UAPs gaining traction in media

[PenguinHunter]

Bigfoot does not exist either so you don't need to worry about it.

Just shattering everyone's hopes and dreams.... especially Kokanee drinkers...

[doulos]

Oh I didn't mean THAT bigfoot. Just the other ones. Clearly that one is real.

[loppantorkel]

Sora is pretty cool.

Being able to distinguish between faked video/photos and real is certainly a challlenge, and one that is increasingly going to become even more difficult, but it's one that we are going to need to come up with solutions to for far more important things than blurry weather balloon videos. I don't buy it as an excuse for why people won't believe these videos/photos. Skilled analysis shows that they almost always have easily explainable origins.

These conspiracy theories tend to go in cycles as they die out of the public consciousness. As more people grow up who were not exposed to all of the ways that these things got shot down by experts in the past they think they came up with new ideas. They didn't. It's the same rehashed blurry videos and "Doug heard from Bob who fills the photocopy paper at the Pentagon that there might be things hidden there" that has always existed. Nothing new.

Like I said, I would be one of the very first to be absolutely elated to see some solid evidence. Right now we have none sadly.

The reason I started this thread was to see what views people had of the current "cylcle". The theories aren't new, but new reports, testimonies are coming out. No evidence of course, since that would be wide spread news. ..but there's more interest lately and some people seem more credible than others.

I think there are good reasons to have an open mind about UAP reports. Not to believe it's alien visitors, but support investigation and in the case of the US government - push for release of information.

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Bigfoot does not exist either so you don't need to worry about it.

Yea, I thought it was a good parallel - regardless if things are real or not, people will be less persuaded by video/photo evidence from now on. ..although I haven't seen you disprove Bigfoots...

[PenguinHunter]

..although I haven't seen you disprove Bigfoots...

Where is the burden of proof?

Should the burden of proof not be on the side trying to prove that Bigfoot exists?

How can one disprove the existence of something if that something does not exist?

[loppantorkel]

Where is the burden of proof?

Should the burden of proof not be on the side trying to prove that Bigfoot exists?

How can one disprove the existence of something if that something does not exist?

I believe the burden of proof lies on the one making claims, whether positive or negative. I'm more interested in the UAP discussion though, where I feel more open minded and curious about the reports and discussions going on. I doubt anyone here believes in bigfoots, it was just a point I made. A valid one imo.

[doulos]

The reason I started this thread was to see what views people had of the current "cylcle". The theories aren't new, but new reports, testimonies are coming out. No evidence of course, since that would be wide spread news. ..but there's more interest lately and some people seem more credible than others.

I think there are good reasons to have an open mind about UAP reports. Not to believe it's alien visitors, but support investigation and in the case of the US government - push for release of information. Yea, I thought it was a good parallel - regardless if things are real or not, people will be less persuaded by video/photo evidence from now on. ..although I haven't seen you disprove Bigfoots...

For sure. I also find the psychology of these cycles to be interesting. Even things like flat earth conspiracies don't stay dead forever and eventually pop up again like zombies until they get beat down in the public consciousness, only to rise again a generation later. It's the same for cryptids, UAPs/UFOs, ghosts/paranormal.

Conspiracies generally bubble out of a mistrust of authority or institutions. "Someone is hiding the truth!" "The truth is out there!" Tack on how social media can supercharge and spread some of this stuff much faster than before and you get an interesting mix.

Most of what we are hearing today would have faded into the background pretty quickly in the past since it's pretty much same old same old and has very little substance to it. But now you can monetize conspiracies via youtube and other media and so there is an incentive for people to push these beliefs even if they don't truly hold them themselves (the question of true believer vs opportunistic "scammer" is interesting as well) so these junk narratives go further, faster, and stick around longer.

I don't think society is any more susceptible to being duped than in the past - in fact I think the opposite could 'potentially' be true (I suspect there may be some data on this out there but I've not gone looking for it). I do think that the ease with which individuals can find and build communities with others who share their fringe views, and the ways in which those fringe views can be amplified and monetized, means that things that really would have belonged to 'crazy uncle Jimmy' in the past, now belong to 500 crazy uncle jimmies who all share a Facebook group and a Youtube channel.

[loppantorkel]

Otoh - it must be very easy to succeed in a conspiracy if people continue to lump any and all theories together that has a hint of controversy or conspiracy angle to it. There are two ditches for people to fall into - those who get duped too easily and those who wants proof before any effort has gone into researching the matter at hand. Yes, you can monetize conspiracy theories, just as any other thing. You can monetize debunking conspiracy theories too. Can I be sure that the debunking is correctly done? At most I can follow the logic and make an assessment of the person in the video.

I haven't seen anything yet to make me a believer, but I want more research to go into the claims and stories. Plenty of things we're still unaware of, even scientific things which doesn't make sense, and there's room for UAP explanations in a number of non mundane ways.

[doulos]

Sounds like we mostly agree then.

Both of us agree that there is no evidence. I also have no problem with private enterprises putting whatever time and money they want into looking for spherules at the bottom of the ocean.

I certainly don't think public money should be wasted on hunting for things that are extreme fringe beliefs with next to no evidence.

I also think that guys who make claims that are bullshit (like Avi Loeb) should rightfully be called out for their bullshit.

[dejeanneret]

These are the type of stories that interest me:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tic-tac...use-testimony/

More specifically, anecdotes like this:

Retired Navy Cmdr. David Fravor was commander of the F/A-18F squadron on the USS Nimitz when he says he spotted the object during a flight off the coast of Southern California on Nov. 14, 2004.

In a 2021 interview with "60 Minutes," Fravor, a graduate of the Top Gun naval flight school, also spoke about what he saw.

He and Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich were training with the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group about 100 miles southwest of San Diego, Favor told "60 Minutes." At the time, advanced radar on a ship that was a part of their training group, the USS Princeton, detected what operators called "multiple anomalous aerial vehicles" over the horizon, descending 80,000 feet in less than a second. Fravor and Dietrich diverted to investigate.

To put that into some perspective, anything descending 80,000 ft in less than a second is moving at over 54,500 MPH (over 87,700 KM/hour).

-That's faster than Mach 71
-It's more than 2.7x faster than the world's fastest hypersonic missile (the Avangard)
-It's more than 3x as fast as a space shuttle re-entering the Earth's atmosphere
-It's 33% faster than the speed at which an asteroid impacts Earth, assuming it doesn't disintegrate in the atmosphere first.

Is it possible they're full of bologna? Sure it is. Does it necessarily mean there's an otherworldly explanation? Not at all. But I personally think it's incredibly interesting and worth investigating when the most advanced machinery we have (and highly trained operators of that machinery) encounter things that appear to be unexplainable by known science and our current technological limits.

[doulos]

Mick West has touched on this particular situation more than once as well. There's plausible and mundane possible explanations for it.

[dejeanneret]

This is what I've seen from Mick West about it:

First of all, that was 17 years ago back in 2004. And I think memories have changed quite a bit since then. So it's difficult to read much into current accounts.

I was actually talking to Alex on Twitter last night, actually, and she was saying that the entire encounter lasted just around 10 seconds from the first time they saw it. But the other pilot involved, Dave Fravor, had said before that the entire encounter from the first time he saw it lasted about five minutes. So there are quite significant differences in the accounts of the two pilots.

Eyewitness accounts are very difficult to analyze because they are subject to observation errors and memory errors. So I prefer to go with the actual data where possible, like the videos.

Not exactly an impressive refutation. Maybe there's more from him about it. But otherwise, yeah, he's generally a skeptic but doesn't seem to add a lot.

[doulos]

This is what I've seen from Mick West about it:



Not exactly an impressive refutation. Maybe there's more from him about it. But otherwise, yeah, he's generally a skeptic but doesn't seem to add a lot.

He's done literally hours of youtube on this exact topic. There are good reasons to think that these guys saw something very boring and mundane. I'm not even saying they are lying. They are likely just confused, mistaken, have poor memories etc. None of this is new. To claim that he doesn't seem to add a lot is just completely untrue but I could see how you might think that from a brief comment in a CBC article. He's been doing this a long time and is well known for being excellent at this.