UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

Here the "paid to be careless" Skin Walker Ranch crew literally interpreted a flying insect as an object traveling thousands of miles an hour:

https://twitter.com/MickWest/status/1674199613153370112?s=20

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There are only two possible explanations for the above. The guys are either

1. honest but incompetent, or
2. dishonest and fraudulent.

Regardless of which is true, it renders the entire worth of the show moot.


Just last week I had a discussion with my brother about Skinwalker Ranch. He wanted to know what I thought of some of the things they allegedly discovered there and could I debunk them.

My opening comment was "Skinwalker Ranch is - first and foremost - a TV show. That means the show will be full of drama - whether or not there was in fact any drama to be had."


So I lied. There is a third explanation:

3. It is a TV show. It is for entertainment purposes, not for science. It doesn't even qualify as fraudulent because no intelligent viewer would (should) believe it is anything other than contrived TV drama.

 

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Kind of like kayfabe for the paranormal, except less scripted than pro-wrestling. (I.e., they usually can't anticipate in advance what mundanity they'll come across that can be spun into something transmundane.)
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:furiously Googles 'kayfabe':

Well TIL! I did not know it had a term!


'transmundane'. Great term! Defines what something is not, without having to define what it is.

 

Mick West’s other video shows the dipping up and down motion of the ufo / bird along its course. More birdy would you say?
https://www.metabunk.org/data/video/45/45259-e173abd0917a85c602937767d126f764.mp4

 

Transmundane as in otherworldly, transcendent, or preternatural. It alludes to the domain of reality that transcends materiality and is not at all real to the materialist skeptic.

 

Yes I know.

The beauty of the term is that it doesn't pretend to guess what those things are (since that list could be endless); all it does is state what it is not.

Paranormal is a close synonym, but it carries baggage. If one were to talk about a paranormal UAP, I would think ghosts and interdimensions, rather than alien aircraft, but maybe that's just me.

 

It was C C's word.

There doesn't have to be anything in the set for the set to be useful. In fact I've found it difficult to have conversations in the U/G/M forum without such a word. It is analogous to 'paranormal' - a word that is certainly useful in sentences like 'prove to me there's something paranormal happening in that photo'. The beauty of this is that I can specify what I'm not looking for, and letting the claimant be in charge of labeling it. I have been using the word 'exotic'.

 

No. You've got it backwards.

You would coin the term, "non-fleshy humanoids". This is open set of all people who are not humanoid and covered in flesh. It would (if they existed) include furry purple critters, and anything else that either exist or doesn't exist and/or hasn't even been imagined yet. That is a set that is about to become useful to us.

(This is a tortured analogy now, but it can't be helped.)

So Magical Guy starts talking about things "found" in the Amazon Jungle. "There are small spherical purple fur-bearers!" he cries.
We say "Nonsense. There's no evidence of SSFBs."
He goes off after the next shiny bauble, declaring "And there are large yellow rectangular spongeoids too!"

Now we need a term to throw all MG's imaginings into. The only property of the set is that it contains all medium-sized non-fleshy humanoids.
So that when he goes off with his butterfly net to look for anything that might be colossal, green, and/or tortilla-shaped, (which are only postulated so far), I don't have to keep adding to my list of nonsense.
We can simply say there is no evidence of "non-fleshy humanoids".


To bring this full-circle: "trans-mundane" includes aliens, ghosts, magic and angels -but just for starters. Its usefulness arises in that includes stuff we not been talking about yet. Before the fantasy of time-travellers popped up, it was already included in the set merely by dint of not being mundane. "Trans-mundane" also includes the next woo MG comes up with (trans-dimensional trolls) using wishful thinking and a complete lack of evidence.

Consider the nigh-synonymous term "paranormal".

 

Jimmy Carter's encounter with a UFO:

"Future President Jimmy Carter files a report with the International UFO Bureau on September 18, 1973, claiming he had seen an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) in October 1969.

During the presidential campaign of 1976, Democratic challenger Carter was forthcoming about his belief that he had seen a UFO. He described waiting outside for a Lion’s Club Meeting in Leary, Georgia, to begin, at about 7:30 p.m., when he spotted what he called “the darndest thing I’ve ever seen” in the sky. Carter, as well as 10 to 12 other people who witnessed the same event, described the object as “very bright [with] changing colors and about the size of the moon.” Carter reported that “the object hovered about 30 degrees above the horizon and moved in toward the earth and away before disappearing into the distance.” He later told a reporter that, after the experience, he vowed never again to ridicule anyone who claimed to have seen a UFO...."--- https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/carter-files-report-on-ufo-sighting

Explanations by skeptics include the planet Venus (go figure) and a high altitude barium cloud from a nearby rocket launch. Plausible but not conclusive. Carter described the object as moving towards the earth and then disappearing into the distance. That doesn't fit with either of the 2 explanations.

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

 

Sarcasm, MR?

And here I thought you'd established it was bad manners to mock others' theories.

You've just vindicated all those skeptics who mocked UFO-believers. Well done.

 

Banning sarcasm from Sci Forums? On what basis?

 

(banning? Way to put words in my mouth. Have you considered being honest?)

Anyway, you have historically complained about UFO enthusiasts being mocked by skeptics for their views.

You can't have it both ways.
Either it's wrong and skeptics shouldn't mock and neither should you,
or it's OK to mock and skeptics mock and you mock too.
But to preach one and do the other is hypocrisy.

 

The Middle East Orb.
Why would a party balloon be considered a candidate for the orb?
Here are a few reasons for why here on this link:
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/10/24/isnt-that-a-balloon-deflating-a-dod-ufo-video/

link found at Metabunk.

 

I wouldn't bet money on it being something "other-worldly" as opposed to a mundane explanation like a balloon.

That's the way for determining what one actually thinks about _X_ or how one should regard _X_ in a personal and practical self-interest context. As opposed to a school master expressing philosophical reservations about epistemological perfection slash absolute proof (outside of formal systems), or politically accommodating some "radical equality of cultural beliefs" on the social justice front (decolonization of knowledge).

The "just forget it if you're not willing to bet it" perspective.
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"After getting some intense media grilling about whistleblower reports, the man who headed up the Pentagon's UFO office is stepping down.

As Politico reports, Sean Kirkpatrick is leaving his role as the director of the Department of Defense's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) after less than 18 months on the job and will be replaced by his deputy, Tim Phillips, until the Pentagon can appoint a more permanent director.

Notably, Kirkpatrick's exit from the office came just over a week after a protracted media exchange in which he admitted that claims made by whistleblower David Grusch — whose allegations about widespread alien coverups and the government's possession of reverse-engineered alien technology the AARO head had previously called "insulting" — just might have had some merit after all.


"We're investigating each and every one of [Grusch's claims]," the now-resigned AARO director said during the off-camera Halloween meeting with the press. "We're cross-referencing those. There are some bits of information that are turning out to be things and events that really happened."

"A lot of it is still under review," Kirkpatrick continued, "and we're putting all that together into our historical report."---- https://news.yahoo.com/military-ufo...SXkpT8Gbvwo3pj79XPMX9hNaz0FbeDgWV7QO1scC5Q998

 

As I noted at SV a while back -- about expecting this kind of irony -- Grusch was arguably one of the few things they had left. As items like the spheres fell to closer scrutiny. I mean, as whacky an "X-Files" trope as it seems, Grusch's claims may have become the Hail Mary pass, a hope for preserving the perception of the Office as having more purpose than just "ordinary" national security concerns...

Kirkpatrick: "The best thing that could come out of this job is to prove that there are aliens," he told the magazine. "If we don’t prove it’s aliens, then what we’re finding is evidence of other people doing stuff in our backyard, and that’s not good."​

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An odd take on it.

Proving it's humans doing stuff in our backyard is somehow worse than proving an alien species is doing stuff in our backyard? A species whose capabiites and motives we can even conceive of?