How Should People Interpret 'UFO'?

Discussion in 'UFOs, Ghosts and Monsters' started by Yazata, Jan 16, 2017.

  1. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Example of What Can be Mistaken as a UFO / UFE / CE-5 over Windsor, ON - Aug 23, 2015

     
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  3. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    LOL! The filmer even identifies as a jet right away!

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  5. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Except to gullible fools that see what they want to see, and of course, the pretentious nonsense from yourself, knowing that they are clouds.

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    And of course did you not recently declare that metallic balloons were not around in the 60's? when they have been round since the 40's.

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  7. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    When were these alleged metallic weather balloons invented?
     
  8. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    C'mon MR are you that desperate that you need to tell lies, when it is right before your eyes!

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    7 seconds into the video wasn't it MR?

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  9. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Right..he identified it as a jetliner right away. There was no mistaking it for something else.
     
  10. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Don't be so childishly silly MR......He identified it 7 seconds into the video......
     
  11. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    "About 11:20 p.m., Olden Moore, a plasterer, was returning to his home in Huntsburg, Ohio, from Painesville, driving on Route 86. He noticed a bright star-like light approaching, apparently following the course of the road. As the light got brighter and brighter, Moore pulled to the side of the road to watch, and switched off his ignition. (When his story was first publicized, some erroneous news reports were circulated that his motor had failed.) Moore was later interviewed by NICAP member C. W. Fitch in Cleveland, and gave a detailed statement:

    "In a matter of seconds from the time I first saw the object it was over a large field at the intersection of Hart Road and Route 86. While it was still high in the air, it [the light] seemed to split apart and one section moved upward out of my range of vision. The other descended slowly and silently into the field adjoining the road, where it loomed big like a house in front of me. In the darkness I could not discern whether it was actually resting on the ground or hovering just above it.

    "It appeared to be perhaps 50 feet across and 20 feet from the top to the bottom. It was round and shaped like a saucer with another inverted one resting on top of the lower saucer. It had an inverted cone-shaped dome in the center of the top part. It was mirror-like. . . surrounded by a bluish-green mist or haze, through which it glowed like the dial of a luminous watch. It began to pulsate, first glowing brightly and then dimming with rhythmic repetition.

    "I sat in my car and watched the strange object for about 15 minutes, then got out and walked toward it to get a closer look. My feelings at the time were more of curiosity than of anything else, in fact, I do not recall having any feeling of fear. I was so amazed at what I was seeing that I was filled with a sensation of wonderment and curiosity which occupied my mind completely.

    "The sky was clear and the moon shining brightly and the surface of the object reflected the moonlight. It appeared to be of a very shiny substance, though I cannot say whether it was metallic or not. . . As I got closer I heard a humming or ticking sound like that of an electric meter. About halfway up to it the thought crossed my mind that no one would believe me if I told them what I saw so I decided I would try to get someone else there as a witness. I stopped, returned to my car and drove home to get my wife. Though I made a hurried trip, when we got back to the field about twenty minutes later the object was gone."


    Next morning Mrs. Moore phoned the sheriff and reported the incident, since Moore had been reluctant to report it. Moore was subsequently interviewed by Sheriff Louis A. Robusky, Geauga County; Civil Defense Officials; newsmen and others.

    Kenneth Locke, Lake County Civil Defense Director, led an investigating party to the site of the report next day. At the point where the UFO was observed, Locke found small markings about 1-1/2 inches deep. Each marking consisted of three holes arranged in a triangular pattern with a fourth hole outside of the lines of the triangle. NICAP Adviser Ralph C. Mayher (then associated with the news department of station KYW) made a plaster cast of one set of the holes. The cast was turned over to Richard Gray, research physicist at Case Institute of Technology for examination. It was reported that the markings could have been made by some very heavy type of tripod.

    Locke took a Geiger counter reading at 2:00 p.m. (about 15 hours after the sighting). An area about 50 feet in diameter showed a reading of 150 micro roentgens per hour above normal background radiation at the center of the area. At the perimeters, the reading tapered off to about 20-30 micro roentgens per hour above normal. A second reading at 5:00 p.m. showed that the radiation at the center of the area had dropped off to 20-25 micro roentgens per hour above normal, and the count at the perimeter was now normal. The 2:00 p.m. reading was approximately 10 times greater than the normal background radiation for the area, which is 15-20 micro roentgens per hour.

    A few weeks later the news leaked out that Moore had been taken to Washington, D.C., where "high officials in the Defense Department" interrogated him. Later probing uncovered that Moore alleged he had been sworn to secrecy after being shown films and slides of UFOs, but felt that he had kept silent long enough. He described the experience in detail to a NICAP member. [See Section IX.]

    Other witnesses reported UFOs in the area the night of Moore's sighting. Because of this, the physical evidence, and Moore's sound reputation, his story would appear to warrant the attention of Congressional investigators. If his story is accurate merely in broad outline, the implication is obvious: Highly important information about UFOs is being withheld from the public."---http://www.nicap.org/ufoe/section_12.htm
     
    Last edited: Jan 16, 2017
  12. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Wow!!!!
    Hmmmm, a UFO! Unidentified Flying Object...possibly though a combination of tiredness, illusions, delusions, Venus, but certainly unlikely to be any Alien/time traveller...I mean when are these Aliens/time travellers, ever going to make their "mythical"visitations official.
    The same old same old flittering in and flittering out
     
  13. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Alleged?? No the only things alleged, are your mystical, mythical sightings.

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    You have a short memory MR: I have given photos of weather balloons at least from the fifties era.....

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  14. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    That's a satellite and some foil lying officers posed with at Roswell. Show me some real photos of old weather balloons. Generally they were made of white latex, but other colors included yellow, red, blue, and green. And in case you didn't know:

    "The average balloon will ascend for about 90 minutes before bursting. After the ascent is complete, the payload boxes and flight equipment will slowly fall on a parachute for around 30 minutes, giving the average flight a total duration of two hours."---http://www.stratostar.net/faq.html

    So much for the descending weather balloon theory.
     
    Last edited: Jan 17, 2017
  15. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Nice try again MR...more illustrative examples of you doing what you do best......posting known fraudulent and obfuscating comments.
    It's a Satellite Balloon obviously, and quite large, which begs the question how did it get into orbit.....

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    And of course no one as far as I know, mentioned anything about "descending weather balloon" .....
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo
    Echo 1A was easily visible to the unaided eye over most of the Earth. The spacecraft was nicknamed a 'satelloon' by those involved in the project, as a portmanteau of satellite-balloon.
    http://greg.org/archive/2007/10/07/the_satelloons_of_project_echo_must_find_satelloons.html
    From about 1956 until 1964, US aeronautics engineers and rocket scientists at the Langley Research Center developed a series of spherical satellite balloons called, awesomely enough, satelloons. Dubbed Project Echo, the 100-foot diameter aluminumized balloons were one of the inaugural projects for NASA, which was established in 1958.

    And of course the foil is the remnants of what some impressionable nuts thought was a Alien UFO, but was a secret U.S. military Air Force surveillance balloon....quite metallic looking hey MR? and in the forties MR?

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    Last edited: Jan 17, 2017
  16. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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

    Project Echo
    was the first passive communications satellite experiment. Each of the two American spacecraft, launched in 1960 and 1964, was a metalized balloon satellite acting as a passive reflector of microwave signals. Communication signals were bounced off them from one point on Earth to another.

    Echo 1A

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    Echo 1 sits fully inflated at a Navy hangar in Weeksville, North Carolina
    OperatorNASA
    Harvard designation1960 Alpha 11
    COSPAR ID1960-009A
    SATCAT №49
    Spacecraft properties
    ManufacturerBell Labs
    Launch mass66 kg (146 lb)
    Dimensions30.48 m (100.0 ft) diameter sphere when inflated
    Start of mission
    Launch date09:39:43, August 12, 1960
    RocketThor-Delta
    Launch siteCape Canaveral AFS SLC-17A
    End of mission
    Decay dateMay 24, 1968
    Orbital parameters
    Reference systemGeocentric
    Eccentricity0.01002
    Perigee1,524 km (947 mi)
    Apogee1,684 km (1,046 mi)
    Inclination47.2°
    Period118.3 min
    Echo 2

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    Echo 2 undergoing tensile stress test in a dirigible hangar at Weeksville, North Carolina
    OperatorNASA
    COSPAR ID1964-004A
    SATCAT №740
    Spacecraft properties
    ManufacturerBell Labs
    Dimensions41 m (135 ft) diameter sphere when inflated
    Start of mission
    Launch date13:59:04, January 25, 1964
    RocketThor-Agena B
    Launch siteVandenberg AFB
    End of mission
    Decay dateJune 7, 1969
    Orbital parameters
    Reference systemGeocentric
    Eccentricity0.01899
    Perigee1,029 km (639 mi)
    Apogee1,316 km (818 mi)
    Inclination81.5°
    Period108.95 min
    Project Echo was
     
  17. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I agree. It rarely happens that way though, since the (grieviously misnamed) "skeptics" all seemingly believe that they already know beforehand what all UFO reports will reduce to: known natural phenomena. How they acquired that a-priori knowledge isn't clear. It seems to me to be an article of faith.

    That's why I said that there's a grain of truth to #1, in that it kind of describes a UFOlogy research program: try to eliminate all the known mundane causes before committing to extra-mundane hypotheses. I think that's entirely reasonable.

    The early 1950's authorities were caught off-guard by the UFO thing and found themselves out of their depth trying to evaluate what appeared to them to be low likelihood possibilities. So just pragmatically, they decided that there was most likely nothing there that threatened the country and shrugged UFOs off. I kind of follow their lead myself, since I don't take UFO's all that seriously and don't factor them into my thinking very often. (I usually only think about them as epistemological and philosophy-of-science problem cases.)

    This illustrates what might be an interesting divergence between practical and logical thought. Government officials might decide that what they believe are low probability events can be safely ignored in their practical thinking, even if the logical possibility of the low probability event hasn't been totally eliminated.

    But all of these assessments of probabilities seem to be to be highly informal and extremely intuitive. (I don't see how they could be anything else.) There's lots of invocation of the authority of "science" being tossed around, but these seem to me to nevertheless be intuitive unscientific judgments. And there's the additional problem of sliding from assessments of 'low probability' to judgments of 'impossiblity', which seems to be the move the "skeptics" want to make.

    Intellectually speaking, I think that is probably the best thing to do with the most confounding cases.

    I added #3 as I was writing, basically for completeness. I wanted to hit all the possibilities, and sometimes those who advocate interpreting 'UFO' as 'unidentifiable flying object' do seem to suggest it. Once again there's a grain of truth to it, since the word 'unidentified' does seem to exclude all identifications. When something is identified, it stops being a 'UFO'. That might arguably push UFO's out of the cognitive class entirely.

    #4 seemed to me to be more in line with what UFO proponents typically mean when they say 'unidentified flying object'. They aren't arguing that UFO's must always be unidentified, they are just arguing that 'UFO's (as they interpret the term) mustn't be identifiable as known physical phenomena of the mundane sort.

    I agree that interpreting 'UFO' in the more non-cognitive manner would remove UFOs from the domain of science. They would become more akin to mystical experience in religion.

    I'm less sure that #4 would exclude UFO's from the domain of science, since extra-mundane phenomena needn't be non-natural in the big sense. Alien spaceships and time-travelers certainly seem extra-mundane, yet they might nevertheless fall within the methodological naturalism that defines the scope of science. They might just be technology that humans don't understand yet.

    I was just trying to suggest that UFO "believers" often disagree among themselves and have narrower and wider ideas about what UFO's might be.

    One could probably tease out a whole variety of interpretations of 'naturalism' too.

    I don't think that my phrase 'extra-mundane' has to be given such a strong interpretation. It needn't mean "not consistent with the norms of any overarching scheme". That's pushing it too hard in the direction of #3 in my opinion. I was just thinking of sorts of events that aren't included in our expectation of what is most likely to happen.

    But there is an interesting idea there. UFO proponents don't typically want to say that the extra-mundane explanations for UFOs are merely as-yet unknown natural phenomena. Instead, they typically want to attribute UFOs to some intelligent conscious typically non-human agency with powers superior to our own. That makes them suspiciously similar to angels. I've long suspected that UFO belief is a modern (and modernist) folk-religious expression that repackages the heavenly visitations of past centuries in pseudo-scientific drag.

    It's actually a little striking how analogous this UFO discussion is to Hume's discussion of miracles.
     
  18. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    Unidentified means exactly that - unidentified. Anything beyond that is speculation.
     
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  19. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, but actually quite dull and lacks the mystique and paranormal qualities that the gullible and impressionable require to keep their lives interesting!

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  20. river

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    Hmmm....if I may be allowed to be so bold here Yazata to add another rule , the 7th rule ;

    The behaviour of UFO's which seems to be missing in everybodies so called " rules " . James R. , billvon and Yazata .

    The behaviour of UFO's ; which is speed and maneuverability .

    The speed of these objects can be from 1000 to 50000 mph ; which in terms of miles per minute is about , calculated as 1000mph = 16.7 miles per minute . So per second = 0.278miles
    as 50000mph= 833.33 miles per minute . Per second = 13.8888 or 13.9 miles .

    As well the maneuverability of these UFO's ; the ability to turn on a dime when the G forces would kill the pilot.

    This ability to maneuver in a manner that are lethal to any conventional pilot is important information .

    As well the ability for some UFO's that are enormous in size can keep in flight at extremely low speeds .

    So the speed and manueverability is an extremely important consideration when interpreting UFO information . Maybe the most important .
     
  21. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    The presumed speed and maneuverability.

    One of the 10 points of the original list of UFO analysis is that it is impossible to determine distance - and thus size and speed - of unknown objects unless their relationship to known object is certain.

    It is not by any means certain what speed (and thus maneuverability) an unknown object is moving at.
     
  22. river

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    Pilots of fighter jets and commerical jets have a pretty good idea ; as well as radar information . As well consider the maneuverability of these UFO's , turning on a dime .
     
  23. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    But they don't have superpowers.
     

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