UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

WTF is your problem?

I was alluding to rape.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Really? You have rape fantasies? Please take that unsavory topic elsewhere. Unless you wish to 'corroborate' a first-hand UFO/alien(s) probing encounter(s) of, let's say, an 'intimate, violating' nature!
'Qualified' hypnotic regression 'therapy' might be useful. Might. Best though to search online for contra views (false memories syndrome) before embarking on such a 'journey'.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Oh yeah!

Like totally!

I want to be raped by an alien!

My personal pick

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Hopefully someone will intelligently, honestly comment on article linked to in #5360.

 

Do you ever stop and think that people really looking for extraterrestrial life would be offended by MR and your bullshit?

You can say no. But that means you're really not interested.

 

'Interested' to respond with this much: A self-confessed alcoholic's notion of what constitutes 'BS' deserves to taken lightly at best.
BTW - If I'm not mistaken, you have never offered any intelligent, relevant contribution to the actual topic of this long thread - reality and nature of non-mundane UFOs (not to be confused with the James R penned demeaning thread title).
Not once. Just banal quips. Yet without any censure from the mods. Speaks volumes as to the true SF standards - imo.
Bye bye.

 

Oh for fucks sake!

Just shut up!

 

James R is, as quoted above, evidently peering into a mirror and castigating himself. Please stop it though. So unedifying.

 

I think that employing the idea of "proof" is often inappropriate outside mathematics and logic. But that doesn't mean that inference is inappropriate. Sometimes that's deductive inference, but more often it's something else, whether induction or abduction. What the latter two have in common is that they don't imply logical necessity in the same way that deduction does. In inductive or abductive arguments, it's possible for all of the premises to be true and the conclusion false. To the extent that these arguments succeed, they make conclusions more likely.

We probably need to define what "circumstantial evidence" is. Circumstantial evidence is evidence of something other than what one wants to demonstrate, but supports a plausible inference that what one wants to demonstrate is indeed the case. In a trial, a prosecutor might present results of a dna test, showing that biological materials left at the crime scene match the accused. Which supports the inference that the accused was present at the crime scene.

Virtually all scientific evidence is circumstantial in that sense. We might want to determine the pressure in a pressure vessel. How could we do that? We consult a pressure gauge. But reporting the reading on a gauge isn't the same thing as reporting the pressure, without an additional inference about what the pressure gauge is doing and how it works. Evidence like photographs, instrument readings and experimental results occur everywhere in science. Their value oftentimes is that they justify inferences about particular physical states of affairs that we believe caused the evidence to be such as it is. Circumstantial.

I think that the most reasonable inference from the many observation reports is that something seems to have really been there in a subset of the reports and we don't know what it was. We don't even know whether it was all the same kind of unknown something each time. It's way premature to say much of anything about how they were controlled or what motivation they might have served. (Assuming intelligent agency behind them, which is unknown at this time as well.)

I guess that where we differ is that I'm not comfortable drawing the kind of inferences that you are drawing: whimsical/mischievous motivations, etc. I prefer to maintain my agnostic stance.

Where we are in agreement is in our disagreement with the so-called "skeptics" (more accurately debunkers) who try with all of their might to sneer and ridicule the whole matter into silence.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Perhaps, but not in this field.

An alien landing its ship on the white House lawn constitutes proof in any rational person's books.

That's not to say that's the minimum required, simply that a status of 'proven' can be attained.
There is an entire continuum below that that still constitutes proof.

The fact that UFOs are notoriously hard to get extant samples of does not make it OK to say 'We'll accept unrepeatable non-extant events as if that's equivalent to proof.'

 

We share similar outlooks. Especially as to typical motivations of many 'debunkers'. Where we differ is to degree of commitment to a concrete position.
I've essentially nailed my colors to the mast in ascribing all or nearly all nonmundane UFO/UAP etc. encounters to the paranormal. Which is a label, not an explanation. But nevertheless one that is essentially exclusive of 'nuts & bolts' interplanetary alien piloted 'saucers'. I can't 'prove' it. It's a world view that has grown more solid from studying a necessarily limited subset of the huge catalog of reported encounters.

If I was to single out one key facet from many, it's the many reports of low altitude supersonic/hypersonic speeds with never one observed sonic boom.
Sticking my neck out, I will state categorically that no physical craft, which has to displace air in moving from A to B, will ever be capable of that extraordinary feat!

Hence the likelihood one is dealing with 'projections' of some sort. Capable of reflecting light and radar (not always the latter!), but analogous in some ways to a 3D holographic projection.
But also able to manifest as a 'physical craft' at times e.g. leaving impressions in fields, or low level radioactivity. Some will say that's a grab-bag so wide it's impossible to disprove.
Well sorry,but imo the totality of recorded incidents indicates to me UFO and related phenomena owe to intelligences wielding god-like powers. Something I have gotten used to accepting as the only overall coherent position to take.
A true explanation is likely always to remain as far off as finding the proverbial pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

 

By Q logic, that makes you a sock of Yazata and a sycophant.

 

It's certainly having its effect suppressing discussion of the topic in the relevant professional communities. From page 4 of the UAP preliminary assessment:

"Narratives from aviators in the operational community and analysts from the military and IC describe disparagement associated with observing UAP, reporting it, or attempting to discuss it with colleagues. Although the effects of these stigmas have lessened as senior members of the scientific, policy, military, and intelligence communities engage on the topic seriously in public, reputational risk may keep many observers silent, complicating scientific pursuit of the topic."

https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf

I expect that the same kind of disparagement occurs in the academic world as well. The result being that the only people who feel free to make these kinds of reports and discuss these sort of phenomena are lay people who don't face that kind of reputational career risk. And that in turn makes the resulting reports much easier to dismiss with a laugh and a sneer.

I think that this thread and others like it illustrate the same sort of ridicule and disparagement happening right here on Sciforums.

 

Too often people are simply uncomfortable with concluding "I don't know". To me it is the default position and one in which I take great comfort, although would obviously prefer to know. Saying "I don't know" means that you're still on your journey, with all the exciting places to visit along the way, if one wishes to continue it.

I wouldn't even begin to ask about "control" or "motivation" until they were on the table as meaningful questions. Which is a long way off, given how much we don't know about things. To even contemplate those questions is to effectively discount that wealth of ignorance that we have, and to simply assume that whatever "unknown" it is, it is at least one that we seem, somehow, to know enough about it to ascribe motivation etc. We're nowhere near that, in my view, given our levels of ignorance.

Aye. There are still some sensible people among us.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Hmmm. On the whole I find skeptics and debunkers simply to be those willing to throw up all the other possibilities. I haven't come across any who try to silence the issue, I suspect because doing so would also end their own activity of being a skeptic/debunker: they can't really do what they do without the loud voice of those who come up with the claims. Anyone who look to "sneer and ridicule" others, whether skeptics or not, in any walk of life, are contemptible. But not all skeptics and debunkers are. Just as not all those who believe in aliens visiting us, and UFOs being of alien origin, are completely nuts.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Yes.

I'm not comfortable with the word "paranormal", which I associate with ESP, spiritualism and ghost-hunting.

I'm not sure what word to use to describe UFO/UAPs (my choice has been to call them anomalies) but my thinking tends towards the assumption that these things are phenomena that violate our expectations and hence are anomalous in that sense, but they most likely aren't violating scientific principles. Or perhaps I should say they aren't violating some more complete and accurate set of ideal scientific principles. By that I mean that a helicopter clattering overhead would probably have seemed impossible to the ancients and medievals, but it's unremarkable in an age when the principles are known. And by analogy, there might be a stubborn residual set of things happening today that are totally unexpected given our current state of scientific understanding. We shouldn't just refuse to acknowledge the possibility. One would think that the appropriate response would be curiosity, not ridicule.

I'm not able to fully justify that feeling, it's more a matter of faith I guess. There's a monism implicit in it (everything that happens will fall within the scope of an ideal set of scientific principles with no loose ends or outliers) and perhaps a bit of implicit ontological naturalism. I can't entirely justify it, but it's how I conceive of reality.

I don't know. My sci-fi sensibility can imagine a hypothetical vehicle that can manage the airflow around its body so as to reduce heating and prevent shock-waves (sonic booms). It might be that only the most crude aircraft produce shock waves.

I do agree in feeling some skepticism about interstellar visitors. My reasoning on that was expressed in an earlier post I made in response to Wegs. My feeling (it can't be knowledge, can it?) is that space faring civilizations are likely spread very thinly through the galaxy, very distant from one another. If all that relativistic speed of light stuff holds up in the future and does represent an absolute cosmic speed limit, then I don't expect cosmic visitors.

Though there is another sci-fi possibility: that some unknown intelligent race sent out a fleet of self-reproducing robots that have been multiplying and expanding for long periods of time. Time, distance and the repeated disappointment of reaching yet another star system that's sterile wouldn't bother robots with their single-minded mission. Though if these sorts of robots did finally discover Earth, they might not be able to report back their discovery before the race that sent them was extinct.

Having said all that, I want to emphasize that I'm advancing them as mere possibilities. I'm not suggesting that I believe that UFOs/UAPs are interstellar visitors even if robotic. I consider that a remote possibility, but one that can't simply be dismissed with ridicule.

Maybe, but I'm unmoved.

Intelligence maybe. The tic-tacs did react to approaching aircraft but it needn't have required much intelligence to do that. They did seem to have some situational awareness. I'm more moved by the UAP's seeming interest in military facilities and training activities. The UAP assessment says that when they were looking for patterns, that's one they noted. But they acknowledge the possibility that this was merely a reporting bias since their dataset consisted of US government reports and these military activities are where the active sensors were. The UAP task force says that they want to cast their net wider by starting new projects such as applying AI computer searches to archived air traffic control radar data in an attempt to see if the pattern of UAPs being frequent around military facilities continues to hold.

God-like? I don't want to go there. There were 18 reports of the 144 that the UAP task force studied that did seem to display extraordinary flight characteristics. That wasn't always "God-like". In some cases it was just an object holding its position in high winds.

I'm put off by attributing divine characteristics to these things. That's probably because it threatens to fold the UAPs in with the age old myth of wonders in the heavens. I'm more interested in disentangling those so as to discern whatever scientific signal might be hiding in the cultural noise.

Maybe. But we will never know until we investigate. And we won't investigate if everyone who takes the subject seriously is ridiculed and runs the risk of having their career destroyed.