In light of the recent article by the New Yorker (see below) and the forthcoming DoD report which is expected to land in June, I'm curious what people's views are here on on UFOs and unexplained arial phenomena (UAPs). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/how-the-pentagon-started-taking-ufos-seriously
How much time do you have . This is one of my favorite subjects, always fascinated me, but my views have evolved over time from when I was a kid slowly into what they are now. I’ll say this, I don’t think “the government” knows all that much, and I don’t think we’ll ever get an answer. Unidentified aerial phenomenon seem to have been a thing for as long as we’ve recorded history, hell, before that if you take into account petroglyphs and such. I’m more on the Jacques Vallée side of this now, the “conventional” explanations are least interesting, and for me, the least likely to be true.
At this stage of my life, as an semi-old fart, I still tend to believe in extraterrestrial life. There are just too many other planets for it not to have arisen elsewhere. BUT - even if it exists, I have no fricking idea of how high the chances are for it to exist near enough for the aliens to reach us. I would probably vote no on that one. The ridiculous distances between planetary systems, not to mention other galaxies, is just mind blowing. I would love to talk to a scientist specializing in this field and hear his/her opinion about how probable it is that some aliens actually develop the technology to travel such distances. By the way, wormholes are not only a sci-fi concept, science is fascinating as hell. Semi-related rant - I absolutely hate the fact that this particular topic, similar to many others - seems to have been almost completely dominated by... people... who choose to believe in conspiracy theories.
That’s what happens when science chooses to ignore the phenomena entirely and make it a laughing matter, force any colleagues to study it seriously out, and the news makes it a point to laugh at and mock anyone who even reports seeing a weird object in the sky. And IMO of course life exists elsewhere in the universe, the chances for that are way too high.
Not sure science does that. Media on the other hand... ironically has become one of the main sources of fake news and conspiracy theories. It's sad
Are you kidding? Of course they do. You cannot seriously study the UFO phenomenon in any depth or in any public fashion and not be outcast by your peers. Only select few things in science are set up to look for extraterrestrial life, like SETI. If you do it in a university setting for example, you’re out (same as if you question established timelines of certain monuments like Robert Schoch and the Sphinx, or if you dare raise the idea that modern human has been intelligent or lived in certain places longer than the current established narrative/dogma), it’s very sad that in academia and science you can’t ask the big questions or even at least look at different possibilities. The line always moves, we always find out things we thought were wrong, were indeed correct, and yet generation after generation science repeats those sort of mistakes, it’s a very petty and competitive field like anything else.
Cmon Weezy. Science doesn't do it. More so... there is no SCIENCE. There is a bunch of people who love to explore and find new things and care very little (some do, of course, and get cushy positions in universities) about consequence. If there was something about UFO, they would most certainly not just skip over it. The entire history of science shows that -- people ignoring common sense and trying to do the impossible or crazy or stupid. Moreover, science follows an extremely extensive set of control mechanisms, created to avoid mistakes and stupid s*** like "MSG is harmful" and "Vaccines cause autism". Or even "There is a s***load of iron in spinach". Media has none of that.
Yes, some of the established intitutions won't let you research stuff they find unlikely based on current understanding. But that's not limited to UFO or some other s***. It's just that UFO is "commonly understood" so it is easy to make a story out of. Studying ability to make people live off of a photosynthesis is not -- because most wouldn't understand what it is and dumb it down to "crazy scientists want to turn us all into plants". Which is good for a Sun article, admittedly. P.S. in nearly any research/exploration bound field, for example software engineering, it is very rare for people who have the money (product management and marketing in this case) to be willing to invest into something that wouldn't clearly bring in benefit. That's common sense. Science labs also operate like that, unfortunately. But there is a flip side to that. If there was even a modicum of thruth to the whole UFO BS, some dumass crazy techbro, like Musk, would have funded that already. Alas.
See, it’s very hard to have this sort of discussion when you have comments like “the whole UFO BS”, you immediately dismiss it because you’ve been told to, told it’s BS. Have you read the books? Done the research? Not the conspiracy stuff, the actual legit reports. The Jacques Vallée stuff? Doubtful. There’s something real to all this, but again, I don’t currently think it’s aliens from this star or that planet visiting. It’s just sad to me that as soon as this topic gets brought up you can’t even have a fun discussion about it, most people’s programming immediately kicks in, they get dismissive, calling it dumb and nonsense, some even get legitimately angry, which I find most odd of all. Anyway, I think I took this thread way off topic, wasn’t my intent, you ever want to discuss it with an open minded person D-Fish Man, shoot me a PM, I don’t like offending the intelligence of those who know everything already and are above even discussing this sort of thing.
Come on @Weezy, don't get discouraged this easily. This could turn into a good thread still. I admit I haven't really "studied" UFOs, if you have some information you deem worth sharing please do - I will certainly give it a shot, I'm sure others will too.
BS may have been harsh. Malarkey? Come on Weezy. I don't think I am more intelligent than anyone and you should know me better than that. However, an argument based on "open your mind, man" isn't very sound and is hard to refer to properly. I haven't looked into it, admittedly, but I have a different stance on it. Allow me to give you an analogy. My wife has gone through a phase of alternative "medicine" (almost over now, thankfully). I am not a doctor, so I can not judge the effectiveness. What I do know, is 2 things: 1. most modern doctors and health scolars dismiss a great percentage of alternative "medicine" as unproven, false or flat out harmful (I am looking at you, Gwyneth) 2. if there was an actual working medicine you could extract using a donkey and a mill in a middle of a Chinese village and make a profit off of, Pfizer, Johnson^2 and such would have been selling it over the counter for years at this point, yet somehow they do not This tells me that the proof isn't there or we would have seen it by now. Especially for things claimed to be around for millenia. Especially for things that can be sold for profit. Same thing with UFOs. There is a great deal of scientific discussion about the existence of life outside of Earth. And I myself subscribe to the belief that there probably is life. However, many many accounts of UFO sightings and such have been thoroughly disproven, from the cave drawings (can't remember which exactly) to flying saucers. This tells me, much like in the case of the "medicine" above, that it is probably, most likely, not true or we would have seen a definitive proof (via evidence or even thought experiment) by now.
Yeah I’m done with this, like I said, these sort of discussions always devolve into this, there’s always one person that has to be the gatekeeper for science and what can and can’t be discussed seriously. I don’t think that was insulting either, I made a logical assumption that you hadn’t done those things based on your dismissive attitude towards this subject, and it seems I was right. It’s cool I have a crowd I can discuss this stuff freely with, this is just the wrong room for that. It’s my fault for chiming in on someone else’s opinion in this thread, it was supposed to be about our views on the subject, not an argument about it, and that on me.
I believe there is life elsewhere in the universe. But I don't believe we will ever find it. I think we/they would have made contact by now. The speed with which the universe is expanding makes contact more and more unlikely by the day. I was watching something where some "experts" said contact with another galaxy is almost impossible at this point because of the speed at which the universe expands. So that means we are looking at Milky Way residents only.
I'm on the camp that there is life outside of Earth... It would be arrogant to believe we are it. All the footage uncovered/forwarded, testimonies by pilots/cops (most of whom are credible to be at their chosen profession) and these ancient drawings that can be argued that don't just come from nothing. Then there's N.A.SA. which could stand for N.A.S.A - Never A Straight Answer.
But this assumes the only forms of travel are what we know right now on earth. It also assumes the only forms of travel are physical as we think of them and that we are absolutely bound by that. I love science and all it’s done for us, but for how smart they are as scientists a lot of them get stuck thinking inside the box. I’m sure at one point not super long ago “experts” said we’d never go to the moon, or have probes go out into deep space (relative to us) and take photos of the far out planets and such. I don’t think we will get beyond any of this in our lifetimes though, so yes it is how we have to look at it, but it’s fun to me to think of crazy stuff like that, and again just because we are bound by these laws doesn’t mean super advanced civilizations necessarily would be.
Partially. I do believe there is life elsewhere, but for it to be advanced enough to figure out how to use controlled wormholes or some other method that outpaces the speed of light? The fact that there is life on this planet is statistically improbable to an unfathomable degree. To say that there is life on another planet that surpassed us that far in technology? It's possible, but seems improbable. Just look at our planet. We are the only species on this planet that is remotely capable of harnessing something as "simple" as fire. No other species can even begin to harness fire. So to think there are other species that have learned to harness other things that we can't even begin to understand? Like I said, it's not impossible, but the odds seem so astronomical to me, it's hard to even ponder what it would be like. But it is fun to imagine what life on other planets would look like...which goes to show you how far ahead of his time George Lucas was. So many movies and TV shows have aliens looking almost exactly like humans with some slight modifications. The cantina scene is still more creative (and probably a better representation of how it would actually be) than the stuff that passes for sci-fi today. Even Star Trek is mostly human-like creatures with a slight variation when it comes to species in the Federation (like the Vulcans have larger ears, or Klingons have a ridge on their forehead, different skin color).
It's funny. I bring up our inability to reach other parts of the universe, then this video premieres today.
