it hit, it was a UFO

  35. 35.

    Hungry Joe

    April 28, 2020 at 1:24 pm

    @Feathers: I liked  “The Secret History” a lot, but I LOVED “The Little Friend.”

  36. 36.

    MattF

    April 28, 2020 at 1:27 pm

    There’s also the fact that our visual apparatus is wired pretty much directly into our brains and any physical input to our eyes undergoes heavy signal processing before we become aware of it. In particular, we’re evolved to look out for predators, and a false positive is much more survivable than a false negative.

  37. 37.

    Hungry Joe

    April 28, 2020 at 1:28 pm

    Pictures of UFOs are always blurry because when the pictures aren’t blurry the airborne objects are easily identifiable. Call me when there’s a clear, context-reliable shot of a what-the-hell-is-THAT????

  38. 38.

    Matt McIrvin

    April 28, 2020 at 1:31 pm

    @lumpkin: You might have seen something! (Ball lightning, whatever that is, or some kind of corona discharge phenomenon. Or even a large meteor, though if it was glowing below cloud level that’s pretty unlikely.)

    The weirdest unexplained-sighting experience I ever had was when I was a little kid, lying in bed on a hot summer night with the window open–I saw a strange wave of light wash over the metal window screen, with sort of a frying noise accompanying it.

    Being a kid accustomed to speculating about such things, I assumed it was some ball-lightning-like phenomenon. My best guess is that I was really just dreaming, or having a falling-asleep hallucination. But I’ll never know.

  39. 39.

    Lawrence

    April 28, 2020 at 1:32 pm

    Blink 182 is pushing UFO theories, but not the Foo Fighters?

  40. 40.

    Dan B

    April 28, 2020 at 1:35 pm

    @Baud: Ditto!

    When I was at university in the midwest, in O M vicinity, a group of us took dry cleaning bags and put a balsa wood cross at the bottom with 20 b’day candles lit and let them float away over campus and the river valley to the west.

    The next morning the PA system in the large dining hall was broadcasting the radio which announced that the Colorado Project (Federal UFO investigation) had been called in to the city to investigate 30 foot tall glowing objects that spewed bolts of light and fire.

    We looked at each other and remained very quiet.

    30 feet +?  The bags were standard 3- 1/2 feet.

  41. 41.

    Kelly

    April 28, 2020 at 1:35 pm

    Sitting on my back porch one night I saw a white light the size of an average star wink into existence. It appeared to hang there motionless growing to the brightness of Venus. Supernova, I thought with excitement! Then it turned and joined the flight path for PDX. Must have been coming straight at me with landing lights on and descending at just the right angle as it flew in from the Pacific.

  42. 42.

    Hungry Joe

    April 28, 2020 at 1:37 pm

    I like s-f as much (well, almost as much) as the next nerd, but I’ve long suspected that the speed of light is, in fact, inviolable, and no matter how advanced the extraterrestrial civilization, it will be thus constrained/restricted. Wormholes, et al are devices s-f writers use to dodge this unfortunate and inconvenient state of affairs … affairs in this universe, anyway.

  43. 43.

    Amir Khalid

    April 28, 2020 at 1:37 pm

    @Roger Moore:

    You may be right.

  44. 44.

    MattF

    April 28, 2020 at 1:42 pm

    @Kelly: And, any signals we get from ‘them’ are likely to be the alien version of ‘I Love Lucy’.

  45. 45.

    joel hanes

    April 28, 2020 at 1:44 pm

    I wanted to believe that they were really space ships.

    Oh, me too!

    Twelve-year-old me really really wanted telekinesis and teleportation to be real things, too.

    (Telepathy not so much … what 12-year-old boy would want his parents to be able to read his mind?)

    Learned the word “tesseract” from Wrinkle In Time, and thought I knew something.

    Loved Zenna Henderson’s books about  The People.

    Then I learned about the scale of the universe, and relativity, and the experiments testing for the existence of paranormal phenomena, and learned about motivated reasoning and selection bias, and the human tendency to see patterns in noise.  And Occam’s razor.

    At present, we are the custodians of the only known life in the Universe.   We’re doing a really shitty job of it.

  46. 46.

    Dan B

    April 28, 2020 at 1:44 pm

    @Amir Khalid: Occam’s razor award winner!

  47. 47.

    Dan B

    April 28, 2020 at 1:49 pm

    @MattF:  I believe the signals we get are far more likely to be Real Housewives of Xirkwlssst, or shopping channel.  Would we want to visit them?

  48. 48.

    Hungry Joe

    April 28, 2020 at 1:49 pm

    @MattF: I’d rather see an extraterrestrial “Honeymooners,” but that’s just me.

  49. 49.

    bemused

    April 28, 2020 at 1:50 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Ha, I’ve never forgotten that tv episode, Twilight Zone? Poor earthlings boarding the ufo to visit the aliens’ planet didn’t decipher the book “To Serve Mankind” in time.

  50. 50.

    Dan B

    April 28, 2020 at 1:53 pm

    @bemused: Outer Limits.  My brother described it in terms that convinced me I didn’t need to see the episode ever.

  51. 51.

    bemused

    April 28, 2020 at 1:53 pm

    @bemused:

    Come to think of it, Republicans playbook to serve Americans is remarkably similar.

  52. 52.

    bemused

    April 28, 2020 at 1:54 pm

    @Dan B:

    I get those two shows mixed up.

  53. 53.

    MattF

    April 28, 2020 at 1:55 pm

    @joel hanes: About seeing patterns in noise… what needs to be understood is that the patterns are really there, but are entirely unconstrained. ‘Random’ means that any possible pattern may occur.

  54. 54.

    Kenneth Fair

    April 28, 2020 at 1:56 pm

    Lister: Your explanation for anything slightly peculiar is aliens, isn’t it? You lose your keys, it’s aliens. A picture falls off the wall, it’s aliens. That time we used up a whole bog roll in a day, you thought that was aliens as well.
    Rimmer: Well we didn’t use it all, Lister. Who did?
    Lister: Rimmer, ALIENS used our bog roll?
    Rimmer: Just cause they’re aliens doesn’t mean to say they don’t have to visit the little boys’ room. Only they probably do something weird and alien-esque, like it comes out of the top of their heads or something.
    Lister: Well I wouldn’t like to be stuck behind one in a cinema.

    – Red Dwarf, “Kryten” (S2 E1)

  55. 55.

    Mayim

    April 28, 2020 at 1:59 pm

    @Amir Khalid: there’s an episode of the original Star Trek (Squire of Gothos) that has a bored adolescent causing trouble for the Enterprise crew.

  56. 56.

    Suzy

    April 28, 2020 at 1:59 pm

    Take a couple of hours of your life and watch this video. It’s long, the first minutes will make you go ???, but you should PERSIST, and watch the different testimonies. IF possible, persist TILL THE END. There are a couple of testimonies near the end that make you go ????

    If you’ve never heard of this video, it will probably be pretty disturbing, unsettling.

    The Disclosure Project.

    Conference with former US officials, people who have worked at Nasa, etc.

    Believe it or not, this conference happened in 2001. When I accidentally found this video, it changed my perspective.

    I was shaken.

    Dr. Steven Greer, who was the organizer of this conference, has been working on this for over twenty years. His views are very out there. He also has a good ego. DESPITE these caveats, he has made big contributions over the years to the search on the phenomenon. And when you are ready, watch the more recent productions of Dr. Greer. He has taken images of very surprising phenomenons.

    But first things first, watch the video of The Disclosure Project. This is a first step. Give yourself time to digest it.

    Here’s the link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i-

    48LpRB9c&list=PL2AIKLQ51rZWTyyltOOFuWxnX7JJB-RTr

    Testimonies from former U.S. Officials begin around 15:00

    Last note: if you are impressed and shaken by the video, if you want to research further, be CAREFUL: the majority of UFO stuff on the Internet is CRAP.  The conspiracy stuff is so crazy…  Please don’t become followers of Q-Anon and the like…  These people are nuts.

  57. 57.

    Jager

    April 28, 2020 at 2:00 pm

    I worked with a guy, who claimed to have seen a UFO while driving back from Florida with his wife.  She was asleep and didn’t see it. The episode shook him up so much, he turned to Jesus. He started bringing a bible to work. He irritated his co-workers with his claims and stories and about how much his savior was helping him cope. Eventually, his wife couldn’t take it anymore and left him. He quit his job (he was a newsman) and went to work for Pat Robertson. After 5 years at CBN and no raise he quit.  I had a drink with him at the NAB Convention in Vegas about 10 years ago and he said, “WTF was I thinking.”

  58. 58.

    joel hanes

    April 28, 2020 at 2:00 pm

    @MattF:

    I’m mostly talking about seeing in sun-dapple a leopard that isn’t there, or the face of Jesus in a pancake, or a warrior astride the heavens in Orion.

  59. 59.

    Just One More Canuck

    April 28, 2020 at 2:01 pm

    @MattF:

    “Historical Documents” a la Galaxy Quest?

  60. 60.

    dopey-o

    April 28, 2020 at 2:05 pm

    The ubiquity of pocket-sized cameras pretty much demonstrates that we are not being visiting by UFOs. Thanks, Steve Jobs…. As Enrico Fermi asked, “Where are they?” No convincing photos, let alone hi-res videos.

    In light of humanity’s certain demise over the next 500 years, it would be great if our super intelligent Dutch Uncles would descend with a metaphorical 2×4 and set mankind straight in regard to despoiling our nest. Alas, this is not to be.

    There is no intelligent life in this corner of the galaxy. Not even us. This should be obvious to any observer. If we can not get beyond stupid, our descendants are.doomed to ecological calamities, pandemics, mass migrations, wars and unimagined catastrophes.

  61. 61.

    bemused

    April 28, 2020 at 2:06 pm

    It’s interesting to read about ufo’s but just as entertainment. On the other hand, when a pre-teen at a slumber party, we played with a ouija board. I thought it was creepy at the time and haven’t changed my mind 50 years later.

  62. 62.

    tam1MI

    April 28, 2020 at 2:11 pm

    I keep thinking of the episode of Amazing Stories where it turns out the aliens had been monitoring old TV episodes like I Love Lucy, and they came to Earth to get Milton Berle’s autograph.

  63. 63.

    TCS

    April 28, 2020 at 2:12 pm

    How would you respond to “Take me to your leader”?

  64. 64.

    MattF

    April 28, 2020 at 2:16 pm

    @TCS: ‘He’s not someone you’d really want to meet.’

  65. 65.

    billcinsd

    April 28, 2020 at 2:17 pm

    @Amir Khalid:

    If you do count our solar system, which pat’s question doesn’t rule out, the answer is 6 seconds

  66. 66.

    John Revolta

    April 28, 2020 at 2:19 pm

    @TCS: “I’ll take you right to him, but I must warn you- he hates all aliens and wants you all to die. Just sayin’.”

  67. 67.

    Bob7094

    April 28, 2020 at 2:23 pm

    Not UFOs, but the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds just flew by my backyard in Central New Jersey in a steep turn on their way to buzz Philadelphia.  Impressive & loud.

  68. 68.

    joel hanes

    April 28, 2020 at 2:26 pm

    @pat:

    A vessel traveling at the speed of light has infinite mass.  We would definitely notice such a thing as it arrived in the Solar System and disrupted orbits.

  69. 69.

    ljdramone

    April 28, 2020 at 2:36 pm

    @pat:

    So how many years, traveling at the speed of light, would it take for a UFO to get here from the nearest known planet?

    Nearest known exoplanet is Proxima Centauri b, which orbits Proxima Centauri, our nearest star. It’s about 4.25 light-years away, so about four years and three months.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_exoplanets

  70. 70.

    germy

    April 28, 2020 at 2:39 pm

    @dopey-o:

    The ubiquity of pocket-sized cameras pretty much demonstrates that we are not being visiting by UFOs.

    We are getting more visual proof of police misbehavior, though.

  71. 71.

    germy

    April 28, 2020 at 2:41 pm

    “Aliens erase your memory, so if you think you’ve never seen a UFO, you probably see them all the time!”

    (Father Sarducci)

  72. 72.

    TupeloPhoney

    April 28, 2020 at 2:46 pm

    What Hermann Fegelein said — I believe in UFOs.  I see them all the time, until I identify, to whatever extent, the flying object in question.

    Now that picture, unless I see video of it moving very erratically, that’s quite obviously a picture of a weather balloon reflecting the sun near the horizon.

  73. 73.

    Brachiator

    April 28, 2020 at 2:46 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    I want to believe… and I always figure that in this sprawling universe, it’s unlikely we’re the only planet that can produce (what is called) intelligent life

    I suppose. But putting aside possible issues of time scales, distance, diversity of types of possible life, etc…

    I think the idea of aliens to reticent to reveal themselves or who agree to co-operate in a conspiracy hatched by any Earth government is inherently ridiculous.

    My aliens would have landed plop down in the middle of the largest sports stadium during the Olympics or World Cup, come out of their space ship and shouted, via universal translator, “That’s right. ET, muthafuckers!”

    Of course, now that we will never go to big sports events again, because of the pandemic, this will never happen.

  74. 74.

    catclub

    April 28, 2020 at 2:47 pm

    @Amir Khalid:

    are really just bored extraterrestrial adolescents tormenting us for fun. I find this idea appealing.

    Of course, the other theory, that the reason we don’t see other life nearby  is that something much bigger is killing off any competition, is scarier.

  75. 75.

    Mart

    April 28, 2020 at 2:49 pm

    @Roger Moore:

    There’s a huge gap between “we are not alone in the universe” and “extraterrestrials are visiting the Earth”.

    Watching technology advance over the past 60 years has ruined alien sci-fy books and movies for me. If we are visited by another “life” form (ain’t gonna happen), it will be electronic. No ET, and no force will be with you.

  76. 76.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    April 28, 2020 at 2:49 pm

    After reading some classic  sci fi as a kid,  I  did come to the realization that someone “buzzing” earth – investigating it with a space ship from, with or without antennae and poor losers no one would ever believe – didn’t make a lot of sense.

    (Independence Day made pitiful sense – if you’ve got that much power, why the hell are you wasting it blowing up cities on worlds that can’t even pose a threat to you? Still, it made a bit more sense than V (oxygen breathers looking for water, when hydrogen is the most common element in the universe; and, looking at some of the worst game on the planet – yeah, “To Serve Man… it’s a cookbook!” is a fine punchline, but why would a carnivore want meat that is so slow to grow?).)

    I’d like to believe in something, myself, but right now, I’d say that any aliens able to communicate with us would quickly realize that this place is just completely *crazy* right now, and it’s the wrong time to make contact.

  77. 77.

    Brachiator

    April 28, 2020 at 2:53 pm

    @joel hanes:

    I am agnostic about the existence of alien life elsewhere. Unlikely, based on what we know now. However….

    Then I learned about the scale of the universe, and relativity, and the experiments testing for the existence of paranormal phenomena, and learned about motivated reasoning and selection bias, and the human tendency to see patterns in noise. And Occam’s razor.

    At present, we are the custodians of the only known life in the Universe.

    I’m ancient.  I had science text books that would sagely note that our solar system was the only one in the entire universe that had planets.

  78. 78.

    JaneE

    April 28, 2020 at 2:54 pm

    My husband saw something when he was stationed at Barstow (CA desert) in the 50’s, when UFOs were big.  He didn’t think it was a “flying saucer” but he had and still has no idea what it was.   I myself saw something that really did look like a classic flying saucer, but as we went further down the road the angle changed the way the light was being reflected off it, and it was obviously a lenticular cloud formation.  For a couple of minutes it had me guessing.

  79. 79.

    germy

    April 28, 2020 at 3:00 pm

    Scoop: @EWarren and @AOC team up on a new proposal to halt big mergers during the coronavirus pandemic.

    Warren sees “private equity vultures” looking to “gobble up” small biz. AOC warns of “decades-long economic consequences” of inaction for consumers.

    https://t.co/zd7H4w73PB— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 28, 2020

  80. 80.

    rikyrah

    April 28, 2020 at 3:04 pm

    In the middle of a PANDEMIC… don’t care about ?

  81. 81.

    Miss Bianca

    April 28, 2020 at 3:05 pm

    @Feathers: I read that book about 20 years ago and it scared the everloving crap out of me – haunted me, even. Same with Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin.

    Something about young people going down that spiral into madness and murder really shook me up.

  82. 82.

    tam1MI

    April 28, 2020 at 3:10 pm

    I read somewhere that if you map the places where clusters of UFO sightings took place, they all turn out to be near places where stealth fighters and stealth bombers were being tested.

  83. 83.

    Mart

    April 28, 2020 at 3:22 pm

    @tam1MI: Unpossible. You can’t see stealth planes because they are invisible. My President told me this.

  84. 84.

    SFBayAreaGal

    April 28, 2020 at 3:23 pm

    My uncle was a captain in SAC, flew out of Travis Airforce Base.

    I asked him if he ever saw UFOs while he was flying.

    He told me one time he and the rest of the cockpit crew saw this light in the distance, then it rapidly accelerated towards them, lit up the cockpit with a green light and then flew off. I asked him if it was a flying saucer. With a smile, he said he couldn’t confirm or deny. However, he could confirm it was a UFO (Unidentified Flying Object).

  85. 85.

    RobertB

    April 28, 2020 at 3:32 pm

    @Mayim: Word on the streets (Harlan Ellison I think) is that Gene Roddenberry had one SF story idea: we find God/a god, and find out that they’re a child, or insane, or both.  In TNG, Q showed up when, third episode?  Fourth?

  86. 86.

    RobertB

    April 28, 2020 at 3:40 pm

    @pat: Heinlein’s _Have Spacesuit, Will Travel_, spends a page or so discussing this.  If you can maintain constant acceleration, time dilation catches up with you pretty quickly.  The 4 years from alpha centauri turns into a couple of months duration on board the vessel itself.  That was just a longish ocean voyage a couple hundred years ago.

  87. 87.

    wjs

    April 28, 2020 at 3:42 pm

    I agree with Cheryl because why wouldn’t you?

    There are a lot of really bad pilots out there who are kept in their positions of trust because they are “easy to get along with” and “meet the standards” and have not killed themselves. Then there are a lot of really poorly designed planes with faulty equipment on them that fails a lot. Then there are cameras and sensors and tracking systems that don’t work properly because an incompetent contractor can’t get them to work. And then there are a lot of people who really, really want there to be UFOs and aliens and all that shit and they’ve never taken a proper college-level astronomy course.

    That may or may not be true in this case. Just sayin’.

  88. 88.

    MomSense

    April 28, 2020 at 3:44 pm

    @Amir Khalid:

    They came here for the Chuck Berry music.

  89. 89.

    m.j.

    April 28, 2020 at 3:58 pm

    Why would an alien civilization’s economics be any different from our own?

    It’s expensive to send beings into an extremely hostile environment. What’s the gain? Knowledge. Profit. Curious interest satiated?

    Trying to remove yourselves from an environment you are tied to by millions of years of evolution seems like a desperate act.

  90. 90.

    AnnaN

    April 28, 2020 at 4:02 pm

    I used to work for the Global Monitoring Division of NOAA (in program support, not research) and they do atmospheric air sampling utilizing high-altitude balloons.  https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/aircore/

  91. 91.

    Another Scott

    April 28, 2020 at 4:03 pm

    @SFBayAreaGal: Once I was in a boring engineering class in an old building in grad school decades ago.  The windows were open because the steam radiators were pumping out too much heat.  It was mid-afternoon and the sun was shining into the room.

    I was daydreaming and glanced out of the corner of my eye to see a student at his desk to my right looked like he was engulfed in bright red dancing flames!!  When I looked at him straight on, nothing was unusual – it was only when I looked at him with my peripheral vision.

    The most reasonable explanation involves a few things:

    1. Convection air currents from the temperature difference from the hot radiator and the cooler outside air.
    2. The convection currents change the relative density of the air and make regions of high and low density for the light to pass through (giving the dancing effect).
    3. Our eyes have different sensitivities to color, contrast, motion, etc., depending on whether we’re looking straight-on or peripherally (giving the red flames effect).

    Couple all of those things together, and one can see really, really strange things on occasion.  OMG!  HE (OR HIS SOUL) IS ON FIRE!!!   ;-)

    On what the sensors see in radars and the like, well, most electronics really likes to have a stable ground connection.  It’s a stable 0V reference.  How does one make a stable ground on an aircraft when it’s going through the air, picking up static electricity as a natural consequence of its motion?  (Yeah, people are clever and understand how to solve such problems in most cases.)  But seemingly weird things can happen without aliens or whatever be invoked (via electronics glitches, or the sensors picking up unusual air density conditions).

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  92. 92.

    SFBayAreaGal

    April 28, 2020 at 4:07 pm

    @RobertB: A child/God showed up in Star Trek the original series. The episode is “Squire of Gothos”

    Trelane the child/God is probably the precursor to Q

  93. 93.

    Scamp Dog

    April 28, 2020 at 4:11 pm

    Finding about intelligent life somewhere else in the universe isn’t likely to happen in my lifetime, but I’d love to know if there’s life in Europa’s ocean, underneath the layer of ice that covers its surface.  We’ve sent probes to Jupiter, so we can definitely get to that moon, but landing on it and then getting through 10-30 km of ice will be a challenge.

  94. 94.

    mrmoshpotato

    April 28, 2020 at 4:19 pm

    Can I scrooch him now?

  95. 95.

    mrmoshpotato

    April 28, 2020 at 4:21 pm

    @Scamp Dog: Hey Scamp Dog.  How’re you doing?

  96. 96.

    peej01

    April 28, 2020 at 4:56 pm

    When I was a kid, I was convinced that the lights from the traffic on the nearby interstate were some kind of UFO.

  97. 97.

    J R in WV

    April 28, 2020 at 4:59 pm

    OK, I’m going to go with two flying saucer stories — one a personal story of my own experience back in the winter of 1970-71, and the other told to me by the guy it happened to as he and a friend and I walked down off his ridge top meadows in the late evening.

    I was a newbie sailor on a big old ship moored in the Navy base in Key West in either very late 1970 or early ’71. A fellow sailor and I had been to the Enlisted Men’s club on the base and walked back to the ship fairly early in the evening, 9 or 10. It was a wonderful tropical night, clear as a bell, warm and comfortable, and we went up to the helicopter landing pad to look at the sky and relax before going to hit the rack.

    We had pulled some life jackets out of a locker and laid down. Dave was on my left, we were facing south, the ship was moored pointing nearly due north. So I was looking southwest and Dave was looking southeast, when he said something like “Holy Shit!” — when I looked to my left, to the southeast, there were three swoopy shaped brightly glowing objects in a triangular formation headed north low and fast.

    We jumped up and watched as they passed over the base, over the land east of the ship and its mooring, and after just a few seconds, as they were a good bit north of the ship, they blinked out of existence. as gone as they could have been. Dave told me that was how he first saw them, blinked into his view instantly.

    They were glowing swoopy shapes, bird-like icons, and their glow was mobile, at the time I thought of a fluorescent tube that’s old and failing, sometimes you can see the arc moving around inside the tube, and these glowed like that. No straight lines, all curves, nothing like either modern stealth aircraft or the angular fighters the Navy flew out of Boca Chica Naval Air Station back in those days.

    As soon as these objects were gone, if they were gone, we immediately went way below decks, wanting to get steel between us and the sky. We didn’t know what we had seen, just that it wasn’t anything we had ever seen before. The next day Dave wouldn’t talk about it, he had decided denial was his path to safety. I have never forgotten the sights.

    Flash forward 10 years. We have bought our land in rural WV, and keep some livestock. I have met another local farmer, and struck up a friendship, we work together on each other’s farms, as many tasks go 5 times as quickly with two guys as with one. Tom was a real big hard working guy, and one summer day he wants to drive over to another hollow to look at Brown Swiss cattle on a farm over there.

    The farmer works at a local factory, an FMC chemical plant, and farms partly by headlights on his tractor, which is pretty common around here — small hill farms even if you’re really good at it you’ll need a job for the cash flow. As we walk among the cattle, and dusk begins, the owner of the farm tells us he doesn’t care to be out much after dark, so we head down off the ridge.

    I ask what caused him to want to be in after dark, and after a few steps he tells us a story. His daughter was in high school, and had borrowed a car to visit a neighbor girl friend after dinner. When she wasn’t home after a little while, he tried to call, but couldn’t connect with them. Remember, this was long before cell phones in the late 1960s, and we’re hearing the story around 1979-80-81. So he fired up his pickup truck and drove up the creek towards the neighbor’s farm.

    After just a mile or so he sees his daughter’s car, it’s dark beside the road. He walks up to the car, and she is hysterical. Something came down, all lit up, and stopped the car’s electronics cold. It wouldn’t start, no lights, no radio. He tried to start it, same old nothing. So they got into the truck, turned around and headed home.

    Just a few minutes later, same thing happens again. Bright light slowly sinks toward them, pickup stops running, all the electric is off. Strange lights flash around, silently. After a few minutes, it rises into the clear sky and vanishes. They are in shock, daughter hysterical, older farmer also pretty upset. After they calm down, he tries the starter, and this time the truck fires up, they get home without further excitement. And over a decade later this guy is reluctant to be up on his ridge after dark~!!~

    This event happened in the late 1960s, and there were other sightings, mostly nearer the plants in the Kanawha Valley, where there are bright lights and huge industrial installations. We were told the story by someone who was there first hand 11 or 12 years later.

    Over the years of coming home late after work, I’ve also seen other high flying strangeness, but mostly all colored meteors and bolides flying down out of space, melting at high speed as they fall towards Earth.

    Way long ago wife and I saw a really big meteor skip through the stratosphere around midnight after work. The place lit up brighter than daylight, and when we looked out the car, there was a bar of white light from horizon to horizon. It was seen from North Carolina to up state NY, and I suspect we were really lucky it didn’t impact along the eastern seaboard somewhere. Not a flying saucer, I don’t suspect, just random space junk vaporizing in the sky…

    There are really strange things out there. Whether flying saucers, UFOs, or really strange electrical fields falling out of a clear sky, I dunno. Really hard to imagine an optical illusion that mimics a trio of flying shapes in a tropical sky with radar active all around. Back then Key West had missile bases as well as the Navy Air Station. Cubans, don’t you know!! Can’t trust them at all ~!!~

    ETA fix spelling, make dates clearer.

  98. 98.

    Uncle Cosmo

    April 28, 2020 at 5:28 pm

    @Hungry Joe: “To the 17th moon of Hisanus, Malice!” :^D

  99. 99.

    Uncle Cosmo

    April 28, 2020 at 5:34 pm

    @Dan B: Nope. Here’s the proof.

    FWIW the episode is based on a short story by well-known SF author Damon Knight.

    What’s that old saw? “Better to be quiet & be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth & remove all doubt.” Not that anyone forced you to speak up.

    What’s that other old saw? “It ain’t so much what we don’t know, it’s what we know that just ain’t so.”

  100. 100.

    Keith P.

    April 28, 2020 at 5:54 pm

    In the case of the these videos, the objects were traveling extremely fast but also were tracked by the aircraft avionics, so had their true distance and speed. Their movements appeared to violate physics…what kind of objects could appear to do something like that?

  101. 101.

    NotMax

    April 28, 2020 at 5:57 pm

    @Amir Khalid

    In some now long-forgotten work of science fiction

    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

    “Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.”
    “Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him.
    “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”

  102. 102.

    Amir Khalid

    April 28, 2020 at 6:22 pm

    @NotMax:

    Yeah, that’s the one!

  103. 103.

    Another Scott

    April 28, 2020 at 6:26 pm

    @Keith P.: Which is more likely:

    1. Something violated the well-known and well-understood laws of physics.
    2. The sensors (radar/etc.) misinterpreted what they “measured”.

    I’m going with #2, because what one “measures” depends on the process used, the assumptions about the environment in which the measurement is done, and how it’s calibrated.

    “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.”

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  104. 104.

    Scamp Dog

    April 28, 2020 at 7:31 pm

    @mrmoshpotato: Fine, thanks! Meeca is doing well too. How are things for you?

  105. 105.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    April 28, 2020 at 11:28 pm

    @Amir Khalid: Fair enough, but I did reference it with “buzzing” :-).

    (My main point was, actual alien vessels would be unlikely to be something *we* notice as often as we notice UFOs, because space travel would either be super expensive, or so cheap that there’s no point of noticing (and certainly  not *visiting*) earth.)

  106. 106.

    cope

    April 28, 2020 at 11:28 pm

    I don’t normally worry about UFO stuff, it’s just harmless diversion for some people, I guess.

    However, I did view the videos and have an observation and a question.  The observation is that the one video with a dark, fuzzy object surrounded by a halo of light sure looks like the optical phenomenon called a glory.  The questions is:  do the data on the HUD give any helpful information about the course of the plane in relation to the UFO and any useful information about the spectrum in which the video is shot?  I did see “IR” displayed but don’t know to what that refers.

    Fortunately, this thread is dead and I can go to bed.

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