UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

Discussion in 'UFOs, Ghosts and Monsters' started by Magical Realist, Oct 10, 2017.

  1. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    16,605
    A demonstration of spontaneously formed geometrical shapes from sound waves in a granular medium. I mention this to suggest the possible role of electromagnetic waves in forming the lightwheels.

     
    Last edited: Mar 4, 2023
    Yazata likes this.
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. Yazata Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,902
    Isn't part of the reason for those patterns is sound waves reflecting off the edges of the plate and forming interference patterns? If that is halfway true, how could it happen in the open ocean?
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    16,605
    Maybe the waves of the ocean causing density fluctuations. Just a guess..
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    18,935
    Requesting the thread title be changed to 'UAPs - lets just take wild guesses at random physics principles'.
     
  8. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    16,605
    You're right. That was a crappy attempt on my part. So what do you think causes the lightwheels?
     
  9. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    6,549
    Extra terrestrial phenomenon looking to colonize our planet!
     
  10. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    18,935
    Bioluminescent plankton light up when they sense movement in the water. So, depending on the ebbing and flowing of current and eddies, or even the motion of fish (relatively controlled and deliberate compared to plankton) vast areas of the ocean can light up with green glowing filaments and stringers and that can shift and move rapidly - somewhat akin to auroras in the sky. This is known.

    Here are just a couple of examples - they're not really great:




    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Because these displays are based entirely on the distribution of plankton and motion of the water, they are unique every time - much like aurorae are. Just because a given video doesn't look exactly like some "wheel" of light doesn't mean the conditions couldn't be satisfied to form such a wheel naturally.

    Note also that three words such as "wheel of light" should probably be taken with a grain of salt. Imagine seeing, say, the aurora borealis for the first time, and describing it with only three words (say, "ribbon of light"), without some enthusiast, somewhere taking it so literally as to think you were describing some mysterious force not explainable by physics.
     
    Last edited: Mar 6, 2023
  11. Yazata Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,902
    I posted this in the Obfuscation thread in Open Government, but it might be more appropriate here in this thread.

    I think that speculation is something that both sides in this little war are doing. Both sides are hypothesizing about various sighting reports. (Hypothesizing isn't necessarily bad, it's a basic part of the stereotypical 'scientific method'.)

    The problem seems to revolve around the nature of the speculations.

    I guess that explaining something consists of reducing the unknown to the known. So explanations will only seem to work when they redescribe some event in terms of the stock of concepts that are already accepted by the one doing the explaining or by those expected to accept the explanation.

    But the history of ideas, from ancient times to now, illustrates that our existing stock of concepts, the ways we habitually think about things, is often insufficient to explain what we want to explain. Sometimes we need to add and subtract from our bag of concepts before some phenomena start to make sense. (Think of the nature of life before the 19th-20th centuries or chemistry before the 18th century.)

    Space aliens seems to be a concept that some people are unwilling to accept, hence it can't play any role in explanations that they are willing to accept.

    We don't know what the UAPs are. (True.) The stock of concepts that we currently accept as valid explanatory principles may or may not be sufficient to explain the more problematic reports. (True.) In some of the cases we lack sufficient information to make that leap either way based on anything more than what we already believe. (Certainly arguable and I think it's true.)

    I have no objection to hypothesizing about space aliens as long as the hypothesis is acknowledged to be entirely speculative at this point: If space aliens (or their artifacts like robots) are visiting the solar system, then they might be responsible for some of the some of the sightings. (Seems entirely plausible to me.)

    But I'm more doubtful about arguing in the other direction: The argument that the observed sightings should be accepted as evidence that space aliens are visiting the solar system. In retrospect from the vantage point of a hypothetical future in which we discover the space aliens, it might prove from that perspective to have been true now. But I don't think that we should make that kind of leap today, given our current state of knowledge and knowing what we currently know. (Scientific discovery is a boostrap process.)

    So my belief is that the most rational position to take today is agnostic. The observed reports seem to be consistent with an unknown number of possible explanations, ranging from the mundane and uninteresting to many possible explanations that we haven't even thought of yet. Space aliens is just one hypothetical possibility, and probably not the most likely one. (Though prior likelihood is hard to know at this point, since it once again depends on what we already believe.)

    The only thing we can say with real truth and justification is "I don't know".
     
    wegs and Magical Realist like this.
  12. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    9,253
    I like your idea that it would behoove us to be “agnostic” when it comes to space aliens, or the possibility that they may exist. If they exist, and I’ve posted this before, I doubt they’re visiting us Earthlings, but what is the harm of believing that they could be visiting? Right?

    From a science perspective, how does MR’s beliefs for example, hurt this forum? In this little corner of the internet, hidden in this sub-forum, is this thread that doesn’t condemn the scientific method, so I’m surprised (although by now, I shouldn’t be) why skeptics give MR such a hard time. He’s not kicking science out of the discussion; he’s merely suggesting that what we think we know about the universe, isn’t all there is.

    Of course, scientists know that there is so much to the universe that we can’t yet fathom, but space aliens conveniently stays out of the “wonder” of it all. I don’t personally care if space aliens exist, not sure why really, but I’ve never been swept away by the mystery of their potential to exist. But, if MR is intrigued, I don’t see why skeptics want to convince him otherwise.

    In defense of our forum skeptics though, I think early on in the discussion, like last year and before then, MR did take a more definitive stance on space aliens and sparring ensued from the skeptics. But, he has settled into a more agnostic mindset now, so…I’m hopeful that the “other side” will give him some credit. Needless to say, this thread shouldn’t be taken as seriously as the hard science section, but that dead horse has been beaten enough.
     
    Last edited: Mar 8, 2023
    Magical Realist and Yazata like this.
  13. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    16,605
    I have taken a more agnostic view on uaps over the years of this thread. That's one thing I've learned from discussion here. We really can't say what they are, even if they display behavior beyond our own technology. Another thing I've learned is that no amount of evidence will persuade someone who has already made up their mind. Which sort of makes this thread entirely pointless in the long run. But as long as we remain openminded like science teaches us to, then maybe there is hope that some good will come out of all this.
     
    Last edited: Mar 10, 2023
  14. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    18,935
    Fixed that for you.

    You have no way of knowing that.

    So far, we only have a little amount of evidence - mostly in the form of flawed eyewitness reports, blurry photos and some unusual radar/FLIR traces. Who knows what "someone" will be persuaded by if we ever manage to have lots of evidence - let alone a preponderance of evidence.

    (After all, we have a little amount of evidence of God, too, and many minds are rational enough to not make their bets on that.)
     
  15. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

    Messages:
    39,397
    No. We're beyond that.

    The problem is that your side of this little war keeps telling lies about what my side of this war claims (and/or believes).

    As you rightly say, there is nothing wrong with tossing hypotheses around. Some hypotheses will not be supported by evidence; others might have more or less supporting evidence. This sort of thing is completely standard in scientific investigations - indeed, in careful investigations of any kind.

    Let's be clear: you are completely free to speculate that the bluish light somebody reported seeing in the sky was an Angelic Being from God's Heaven, or a super-advanced aquatic alien spaceship from the planet Zog, or a luminous ghost remnant from the wreck of the Mary Celeste, or the planet Venus.

    If you have evidence that points convincingly towards the conclusion that the light was, in fact, a luminous ghost remnant from the Mary Celeste, that's fantastic. (When I say "convincingly", I'm referring, of course, not just to what happens to convince you, but what will convince the average disinterested scientist, say.)

    If you lack good evidence for the existence of Celestine ghosts in general, or, more specifically, you lack good evidence that connects the particular blue light in question to ghosts from the Mary Celeste, then your hypothesis will remain a weak possibility at best. On the other hand, there is a lot of good evidence for the existence of the planet Venus, along with a lot of good evidence that the planet Venus often appears as a bright bluish light in the sky. So, long before we even start to examine the particular circumstances of this particular sighting of a bluish light in the sky, the probability that the light will turn out to be the planet Venus is already much more likely than that it will turn out to be ghosts from the Mary Celeste. Nothing in this guarantees that it will turn out to be Venus, or that it won't turn out to be ghosts from the Mary Celeste, of course. The only thing that will guarantee is if we are able to definitively rule out one or both of those possibilities. Maybe Venus was not in the right position in the sky when the blue light was seen; in that case we would know it can't be Venus.

    It's interesting to think about what might prove that the bluish light was not a ghost from the Mary Celeste, too. Can we falsify that hypothesis, in a similar way to how we could potentially falsify the possibility that it was the planet Venus?

    If we can't ever prove that the thing was not a ghost from the Mary Celeste, that probably means that the Celestine ghost hypothesis is not scientific. The scientist says "Hey, I checked the star chart, and the planet Venus was in exactly the right place in the sky to correspond to the sighting of that bluish light! Sure looks like Venus to me." But then the ghost hunter says "It could just as well have been a ghost from the Mary Celeste hiding the planet Venus and appearing in the place normally occupied by the planet in the sky. Ghosts are tricksy that way!" Who's to say the ghost hunter is wrong, then? I mean, after all, we can't ever know anything for sure. Right? (Descartes be damned.)
    In science it often amounts to coming up with a useful predictive model to describe the observed and repeatable phenomenon at hand.

    UFO enthusiasts typically demand that UFOs be unpredictable and unrepeatable. It's almost as if they are designed to confound standard investigative methods. Funny, that.
    As you admit just after this sentence, that's not true. There are many counter-examples from the history of science in which new concepts were required before a phenomenon was considered to be understood.
    Maybe so. But you know that none of those people are talking to you here, in this thread, on sciforums. Because we have told you that we're all willing to accept the existence of space aliens. All we require is some convincing evidence for them.
    By definition. The "U" still stands for "unidentified". The ones that have been identified are no longer unidentified, obviously. We know what they are, because we identified them.
    There has not yet been a single case in which the stock of concepts we currently accept as valid has been proven insufficient for explaining problematic reports. (True.)
    Hence "U" is for "unidentified".
    None of the skeptics here have ever objected to this claim. As you know.

    That "If" in bold type is doing a LOT of heavy lifting, there, though. Don't you agree? Especially because, so far, there are precisely zero items of independent evidence that show that even a single "space alien" exists. If your aim is to prove that a UFO is a space alien, you can't just assume that the UFO is a space alien and rely on that assumption as evidence for the existence of space aliens. That's completely circular. What's needed is some independent evidence for space aliens.
    Is this you returning to the fold of sensible skepticism, then? I hope so.
    The rational position to take on every question whose answer is currently unknown is agnostic. Welcome to the skeptics' society!
    Ghost fragments from the wreck of the Mary Celeste remain an open possibility, you mean.

    Seems unlikely, though, doesn't it?
    What's the most likely one, in your opinion?
    Saying "I don't know" has never been the problematic feature of your posts on this topic.

    Wilfully and knowingly seeking to misrepresent your opponents' position is the main issue of contention, for me anyway.
     
  16. Seattle Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,851
    That "kite" looks similar to me to a stealth bomber from a certain angle.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  17. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

    Messages:
    39,397
    wegs:
    It's a good question that people often ask about woo beliefs: where is the harm in believing?

    The important question you should ask yourself is this: do I care whether what I believe is true?

    If your answer to that question is "No. It's fine for me to believe in things that make me happy - or even things that might make me miserable - even if they aren't real/true." then the question of "where's the harm" reduces to whether you are likely to suffer from believing in things that aren't true.

    If, on the other hand, your answer is "Yes! I want to believe only in things that are true, to the extent that I can work out what's true. I don't want to believe in false things, even if it might make me happy to believe them." then you'll probably already have found your own answer to "where's the harm in believing things that aren't true?"

    I would suggest that, generally speaking, believing in things that aren't true can be harmful to the believer in lots of different ways. Investing one's time and energy in a false belief seems to me like an unfortunately waste of the limited time one has on this Earth, in my opinion. That's the minimal harm - that you'll simply waste time believing in something that gives you no benefit.

    The worse situation is that you believe in something that actually causes you measurable harm. For instance, suppose you believe firmly in a particular religion, which demands that you give 90% of your life savings to its Church, and that religion is not true. Dutifully, you give most of your savings to the Church, and the result is that you can no longer pay your bills. You end up living on the street, but you still make sure that every Friday night you attend the Church's regular service. If you receive welfare payments, you dutifully give 90% of that money to the Church, despite having to live on the street. And, we're assuming in this example, this is all for a belief that isn't true.

    There are even worse examples of people believing stuff that isn't true. Beliefs motivate actions. Beliefs can motivate a person to be violent towards other people. If those beliefs are also false, that violence has no justification.

    Even false beliefs that seemingly make people happy can turn out to harm them in the longer term. If you believe that your beloved grandmother is living on as a ghost in your house, looking out for you, that might give you comfort in the short term. But is it a healthy belief for you in the longer term? What happens if bad things happen to you? Do you start to blame your dead grandmother? Do you start taking unnecessary risks because you falsely believe that Grandma will protect you no matter what? Do you simply waste hours thinking about what Grandma's opinions might be about your life, and live your life worried about possibly disppointing a ghost?

    Bottom line: believing in things that aren't true seems like a potentially slippery slope that I personally don't like the idea of embarking upon. Your mileage may vary.
     
  18. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

    Messages:
    39,397
    (continued...)

    MR's beliefs don't hurt this forum. This thread is here for people like MR. Our membership voted to have a "UFO" forum.

    On the other hand, I'm sure there are some people who have decided to leave sciforums because we have a UFO forum. Depending on your perspective, that could be considered a "hurt" to the forum.

    The reason skeptics give MR such a hard time is twofold. The first reason is that MR seems to be unable to think critically about woo, or at least to be unwilling to learn how to think critically about it (which is actually a more serious character flaw). Since sciforums' mission statement includes such things as respect for critical thinking and the scientific method, people who actively refuse to learn anything about it tend to attract special attention.

    The second reason - actually more important in the end than the first one - is that MR is either a stubborn, gullible fool or a troll (or both). MR tells lies. MR lies by omission often, and by commission sometimes. His attitudes, whether conscious and deliberate or due to some kind of problem he has, are troll-like, for the most part. He ignores everything that tends to refute his claims. He refuses to learn from past mistakes. He regularly makes blanket, silly claims that he ought to know he can't begin to support (and, indeed, he never starts to even try supporting them). He throws babyish temper tantrums. He put almost no effort into his posts. He only ever replies to counter-arguments selectively, if at all.

    It is not true that MR is "merely suggesting that what we think we know about the unverse isn't all there is" - that's more Yazata's playbook. Look at what MR actually claims. He always has a lot to say about what every UFO can't possibly be, for instance. (That makes it quite ironic, by the way, that Yazata completely ignores that behaviour from MR while also regularly telling the lie that skeptics like myself have decided in advance what every UFO can't possibly be. But I've called out that behaviour elsewhere.)

    MR is on the record as regularly claiming, without any good evidence, that UFOs are "craft" that have "pilots" or which are "intelligently controlled". Moreover, he regularly drops these contentious claims into his posts as if they have been proven and are uncontroversial, which is a continuation of the same kind of troll-like dishonesty that typifies his posts. At the extreme end, MR occasionally lets slip some of his true beliefs about UFOs - for instance he believes that there is "probably" a super-advanced aquatic civilisation of aliens living at the bottom of Earth's oceans, contructing high-tech "craft" that can operate in both the sky and under water. All this, despite the complete lack of any supporting evidence, as usual.

    MR is not "kicking science out of the discussion", but only because other people are bringing the science in and he can't do anything about that.
    No. If you follow real science - the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), for example - then you'll quickly find that there's no shortage of real practising scientists who are enthusiastic about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life in any form. The weight of opinion among employed astronomers, I'd wager, would likely be that the majority of astronomers believe (and many would hope) that intelligent extraterrestrial life will eventually be found beyond the Earth. Regardless of what they believe, I can guarantee that every astronomer would love to be the first to discover real convincing proof of extraterrestrial life and/or intelligence.

    I don't know where people get the notion that scientists lack imagination. Lots of scientists got interested in science through their love of science fiction, for example. Scientists are creative people. Their work demands it. A closed-minded scientist will never discover anything new.
    Speaking for myself, I'm one of those people who would love to discover that there's intelligent life in the universe other than here on Earth - for all kinds of reasons. I'm fascinated by the idea and have been since I was a kid.

    None of the usual crowd of skeptics who post in this thread want to convince MR, or you, or anybody, that aliens can't possibly exist. None of us have ever tried to do that, even once.

    The following claims are not the same:
    1. Extraterrestrial life exists somewhere in the universe.
    2. Extraterrestrial aliens are currently visiting Earth in spaceships.

    It is possible that both of these claims are true. If I had to bet on it, I'd personally wager that #1 is true while #2 is false, but that's just my educated guessing. But I don't know. If #1 turns out to be false, then #2 must be false, too.

    I have no in-principle objection to believing #2. I'm totally ready to believe #2, just as soon as I see some suitable evidence sufficient to convince me that #2 is true.

    I point out that the history of this current discussion thread. MR has probably posted 100+ UFO videos by now - lots of separate cases that he has claimed are all aliens (or other woo). How many of those discussions have you come out of convinced that MR has found proof that aliens are visiting Earth right now? In which of those cases have you found the totality of the evidence so convincing that it would be impossible for you to honestly dispute that aliens are visiting Earth?

    The answer is: none of them. Nothing MR has posted in this 8500 post thread has convinced you of his claims, so far.

    Now, you might go on to wonder: if you're not convinced by any of this, what on earth convinced MR that the little green men are visiting us?

    Why hasn't he shown you what it was that convinced him, so that you'd be convinced too? Or is it that he has shown you what convinced him, but it didn't convince you?

    Please note, for comparison: I have never tried to convince you that aliens are not currently visiting Earth. All I have ever tried to do is to help you to understand why I'm not convinced that is happening. I don't want to do your thinking for you. I want you to do your own thinking. MR is never going to tell you how to think; he will tell you what to think - loudly and repetitively and unoriginally.

    I'd like to come back to the "where's the harm?" question here, at the end. You have to decide for yourself whether you think there might be harm for you if you wind up believing in things that aren't true. If you decide there is the potential for harm, and you care about that, then you need to think about how you're going to go about deciding what is and isn't true. Hint: blindly accepting what somebody tells you in a youtube pseudo-documentary is not a method I'd recommend you adopt.

    You asked what's the harm MR brings to sciforums. My answer was: nothing much. (That's one reason he's still here, rather than banned.) But you didn't ask what harm MR might be bringing to himself. If MR believes in lots of things that aren't true, is that a problem for him, do you think? Is his life any the less if he believes in a whole lot of woo? What if it makes him really happy? Does that make it okay? Food for thought.
     
    Last edited: Mar 10, 2023
  19. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    16,605
    There is nothing inherently harmful or destructive in believing in the extraordinary or the miraculous. If that is the kind of universe you live in, then you have hope--audacious, irrational, and indestructible. If you on the other hand believe the universe is an ultimately meaningless affair of colliding atoms, then you accept that and become a stronger person for it. In both cases good comes out of believing, and that in the end may be why we believe in anything. Belief is always preferred over the uncertainty and stress of not knowing.
     
    Last edited: Mar 10, 2023
  20. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    18,935
    Yes, no one is objecting to anyone believing whatever they want. But this forum is not called Belief Forums. The ethos here is about rational, evidence-based discussion. Make whatever assertions you want, but you will be challenged to defend them with evidence. If that's not your bag, this may not be the place for you.
     
  21. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    9,253
    Evidence-based discussions about “monsters?” This subforum would have zero threads if we were to treat it like the hard science section. lol
     
    Seattle likes this.
  22. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    9,253
    I meant - is it harmful to the integrity of the site, to allow MR’s opinions to be aired out under the subforum “UFO’s, Ghosts and Monsters?”

    By sheer fact that he’s posting in this sub-forum, an outsider could safely assume that is where such “wild ideas” belong, n’est pas?

    That said, everything you have replied is true, but why have a section like this if for no other reason than to invite fringe topics that don’t fit anywhere else, with the understanding that the enigmas they turn out to be, may not have rational explanations?

    As a side thought, I don’t see MR as an irrational guy who disassociates himself from science. I’d say that up until recently, now with NASA stepping in to examine these UFO claims with a scientific lens, these discussions weren’t taken all that seriously and that’s changing. That’s a good thing. I’m a skeptic fwiw, but also don’t take issue with MR’s ideas about paranormal activity or UAP’s.

    Bigfoot on the other hand…
     
    Last edited: Mar 10, 2023
  23. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    18,935
    What? No. Just because UAPs and monsters are at the limit of investigation doesn't mean they can't be discussed; it simply means we can't draw hard conclusions the way Magical Realist is so fond of doing.

    There's a LOT of discussion to be had in the grey area between
    skeptics "it could be a plane / it could be a guy in a gorilla suit"
    and
    enthusiasts "it can't be a plane**/ it can't be a guy in a gorilla suit; it is a piloted craft / it is a monster".

    **As James R points out, for someone who complains a lot about skeptical claims about what things "can't be", Magical Realist sure says "it's not X" a lot.
     

Share This Page