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UFOs are experimental military aircraft/drones. If it were aliens, someone in the govt would snitch eventually and say aliens are real.
it were aliens, someone in the govt would snitch
There are countless govt officials who've said aliens are real. They are usually subjected to character assassinations.
Also, the behavior described in UFOs sighting in the late 40's is beyond anything we can do now. They are either atmospheric phenomena or aliens.
I think that eyewitness sightings without photographic evidence are poor evidence in cases like this. It's like how after a plesiosaur was shown in the original King Kong, hundreds of sightings of plesiosaur-like creatures in Loch Ness happened despite being obviously false. UFO hysteria was a cultural phenomenon in response to the Cold War.
There are still quite a lot of videos of UFOs doing crazy acrobatics that are impossible for modern aircraft, and I will concede that not all of them can be out-of-focus bugs or tricks of the light. The simplest solution is experimental military tech. Since militaries have tech that is several decades more advanced than what is declassified, they can probably do all this crazy impossible shit. TBH I hope it is aliens though, since that would be a get-out-of-jail-free card for climate change.
TBH I hope it is aliens though, since that would be a get-out-of-jail-free card for climate change.
I mean they sat around and let us sit 5 minutes from global thermonuclear holocaust in the cold war I don't think anyone's coming to our rescue if we can't sort this ourselves.
You should read the "aliens have already intervened to prevent nuclear launches" conspiracy lol
I think you're drastically underestimating the technological leaps that would be required for some of the things that these objects have been observed doing. I'd recommend you take a look at this paper, it goes over a couple highly credible sightings and calculates estimated accelerations for the sighted objects, as well as estimations of how much energy would be required to accomplish that acceleration.
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/10/939/htm
Spoiler: In the most credible case in this paper, and arguably one of the most credible UFO sightings to have ever been recorded, the USS Nimitz sighting, the objects sighted (visually, on radar, and on both IR and visual light videos) were seen to accelerate at speeds of over 5000g, which would require energy output around 1100 Gigawatts. Which is around the total capacity of every power plant in the US, circa 2012. Producing that amount of energy in an object roughly the size of an F-16 and using it to accelerate something so quickly that hopping between solar systems would take 1.2 days from the craft's temporal perspective is so far beyond any technology that any military has produced as to be practically magical. I do not exaggerate when I say that any country that had the technological capability to do shit like that could effortlessly conquer the entire planet within a week if they so desired, it is the ultimate strategic trump card, it breaks MAD in half. In my opinion, there is no way in hell any military has this technology and yet simultaneously continues to develop utterly inferior conventional aircraft, it just doesn't make any sense.
I tend to think that it was a mixture of the government trying to distract from/discredit sightings of experimental craft and displaced anxiety over the Cold War. (Sorry to be a bummer, that isn't as fun as actual aliens, carry on.)
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/us/cia-admits-government-lied-about-ufo-sightings.html
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/14/men-in-black-ufo-sightings-mirage-makers-movie
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2254010/
The theory that UFOs are deep state projects is honest to god even more extraordinary than the alien theory
Because apparently without anyone knowing about it, the deep state has somehow achieved technological singularity of a magnitude so profound that they have utterly conquered the forces of gravity, the laws of thermodynamics, and the known limits of energy conversion all while keeping it under wraps
And that's just the small UFOs, then we have the reports of the giant objects, the mile long monstrosities some Boeing pilots have seen around the world, you're telling me the fuckin Army corp of engineers has access to airships that makes that marvel carrier in the adventures look like flying tin can?
Bro it's aliens bro, Occams razors bro, they're here bro, keep it simple bro
At least the Q-anon cult hasn't started declaring unknown stuff in the sky to be demons yet.
https://youtu.be/gVvCZIGIyeg
this is one of the best explications I've watched on the phenomenon, it's just so strange that alien abductions as a cultural trope only appear in the literature after the Bugs Bunny cartoon in the early 1950s lol. It's definitely a Nuclear Age phenomenon to be obsessed with flying saucers.... psyop written all over it.
but the "collective hallucination" & Jungian "human spiritual/technological" aspiration woo-woo is somewhat uplifting, if completely hilarious and sad
Terence McKenna was definitely an anti-communist spook & "New Age" grifter who could deradicalize just as well as he could make flowery speeches about the "archons" & "object at the end of history" or whatever bullshit
if aliens are real I hope they either nuke us or save us with the immortal science of communism
I find the topic of UFOs and contact with aliens somewhat fascinating, but exhausting since many people interested in these theories also believe aliens are in control of our government, but if this is true why are we still capitalist? :posadas:
For real though, I was discussing recently about the possibility of alien civs coming in contact with Earth. I proposed that if aliens made contact with earth, there's 3 possible scenarios. They're some kind of type 2 or 3 civilization that is willing to exploit the earth's resources, in which case we are ants to them and they'd see no issue devastating us with the kinds of technology they've acquired. Another possibility is that they're a benign civilization looking for a hospitable planet because they overexploited their own, like we're doing. Then the most optimistic possibility, that they're a benevolent type 2 or 3 civilization that will usher us out of the dark age of our clearly unethical and inefficient distribution of resources. I know these aren't the only possibilities, but they're the only ones I can envision being likely. The first and last are obviously untrue, IMO the only reason aliens could know about Earth and come here but not change our way of life much is that they're looking for a place they can sustain themselves in, while not making a huge fuss with the local population.
It's always going to be more energy effective to fix your own planet than flee to a different solar system.
I think the scenarios for alien contact you lay out assume too much that the aliens think and act like we do. If there are galaxy-traveling aliens out there and they made contact with us, I think it might be hard to distinguish their contact from some kind of cosmic cataclysmic event - imagine an anthill that sits near where they're building a highway. From this POV, the "good ending" is one where we are coincidentally unaffected by contact and can even use the observations we make during it to advance ourselves a bit, and the "bad ending" is the one where we get paved over by a civilization that doesn't even realize we're here.
UFOs are all helicopters and planes & completely explicable atmospheric phenomena. Literally just funny clouds & lightning.
If you were looking for the utterly boring counterargument
I think they are real; some are definitely man-made experimental craft. But the rest? Idk, if you think these are physical nuts-and-bolts objects piloted by alien scientists trying to study us or something it just doesn't add up; their behavior is too weird, nonsensical, dreamlike, and seemingly intentionally misleading/disinformative. I'm more amenable to Jacque Vallee's hypothesis that something much weirder is going on; UFO encounters/alien abduction reports bear an insane amount of resemblance to archaic accounts of contact with gods, angels, and the fae, and contactees sometimes have visionary psychedelic experiences of divine revelation, cosmic information downloads into their minds, and other cognitive alterations. It all seems like different interpretations of the same phenomenon. Whatever is happening to these people is clearly a psychological phenomenon on some level at least, similar to states like near-death experiences or shamanic trances/psychosis happening to people with no history of mental health problems, but sometimes physical evidence is present too. So what is it? Fuck if I know yo, but I would be absolutely flabbergasted if UFOs are literal spaceships that broke the light barrier to come visit us.
BIG agreed! There's numerous sightings that nobody has ever been able to explain, most notably recently the 2004 USS Nimtiz sightings, and as evidenced by this paper I linked elsewhere in the thread (https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/10/939/htm) it is incredibly unlikely for some of the objects being sighted to be experimental military aircraft or otherwise human-made, it's just far too big of a technological leap.
It should also be noted that the current status quo of 'UFOs aren't real, people are stupid and misidentify shit and that's all it is' (not to say that people don't misidentify shit, that's anywhere from 90-75% of sightings depending on which analysis you prefer) was deliberately cultivated by a USAF backed scientific 'study' that was working to 'prove' UFOs fake from the moment it started, the Condon Report. Wikipedia has a great summary of all that bullshit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condon_Committee) and I urge you to take a look at the actual report itself, as it blatantly ignores it's own data in order to come to the preset conclusion of 'UFOs ain't real'. (https://files.ncas.org/condon/text/contents.htm)
I do want to stress however that I don't believe there's some giant cover-up going on. My personal research on the subject suggests that it's fundamentally a matter of the authorities involved falling victim to the same environment of ridicule and dismissiveness that the CIA cultivated with the Robertson Panel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertson_Panel) because they believed UFOs weren't real, and considered UFO sightings clogging up reporting lines for unknown aircraft to be a national security threat. In the academic world thinking that UFOs should be studied means you'll be considered a total quack by nearly everyone, and your career will be ruined, and in the military world doing anything but ignoring UFO sightings and reports has been a good way to get ridiculed and passed over for promotions. This has only started to change very recently, as it seems like the US Navy has been taking something of an interest in the subject after multiple high-profile very credible sightings, and there's been a concerted effort from some former members of the US Intelligence Community to lift the stigma surrounding the subject.
I think they are real, because human perception is terrible at the best of times and the sky is full of weird shit like airplanes, birds, and those green flashes that happen at sundown.
I do not think they are aliens because there isn't anything especially interesting on earth unless the aliens are really in to beetles, but lets be honest they probably already have beetles on their home planet because that seems like a really good, solid evolutionary body plan.
Radio War Nerd EP244 — Pentagon UFOs, with Matthew Phelan
https://www.breaker.audio/war-nerd-radio-subscriber-feed-2/e/70937052
Now there's a band I haven't thought about in a hot minute :cat-vibing:
