so, here I sit with a strange book, documenting ghost, UFO, and other strange crap sightings.
This book came out in 1982, but seems to have all the info on falling objects, UFOs and ghosts up to that date, and it also seems to have a lot of them. How come we don’t see this anymore? If you look at this book and its articles, they all seem to say something like" many people saw a light over Madrid, watching it hover, then speed away", or " a vision of the virgin was seen over Istanbul, and told people that another vision would arrive and cleanse them"…
Okay, I made those up, but, what the Hell??? How come a whole book documents this crazy stuff, but it doesn’t seem to to be a thing we all know about?
I think you hit on the reason right there. Make up some more stuff, put it in a book, and see how relevant it is 25 years later.
The stuff in that book had no support and couldn’t be distinguished from fantasy, methinks. Keep in mind that the evidence for UFOs, ghosts, bigfoot, etc. is not getting stronger. Accumulation of accounts, none of which can be verified, is not valid evidence, no matter how many you can gather.
but in the book, they cite documents from ancient times as well as recent. Is it just too much of a pain in the ass to discredit this stuff?? It’s actually a Reader’s Digest compendium of strangeness.
What about the docs they cite, like, " an airship was seen", and that goes back to 1250 or earlier?
Reader’s Digest has the scientific credibility of, oh, People Magazine. Their “documentation” should read “someone said something once”. Seriously, this all boils down to “someone with no aviation or astronomical training said they saw something once”. Otherwise we’re into the hellhole of “the fact that the aliens are so good at hiding their existence proves that they do exist”.
I think it’s a bit of that and some of the “your word against his” type deal as well. Not to mention, how can one prove there are ghosts or aliens without physical evidence? So, the novelty of those types of books wear off.
The Bermuda Triangle legend was nailed in a book many years ago.
The author simply tracked down each named ship that had ‘mysteriously disappeared’. Many were still sailing around!
As for planes that ‘mysteriously disappeared’, there were usually severe storms in the area…
I read somewhere that with all the camera equipped cellphones we should be swamped by photos of UFOs and such. Yet, it doesn’t seem like you ever see even bad hoaxes anymore. 'Tis a pity really.
Image Googling ‘cellphone UFO’ gives 113 results, 95% of which are products for cell phones, which leaves about 9 pictures taken by cellphones of UFOs, in the entire world, on the enitre google-searched internet. :dubious:
meanwhile ‘UFO’ gives 459,000 :smack:
If you mean there are fewer UFO reports than in the past - if that’s true, it’s probably because we aren’t as fascinated by airplanes and spaceships anymore. The novelty’s worn off. We’re getting used to ignoring “mysterious” lights in the sky because most (if not all) of them are truly mysterious.
I think it was Dave Barry who got really interested in a guy in Florida who had these pictures of a UFO. But when he went to meet the guy, he found the story didn’t really add up, and the photos on close inspection looked like they could be faked, even to the untrained eye.
He talked to the author of a book on the UFO phenomenon, and the author pointed out that while there has always been a segment of the population that called the cops because their brains were being controlled by the electrical sockets, and so on, it was only after the comic books in the 50s printed lurid tales of ETs and flying saucers that we started to get people claiming to have been abducted.
I started a thread about that at one time. I used to think that the majority of UFO pics were honest mistakes, but if that were true, we should be flooded with cellphone pics. Now I’m think the vast majority of UFO pics were purposely faked.
When I was a youngling I used to read every book I could get my hands on about UFOs and The Bermuda Triangle and such. Sort of an “I Want to Believe” thing.
Anyway, I saw an interesting show in the Discovery Channel years ago about The Bermuda Triangle. Supposedly there may be gaseous methane deposits in the ocean floor there, and when a pocket of methane gas is released all the bubbles rise to the surface and ships lose bouyancy. They demonstrated the effect in a pool or fishtank with a model ship. I think they made a case that the methane could affect planes too.
I’ve also heard that if you drew an area the same size as the Bermuda Triangle anywhere else on the globe, you’d get pretty much the same number of missing planes and boats. In other words, the amount of stuff disappearing there is exactly what you’d expect.
Not quite. To be accurate, “if you drew an area the same size as the Bermuda Triangle anywhere else on the globe” which has a similar number of planes and ships crossing it you’d get pretty much the same number of missing planes and boats".
I also remember reading (I’m not citing for this, someone else find it) that the famous flight of Navy planes that started the whole BT thing had been figured out. Apparently if you don’t have gps, and you’re not familiar with the area, island A can look an awful lot like islang B.
So the planes radio in that they’re over A and heading on X compass reading. They don’t arrive. But if you’re really over B and head out on X, you’ll never hit land on one tank of gas. Mystery probably solved.
…just one theory! 