Give us your best three credible UFO sightings, and please skip past the “there are too many to give you an example” and the very popular “here are three common ones and if they don’t work I’ve got a thousand more to throw at you until you give up and walk away” responses. Just your best three.
Which is poisoning the well.
To be clear on my own motivations: I think humans suck ass a lot of the time, both in how we treat each other and how we treat our planet. And I strongly desire to live in a galaxy with numerous sentient species, hopefully wiser than us.
But my desires shouldn’t trump empirical evidence. And the lack of seeing anything at all is grounds for suspecting that there are few to no other sentient species in our galaxy, for reasons I’ll elaborate in the next response.
Yeah, I’d put the upper limit as something like a handful, for this working as the main filter right now.
Currently we only know of one example of a technological species. This singular data point of Homo sapiens tells us that:
-
The time gap between sharpening stones and being able to create space probes is incredibly short, compared to cosmic timescales.
-
Different factions and civilizations choose to do different things. Even if one group does not see the point in making a flashing green beacon in space, maybe another does, or will.
Remember, you were the one emphasizing that we should not see ourselves as special. So, guessing that we are a typical sentient species, and based on the galaxy being 13.6 billion years old, it’s not unreasonable for us to see megaprojects (not just dyson spheres but stuff that might be completely mysterious to us right now), replicating probes, visitors or other bric-a-brac.
The fact that we see zilch…it obviously doesn’t prove anything either way. But it’s a reason to lean us towards the pessimistic end.
Not only are there supposedly an incredible number of alien life forms out there, but they are both deliberately hiding from us and at the same time doing such a piss-poor job of it that there are supposedly thousands of reports concerning them.
The center of the galaxy is like 25000 light years away. They cant get here and dont even know we are here.
Good points. But of course, there is lots of top secret stuff going on, which could be the cause of the best “UFO” sightings. Not to mention hoaxes.
I saw a UFO once, a bright light was “following” me down a dark country road. I pulled over- it was Venus.
I have never bought into the “The lack of evidence is the best evidence that evidence is being hidden!” bs.
Years ago, I asked someone more knowledgeable on the subject on another forum a similar question regarding the most credible UFO sightings. I’ll post their answer below:
1: The RB-47 incident on 17 Jul 1957: a SAC RB-47H ELINT aircraft was followed by an unidentified object for 700 miles across four states. How did they follow the bogey? By its own radar signals. Yes, the bogey was emitting its own radar, which the ELINT gear on the RB-47 picked up and tracked. The bogey (a large orange-red oval shaped light) was seen visually by the pilot (a 15-year veteran with the rank of Major), copilot, and navigator, while the ELINT operators (3) saw the bogey’s radar signals. The bogey was also picked up by an air defense radar near Dallas, TX, and the RB-47 actually pursued the object (and played cat-and-mouse with it) for a time before fuel ran low.
2: Portage County OH (17 June 1966): Police chase involving two sheriff’s deputies, then a third officer, and finally, a PA lawman, where an object was chased for 85 miles at speeds exceeding 105 MPH. Also seen by other law enforcement officers (and photographed by a police chief) and civilians. The weird thing about it was that when the pursuing sheriff’s car took a wrong turn, the bogey waited for the lawmen to come back. When the squad car entered a town and slowed down? The bogey slowed down, and when they got out of a town and sped up? It sped up.
3: Lakenheath/Bentwaters, England (13/14 Aug 1956): Radar-visual sightings by USAF and RAF radar operators, ground personnel, a C-47 crew, and the crews of two RAF Venom NF-6 interceptors. Several of the bogeys were tracked at speeds up to 12,000 MPH, and at least one was determined by radar operators at USAF Lakenheath to be “several times larger than a B-36.” One of the RAF Venom radar officers, when chasing one of the unknowns, said, “Clearest target I have ever seen on radar.”
4: Depthos, KS, 2 Nov 1971: A 16-year old boy sees a mushroom-shaped object hovering near the barn on his family’s farm. The object is just a few feet above the ground, and is emitting a glow that briefly blinds him. He runs to get his parents, who see the object leaving in the distance. The UFO left a ring of dried up soil, and when the boy’s mother touched it, her fingers went numb (and remained so the rest of her life). The case was investigated by Dr. Hynek and Ted Phillips, his protege who specialized in physical trace cases, and found that the ring soil was dry to the depth of one foot, and lab tests found a high concentration of fulvic acid. Furthermore, the ring soil was shown in the lab (and in the field) to be hydrophobic (it repels water). The UFO affected soil will also not support seed germination and plant growth.
5: Socorro, NM, 24 Apr 1964: The Lonnie Zamora case, where a police officer saw an white egg-shaped object on the ground with two occupants about the size of small children in white coveralls walking around the object. The officer called it in, then saw that the occupants were nowhere to be seen. A roaring sound was heard, as the object lifted off to an altitude of about 15 feet before moving away. Other law enforcement officers responding to the call also saw it (but kept it to themselves). An investigation by the military (an Army Captain in charge of an off-range facility for White Sands lived in town and some MPs responded, as did an FBI agent before Blue Book investigators arrived), Dr. Hynek, Dr. James MacDonald, and Coral and Jim Lorenzen, the directors of APRO, also investigated the case. Physical traces in the form of burned bushes, dried up soil, landing gear impressions, and even several small footprints, were found at the scene (the NM State Police secured the site before the military arrived, and treated it as a crime scene). This is one of only four occupant cases in Blue Book files that is listed as “Unidentified.”
6: The 1976 Tehran intercept mentioned above.
7: Kaikoura, NZ, 30/31 Dec 1978: An Australian TV crew aboard an Argosy cargo aircraft flying between Christchurch and Wellington, films unidentified lights at the same time Air Traffic Control radar is picking up unidentified targets in the same location as where the crew is filming. The bogeys are seen on both legs of the trip (Christchurch-Wellington and return), as are the radar targets. The RNZAF was sufficiently concerned that their A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft were put on an air defense alert for several days. This is the only known radar-visual which is accompanied by photographic or video evidence supporting the sighting (or the other way around).
8: Washington, DC, 19/20 and 26/27 Jul 1952: When the Saucers came to D.C…Back-to-back weekends where radar controllers at Washington National AP, Baltimore-Washington IAP, and Andrews AFB picked up numerous radar targets at speeds ranging from 130 MPH to “Several thousand MPH”. Interceptors were scrambled, but the controllers noticed something: on three of the four occasions when F-94 fighters came in, the bogeys left-as if they had gone straight up. When the fighters left to refuel, the bogeys returned in the exact same space they had been when the fighters arrived. On the fourth instance, a fighter pilot was surrounded by several lights that closed in on his aircraft, and he was concerned enough to unsafe his 20-mm cannon. The bogeys left after a minute or so-but the senior controller at Washington National saw on both nights that as the fighters came in and the controllers began directing them, the bogeys left as mentioned-and he was convinced that the unknowns were listening in on his radio transmissions.
First off, the galactic center is likely uninhabitable by life as we know it.
Secondly, 25,000 years is impressively long by human standards – twice as long as we started shifting from hunter-gatherer to civilized – it is as nothing compared to the age of our own solar system, surrounding a population III star, the youngest around. Population II and I stars are vastly older, although less likely to have stable planets with the resources needed to support a civilization similar to ours.
How long would it take to colonise the galaxy? | OpenLearn - Open University.
By this time, given sufficient resources, the initial population of 1000 on the first ship to Stellar One will have been doubled 106years/25 years = 40,000 times.
That’s an unimaginably large number, namely 240000.
The number of ships will double every 100 years, and after about 30,000 years there will be as many ships as there are stars in the Galaxy.
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
– Douglas Adams
This sounds suspiciously like a case of people “chasing” Venus.
If you look into the details of the case it clearly wasn’t Venus. Venus and the Echo 1 satellite were the official explanations but (among other details) the satellite was not visible in the predawn sky and Venus was in the opposite direction of the chase.
I apologize in advance if someone has already made this point (I haven’t read through this entire thread, and I composed this post without knowing that it existed. Coincidentally, I noticed this thread was up and relevant to the argument I was toying with against extraterrestrial life.)
I think extraterrestrial life is not only possible, but probable, based on the sheer number of stars and planets. It’s practically impossible, however, that any E-T life should be able to contact us, or be contacted, before one or both of us (humans and non-humans) die out.
I base this on the difficulty of any intelligent form of life surviving its middle period, of which we’re now in the very beginnings.
The first period of life is simple pre-intelligence—one-celled, then multi-celled, then eventually a form of life that slowly approaches intelligence. Billions of years to get to that point. If you assume that a species will evolve to the point of self-consciousness, marking the beginnings of intelligence, then it seems to me inevitable that the species will develop crude beliefs (and wrong beliefs) about who they are and how they got there. In short, religion. Combined with other belief systems that seems to me inevitable—tribalism, racism, nationalism, classism—as a building block of civilization, that species will cling to its more primitive concepts as it slowly evolves towards a true understanding of how it came to exist, but for a long time, that species will lack the technological capability to destroy itself. (Other sources of destruction—asteroid collision, deadly global warmings or coolings, massive volcanic explosions, etc.—are always possible.) Humans have turned the corner and are now at the beginning of the second period, where we have the technical ability to destroy ourselves but also have the active remnants of our most divisive primitive beliefs.
This second period will end either in self-destruction or in enlightenment, where we will have developed the neutering of primitive beliefs about other people’s religions, nations, tribes, races, classes, to the point where no one pays serious attention to those beliefs. Ideally, these belief systems cease to exist entirely or are universally acknowledged to be a useless remnant of the distant past. This enlightenment, which takes a long time to develop, leads to the third period of life.
No one knows, of course, how long this dangerous second period lasts, but it is my belief that few species will get through it in one piece. By the point that an intelligent species can master the hard problem of extra-planetary travel or extra-stellar communication, it will probably endure thousands of years of self-destructive capacity on a scale we hardly imagine. The co-existence of nuclear weaponry (which itself may be a primitive form of technological self-destruction) and widespread hatred among groups of humans insisting that their enemies (and often their own selves) must and should die, coupled with the lesser danger of asteroids and such, most likely wipes out nearly every intelligent species in the universe before they develop the capacity to make contact beyond their own star system or galaxy.
I don’t envision a scenario where this middle period does not last for thousands of years in the development of a species enlightened enough to abandon its crude and self-destructive beliefs.
Paradox: A paradox is a self-contradictory statement or scenario that challenges conventional thinking.
There are a couple of assumptions that, to my mind, keep it from being a paradox.
(emphasis mine) What is that understanding? As far as I know, we have no idea what the chance of of life spontaneously arising are. Until we know that, we can’t hazard a reliable guess as to how many communicating aliens there are out there. Brian Cox says there are 20 billion earth-like planets in our galaxy. If the odds of life arising spontaneously are 1 in a billion, there should be 20 planets with life out there. If the odds are 1 in a trillion, then we are probably it. No one knows this number. I will say, if it’s as easy as some would have you think, we should have been able to create it in the lab by now.
The second is the notion of self-replicating probes. This is a fantasy. Machines have gears, gaskets, finely machined parts and so on. Probes additionally need engines and fuel. We can’t even make a self replicating robot here on earth, without a functioning engine, much less one that could process fuel, etc on another planet. Then chart a course to another planet, land without crashing, and start the process over again?
Plus fossil fuels are only available on planets that already have life.
Getting to a tenth of the speed is only half of the battle, surviving that speed is another whole bailiwick.
Given the distances and the unknown chance of life arising, to me, there is no paradox.
I certainly hope humanity isn’t the only intelligent species in the universe.
each incident is different.
- an orange-red light that flies at regular airplane speed, steadily for 700 miles.
- police cars at regular car speeds , 105 mph, slowing down and speeding up with the cars.
- Object at 12,000 mph, and 3 times larger than a B-36 plane
- Mushroom -shaped object hovering 15 feet above ground,and glowing
- White egg-shaped object, hovering, not glowing
- lights at regular airplane speed, for two trips
- several objects at speeds from 130 to several thousand MPH, which surround the air force plane
Are we being visited by aliens from 8 different planets with 8 different technologies?
Oh, and we haven’t mentioned crop circles yet.
There’s an old expression, quoted by Carl Sagan and others: “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence”. Concrete, reproducible, evidence.
Also, it’s kind of weird to me that aliens with the technology to travel a billion miles, and the ability to stay hidden, follow our cars and planes at a distance of a few hundred yards. They should be able to film and measure us from a little farther away. We unsophisticated humans have cameras on spy satellites that can read a license plate from 24 thousand miles away.
This is one of the big reasons Mars exploration is so exciting. We’re finding little hints and bits that life may have once existed there. Absolutely nothing is even close to conclusive, but enough evidence for me to think more missions are necessary.
Really three choices
- There is no evidence of life ever having existed on Mars
- Evidence of past life on Mars, and seems to be of common origin with Earth life—this raises lots of interesting questions, but gets us no closer to an estimate of “the number”
- Evidence of past life on Mars, and it shares no common ancestor with Earth life—two life events in the same solar system, the odds of life arising might be 100%
Same rules apply for Europa, Enceladus, etc.
These are the two I could quickly find Skeptoid episodes about. I’ve written out the punch lines, but for the full detail read the articles or listen to the episodes. Feel free to argue about why the Skeptoid explanations are wrong, but I have no further insight than what is contained in those articles.
Zamora seems sincere and reliable, but it was probably a college prank.
A variety of explanations covering the different aspects. The light was probably Jupiter and the missiles were probably meteors. One of the F-4s was known to have electrical and radar problems, and all of the pilots were inexperienced with night flying.
Yes, I know. Did you read that as me suggesting the opposite?
My point is this: many people frame the Fermi paradox as making the positive claim that there should be evidence of lots of ETIs out there. They then usually go on to claim that the paradox is “solved” by questioning the assumptions that that conclusion is based on.
But what have we actually “solved”? Have we filled in all the unknowns of the Drake equation?
I think the better framing is this: we have two significant data points, one is the fact that we see no evidence of any technological civilizations other than our own – when it could possibly been the case that we’d see a galaxy lit up with countless technology and culture of a million species. And the other is that, taking Homo sapiens as an example, sentient species progress incredibly quickly and tend to make “noise” as soon as they have the ability to do so.
Taking these data seriously gives us some reason to doubt that there are a high number of ETIs. But regardless there are clearly big unknowns here.
It’s bizarre to define machines this narrowly and use that as the basis for claiming that this makes it implausible. You may as well say it’s impossible to make a moon rover, because cars need air for their internal combustion engines. No-one was claiming a self-replicating drone would be some kind of steampunk machine, powered by premium unleaded.
Anyway, I’ll just say that, in terms of the fermi paradox, engineering challenges are not very plausible great filters. A species more advanced than us is likely to be millions of years ahead of us; thousands of times the length of all human history.
So we can hypothesize that some things may be physically impossible, like faster than light, no matter how advanced a species is. But so-and-so engineering problem looks insanely hard is just not going to cut it for a great filter.
Allowing that spy satellite capabilities are highly secret, what evidence points to this?
Note that the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman space telescope was developed from the optical systems of two reconnaissance satellites that the military considered obsolete in 2012. (cite)
Not saying this necessarily proves being able to read license plates from orbit, just a bit of context.
True, but there are several criteria that will need to be met if SRPs are to colonize the galaxy. One is that they will need a way to convert whatever raw materials they find into an interstellar vehicle. That alone seems to be a non-starter. Additionally they will need some kind of engine and some kind of fuel for that engine. Rocket fuel may seem anachronistic, but asking a robot to build a nuclear propulsion system, a solar sail or a fusion engine are way outside of the scope of an unsupervised robot. And then there’s the guidance systems, etc. Any craft that is going to colonize the galaxy will need to be able to travel interstellar, find a host planet, land and build a copy of itself by mining and fabricating local resources, developing a propulsion system that will escape not only the local planet gravity but reach escape velocity of that solar system, have a navigation system that will guide it to the next star, and so on.
The idea of a self-replicating robot has been around since the 40’s and we are not much closer to having them now. And they don’t have to contend with flying. Opinions vary, yes, but I don’t believe these are possible and will never come to pass.
Everything I can find online says that this isn’t possible.