However, no such conclusions can be made - either pro- or anti- the "But its Aliens" argument - since the entire subject is couched in dire secrecy, with a lot of people whose lives would change, drastically, if it were the case that these UFO's turn out to be non-human in origin.
If it turns out that aliens are on the planet and have advanced technology that could ruin us all, maybe the Pentagon and the Kremlin would find a reason to stop starving their own people for the sake of assumed dominance over the planet, and instead unite to either befriend, or defeat, the common alien friend/foe.
One can imagine the reason all of these events are couched in such secrecy might be, indeed, militaristic hubris. Or, in other words, FOMO at a grand scale ..
The Romans were arguably a flash of insight away from the hot air balloon, they had good uses for it and all the prerequisite techs. Analogously, we might be one really good flash of insight away from technology we'll just actually get a thousand years from now. So the aliens could be otherwise on our tech level, but they just figured out warp drive.
I'm not saying I think these things, I'm just trying to point out that your conclusion is not a given.
It certainly means that they have those capabilities as pertains to travel, but it is not a given that they would have those capabilities in a military sense. Of course the argument can be made that you can convert that kind of power into a weapon, but I'd hazard to say that a haphazard conversion does not in fact impart upon you a godlike ability to ignore everything we could possibly do.
I'm definitely not arguing that this means we should increase military spending. I think that is fundamentally not a great idea for us in the first place. Instead, I am arguing that while the things you are talking about are widely used as sci-fi tropes and held as beliefs by a lot of people, I do not think they stand on their own merits.
A well equipped squad of marines would still eventually succumb to a gird of barbarians unless they could resupply.
It's more like neolithic man meets nuclear submarine... but worse. We have 0 tools at our disposal to fight anything that's farther away than the edge of the atmosphere. "They" can take a few decades to accelerate a really massive "civilization ending" object and slam it into us. It's not like we can go anywhere to avoid it.
Even if an alien civilization finds our planet, I don't see why that would imply we are inside their logistic operational range.
Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence, which means they are not the product of evolution, which means they are something so strange that the idea of befriending or defeating them makes no sense. They're something more like this story: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...
Or maybe they are scouts that were sent all over the cosmos for the purpose of exploration and they will report back their findings to their home eventually.
There are plenty of rational explanations for their behavior, especially if we are extremely far behind them in our technological development.
They only have a tiny poorly manned outpost?
Are you sure you know what their goals would be?
>> Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence, which means they are not the product of evolution, which means they are something so strange that the idea of befriending or defeating them makes no sense.
This. If - and that's a big if - we assume previous bizarre aerial activities observed by humans were in fact of ET origin, then it's only natural to think of those ETs more like AI (robots) that don't necessarily share our goal-oriented intelligence, but rather possess higher levels of intelligence and their own agenda. As a result, you're right; we wouldn't even begin to understand their purpose cause theirs just has no counterpart in humans.
Given the distances and ages required for interstellar travel, these things are more likely unmanned probes than busses filled with tourists.
> It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.
Fictional times indeed. Just don't think too hard about the money.
E.g. how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?
For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset. It might not affect "day to day life" in terms of the lights staying on and there being food on the shelves, but there could be a significant personal impact on a lot of people which may lead to a lot of things like depression/substance-abuse/suicides/general-"fuck it, its the end end of world, I am going to <x>"-sentiment/etc that will have knock-on effects (e.g. not turning up for work, abandoning family/responsibilities, running away to live as a hermit in the woods, gun hoarding etc)
Non-abrahamic religions like Hinduism,Jainism, Buddhism, believes in existence of world systems other than current one.
Buddhism is especially is accommodative in terms of acceptance, of evidences that refutes Buddhist world view[0].
[0]http://www.openculture.com/2016/09/carl-sagan-the-dalai-lama...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2014/may/14/po...
Nearly everyone is fine with this idea, but most everyone also thinks people with religious views different than their own will have trouble with it.
The major religions have already shown how they deal with evidence of outside of the garden of Eden. Several don't care, because the garden isn't part of their belief system to start with, and most of the rest have no problem with it (because they don't view the garden as literal), and the remainder just dismiss the evidence and distrust the entire field of science associated with it.
I don't think expanding that to off Earth is likely to change a thing about those responses, though the details of exactly which groups have each response might be a little different (though I suspect not much.)
I doubt it.
If the last few years have taught me anything, it's that no amount of evidence can dissuade someone from believing something they want to believe in.
Humans began in the Garden of Eden, but that's only one species, albeit an important one.
It is easier to square religion with life on other planets than it is to square the odds of evolution happening in a similar way on multiple planets.
I don't think it would change anything for them. We're living in a golden age of science, and that did not change anything for them. The existence of aliens would just be one more thing to either reject or literally bedevil.
Like they've dealt with every other scientific advancement that killed their beliefs. They will deny it as much and as long as they can until they will be forced to admit it, at which point "god" will shrink to an even meaningful pocket of scientific ignorance. Some of them will keep denying it forever
It is either US or Chinese skunkworks and given it was in US airspace I doubt the Chinese would do this. Also it has to be US because otherwise military brass would be freaking out the Chinese are penitrating us airspace with advanced tech.
Thus it is a us skunkworks project.
It is probably just advanced drone techonology. Probably really cool tech.
Occaam's Razor claims that terrestrial technology is more likely than extraterrestrial because it relies on fewer unproven assumptions, namely the existence of extraterrestrial life, its presence on Earth, and everything we know about physics being wrong, despite the math somehow working out to describe the universe incredibly well.
That said I think there are other alternatives that are even more likely: that these sightings are sensor malfunctions or natural phenomena that have been blown out of proportion by popular myth and deliberate disinformation -- (which is certainly the case with all other UFO sightings).
The US has lots of boring drones, but perhaps there is a secret drone fighter program. It would surprise me somewhat if the US weren't working on something like this, perhaps with a goal of keeping it secret until it needs to be deployed operationally. Plenty of military technologies have been kept secret for decades, such as the SR-71 and the spy satellites on which the Hubble Space Telescope was based. On that note, did you know that the Hubble was basically an extra spy satellite donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the US had a fleet of them pointed downwards toward earth? For more on this, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
So, consider: what kind of reconnaissance satellites does the US have today, that resulted in the retirement of the "Crystal" series? (Obviously something digital) Did the US's investment in supersonic spycraft end with the SR-71? If the US were going to design such a craft today, would it have a pilot or would it be autonomous?
On the other hand, if this were a top secret US technology, then I suspect all of the people who observed these phenomena would simply have been sworn to secrecy. I doubt it would be treated as a UFO and I doubt these officers would be speaking publicly about it. Unless this is all some kind of cover for the program. Who knows!
The predecessor of the SR-71 first flew in April on 1962, the public announcement was July of 1964. Given how much trouble we've had with our hypersonic research programs over the decades, and the lack of need for it given stealth is more affordable, there might have been some cool stuff, but it's not a practical or likely operational tool.
The first launch of a KH-11 was mid-seventies and subject to a lot of media coverage during the spy trials a few years later. Imagery was leaked during the Reagan admin. We don't need better resolution, we need more coverage.
So IMO our secrets are less about silver-bullet platforms and more about exploits. Exploiting their radars, sensors, communications systems, networks and computers. We don't really need a Mach 5 platform or 1" resolution for anything. It would be neat, but it would be unaffordable to buy and maintain.
That must be some damn nice secret propulsion system.
For decades, he worked as a civil servant in the DoD as an instrumentation and test engineer on a few well known weapons programs (and some not so much). I think he based his comment on the trajectory military technology was taking, as he commented similarly to you (referring to Pyxl101) regarding the human problem. i.e. if you remove the humans, you can save weight on life support, and you can do things you otherwise can't when you're limited to keeping the pilot alive and (mostly) functioning.
Part of me wants to believe he might've seen what we'd now call UFOs, but I'm confident that's wishful thinking. His remarks were offered based on his own experiences, and I'm sure he extrapolated from there. Regardless, I wouldn't be surprised if some of your predictions did turn out to be true in the near future.
Your last statement also reminded me of Project Mogul[1] and the use of UFOs as a cover story (or rather not, as the case might be). In all likelihood, the Roswell "UFO crash" was an errant Mogul balloon--a project shrouded in secrecy to some degree or another, mostly because we knew the Soviets had stolen our technology but we didn't want them to know we had ways of detecting their tests. I don't believe the USAF instigated the UFO theory, and neither do I believe the air force particularly cared. After all, if I understand the timeline correctly, it wasn't until the mid/late 1970s when the UFO researcher Stanton Friedman began perpetuating the myth, long after the actual event in 1947. As a cover story, that would've come far too late to be useful enough to cover for Project Mogul. To an extent--at least in the early days--I suspect early UFO "research" was largely the outcome of a means to pursue fame or money via book sales and speaking engagements more than a theory perpetuated by the government.
Now, that's not to say that the government isn't using it now that UFOs have long been established in popular culture. That may very well be a strong possibility.
Aside: I once attended a talk with my father that Mr. Friedman gave in the 1990s on UFOs. I also recall Friedman was made somewhat uncomfortable with the fact my father was not only aware of Project Blue Book but had access to the archives when he was at the air force academy. The brief exchange between the two was made when Mr. Friedman asked the audience if anyone had heard of the project and were familiar with (IIRC) volume 13.
Friedman quickly changed subjects away from "government cover up" for reasons that escape me. :)
That's a little misleading. Acceleration hasn't any effects on human body. You can't sense gravity: free fall is the same as ingravity. What you can feel is forces being transmitted by matter contact.
If you can create a field that transmits a force similar to gravity uniformly, there would be no pressure.
That would be pretty bulky and costly to include in an aircraft cockpit, but I wonder if it would solve the G-force problem.
I'm not sure if this would actually be better, though. 7 Gs of acceleration would be experienced as 7 bar pressure, equivalent to water pressure at 60 meters underwater, which is quite deep. Rapid changes in pressure between 1 bar and let's say 7 bar would probably be more uncomfortable to experience than regular G-forces.
Now you're moving again goal posts just "to be right". That's incredibly childish.
Of course you haven't adressed my core point, possibly because you can't understand it.
Edit: try stating my point and we'll see what's on your mind.
I believe your core point is that humans can't detect a force which acts identically on their whole body. Have I understood? This statement is true, of course, but does not seem relevant in context, as it seems to ignore all but the one sentence you quoted, which itself is true in its own context. I don't consider Pyxl101's ignoring of magical-seeming hypothetical technology to be misleading.
Pyxl101's comment [1], which you replied to, is all about practical technology. In that context, your comment seems like an irrelevant technicality (I think this is why you got downvoted), as no practical mode of transport can move someone without physical contact, which transfers force unevenly (just to the parts of the body in contact with the vehicle).
More than "detect", a uniform force simply doesn't affect us.
This statement is true, of course, but does not seem relevant in context...
On the contrary, the thread was started discussing if we could be facing a far superior technology, continued by Pyxl101 speculating UFOs could be drones because enormous accelerations prevent manned ships, and then I pointed that, if it's really a futurist technology, acceleration in itself could not be a problem.
... no practical mode of transport can move someone without physical contact
The "practical" thing has been inserted by yourself. Also it's not about "practical" it's about "known by us".
I don't mean anything supernatural.
(I quite like the idea of aliens drawing ideas from their spacecraft from our popular culture as a storyline, but not as an explanation for the phenomena!)
And stories of abduction by aliens often involved those aliens claiming to be from Mars or Venus before it was commonly known that those planets didn't harbor life, much less advanced civilizations.
And the archetypal "grey alien" didn't really become the template for modern alien abduction stories until Whitley Strieber popularized them in a book - many descriptions of alien encounters until that point were of "Nordic" human type aliens.
So yeah, either aliens are being careful not to appear more advanced than popular culture would allow (maybe to the point of appearing as angels and demons to humans when their view of reality was entirely dominated by religion and not science) or much of the UFO phenomenon is basically a meme.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121214172708/http://ancientali...
It seems much more likely that these assumed acts of God were a misunderstood natural phenomenon rather than extraterrestrial beings who we have yet to capture on camera. Considering how closely the depictions of the event match pictures of sun dogs leaves it as the most reasonable solution.
Yeah... sundogs are weird, leaping sundogs are weirder[0].
Increasingly, the picture we are being shown is generated by processing raw sensor data - for example, just compare raw (or partially processed) weather radar data to the processed maps you see in forecasts. Two recent trends -- the synthesis of views from multiple sensors of different types, and their presentation as virtual reality -- have come together in devices such as the F-35 Helmet-Mounted Display [1]. I would guess that this level of interpretation of data and synthesis of images presents an increased scope for artifact generation, and the presentation makes it seem more real.
Its even possible tests are done knowing other military pilots are in vicinity to guage their reaction to it.
To me this is the simplest explanation (if weather balloons and drones are ruled out).