Thread summary: What if the burden of proof were the other way around?
I will 100% agree … modifying only that the perceived signal might be more than noise.
Here is the pattern:
- across different eras, across radically different systems from naked eye, to photography, to telescopes, to radar …, by different observers, when noisy nebulous data is paid close attention to, there are perceived “things” seen, that happen to reflect the mythologies and anxieties of the time and place.
That is not a mere coincidence.
What can explain it?
If there is a pattern of always an apparent spot at ten o clock when I look through my telescope, whenever and wherever I look, what is the probable explanation? A phantom planet that only I observe and that moves to where I look? A ship teleporting? A fairy? Or?
A scotoma?
Uncertainty is the terrain, always has been. The issue isn’t that I’m claiming aliens from the gaps; it’s that you’re treating ambiguity as closure, as if the presence of a likelier explanation shuts the case entirely.
I’m not ignoring the Campbellian or sociopolitical angles you’re right, those matter. But reducing the Phenomenon to cultural archetypes or defense industrial noise only is just as premature as declaring it alien. If you really care about what “we should be doing,” then maybe we should stop shutting down the questions before they’ve been asked in full. Some patterns deserve real curiosity before they’re buried under certainty theater.
Hah, I wish. The question about “who watches the watchmen” does not lead to entire closures.
Still missing the huge point, The reports I did see were not made in the same year, or coming from the same guys, your premature argument here is the one that was dismissed. In the meantime, more advances in research and tools point to a gross failure from proponents of the phenomenon when they fail to use those new tools.
[Looks at the audience]
Heh, he don’t know me really well uh, folks?
Sorry to say, this argument that me and others should not shut down the feeble evidence is in reality a demand to keep the ignorance and uncertainty going. It is more popular and convenient.
It’s the boilerplate for every unexplained multi-sensor anomaly in this thread for exactly one reason: you’ve offered exactly one anomaly to examine.
Is this deliberate on your part? If so, you’ve caused the problem you’re critiquing. If it’s not deliberate, fix it. Give us another example to look at. This time, choose an example that’s probably not balloons.
Sine we aren’t getting sightings of nearby saucers and aliens on the ground any more, the only reports are tiny lights in the sky many kilometres away and returns at the edge of detectability. The ‘qualitative shift in data’ is always towards more distant phenomena that need detailed examination to interpret. Chas Underwood, who filmed the apparent object in the Princeton/Nimitz event, could not even see it with his own eyes.
We should not forget that pilots are trained to interpret sensor readings and tiny data points as threats, even if they can only see them as a blob on a FLIR cam. A couple of years ago they started filming objects off the east coast of the USA, and caught some of them on their own smartphones; these turned out to be small novelty balloons, one with a picture of Batman and another celebrating a graduation.
First, you must establish a pattern. You’ve failed to do so.
The case isn’t even open. You have presented nothing.
Ann Leckie has a great series on Bluesky that relates to this thread. Worth reading.
The moon is not full of ancient civilizations or weird creatures. It is a barren rock. We know because we have been there. We have been there. Working together we can accomplish astounding things and create wonders.
Absolutely! But even easier to access: I spent the morning writing a sonnet about watching a couple of mockingbirds and a blue jay mob a red-tailed hawk at my neighbor’s house (I was very, very bored this morning). There’s amazing and delightful shit happening all around us all the time. This world is full of mystery and wonder as is. Slime molds, man–slime molds!
Anne Leckie must hate Walt Whitman as much as I do:
Yes. As an amateur photographer, I can attest to this.
You might be overestimating the reliability of the instruments you are referencing. I was on a committee trying to improve the quality of military electronics, and spoke a few times at their big conference. It’s a miracle the stuff works as well as it does. One example was a radar system for a land vehicle which had a mean time to failure of 11 hours, which they thought was good.
I’m not knocking them, the stuff has to work in extreme environments. But glitches in the equipment, or in the design of the equipment, are a much more plausible explanation than Vallee’s.
I can’t speak for Leckie, but I don’t mind that poem at all. Find your wonder where you may–and if Whitman didn’t care for the lecture but preferred to touch (leaves of) grass when he found wonder, more power to him.
If Whitman interrupted the lecturer to tell everyone how blinkered they were, instead of wander’ng off by himself, I’d get the hate. But he let them live their best lives and went off to live his.
Not precisely on-topic, but I loved what I once read someone else say about it - that Lloyd’s of London didn’t charge higher premiums for ships operating in that area, so it (higher incidence of missing ships) must not be real.
Science deniers engaged in pure certainty theater!
It’s a fair cop. I took it to be an assertion that science kills wonder but he has a right to that opinion.
Also, I really just hate that poem–not all of Whitman. I just said that to be jerk.
And I don’t even hate the poem. I disagree with the idea behind it but admit he expresses that idea very effectively.
Fair enough. You just caught me off guard–I’ve never seen anyone exaggerate for effect on the Internet before.