3) equipment failure

4) mass delusion

5) error in judgement

6) the creator of the matrix messing / debugging

7) government or private company testing a new type of propulsion

Now look at all these options rationally, which ones are more likely?

The problem with the UFO evidence is, it's shitty every single time. With 4K cameras in cheap smartphones, 50x optical zoom cheap consumer cameras, cheap telescopes widely available, our UFO videos haven't gotten any better.

Of course it is. The greater the clarity of the footage, the lower the probability that the filmed object will remain unidentified (as in Unidentified Flying Object).

If you’re on the look for unidentified things, how could anything but unclear evidence be useful?

Example:

http://www.urbanalarm.com/knowledge-base/2016/digital-chain-...

To be fair, the only thing that can be proven is that it was either filmed with that camera, or someone has extracted the private key from the device (or just tricked the signing chip to sign a custom data packet).

Ding ding ding.

Try taking a picture of a plane at a height > 3000ft with equipment available at hand (during the night) see how it looks like

https://youtube.com/results?search_query=zoom+airplane&q=zoo...

Also this is the only declassified video, I would assume better video exist but this will help ease us into acceptance.

Maybe, like Bigfoot, UFOs are actually intrinsically fuzzy.

In that case, they might want to observe us without interfering to see how we behave naturally. Or maybe they have a sort of prime directive. Or maybe they realize that if they interact with us and expose us to their level of technology, we might destroy ourselves given the level of conflict and violence we're still prone to.

Unfortunately, humans are known to study other species by locking them in cages and cutting them open. :(

The thing is, assuming this scenario to be true, "they" seem to be interfering with us all the time. Humans have developed an entire subculture, complete with religious overtones, around the belief in interference by UFOs. One would assume the quarantine was breached a long, long time ago.

We also have no idea of being able to relate to their culture which may be radically different than our own. It might be far far more right wing for example and they might see us as a slave race or supremely inferior, which we will probably be.

This would explain the strange changes of shape, high speed, hovering without apparent means of support, and disappearances so often reported for these objects.

It does require that the higher dimensional space we occupy be relatively empty in our vicinity, otherwise we would expect far more of these events. Perhaps we're in a 5-D alien lab, being studied in a tank.

But it's far more likely to be a consequence of more mundane human perceptual limitations - tricks of the light, etc.

Contact like that would be intermittant, difficult to document, and perplexing to a species that wants to talk to everybody it runs into. Which kinda describes where we are with some of this odd aerial phenomenae we've been documenting for decades now.

Do you think this is an actual possibility? For ours or any other sort of civilization?

Over time people decide to pass on by ritualistically committing data-suicide, or overdose on data-drugs, or get squeezed out by increasing scarcity of computing resources, or whatever. And so the species gradually dies out until you just have some AI routines running in a hot server room on a dead planet. The last human might not even realize that she's the last.

The same situation could occur without mind uploads if you could build very realistic androids, but I like the mind upload scenario.

And of course this is all very chauvinistically assuming that those AI routines slash robots don't qualify as human even though they're indistinguishable. The AIs could be conscious, or not, I suppose, depending on how they're implemented.

- Permutation City by Greg Egan (Imagine a world where everyone's consciousness has been uploaded to computers.)

- Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (People play sports, knit sweaters, whatever- all in virtual reality.) Note: this book is corny as hell and borderline YA but still fun

- Blindsight by Peter Watts (You spend more and more time playing alone or tittering with a circle of sycophantic AIs. ... squeezed out by increasing scarcity of computing resources)

- https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football (Over time people decide to pass on by ritualistically committing data-suicide) Just for the impact of functional immortality on common people

i'm reminded of a short story by Stephen Baxter, "The Invasion of Venus".

I think any moral species would wait until we've made sufficient progress on our own then meet us at our level instead of rocking the boat by coming down demoing all their advanced tech.