Anthony Flack wrote: Thu Aug 03, 2023 6:02 am Here's one breakdown of the commonly-circulating UFO videos showing how sad they really are. Like, oh that's a bird. And that's an out-of-focus plane.



I don't like this guy's style which is kinda trolly and annoying, but he also lays it out.

They should take their findings to the Secretary of Defense so we can be done with this nonsense once and for all. I mean, it's just VFX artists' words against naval officers' words. Do naval aviators have the time to edit in post? Beats the fuck outta me.

I think the guy in the first video said it best when he said "this is so obviously an out-of-focus airplane that it kind of makes me mad that people in newsrooms who clearly know better are participating in this charade". Why even pretend it's "a triangle-shaped object"?

I mean, it looks VERY OBVIOUS that that was an out-of-focus airplane, right down to the blinking navigation light. The other one was VERY OBVIOUSLY just a bird.

Did you see the clips from the NASA press conference where the NASA guys were saying "this is just a bird. This is just a parallax effect", and "speaking from experience, being high in the atmosphere or in space is an environment which is extremely susceptible to optical illusions. I was once on a flight with someone who swears he saw a UFO, which wasn't. We've had pilots try to rendezvous with buoys".

The second video shows the actual calculations (basic trigonometry) necessary to demonstrate that the "super fast" object was going about 40mph.

I mean, yeah, if this crap is all they've got, then we really should be done with this nonsense once and for all. Why are they persisting with this bullshit? These videos are completely bogus.

To summarise - airplane, duck, lens flare, balloon. Notably absent: evidence of anything breaking the known laws of physics. It's not even violating the known laws of ducks.

Do we have anything better?

The second guy's video spends a fair bit of time ridiculing the notion that a Navy veteran couldn't possibly be a crank. A bit too much time with the ridiculing for my taste, but the point is, when presented with reasonable, plausible explanations for how these videos could all be perfectly ordinary things, why assume they were something else?

Anthony Flack wrote: Fri Aug 04, 2023 11:21 pm The second guy's video spends a fair bit of time ridiculing the notion that a Navy veteran couldn't possibly be a crank. A bit too much time with the ridiculing for my taste, but the point is, when presented with reasonable, plausible explanations for how these videos could all be perfectly ordinary things, why assume they were something else?

If it were one Navy Pilot I'd tend to agree with you, but there were 2 groups of 4 pilots who witnessed the "Tic Tac", and the number of trained pilots (military and otherwise) who have reported seeing things that can't be explained by modern human technology isn't something that I think is easily brushed off as quacks.

But NASA seemed to have no problem dismissing them as being victims of common optical illusions. Like the guy said, they've had pilots try to rendezvous with buoys and all kinds of things. The reason they call them UAPs and not UFOs now is because sometimes they're not even objects at all.

I mean, if NASA thought there was anything to this, they wouldn't be sending out space telescopes or deep space probes, they'd be pouring all their resources into scanning Earth's atmosphere for alien craft, surely? Tracking these craft would be less challenging than the work they currently do (heck, people keep seeing them with the naked eye) and the discovery would be far more important. If there was a grain of truth in any of this, we ought to be throwing ALL our scientific resources at it. Why devote decades of planning and billions of dollars trying to retrieve a Martian soil sample when we have alien spacecraft flying all around our own planet to study?

But those videos were just tragic. They were supposed to be things that couldn't be explained too, but turned out to be trivial to explain. It just shows how much this stuff gets hyped up and sensationalised, and nobody wants to run a news story like "it was a stupid duck all along" or "that is quite obviously a plane, duh". The fact that junk like that gets so much traction should be a huge red flag. I mean, just look at what a joke that out-of-focus airplane footage is, but it still gets shopped around as evidence of aliens.

We should never assume that the known laws of physics have been broken based on some sketchy eye-witness accounts of not-sure-what. Time and time again it turns out to be a mistake of one kind or another. All this vague, ambiguous stuff fits the regular pattern of other things that aren't true.

This thread feels crankier than when it started. The arguments are now going in circles.

The original post on Page 1 draws attention to Mick West’s debunking of the UAP videos that were making headlines a few years back. Those UAP videos aren’t likely proof of aliens or anomalous craft from some kind of secret government project(s) on Earth. The more prosaic explanations for what they are make much more sense.

Some “believers” might still want to home in on those clips and the surrounding testimony as “smoking guns.” Alternately, some naysayers might think it represents the fullest extent of potential evidence of aliens that ever has, or ever will, come to light; since it's likely bunk, then the entire vast field of ufology collapses into folderol, and the subject is now over and done with. The end.

Neither position is valid, in my view.

The burden of proof will always fall on those making claims, but the larger issues of whether aliens exist and whether they’ve ever visited or surveilled Earth in some way are not resolved.

I don't think I can trust Shaun Ryder's ability for recollection

Earlier I was watching one of those "What Would Happen If Humans Vanished Tomorrow" productions. It mentioned how in hundreds of thousands of years Voyager 2 will still be cruising around in interstellar space which got me to thinking about Oumuamua and what if it was actually an interstellar probe from a long gone civilization as surmised in some circles.

I don't think our govt would trust Trump with UAP secrets in addition to thinking that Trump would be wholly uncurious about the phenomena.

Oumuamua is more compelling than those high-profile UAP clips because we know for a fact it came from outside the Solar System. It might represent the first documented case of its kind, and yet it remains a mystery. The thing was here and gone before we could get a proper handle on it.

A curious thing I remember is that around the time it arrived and left, it was the more “fringe,” ufologist types who first suggested it was possibly of alien origin (and not just space debris). And then, several days, in some cases weeks later, more vetted members of the scientific community started to take this idea seriously.

DaveA wrote: Sun Aug 06, 2023 3:53 pm Oumuamua is more compelling than those high-profile UAP clips because we know for a fact it came from outside the Solar System. It might represent the first documented case of its kind, and yet it remains a mystery. The thing was here and gone before we could get a proper handle on it.

A curious thing I remember is that around the time it arrived and left, it was the more “fringe,” ufologist types who first suggested it was possibly of alien origin (and not just space debris). And then, several days, in some cases weeks later, more vetted members of the scientific community started to take this idea seriously.

Here is a video on the subject

Yeah ^^^, probably not little aliens hanging around inside any of those things, but at present, what they actually are, why they behave that way, is inconclusive.

Am all for getting to the bottom of something and then accepting the rational explanation if it makes the most sense.