What I don't get is the arrogance of every side about this subject. We have no answers. We have no understanding. The government seems to be about to admit as much. But the true believers are sure, and the true debunkers, yourself included, are sure. To me, you're both just tin foil hat flunkies clinging to your own special precious version of the coming apocalypse. Your own special cult. Why can't people be more: (Ca) open to nuance and ambiguity and comfortable with their not being a resolution right now, and (Cb) genuinely curious and accepting of other people's perspectives rather than so "sweaty fear sprung" to be full of conviction that everyone who doesn't swallow their brand of belief on the matter is clearly a crank?

More specifically, in your case, you have an actual mirror case of crank-iness: you have a conspiracy for the creation of all the evidence, rather than a conspiracy for the suppression of it. I mean, don't you see that parallel? And aren't you a little suspicious of that?

That's what I mean. I don't blame you specifically. Something about this topic seems to short-circuit everyone to leap logic and arrive directly at certainty. It's a big human blindspot. I wonder why this topic triggers it? Maybe because we don't have any answers, but the stakes, perhaps, are so high.

I'm sorry but your casual debunking, dressed up as reasonableness, is no better than the crankiest of crank theories. Let's all do better, so... meet you somewhere in the middle. :) ;P xx

Seems like it would err on the side of “maybe something exists” which doesn’t quite feel like a middle ground.

Replace UFOs with Sasquatch.

“Sasquatch exists and here is the picture and Sasquatch tracks to prove it!”

“You made that up. It’s a guy in a costume. Why can’t we find any single dead Sasquatch? Why are all the pictures and videos crappy?”

“Why can’t you meet me in the middle and at least admit it’s possible that Sasquatch exists??”

Personally I’m open-minded and find the topic of aliens quite interesting. But there isn’t a single ounce of convincing evidence and it would require a gigantic coverup with tons of complicit actors. There needs to be extraordinary evidence before anyone needs to agree to meet anywhere in the middle. Until then we should default toward it not existing. In other words, your null hypothesis is that it doesn’t exist. So far the evidence has failed to cause someone to reject that hypothesis.

For example, I’m an atheist, but I don’t doubt that many people frequently have religious experiences. I just think that there are more likely explanations of those experiences than that they are caused by a god. I still find religion and accounts of religious experiences fascinating, and I very much respect that it’s a fundamental part of many people’s lives.

Having an opinion doesn’t mean you dismiss everyone who has a different opinion.

To me, it's more plausible to believe that the world we "experience" practically does not exist, and our memories and perceptions very rarely match reality, than to concede that these particular collective personal experiences amount to evidence of anything.

keeping the middle ground is just remaining open-minded. Not discounting any possibility. I think that logical argument you make is a trap and I don't really understand it. Why assume non-existence is a default position. It seems kind of stupid and arrogant that because God hasn't come down and shown you something personally because he hasn't personally convinced you then the smartest thing for you to do is to believe that it just simply can't exist. No offense and you're not the only one who thinks like this but I just think that's kind of stupid and arrogant. I don't think you're stupid I think you're a very smart person but I don't understand why people think that default not existence position is smart. I mean to put it in an engineering point of view just because you haven't seen a bridge failure or just because your software hasnt experienced a particular failure mode yet is not a smart reason for you to believe that it's impossible. I'm sure without an eye blink within one heartbeat you would accept that statement so I don't get why you contract away from this notion as applied to other areas particularly areas where we have no fucking clue what's going on. No offense

my feeling in general is that people contract away from that because the implications emotionally psychologically are too scary. But I don't think that subjective emotional reaction to a possible implication should guide the primary response. maybe I'm making too much of it maybe it doesn't matter but I just think it's an important topic it's an important question. I don't think whether it's decided one way or another I don't think that will have all the answers for us as a species I just think it's interesting and it would be interesting to know.

Generally speaking, it seems like good epistemology to withhold belief in propositions until evidence exists to support them. There aren't "two equally unreasonable cults" on the issue; it's unreasonable to believe in aliens absent evidence and it is reasonable to be skeptical of the former group's claims.

I am for instance virtually certain that life in general and intelligent life in particular abounds in the Universe. I am even more certain that any accounts people tell and have told of alien sightings are lies or misunderstandings.

A 100 years ago if a few thousand people all swore they saw a flying saucer over Stonehenge it would be rather convincing. Nowadays, such a sighting is impossible to witnesses without the object also being caught on any number of detectors around the globe, so if they don’t support the eyewitnesses I’m inclined to believe the sensors.

Something interesting about this stuff is that there's not perfect cover across all sensors always. Maybe sometimes you have people seeing something that's not on radar. Or you have something that's on radar but not on other types of sensor. Or you have something that's in the infrared but not in the visible. I'm not asking you to believe anyone interpretation just to be open and consistent I think that if you're willing to believe the sensors are malfunctioning and creating ghost tracks it's also reasonable to consider that the sensors are not capable of picking up some sorts of technology. I understand that depending on your pliers there's different takes have different probabilities to you but I don't think it's okay to rush to certainty and discount any of those interpretations and say that anyone who suggests as much or obvious for those is out and out crazy. that's offensive and abusive to people and not I think in the spirit of investigation and curiosity.

And I don’t know about the examples you mentioned because I haven’t looked into it.

My point is basically that explaining an anomaly by “visiting aliens” is quite a leap of faith.

I also highly doubt that a credible sighting would not be picked up by the general scientific public.

So given the immense vastness of space and the resulting difficulties in colonising it, I remain unconvinced.

I agree with you that it's a leap of faith. I'm not asking you to make that leap. Seems you have an open mind. All I'm saying is all these experiencer testimonies I think means something is happening.

I'm not sure if by picked up you mean "detected in their telescopes" or "the story picked up and discussed". Case 1 is I think unlikely unless there were sightings everywhere at once. But there have been multiple things seen in the sky over a number of places, like Mexico City, Phoenix, Belgium, etc, that got lots of press, and have videos and hundreds of witnesses. Case 2 I think is a result of stigma. For the same reason that, even tho > 50% of people believe in aliens and psychic abilities, you are not allowed to research into those things, and if you do, people will call you crazy. It's changing a bit now...but

I agree with you on the vastness making it difficult. But I think it's arrogant to say, "Well, it looks difficult. Nah, can't be done." because that assumes that other civilizations would be unlikely to achieve more than us. I think the vastness of space and time, and our civilization's minuteness, is its own counter example to that take. It permits an alternate take which suggests there has to be somebody else out there, and they had plenty of time to do stuff.

In terms of why there's no "open contact" I like to fall back on the Star Trek Prime Directive.

That went all over the world and credible/authoritative people commented on it and the possibility. Of course with all the appropriate caveats and scepticism, but the discussion was had.

About the capabilities of other civilizations, I of course concede there are almost certainly many out there with vastly greater capabilities than us. But space is just so stupidly large. Also what is the chance that aliens happen to make contact just as we as a species started to realise there was more out there than us?

Why isn't there already an alien colony here that was established a 100 million years ago?

That's actually the plot in a sci-fi I'm reading these days so there's that... In addition to the Prime Directive there is also the Dark Forest theory explaining no contact, I quite enjoyed Ken Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy.

I am very excited by our near-term (next 200 years or so) possibilities to colonize the solar system. Rather disappointed I won't get to see it happen barring some major life prologing therapies in the next decades.

I'm sure you may object that your frame is simply a semantically equivalent restating of what I was saying. So I would counter that that's simply your interpretation.

by the way I love your phrasing two equally unreasonable cults that's exactly what I think. the reason I think your framing is wrong is because there's not an equivalence, which I think you are assuming, between people's individual experience and people without that experience. So I'm not asking you to be a member of either of those unreasonable cults I'm not asking you to believe in aliens and I'm not asking you to believe that experiences fabricate their stories. I'm just asking you not to discount people's experiences and upon hearing those to keep an open mind.

Robin presented an argument dependent on a false syllogism: if people were lying about aliens then either (Ca) they were spontaneously coming up with the same hoax or (Cb) there was some organization coordinating the hoaxes

I pointed out this syllogism missed the most obvious, commonly argued and evidentially supported alternative explanation for lots of humans telling the same story or fabricating the same evidence - humans copy each other and adapt popular stories, as they have been doing for thousands of years. That's neither spontaneous, decentralized and unlikely nor a conspiracy: it's the essence of shared knowledge and mythology. Regardless of whether I'm biased against Robin's explanation or not, he simply overlooked this in what was supposed to be his list of only possible conclusions

At no point did I discount other possibilities (I mean, I don't think fairies, angels or "greys" are likely but my argument didn't touch on that branch of the argument). I simply pointed out Robin's enthusiasm for a couple of fantastic explanations (government conspiracies to fake aliens, or actual aliens) lead him to string together a chain of reasoning which altogether neglected one of the most mundane. Which is pretty ironic, given that trying to avoid that kind of bias is literally his specialist subject!

> More specifically, in your case, you have an actual mirror case of crank-iness: you have a conspiracy for the creation of all the evidence, rather than a conspiracy for the suppression of it.

No, I specifically attack Robin's suggestion that a conspiracy for the creation of all the evidence is likely [if the evidence isn't true]. You're welcome to argue that my "humans intentionally and unintentionally copy each others' stories" hypothesis is completely wrong or vanishingly unlikely, of course, but that's a stronger knowledge claim than I made.

Perhaps you should heed your own words about leaping logic to arrive directly at certainty...

I'm sorry, but if you're going to lecture people on nuance and not being arrogant after calling them tinfoil hat flunkies, you probably should read the arguments you're commenting on first (including Robin's). Makes meeting in the middle that bit easier (I really don't have any strong opinions either way on what individual reports did or didn't see) :D

I guess my point was there's a parallel between theorizing that it has to be aliens in theorizing that it has to be fabrication that I see is equally crazy.

I like your point about people mimicking each other. I hadn't thought about that and I do think it's a definite possibility. I guess as I've said elsewhere I simply have too much faith in people to believe there are so many morally corrupt people who fabricate this kind of stuff for some sort of attention or money or fame.

I reached a different conclusion to you and it's normal that will have different views on this topic because it's a big complex topic and none of us have any idea what it's about.

I was pretty harsh to you so I'm sorry. It's no excuse but I guess I feel hurt and angry about what I see as the normalization of abuse of people bold enough to share their stories and say maybe there's something we don't understand is going on. On closer reading of what you said and on your subsequent explanation where I think you did a much better job of explaining your points (I don't think you explained it at all clearly in the first one but you definitely explained it in the follow-up) I see that you weren't saying that. You're just critiquing Robin's particular logic. But I sensed that you delivered it with that kind of contempt for this topic that I see as so corrosive and hurtful, and I hoped to push you away from that into a more reflective and more open and respectful stance towards this topic, And the people brave enough to say what they think about it. Clearly I didn't go about that in the right way. I'm sorry please forgive me, ...but ... i do have more "lecturing" to give you ;) ;p xx if you're up for that

I read them so you shouldn't assume that i didn't and that's in the rules but apart from that it's arrogant and narrow minded because if you're assuming the only reason I disagree with you is because I didn't read what you read then your implicit assumption is that you are absolutely right because if I had read what you'd read I would have reached the same conclusion as you. it's very disrespectful to other viewpoints and so I think if you're going to lecture people on logic and implications then you do well to sharpen your own. Logic without perspective is blind and useless, it's like knowing how to drive the car but not knowing where you're going.

I wasn't lecturing you...as "lecturing" in that usage implies there was angry criticizing, I wasn't angry. But if you feel like it's lecturing and you're feeling resistance to that I guess that might be part of your problem because you're assuming that I don't have anything that I could teach you. So I'm not lecturing I'm teaching you. You taught me About the idea that people copying each other. I'd never thought of that but it's a good point.

So if you're assuming that I have nothing to teach you it's going to be hard for you to be willing to hear what I'm saying and if you're not going to be willing to hear what I'm saying you're probably going to be assuming that you're totally right and you have nothing to learn. So it's not going to be very useful for you for me to continue to talk now is it? That's got nothing to do with me of course that's just where you're at. So before you blame me for how you took what I was saying maybe you could consider how your reaction is getting in the way of you learning something here.

So I think that validates the point that you assume that I didn't read the things that you read, because I had a different view to you. Tho doesn't it seem normal that different people are going to arrive at different views even if they read or look at the same thing? And isn't that kind of diversity of viewpoints something that you're okay with?

See I think it's very arrogant and narrow minded apart from being in the rules, to not assume that people are not reading, the implication being that there's only one truth, one possible conclusion and you're in possession of it. so clearly I think this demonstrates that you're not willing to hear on this topic right now as I said before. I don't blame you specifically I think it's something about this topic that triggers people to leaping logic and going straight to certainty and I don't think you've escaped that yet. Best of luck with doing that I think you'll be able to just open your mind a bit. I'm heartened to hear that you don't have any strong opinions about people's personal experiences I'm totally with you on that.

I think that this is one of those topics that is pefectly ready for inconclusive bike-shedding: easy to build an opinion and argue about it "safely" - without any risk of losing someone's face when proven wrong due to insufficient data. It's some kind of sport where after the match both sides gp home feeling superior to the other because there's no objective way to establish the winner.

This dynamic is not confined to this topic obviously but I think it's kind of a tragedy because it would be interesting and great to see some real logical scientific investigation of this stuff you know from all different actors, just like it would to see real investigation of parapsychological phenomenon, but there's too much craziness, stigma and exactly what you said involved for that to happen easily I think.

That to me is a tragedy and major missed opportunity for us humans to learn something to push forward our knowledge at the frontier of what we understand, in the place where science should really excel, and should really be able to be like a shield to go beyond our limitations of ego, group think and emotion... it's the exact place where in these topics it's the weakest.

So the very things that we could understand more about that are so interesting it's like we've crippled ourselves from doing that because of our mass psychology and however these topics have been manipulated by whoever.

"Somewhere in the middle" would be "yeah, I don't know what causes that, but neither do you" - that leaves us pretty much nowhere, very very far from aliens.

Tho as other people have said maybe they're just copying other people. Which I think is a good point but I'm reluctant to believe that. I genuinely trust the people who come forward and say this crazy shit happened. Because there's so many of them and it's gone on for such a long time. Also, i see there's no motivation to fabricate, not because there's no money and no fame, not because people are uninterested in money and fame, it's just because I don't think that so many people are so morally corrupt that they would just invent this stuff as a way to get money and fame for themselves. I guess I just have a little more faith in people perhaps a little too much faith than to think that.

This is factually incorrect. We have plenty of answers and understanding.

And even though I trust them much less than the random individuals who claim they have experiences, the countless government ex officials who repeat story after story of reverse engineered technology, of interviewing people who have encounters and of acquiring objects that were given to them and acquiring photographs that they took and classifying those objects and photographs.

I think there's two or three things I want to say one is I'm sorry but it seems like sort of willful blindness on your part if you are saying that you think every single report of something like this has been explained away. and that's okay if you don't want to look at this I'm not saying that you need to look at something that scares you or that you're not interested in. I'm not even saying you have to own it and say yeah I just don't want to know about this stuff so I'm just saying it doesn't exist. If you want to do that that's your choice and that's okay and I'm okay with that. I think it would be great if that were the case and you would have said yeah I just don't want to know about this so I'm just going to pretend it's not true, rather than pretend like what you're saying is the truth but I don't even require you to do that. It's okay to live in that pretend. It's a scary crazy kind of subject that I don't think anyone really knows about. So not looking at it at all is pretty smart I think.

The other thing is I sort of reject the memetic idea that UFO story spread because they're interesting and explanations don't spread. I certainly think you can find a lot of explanations if you go looking for UFO stories, but I think debunking actually does spread because it's like a mental algorithm it's like a generally applicable technique that you can apply to any story. I'm not saying that lessens it's quality as a form of skepticism I'm just saying I believe that makes it easier for debunking to actually spread because you can remember when you see a new story you can remember all of the debunking methods and start to pick that apart. But for a story to spread you actually have to spread it from The source because a story is specific so you have to spread the details but a debunking method is just a general method that can apply to many stories.

The third thing that I think is characterizing explanations these days is they seem more crazy more desperate and more reaching then just admitting that there's something going on here. Like the explanations are such crazy mental gymnastics that's sort of like the crazy people have become the debunkers the crazy people have become the ones performing these mental gymnastics to try to explain away things that it looks like they just don't want to face. I really think the tide has turned and that's what a lot of people explaining this stuff away now look like whereas in the past the people debunking it were very much seen as you know sort of logical and sensible but now they don't have that protection. But I believe there's still a lot of stigma attached to it

There are certainly some reports that stand up beyond this level of scrutiny.

I don't understand the assertion that "aliens are more likely than (a laundry list of other supernatural things)". The most significant point against modern day alien contact isn't really that "aliens don't exist"; that seems foolish to think. Its that space is insanely vast, and a civilization would need faster-than-light travel to travel across it in any decent amount of time; faster than light travel is roughly on the same level of "physically possible by our understanding of physics" as Time Travel or Dimensional Travel.

So, its a stretch to think its aliens, but you might as well also believe it could be any of those other things. In fact, I could envision a far-out argument for time travel being more likely; if they're both pretty incomprehensible from a physics standpoint, maybe we flipped their improbability. Maybe time travel is actually more possible than FTL travel. And here's one absolute certainty; across the four dimensions, the dimensionally nearest form of advanced, sentient life is You, ten seconds from now.

FTL is not impossible. The only thing physics say is that you can’t accelerate a particle that has mass past c because that would require infinite energy. But accelerating an object doesn’t have to be the only way to move “faster” than light.

Look at our civilization today and compare it to what it was a thousand or two thousand years back. Now imagine a civilization that’s had three hundred thousand year head start on us.

Who’s to say they haven’t mastered wormholes or bending gravity or harnessing dark energy to accomplish things that are purely in the realm of science fiction today?

Fairies, ghosts and angels don't show up on radar or FLIR and the Inspector General of the DoD has never launched an investigation into how they have been handled by that department.

And it's quite easy to guess why these videos were released. They're technology demonstrators. The general public can think UFOs if they want, but what Chinese and Russian militaries saw was, "holy shit, US can auto-track a far-away bird from a jet fighter".

I'm no expert on naval technology but given my limited understanding of carrier strike group operations this was my intuitive belief from the first time I heard this theory. Since then a number of knowledgeable people have confirmed that this explanation makes practically no sense.

Take Go Fast for example, they're highly competent experienced aviators, but they still very clearly completely misidentified what, in hindsight, is obviously a bird. Clearly if trained operators can make a mistake like that, other mistakes are possible, so you can't just discount the possibility as absurd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8

I can easily see someone thinking an image is of a near object when it's actually a far object, and we know for a fact that highly trained operators can make terrible mistakes using complex tracking equipment.

We're not talking about optical artifacts. The aircraft had radar and it also had access to data from radars installed on the surface ships. The entire system is designed to make identifying friendly targets easy and to give pilots an overview of the tactical situation. IFF in aerial combat has been a solved problem almost since World War II.

IFF and radar aren’t going to help you if tye object isn’t actually where you think it is, so most of your sensors are looking in the wrong place.

In the Go Fast case we actually have all the instrument data we need. From the data on the recording and some basic trigonometry we can see the object was very small only a metre or so across, was approximately half way between the plane and the surface, and was actually only travelling at modest speed commensurate with that of a bird. I can’t _prove_ to you that it was a bird, but I leave it to you to come to your own conclusions.

You're the one who brought up Go Fast, I have made no comments about that here.

> The proposed explanation is that the object was a much bigger commercial plane than they thought, much further away.

I don't know which "proposed explanation" you're referring to but in a recent debate between Mick West and Robert Powell of the SCU hosted by John Greenewald of theblackvault.com, Mick said he thinks it was an F-18.

Neither explanation makes sense because the aircraft's radar has far greater range than the ATFLIR camera so if an aircraft showed up on the ATFLIR it also should have been seen on radar. In addition the Princeton's AEGIS radar system was monitoring the airspace within at least a 100 mile radius and would certainly also have detected any ordinary aircraft that could have been seen by the ATFLIR.

At any given time an AEGIS system is going to be tracking dozens of targets. All we can say about nothing showing on RADAR is they weren’t tracking anything where they thought the object was. If that’s not where it actually was, then the issue is moot.

My reference to Go Fast was a counter to your argument that experienced operators and aviators can’t make misidentifications. FLIR1 is a harder case because all we have is a blurry camera image, but in the case of Go Fast it’s perfectly clear the aviators were mistaken, therefore such mistakes are possible.

I will however point out that this statement:

> Cameras, like human eyes, have effectively infinite range.

is not true in any meaningful sense. Cameras have finite angular resolution. There is sufficient information to determine the angular size of the object in the video. I don't have the exact numbers at hand but I think it corresponds to an F-18 sized object at a range between 20 to 30 miles, well within the F-18's radar range, which exceeds 60 miles. If the object is much farther away then it is also much larger and that hypothesis leads to a different set of problems.

Er, I just checked Metabunk and his last post is from Wednesday, when he said, among other things:

"So we simultaneously have a radar that being jammed and giving all kinds of strange numbers, and you can't even get the airspeed, but is also able to hand over the exact position to the ATFLIR? It does not make sense."

So I'm not sure what you're talking about. His blog is just old posts about becoming a citizen.

Also, birds don't move like that on radar.

https://youtu.be/aB8zcAttP1E?t=9711

Specifically in the Go fast video: https://youtu.be/aB8zcAttP1E?t=9829

The object is shown colder than the ocean; it can't be a bird.

All I've seen are hypotheticals about how the videos could be anything but what the aviators reported, and yeah, so far have just dismissed or ignored their accounts altogether.

Interested to see otherwise!

There were many theories and counter theories. It would be misleading to say the matter is settled.

It's also doubtful to propose this is a technology demonstration. The ability to track objects is not a differentiator; there are plenty videos online showing similar HUDs. In any case the public release has been degraded specifically to withhold information on their optical capabilities.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWWGmiZs4JA&pbjreload=101

I don't really buy that. I don't think some sort of fancy high resolution, possibly AI-driven bird (drone/jet/etc.) tracking is a particularly impressive capability that would have the Russian & Chinese militaries shaking in their shoes.

It's also not about "shaking in their shoes", but about making the other powers aware. This is the soft war that's been happening ever since first two human groups met each other - showing off your sticks and stones to deter others from trying to attack you in the first place.

No, you haven't. Every "debunking" has itself been thoroughly debunked.

They very much reminded me of the attempts to 'debunk' SpaceX rocket landing videos as fake, all of which died out when they landed multiple rockets in daylight in front of tens of thousands of people.

IIRC one of the air force videos couldn't be readily explained, but that was just because there wasn't enough information in the video to calculate scale or relative motion, so it could have been anything. The other two were definitively explained.

No you didn’t.

Yes I did.

No you didn’t...

Talk about low bar to discussion.

They have been debunked; even if you refuse to believe that, the overwhelming body of evidence, statistically, shows no consistent conclusive evidence.

So, what do you want to believe?

That there are one or two pieces of “evidence” to prove “it’s all true”, or that there are thousands of pieces of evidence which have shown no evidence of anything out of the ordinary.

This is how conspiracy theory stuff grows; people hang on to the few outliers.

...now when its true, the body of compelling evidence grows over time (see COVID vaccine -> blood clots) and eventually there is enough of a body of evidence that it starts to be compelling.

...but no matter how “smoking gun” your one example is, it does let make it convincing even if it’s true.

What we haven’t seen is a growing compelling body of evidence for ufos.

That’s fair reason to believe that...

> No, you haven’t

Yes. I have.

This is the justification for that. However, they don't "almost never break down and laugh and crow about their jokes". They do this all the time. It's just that when they do this, it moves from the category of "hardest-to-explain UFO cases" to the category of "known hoaxes". It's an obvious selection effect, not something that requires deeper explanation.