ectospheno 16 hours ago

Humans are bad eye witnesses. We don’t like this so it’s easier to scour the world looking for evidence we were right all along. Combine this with how well we see patterns even when they aren’t there and you get ufos.

  • someone7x 14 hours ago

    This isn’t about eyewitnesses, it’s about looking at historical pictures of the sky before the advent of space flight.

    > Villarroel and her team used the digitized scans to study the night sky as it was before the 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1, to eliminate the possibility of seeing space-based interference from human activity.

    > Under the auspices of Villarroel’s Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project, they identified more than 107,000 transients.

  • JohnFen 16 hours ago

    Yes. Humans tend to see what they expect to see rather than what is actually there.

    • rkomorn 16 hours ago

      The best example of this is all the "ghost hunter" shows that were (are?) popular.

      If you listen to static looking for something to hear, you're gonna find something.

      If you see a heat pattern left by someone leaning on a locker and you want to see something, you're gonna see "a face and body!!!" instead of just the fact that the shoulder pressed more than the arm and left a larger circle.

  • datavirtue 13 hours ago

    Sounds good, but then you have the lights over Arizona in 1995 and other incidents that are on video.

    Are Aliens here goofing off? Probably not but humans are either conjuring these manifestations of mass hallucinations or they are actually happening. I guess the first case is a really a version of the second case.

    We used to have issues with fairies, now it's humanoids visiting in crafts.

montjoy 14 hours ago

It seems like anything that has a hint of legitimizing UAP in any way will promptly be dismissed by the establishment within a day of making headlines. It’s curious that our culture is willing to use any other explanation at all, no matter how tenuous, other than non-human intelligence as at least a possibility for an event.

beyondCritics 15 hours ago

For the informed nerd (e.g. read Elizondo first or Greer, Bledsoe) it should by now be established, that we have a serious UAP problem. Hence it's a good thing that all the incidents that were previously ridiculed and downplayed are now one by one reconsidered.

  • saaaaaam 14 hours ago

    I didn’t know who Elizondo is. I just read a little. It appears he’s been pretty comprehensively debunked?

    By serious UAP problem did you mean problem with people claiming everything is a UAP, or did you mean problem in the sense of “there are lots of UAPs and we don’t know why”?

    • Marshferm 14 hours ago

      The transition from burning bush to UFO to UAP...

      I wonder of we modernized our relationship to phenomena in technology and shift from spectral beings to extraterrestrial beings as a built-in problem of explanations, based in some simplistic reliance of cause and effect.

      https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X2...

      • datavirtue 13 hours ago

        Yes, people used to see fairies a lot.

    • montjoy 14 hours ago

      There are probably 1000s of reports of from people across the globe that are seeing very similar things that remain unexplained. If the evidence went to a courtroom, I think certain UAP “cases” would pass have a positive “verdict” based on overwhelming circumstantial evidence. However, science has a higher bar (as it should) so when we ask our experts what’s happening they have to say “no evidence” or else lose their credibility.

      • Marshferm 14 hours ago

        The debunking of each case of UAP I've seen involves a mixture of science and folk science. They're fairly easily debunked if your persepctive changes.

        • montjoy 12 hours ago

          Some, yes. If you’re genuinely curious I’d invite you to read project blue book or read through nuforc reports.

          But I get it. If I hadn’t heard some things first hand from credible witnesses I’d be more skeptical too.

    • beyondCritics 13 hours ago

      For the records: I'm taking it very seriously and had this book in mind: Elizondo, L. (2024). Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's hunt for UFOs. William Morrow. The tone is very dark though.

more_corn 13 hours ago

Can any headline ending in a question be answered in the affirmative? (No.)