UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

Never thought to. Not absolutely positive but think all other passengers were Chinese returning home (? from holding in Australia) Not very many passengers as I said had a row to myself

There were two people there when I indicated the other seat was mine. Both moved out of there seats and must have found others because did not return

This is the Chinese nurse I found on WeChat who asked had I been to a Chinese restaurant. When I said no said she would take me to one of I bought her a meal

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On the way back to hotel we used a underground tunnel to cross a very wide road and when coming up steps said "Stop Selfie" as she pulled that face and I did mine

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I once was waiting in a K-mart parking lot for my mom to do some shopping and looking up in the sky asked that a ufo make its appearance to me. In no less that ten seconds an orange starlike object emerged from behind a cloud and I took that to be a ufo. I was so excited. After thinking about it later, I concluded it to more likely be the orangish reflection of the sun in the windshield of a jetliner. See...I make mistakes too sometimes.

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No, it was a UFO and God answering a prayer. You killed two birds with one stone, congrats!

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Or...maybe it was an orange, star-shaped weather balloon?

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I’ve never seen a weather balloon, but this thread makes it sound like they’re everywhere.

 

Kind of like aliens spaceships...

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You didn't make a mistake

That was a alien spacecraft designed to look like sun reflecting off a aircraft window window

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Ha ha! that's is exactly what I was going to post!

 

Insert here something about great minds

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I wasn't really praying to God. I was just sending out an intention into the universe. It's one of the core principles of magick. Like tossing a coin into a fountain. I should've used a wand though..

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Who do you think you are with the wand Harry Potter?

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Naww...more like Gandalf the Grey..

 

Hi Wegs. I like your posts because you seem intelligent, reasonable and open-minded and not a soldier either way in the little "skeptics" vs "ufo nuts" (or "everyone gang up and ridicule MR") war that dominates this thread.

I don't think that I have either. I only recall seeing two things in my life that struck me as UFOs at the time, and both quickly resolved to being aircraft, once I had pulled out my binoculars. One was a bright spot of light in the sky like a tiny sun, that resolved into being a small general aviation aircraft with an unpainted shiny metal body reflecting the sun as it made a banking turn. The other was a rigid lighter than air airship partially obscured by a cloud. Actually I should add a third, a large bright fireball I and others around me saw passing across the sky, trailing sparks and seemingly fragmenting. I didn't class that one as a 'UFO' at the time since I thought of it as some kind of bolide, either a meteor or a large reentering satellite. (I'm still interested in bolides.) I still don't know precisely what the fireball was, hence it remains technically a UFO perhaps, according to one way of thinking of things.

The philosopher in me motivates me to make some more comments below which may or may not be helpful, largely to help me get my own mind around the issues here.

The word 'Unidentified' in 'UFO' seems to be very observer-specific, things that particular observers couldn't identify to their own satisfaction at the time, given the information that they had available. There's a big element of personal judgment to it as my 'bolide' example illustrates. I treat that one as sorta-identified, even though it literally isn't. (The bolide hypothesis has never been confirmed to my knowledge.) So 'Unidentified' is going to be a fuzzy category by its nature.

'Unidentified' shouldn't be confused with 'unidentifiable'. There need be no implication that the observation couldn't be identified if more information became available.

But that being said, I'm skeptical about the assumption that all observations are identifiable in principle, only provided that enough information becomes available. I said something like that earlier in the thread and JamesR predictably jumped on it. But it seems to me that identifying/explaining (are those the same thing?) something might exceed the cognitive powers of the being trying to produce the explanation. We just accept that all other animal species besides ourselves are in that position. But if that's true for other animals, what justifies the assumption that human beings are uniquely positioned cognitively to identify/explain/provide an account for everything in reality? There seems to me to be a bit of hubris in making that assumption.

So it seems to me that the reality of a non-empty set of 'things unidentifiable in principle by human beings' remains a possibility. How large a possibility is again a matter of personal judgment. But the 'Fortean' in me makes me personally suspect that such things might indeed exist and might even occasionally intrude in human experience.

After all, human beings evolved on this planet in these prevailing conditions. We are very good at comprehending things upon which our survival depends. But we might be out of our depth entirely regarding sorts of events that rarely if ever occur on Earth. Or in our meso-scale experience of life on Earth (I'm thinking of QM on the microscale here. We didn't evolve perceiving it directly, so we may not be in the best position to understand what's happening on that scale of reality.)

But that's a bit off-topic, since it's not what seems to be at issue in this thread. Both "skeptics" and "ufo nuts" are proposing explanatory categories that they think they and other humans can understand and comprehend.

One side seemingly has the self-appointed mission of reducing everything to "the mundane", which seems to effectively be the claim that the conceptual categories that we use for everyday life (or perhaps the conceptual vocabulary of contemporary science some might insist) are sufficient to explain everything that anyone observes in the sky or anywhere else. (How they think they know this is unclear.) And the "ufo nuts" (of the more stereotypical sort, none of whom seem to be present in this thread which is seemingly directed at battling a straw-man) seem to want to reduce many/most UFO sightings to alien visitations and often to spaceships of some sort. (The defects of that view are even more obvious. Though it should perhaps be pointed out that spaceships and alien visitations don't in themselves contradict science.)

So the bottom line that I'm arguing for here is perhaps simply this: Don't jump to conclusions.

I think that there's considerable "merit" (merit in what way?) to many of them, simply as observation reports. Some of them do seem to me to be complete fabrications which is interesting in a different way (instances of modern myth-making) but not in the more ontological sense we are discussing. But simply taken as observation reports of things the observer couldn't identify at the time given the information available, many of them seem fine and unobjectionable to me.

I don't perceive that contradiction. We collectively experience mysterious things every moment of every day. We experience time, but don't know what it is and can't explain it. We boast about our logical prowess, but can't provide a satisfactory account of what logical implication is. We speak and write, but can't explain meaning. Our human reality is that we can take any subject whatsoever, ask 'Why?' about it, get an answer and ask 'Why?' about the answer, and arrive at the frontiers of human knowledge in just a few iterations. We find ourselves kind of floating with the fog of the unknown in all directions. We begin with our human experience and then try to expand the boundaries of what we know outwards into the surrounding mystery by advancing lots of hypotheses and trying to confirm them with new observations (never mind the questions of induction and confirmation, themselves mysteries). All of us, even scientists, are trying to lift ourselves by our bootstraps.

Yes. I consider the 'tic tac' incidents (not just the videos) to be the most interesting UFO reports that I'm personally aware of. The striking thing (to me anyway) is that taken together, the various features of these reports (radar detection, visual sightings by multiple observers in multiple places, camera images) don't easily reduce to easy and familiar dismissive conclusions. The possibility remains (but not the certainty) that something new and interesting, and perhaps even important, was happening in these cases.

 

Here here! (insert sound of one hand clapping).. I love your view of reality and share many of its observations. We are indeed surrounded by mysteries and riddles that set boundaries on our knowledge and experience. History as well is filled with strange events and transcendent phenomena that have eluded explanation and suggest a side to reality that we have very limited access to. It IS fortean, but I would go so far as to call it otherwordly or paranormal. Maybe ufos fall under this category. The more we learn about reality the more bewildering it becomes. So it's good to be as open-minded as we can be without becoming gullible.

 

Not sure if JamesR did as well, but I commented that given sufficient information becoming available then everything is surely identifiable. This is because, well, it's a logical truth: something is only identifiable if there is sufficient information with which to identify it. Therefore, if there is sufficient information, one can, in principle, identify it. There should be no argument with the logic of this. Sorry. If you think there is I'd honestly like to hear it, please.

Sure, but that is only the case in the absence of "sufficient/enough information". The reason things remain unidentifiable is because of the lack of sufficient info with which to identify it.
What I think you are getting at, and if so then I don't disagree with, is that there are some things with which we, as humans, may not be able to garner sufficient information with which to be able to identify the phenomenon. And if that is what you meant, that's unfortunately not what you have said.

It's ironic that you claim they're battling a strawman when your characterisation of them is itself a strawman. The skeptic isn't saying that everything is mundane (although a few might state that), only that there are explanations that can be given at least for the exampled observations that are mundane and, in their view, are just as likely, if not more so, than the non-mundane explanation. Skeptics here are mostly happy to say that they don't have such an equally probable (at least in their view) mundane explanation, if that should be the case. You seem to be painting the discussion as an "us" and "them" battle, yet the "them" isn't recognisable on the supposed battlefield.

When one appears in this forum, perhaps you want to ask them?

And there's the irony. And the blinkered view. Or delusion. Not sure which it is. I am genuinely surprised at this comment of yours.

And you still think there are "none of whom seem to be present in this thread"?

On that we agree, but the skeptics (or vast majority on this thread) are not doing so. They are putting forth possible explanations, not claims to what the explanation is. There is a difference there that I'm not sure you are noticing in what people are posting. That is really all the skeptic needs to do: put forth an equally or more likely possible explanation, and Occam's Razor should take care of the rest for what one accepts as the most reasonable explanation. Again, that's not proof of one explanation over another, only what is/should be more rational to accept as the reality (until more info becomes available).

No one is really disputing that. The idea that someone has observed something that they couldn't immediately identify is not remarkable. The question then becomes: what is it more reasonable to believe as the more likely explanation: mundane or non-mundane. That's really all there is to it.

Sure, and I don't disagree. But there is a difference between possibility and, say, probability, before you get even close to certainty. Giving a mere possibility is relatively simple: state something that isn't beyond our understanding of the physical laws and we can be pretty sure that it is a possibility. The question is what is the more rational explanation for the observation. That is what the debate here is, and has always been about. It is not some battlefield between some caricature of a skeptic that you want to beat up on, and some caricature of a ufo-nut that others think they want to beat up on.

Some here have given as what they think the more likely explanation, to a large number of the exampled cases, the non-mundane.
Others here have disputed the rationality of those conclusions (of the non-mundane being the most likely explanation), and have, in their view, given equally/more likely mundane explanations. Your desire to turn it into a battlefield between strawmen on either side, between caricatures, even if you only recognise one side as a strawman, is... well... meh.
Sorry.

 

I don't know, James...I've come away from reading his post #6852 with an entirely different view.

Isn't science concerned with approaching topics in a rational way, even those areas that border on the mysterious? Regardless of the winding road and where it leads us...it's science's responsibility to want to get to the truth. I've seen you repeat that over and over in this thread (with good reason), and I'd dare say that Yazata agrees with that position. I can't speak for Yazata but it seems as though he would like to see an end to the stigmatization of UAP's and if the evidence on a case by case basis leads to somewhere unusual (unidentifiable), so be it. I don't think there is any proof of alien life flying around on advanced space crafts in our atmosphere, but that's not the only bucket we should be using when discussing UFO's, in general.

Having said that though, there is a group out there of ''UFO enthusiasts" (I don't care for the label ''nut'') who want everyone to stop analyzing data, and accept that if we aren't immediately seeing something mundane with our naked eyes, it must be other worldly! lol That group hasn't helped the situation, in terms of taking UAP's seriously, but that's not Yazata's stance, from what I can tell.

MR on the other hand, brings awe and wonder to these discussions, and his rebuttals to y'all are intelligent. He may enjoy exploring UFO's a bit more than the average person, but that doesn't make him a loon.

Anyway, I think your frustration comes in (not speaking for you, but just guessing) that you view MR as refusing to admit that there are simply things science can't answer yet, and that he takes ''science doesn't know, yet'' and changes it to ''it must be aliens.'' I don't think he broad brushes like that, and in reading between the lines of his posts, he'd simply like the mockery to stop (from skeptics) and see where the questions may lead...they could lead to somewhere beneficial, without a need to attach aliens to it.

I don't think it's helpful, for example, to say about the tic tac image - ''it's probably a weather balloon, etc...'' if we're just grasping for straws. Hoping mundane explanations are believed so we can move on (and stop discussing these pesky UFO's), isn't very scientific. But, there still needs to be a method to the madness...otherwise, why would we even need science?

UAP's are being reported more often on a global scale now, so we need to find ways to take them seriously enough to properly analyze, and fight against the stereotypical stigmas so we can do that. I think that is exactly what science is all about.

 

There is no stigmatisation of UAPs (at least not in this thread) only of those who promote unwarranted claims that they are of non-mundane origin. There is a distinction that needs to be made in this thread between the phenomenon itself and the claims of individuals regarding those phenomenon.

There isn't just a lack of proof, wegs, there is a lack of any evidence that should rationally lead one to conclude that there is alien life flying around the earth.

I think you have been distracted by MR trying to bring "awe and wonder" to the discussion that you miss him claiming that they are likely aliens, or an undersea race of superhumans, etc. His rebuttals mostly lack sufficient intelligence to avoid logical fallacies, or to even address the issue honestly. His own investigation and analysis into the examples he puts forth is, to put it bluntly, absent at worst, and superficial at best.

It's not quite as obvious as that, but he certainly promotes aliens, superhuman sub-ocean races etc, as far more a reasonable conclusion than anyone sensible should do so.

While I do not condone any mockery, he can probably end much of it by simply being more reasonable in his claims, arguments, and overall approach. But that is between him and those that mock him.

 

There must be some accountability for irresponsible behavour.

If someone in a discussion about UFO witnesses repeatedly says irresponsible things like "I automatically believe the accounts of complete strangers - even the drunk ones" or habitually says "It can't be a case of mistaken identity" then at some point, after dozens and dozens of these, that person' credibility must be discarded.

It is disrespectful toward the readership to troll the thread by habitually posting falsehoods. All MR needs to do to slow the freefall of his credibility is stop posting claims he knows perfectly well are overreaches at-best and outright lies at-worst.