Home » Open thread 6/1/21

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Open thread 6/1/21 — 28 Comments

  1. The issue of UFOs–up until now relegated to “tin foil hat” territory–has now come front and center and to MSM and national attention with the leaks/release of several videos of such UFOs that our military has certified are legitimate, and are of real things whose nature, after their analysis, remains truly “unknown.”

    In recent TV and Internet interviews Lue Alizondo and others have also added fuel to the fire by attaching, for the first time, specific numbers to some of the observed characteristics of these UFOs–things like tracked speeds of 10,000-15,000 miles per hour, drops from 80,000 feet to sea level in a second, calculated G-forces of 500-600 Gs-from abrupt right angle turns and accelerations; capabilities that are far beyond what appear to be the current capabilities of any of the various vehicles fielded by nations here on Earth.

    This crescendo of information, attention, and prominence as the date approaches for the UAP (aka UFO) Report by our Director of National Intelligence detailing what our government knows about this issue (one unclassified report, another in classified form) that is supposed to be delivered to the Senate Intelligence Committee by June 25th.

    This sudden prominence of and increasing credence given to this issue certainly seems to me like “preparation of the intellectual battle space.”

  2. What a unique sense of humor!

    I can’t help but imagine the reception he’d get from today’s woke college students. Would he even be allowed to be invited?

  3. Snow on Pine,

    I’ll reiterate a question I’ve asked before on other threads; given that cameras on satellites circling the earth can read license plates… why is it that gun cameras on $143 million dollar, state-of-the-art combat aircraft produce images comparable to WWII cameras? Even our smartphones produce far better images…

  4. This sudden prominence of and increasing credence given to this issue certainly seems to me like “preparation of the intellectual battle space.”

    Or mistaking optical illusions for actual objects.

  5. UFOs?

    Covid and fear of bring called racist no longer work – and have called into question the left’s claim to own scientific progress.

    A new bogeyman must be invented.

  6. Geoffrey Britain–I think, along with Lue Alizondo, that we are now well past the question of, “if these UFOs are real objects.”

    The government has now admitted that they are.

    And, now, the U.S. government looks like it is finally—and very reluctantly–having to deal with the fact of UAPs–sometimes dozens of them–entering into our and other nation’s airspace as and when they please, with us unable to do anything about it; according to some military pilots this is now almost a daily occurrence.

    BTW–In a recent interview, former DNI Ratcliffe just casually mentioned that the government does have satellite images of UFOs. I expect—if the truth were known—that he government actually has a ton of satellite generated and other images of UFOs.

    I suspect that the government may also have much better images of UFOs, but since many in government just don’t want to deal with this issue, that they are only very reluctantly responding to the crappiest images, and not providing much better ones.

    Re: The blurriness of the images, it may also be that these vehicles have some sort of field around them which makes it pretty impossible to get a clear image of them.

  7. Cohen’s style and delivery lead me to believe that Steven Wright was influenced by him. Could that be?

  8. I’ve been reading the UFO story off-and-on since the mid-sixties. Not much has changed. Roughly 95% of sightings turn out to be satellites, Venus, planes, etc. Roughly 5% aren’t easily explainable. These are given pretend explanations — “swamp gas”, “mass hallucinations” — or ignored. A few turn out to be hoaxes.

    Some people believe too easily that “flying saucers” have been proved. Others believe without really considering all the evidence that it comes down to mistakes and foolishness. However, there have been too many credible observers and some physical evidence IMO to take the latter route.

    The key is not to conflate UFO (or the newer acronym UAP — “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”) with flying saucers. There is something happening, it’s unidentified, and we don’t understand it yet.

  9. Leonard Cohen has always had a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor as can be seen in the above video. It’s no small part of his charm.

    “Ladies and Gentlemen, Leonard Cohen” is a documentary on Cohen as his career as a Canadian poet/writer was taking off. It’s fun and only 44-minutes long. There are several copies uploaded to YouTube.

  10. The real story, as I make it out, behind the recently released Navy UFO footage is that the government does have a great deal of UFO evidence (H/T Snow on Pine) and there has long been a contingent of insiders plus some reporters pushing to get this material released and given a public hearing. The Navy videos are the latest result of this long campaign:
    ____________________________________________________

    So how does a story on U.F.O.s get into The New York Times? Not easily, and only after a great deal of vetting, I assure you.

    The journey began two and a half months ago with a tip to Leslie, who has long reported on U.F.O.s and published a 2010 New York Times best seller, “UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record.” At a confidential meeting Oct. 4 in a Pentagon City hotel with several present and former intelligence officials and a defense contractor, she met Luis Elizondo, the director of a Pentagon program she had never heard of: the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

    She learned it was a secret effort, funded at the initiative of the then Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, starting in 2007, to investigate aerial threats including what the military preferred to call “unidentified aerial phenomena” or just “objects.” This was big news because the United States military had announced as far back as 1969 that U.F.O.s were not worth studying. Leslie also learned that Mr. Elizondo had just resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition — the reason for the meeting….

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/insider/secret-pentagon-ufo-program.html

  11. To expand and redirect on Geoffrey Britain and Snow on Pines thoughts, I co-founded the first and biggest amateur astronomy organization in Minnesota at the State Science Museum in St Paul (I was only an upstart elementary school graduate, then).

    And UFO-ology was certainly one impetus moving me and the curious, sciencey others to take out our telescopes and binoculars with “eyes on the skies.” (Our original group name.)

    Northwestern University’s astronomer J. Allen Hynek devised a credible taxonomy of UFO observations, treating pilots claims, for instance, more seriously than Joe Citizen’s.

    Hynek’s most lasting cultural contribution, however, was the phrase that became the title of the Steven Spielberg movie ‘Close Encounters of The Third Kind,” meaning actual physical contact with extra-terrestial (presumably) life forms.

    But my experiences in the decade of the 1970s taught me a different, opposite, lesson than Hynek’s credulous one: how many times I mistook the ordinary object as extraordinary.
    Quite often

    Planes, helicopters, Venus, Jupiter, the Moon, sun dogs, noctilucent light, comets, auroras — all looking weird and “alien” save on further, longer term observation or closer inspection, revealed as normal phenomenon.

    City people most often mistake meteors or satellites for something U-F-O like.

    And thus, experience taught me that since I could easily be fooled, I concluded that Hynek’s reasonable sociological investigative approach was not going to be sufficient to root out simple human categorical error and wishful “thinking.”

    His project gree moribund, and virtually extinct when the flip phone and other first cell phone s with cams became commonplace.

    This revival of past True Beliefs after the 1990s X-factor was waywardness convince s me that I’m growing old and bored by people’s gullibility.

    It ain’t that I have no time for this. Nor am I incurious. I’m simply bored by human stupidity.

    Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

  12. On reading huxley and the NYTimes cred, I should hasten to add lens flare and photographic defects from many sources and types of optical device imperfections as a cause to treat professional claims skeptically.

    The same as is even moreso with radar. Birds and rain and fog get mistaken as UFOs.

    One highly likely source of human error in these reports is an analog from instrumental weather observations: every new, improved technology leads to some new discovery that isn’t meaningful.

    For example, each generation in radar resulted in finding more and more “tornado” events. Except that these added numbers were not meaningful.

    How can that be? They were either shorter lived, or else close to the ground (and now resolved from ground clutter), or else events out in increasingly empty spaces that had not been regularly observed, much less routinely recorded for later examination before.

    Thus, these weather observations led to mistaken alarms that were merely artifacts of technology change.

    The same is going on, again, with hurricane observation (global warming threat? Worse harm than ev-ah! Not), for example.

    Now, combine front line new technology with the young “pros” staffing radar or flying hey planes, and then you have a new wave of “credible” reports of UFOs — and a new generation of an old fad that’s a pretty duct of new tech and newer generation of naive professionals putting unearned cred behind und served reputations, and viola! An old fad is new again.

    Wake me up when we get a real alien autopsy — PLEASE!

  13. TJ:

    Perhaps you don’t recall Hynek’s journey fully. He moved from being a skeptic of UFO reports to a skeptic of closed-minded positions such as yours.
    ________________________________________________

    Ridicule is not part of the scientific method, and people should not be taught that it is. The steady flow of reports, often made in concert by reliable observers, raises questions of scientific obligation and responsibility. Is there … any residue that is worthy of scientific attention? Or, if there isn’t, does not an obligation exist to say so to the public—not in words of open ridicule but seriously, to keep faith with the trust the public places in science and scientists?

    –J. Allen Hynek

    In a 1985 interview, when asked what caused his change of opinion, Hynek responded, “Two things, really. One was the completely negative and unyielding attitude of the Air Force. They wouldn’t give UFOs the chance of existing, even if they were flying up and down the street in broad daylight. Everything had to have an explanation. I began to resent that, even though I basically felt the same way, because I still thought they weren’t going about it in the right way. You can’t assume that everything is black no matter what. Secondly, the caliber of the witnesses began to trouble me. Quite a few instances were reported by military pilots, for example, and I knew them to be fairly well-trained, so this is when I first began to think that, well, maybe there was something to all this.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Allen_Hynek

  14. One explanation of UFOs, which I think is as credible as anything else at this point, is that they are supernatural, that is, demonic.

    If my memory serves me, Buzz Aldrin ended a chapter in his book Return to Earth by stating that at the end of one test flight he saw a UFO parked on the runway. This is separate from the reportedly debunked UFO sighting on the moon, the “detached adapter panel sighting”.

    And since there isn’t enough squid ink around to confuse people, why not change the language and call them UAPs now?

    Given the current mental malaise in the “civilized world”, I wonder what the reactions to any government revelations will be. Of course, the Experts will give it to us straight, correct?

  15. “Have you seen Baggins?…”
    Why, yes… yes, I have.

    On the demonic connection to UFOs, I have a copy of Fr. Seraphim Rose’s Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Chapter VI of which is about this topic. I haven’t looked at it in a very long time; maybe it’s time for a refresher. Flipping through it just now, I see that he discusses Hynek’s work at some length.

  16. One explanation of UFOs, which I think is as credible as anything else at this point, is that they are supernatural, that is, demonic.

    Baggins, Philip Sells:

    I tend to doubt that UFOs are Star Trek tech from Extraterrestrial Intelligence. For one thing, SETI has been looking for ET for decades now and rolling snake eyes, even though telescopic power has been growing by about ~25% yearly for decades.

    For another, UFO sightings are so often bizarre and don’t fit together as a coherent whole one might expect of technology. (Notwithstanding Arthur C. Clarke’s maxim, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”)

    When it comes to UFOs, my man is Jacques Vallee. (The Lacombe character in Speilberg’s “Close Encounters” was based on Vallee.)
    _________________________________________________

    In the mid-1960s, like many other UFO researchers, Vallée initially attempted to validate the popular Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (or ETH). UFO researcher Jerome Clark[4] argues that Vallée’s first two UFO books were among the most scientifically sophisticated defenses of the ETH ever mounted.

    However, by 1969, Vallée’s conclusions had changed, and he publicly stated that the ETH was too narrow and ignored too much data. Vallée began exploring the commonalities between UFOs, cults, religious movements, demons, angels, ghosts, cryptid sightings, and psychic phenomena. His speculation about these potential links was first detailed in his third UFO book, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers.

    As an alternative to the extraterrestrial visitation hypothesis, Vallée has suggested a multidimensional visitation hypothesis. This hypothesis represents an extension of the ETH where the alleged extraterrestrials could be potentially from anywhere. The entities could be multidimensional beyond space-time; thus they could coexist with humans, yet remain undetected.

    Vallée’s opposition to the popular ETH was not well received by prominent U.S. ufologists, hence he was viewed as something of an outcast. Indeed, Vallée refers to himself as a “heretic among heretics”.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Vallée
    _________________________________________________

    There’s more on the wiki page, for those interested. I recommend all of Vallee’s UFO books. He became interested in UFOs as a young man working at an observatory. His superior ordered the destruction of tapes tracking an object that was moving in an impossible way for satellites of the time.

  17. I think that one way of looking at this issue is that it is an issue of “consensus reality”; the boundaries of the perceptual (the limits of our physical senses, our evolved mental processing capabilities and, the fact that we can only even perceive a small fraction of the entire electromagnetic spectrum) and the belief boxes that each one of us lives within; thus we believe that some things “can be” and that some things just “cannot.”

    We each of us have a culturally conditioned worldview and, for a lot of people, things like UFOs are just outside of the boundaries of their belief system. Thus, there is very great resistance to the idea that UFOs could possibly be real.

    I particularly like the often seemingly “scientific” argument made that–given the vast, light year distances involved–it would just be impossible/impractical on technical, time, or cost grounds for a being from another star system to travel here to Earth.

    Such an argument, it seems to me, rests on the silent assumption that we here, today, somehow are in possession of a complete knowledge about and understanding of all of the laws and forces which comprise the Universe sufficient to allow us to make such a definitive judgment.

    Another argument I see made is that, since SETI has not picked up any electronic signals generated by aliens, that means that there are no alien communication signals to pick up and, thus, no aliens.

    This again assumes that whatever technology we are using, and whatever frequencies we are searching are the very technologies and frequencies any aliens might be using.

    Could it just possibly be that any potential aliens might be using communication and other technologies that we today have no clue about?

  18. Snow on Pine:

    The ET arguments have been explored pretty well. It’s possible ET is out there. There are scenarios such as you describe. However, so far when we look/listen out there all we find is wilderness.

    I wouldn’t expect ET to be communicating on AM radio, but I would expect ET to have some impact on the galaxy that we could sense.

    An ant on earth wouldn’t know what a shopping center is for, but an ant, if it were capable of such reflection, would notice a shopping center and realize it wasn’t the usual natural terrain.

    Here’s a good run-down from a blogger I find persuasive:

    https://www.singularity2050.com/2009/05/seti-and-the-singularity.

    Per this discussion, even if ET is out there, that doesn’t mean ET is necessarily behind the UFOs. They may be separate phenomena. Like I said, I’m betting with Jacques Vallee.

  19. Those who believe that all UFOs are some sort of misperceived natural phenomena are fond of hallucinations, stupidity, planets, clouds, meteorites, birds, mirages, unaknowleged top secret aircraft, light reflections, satellite and rocket launches and their debris dropping from space and, more recently, of drones as explanations for what is being mistakenly perceived as a UFO.

    What I find most persuasive as evidence that UFOs (we’re talking of the top 5% of cases that cannot be explained away, and which involve (sometimes multiple) trained observers, and often several different modalities of observation of the same object i.e. visual observations plus radar, plus images) are actual objects, and those under intelligent control, are things like the recent disclosures by military pilots and specifically by Lue Alizondo of UFOs clocked at speeds of 10,000-15,000 mph, UFOs that have been observed to descend from 80,000 feet to sea level in one second’s time, and calculations putting the G forces generated by abrupt right angle turns and accelerations of some UFOs at 500-600Gs.

    Not the kinds of maneuvers or forces that humans, birds, meteorites, current day front line aircraft, clouds, light reflections, or planets can perform or withstand.

  20. I strongly suspect that there are some misplaced decimal points and or mangled units of measurement in those reported phenomena. I blame Trump and DesNatis.
    🙂

  21. “I blame Trump and DesNatis.” – om

    Is that the Multidimensional persona of DeSantis??

    Well – this thread got off-topic really fast; I guess Cohen as a Comic didn’t have much potential. (Maybe he is an extraterrestrial visitor in disguise?)

    I saw this picture as a meme with the caption “from us extraterrestrials to you humans” – “Quit sending us naked pictures and inviting us to your house.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pioneer_plaque.svg

    Of course, if a similar plaque were to be sent up on newer spacecraft, they would need at least 72 figures to get more genders in.
    No wonder the ETs are not making themselves known.

  22. AesopFan:

    I loved the Saturday Night Live skit on the Golden Record which was part of the Voyager space probe and included music from all over the world.

    The aliens replied:

    SEND MORE CHUCK BERRY

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