Is it time to talk about this yet? ("It simply must be aliens" content)

If it pleases the court, I would like to introduce exhibit A:

This, along with several other edited pieces of film circulated for many years on social media as a "would you ride these amusement park rides?"  Millions of people for two decades completely skipped the logic and physics and just instantly accepted that this was real.  Maybe one in a thousand of us realized that this was completely implausible horse E36 M3.  Some engineer actually did estimates on the G-forces that humans would experience and it was something like 36g.  Seeing as how every bone in your body breaks between 8-10G, and you pass out at 4-6G, they estimated that the humans in those cages would have disintegrated as their bodies ripped through the cages like a jellyfish in a net.

That, of course, assumes you can deny the fact that those G-forces haven't already ripped the ride's car off those toothpicks that supposedly articulate at acclerations not possible while displaying no mechanical means of articulating.

So when it comes to UFOs, I don't think it could possible be advanced military technology.  A new radio frequency that gives you a headache, maybe.  Violating the laws of physics?  No.  Is it an alien space ship?  Possible.  A forged piece of film?  Likely.  Advanced technology from earth?  Not a chance.  I can believe that the gubmint has plenty of technologies that we don't know about, but straight-up violating the laws of physics isn't one of their talents.  As soon as people start believing in things that are implausible without giving it any critical thinking, it becomes a conspiracy.  I have a family member who is a nurse and she refuses to get any vaccinations because she it convinced that they have a microchip in them.  She has believed it for so long, and even after she became a nurse and realized that infused vaccines are typically administered by a needle that measures 0.008" in diameter and she is the one filling the syringe from a vial, she still believes that somehow the government knows which syringe she'll grab out of the drawer, which vial she'll grab from the fridge, which syringe she chooses, and somehow guides this microscopic piece of electronics to its home in your body where (despite its impossibly small size) can implant suggestions in her brain and make her do the bidding of government.  She believed something implausible, clung to it as fact, and even after learning all the reasons why it couldn't possibly be true, she still believes it.

UFO is just unidentified.  In this video below, our brains go nuts thinking it's aliens because even this seasoned Navy pilot can't tell what it is.  In reality, it just means he/she didn't identify it.  For all we know, later in the day they found out that Jim got drunk and stole an F16 for a joyride.

The entire conglomerate of human brains is a funny thing.  I'm a scientist, but also an artist.  Psychochemically speaking, we're all wired differently.  The way we assimilate new data to formulate new truths is all different.

Mathematically speaking, I do believe there is life on other planets.  It might be a bacterium, or some completely different thing altogether.  Maybe that life originated not using DNA or cells at all.  Maybe there are planets full of humanoids that look really similar to us.  Don't know.  But all of the speculation we humans do about it is (to me) comically earth-centric.  We assume it has a form, or made of cells, or has a language, or space travel.  We might find an entire planet of Boron-based life forms that are just piles of magnetically-charged powder.

Many of us laugh at the notion of "little green men from mars" as antiquated and comical that the last generation believed that, but seriously... what many of us believe today is the same thing.  The reality could be that there is nothing out there, or it could be that it is all out there and we couldn't possibly be able to fathom it because we're too busy looking for life as we know it. We look for water and single-celled organisms on other planets.  What if life there doesn't need water or cell structures?

Is there life out there?  Mathematically it's almost impossible that there isn't.  But math isn't life.  Will it show up as 6000 planets with half-naked humanoids that follow greek society like Star Trek would have us believe?  I highly doubt it.  

jimbob_racing said:

In reply to Driven5 :

You forgot one possibility. 

UFOs are man made, but from our future. We sent them back in time to do historical research. I can't imagine a better way of understanding the past than actually traveling to it and experiencing it first hand.

It's still an unlikely possibility but it does away with the remote notion of friendly aliens space traveling to Earth to do nothing but observation.

So, in the future, we are obsessed with primitive military technology, and what's in people's peoples butts...

Heheh... found another one that people thought was real.

aircooled said:

So, in the future, we are obsessed with primitive military technology, and what's in people's peoples butts...

I know a lot of people today who fit that description.

bobzilla said:

I always come back to the F-117. It became active duty in 1979. The public first learned of its existence in 1991. Its first active use was panama in 84. ...

I was flying an F-117 on missions over Libya on my Commodore computer in 1989. I think the game was called F-19 Stealth Fighter, but the F-117 was available and not so secret to the computer gaming industry in the late '80s. https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=1620

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

Spot on, as usual.

See Occam.

See Hanlon.

Thanks, Curtis.

My brother is a former Navy flight officer (back seat in F-18s) and I gather some of the video in question was taken by a guy in his squadron.

Asked him about it, and his response was very "meh". Said that they regularly saw UFO's in the literal sense - flying objects they couldn't identify - but generally didn't think much of it. That most of the things they saw they thought were weird weather balloons or something of that nature.

Put me in the occam's razor camp. If someone or something is trying to observe us, parking themselves at relatively low altitude off the coast is... likely not a particularly effective way to go about it.

Should we spend time trying to figure out what these bizarre phenomena are? Yes. I can not envision a scenario where understanding what these are and expanding our knowledge would not be valuable. In the most innocuous scenario, it would probably lead to scientific discovery and understanding.

Driven5 said:

I'd argue the probability is greater that we're living in a computer simulation.

Definitely. I'd believe these are game glitches.

Let's see. Is an extremely advanced technical civilization spying on us from a distance of many many parsecs, having mastered interstellar travel, but then upon arrival spending all their time studying naval military operations areas, or are China and Russia doing a bunch of low cost zero risk ELINT intel gathering? 

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones-are-spying-on-the-u-s-and-the-pentagon-acts-like-theyre-ufos

In reply to tuna55 :

That Occam.  I'll bet he always had a baby-smooth face.

Aliens:  They are good at keeping us from having proof of their existence.

Aliens: Governments know about them but have reason to not reveal this knowledge because of the embarrassment of not knowing why.

Aliens: Governments know about them and are already collaborating with them.

Military Technology: USA's military vehicles and its a secret like the above mentioned F-22 and Stealth Fighter

Military Technology : Other countries.  Its an embarrassment to not have the technology others have. (see below)

Military Technology : The USA  Military Contract mafia have figured out a way to get funding to create weapons to counter this new threat.  Hence the publicly to scare the public.  All the sightings are "black ops" holograms or viruses in the radar systems designed to scare the  mainstream US military into demanding more money for weapons research which will be channeled into more "black ops" programs.  (this one is my favorite).  

Time Travel: There was a cartoon I saw.   A guy in a lab is walking out of a time machine.  He tells his co-worker "I just went back in time and killed baby Hitler".  Co-worker  says "Who?" .    

I note that 80,000 feet in one second is 54,545 miles per hour.  

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

Just like his son Gillette.

FWIW, I do statistical analysis for a living and after reading many books written by microbiologist, organic chemist, and statisticians, I believe that the origin of life is mind bogglingly improbable.

Even given the probabilistic resource (rolls of the dice in layman terms) of opportunities the entire mass of the visible universe has had in it’s 13.8 billion years makes life a true wonder.

The probabilistic resource the earth has had makes the odds trillions & trillions & trillions to one.

Yes, I’m aware of the concept of “necessity”, perhaps we’ll discover a form of necessity one day that will dramatically improve the odds but until that day comes, not challenging the current neo Darwinistic explanation for the origin of life is as much an act of blind faith as following some religious dogma.

Anyway, I think panspermia (the idea that life on earth originated elsewhere) is currently as viable of explanation for the origin of life on earth as anything else.  Given how wildly the Cambrian, Canadian Shale, & the more recent fossil discoveries in China violate the Darwinistic prediction of gradual change over time, there is evidence that panspermia wasn’t just simple microbes but rather sophisticated organisms.

Bottom line, I think if we stop worrying about being branded a heretic (the core concept of this thread) and start doing pure scientific observation and reasoning, the idea that some advanced species seeded the earth and has made genetic upgrades over time is completely viable.

I realize that this just pushes the enigma up one level from "where did we come from" to "where did our makers come from" but so what, we still have the shocking improbability of life originating on earth and the incredible step function of increasing complexity / diversity during the Cambrian Explosion 540 million years ago.

Mock me, brand me, whatever, until we discover a game changing form of “necessity”, I’ll consider advanced panspermia a viable possibility.

Everybody is getting hung up on the "laws" of physics.

Whose done actual experimentation on other planets? What teams have truly explored what happens in and around a black hole and it's event horizon? What's going on on a quantum level, or an anti quantum (macro didn't seem appropriate, the opposite of quantum sizing, like whatever the opposite of a Plank space is) level?

"But but but we'd have seen something by now". Horse. E36 M3. We've been able to collect radio waves for maybe 100 years. 100 years is NOTHING on a planetary time scale, let alone a galactic or intergalactic scale. We just think it's a long time because we're basically house flies with our ridiculously short life spend.

Us weak minded humans can barely wrap our heads around the scale of the solar system we live in, let alone the galaxy, galactic cluster, or the universe as a whole.

Seriously, for all we truly know and have experienced, we could be INSIDE an event horizon of a much much larger black hole type thing. Or actually just be inside of a simulation.

For all the knowledge we've gained in the past hundred years, we don't know ANYTHING. 

E36 M3, we've been sailing the oceans for thousands of years and we've still barely seen 10% of what they have to offer ON OUR OWN PLANET. It takes some serious balls or a cult like mentality to think we've seen and understand even 1 percent of what the universe has to offer.

We can't even agree on the shape of the universe for berkeleys sake.

jharry3 said:

.....I note that 80,000 feet in one second is 54,545 miles per hour.  

A)  Alien technology that is capable of moving through the atmosphere at 54,545 mph for one second (either massive accel / decel or some sort of teleportation)

B) Sensors on a plane that misinterpreted (heavily filtered data of) something being at 80,000 feet, instead of 5 feet, then correcting itself (in one second).

Carl Sagan pointed out the biggest problem with the panspermia theory. Even more problematic than the distances involved, the radiation hazards and everything else, is that, by whatever process a microbe gets ejected out of a planetary atmosphere and kicked out into space, the only way it can leave its solar system to get here is if it's small enough to be kicked out by that stars' radiation pressure. But if it is, and its local star is of even approximately the same type as ours, then our suns' radiation pressure will keep that microbe from getting here. If the donor star is enough larger and hotter than ours to eject bigger microbes that could get through our sun's push, then it's all too likely that star won't have been on the main sequence long enough for life to have evolved. It make me think that the best place to look for panspermia is out in the Oort cloud. 

Statistically impossible things happen all of the time.

Let's keep going with occam's razor:

Either it really shouldn't have been possible for life to appear as quickly and evolve as rapidly on Earth as it did... or or models are deeply flawed and we don't understand evolution as well as we thought.

I don't think I need to tell you which of those possibilities I think is simpler and more likely...

And if the argument is that it seems impossibly unlikely for life to have spontaneously appeared on our planet, it's not any more likely for it to have spontaneously appeared on any other planet.

I read a few years ago about Area 51 or somewhere out there that was researching energy beams. It seems they could control the distance of the beam (or were trying to) and it would cause an "energy signature" or something like that at a certain point. This was going to be used to give false signals to radar and such. In theory, you could spoof radar to show "planes" flying where there were none. It did cause some sort of visual effect as well. I gather they had some success with this, and then it kind of went away. Either they made it work or it was a dead-end. 

With the Tic-Tacks with water boiling under them, or ridiculous speed displays, perhaps directed energy could cause that.

I do think there is a lot of "weather balloons" and such floating around and being unable to identify them. 

It's odd to me that the military just shrugs when these things show up. If we genuinely encountered something unknown I'm pretty sure the military would freak out. My take is it's our stuff. Not aliens. (Not that I'm against aliens.)

Why are we discussing this now publicly? I have no idea. Some slow reveal to the rest of the world? Fun subject, though!

Beer Baron said:

1.  Statistically impossible things happen all of the time.

2.  Or models are deeply flawed and we don't understand evolution as well as we thought.

3.  It's not any more likely for it to have spontaneously appeared on any other planet.

1.  Only if you're doing the math wrong.  There's a directionality to probability (pre & post realized outcome).  A simple way to control for this is called "function". 

For example, the shape of the rocks at Mount Rushmore are just as likely to look like presidents as anything else but looking like presidents serves a "function" which suggests intent.

2. Very real possibility that I fully embrace...we call this principle "necessity".

3.  I believe it is as there's at least 100 billion planets in our galaxy alone (conservative estimate of one planet for each star) which drives up the probabilistic resource (rolls of the dice). 

In other words, the theory isn't that we came from one specific planet, it's that we came from some other planet.

Beer Baron said:

Statistically impossible things happen all of the time.

Let's keep going with occam's razor:

Either it really shouldn't have been possible for life to appear as quickly and evolve as rapidly on Earth as it did... or or models are deeply flawed and we don't understand evolution as well as we thought.

I don't think I need to tell you which of those possibilities I think is simpler and more likely...

And if the argument is that it seems impossibly unlikely for life to have spontaneously appeared on our planet, it's not any more likely for it to have spontaneously appeared on any other planet.

I know it isn't relevant to the thread.

I also know that the two of us spent hours discussing this a few years back.

But I have to do it anyway. I'll do it in a silly way so you can all roll your eyes and get back to it.

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

Dr. John Stapp would disagree with your assessment of the G-limits of the human body.

I love how people assume unidentifiable means aliens.

I accept the possibility.  However, the government does have a strong national security rationale for looking into any craft in our airspace.  And if we can't identify it, it is best to keep shut up about it so whoever is doing it doesn't know that we don't know who they are.

RX Reven' said:

3.  I believe it is as there's at least 200 billion planets in our galaxy alone (conservative estimate of one for each star) which drives up the probabilistic resource (rolls of the dice) 

My point is, the odds of life spontaneously evolving on one particular planet are "impossibly" low. But the odds of life spontaneously evolving in any of 100's of billions of possible worlds is pretty fair.

If life occurred on a planet, then that is the planet that life occurred on.

Let's say life on earth was seeded here from debris from another planet. Okay. Then life had to have spontaneously occurred on *that* particular planet. That is just as improbable as life occurring spontaneously on *this* particular planet. It had to start somewhere. And were it started, it started.

It's like... if you add up all the odds that you, exactly as you are, were born, they are impossibly small. Think of all the chances of little things that had to align that led to your parents getting together and then *that* particular sperm fertilizing *that* particular egg. Astronomically low. But... you're here. It obviously happened. It's astronomically low that this particular combination occurred exactly as it did, but eventually *something* was going to occur. You are just one of an infinite number of possibilities that actually ended up happening.

Driven5 said:

I've observed phenomena in the sky on more than one occasion that I simply can't explain... However, that doesn't mean aliens should be the first stop when trying to explain them either.

Life on other planets? Almost definitely.

Intelligent life on other planets? Most likely.

Intelligent life on other planets capable of developing space travel? Probably.

Intelligent life on other planets capable of developing space travel that can approach or exceed the speed of light? Maybe.

Intelligent life on other planets capable of developing space travel that can approach or exceed the speed of light before exhausting their resources or annihilating themselves? Probably not.

Intelligent life on other planets capable of developing space travel that can approach or exceed the speed of light before  exhausting their resources or annihilating themselves that just kind of hangs around observing for decades (or more) without making their presence more known in either a friendly or hostile manner? Not likely.

Intelligent life on other planets capable of developing space travel that can approach or exceed the speed of light before  exhausting their resources or annihilating themselves that just kind of hangs around observing for decades (or more) without making their presence more known in either a friendly or hostile manner that just so happens to occur during the same infinitesimally small sliver of time that 'technologically advanced' humans have actually existed? Almost definitely not.

I'd argue the probability is greater that we're living in a computer simulation.

I generally agree with this probability distribution, although maybe not the last statement.

Shadeux said:

...With the Tic-Tacks with water boiling under them...

For some reason the water is "boiling" under this helicopter...  

(sorry, I am not up on all the various sightings and situations, but that one sounds a bit obvious)

Wait, no talk about the big crash?

Eastern nowhere near the Bering Straits once upon a time, big craft hits the deck.  Half of the survivors went west, half went east, crossing the land bridge.

Folks going east had more fuel and food available, those that went west had limited fuel (wood), reflected in their diet.  Westerners were willing to wait, patience; the others not so much.

See Asian vs Native American DNA.

Gotta go, my tinfoil hat needs adjusting .....