I invented it.
Bullshit. Transdimensional aliens invented it.
Wait a minute…
It’s not about preserving ignorance it’s about interrogating where knowledge ends and assumption begins. I’m not defending every vague light in the sky, I’m defending the space to keep asking when the data doesn’t cohere, even after decades. You’re right that sloppy pattern-matching is a trap, but so is wrapping noise in the certainty of dismissal. We’ve mistaken ‘most likely’ for ‘case closed’ so many times in science that it’s become a cliché. Let’s not pretend this terrain is too dangerous to chart just because it resists tidy answers.
You’re mistaking a shift in visibility for a shift in credibility. Sure, we’re not getting low-res photos of humanoids posing with antennas anymore but now we’re seeing consistent blips on advanced sensors, cross verified by trained observers. That doesn’t make the data sacred, but it also doesn’t make it worthless. Balloons explain some cases. Training bias explains some. But that doesn’t mean we stop asking when the pattern keeps circling military space, time and again, decades apart. That’s not folklore. That’s persistence.
What it was found here is that in the specific ‘best case’ an assumption was made that it was the Phenomenon, that assumption was not made by me or many others.
You are talking to a veteran of the climate change debates; it is the humans that are causing the change nowadays. There were a lot of deniers that claimed that it was dangerous to do anything about it. That was the real fear mongering.
And before that, I also got involved a lot with the “evidence” presented for the “Phenomenon”. The mistake here is to assume that me and others do not look at the evidence, on the contrary, we look, and we found it that it is even less impressive than it was before.
Forgot to add that:
You are missing that, as for myself, I actually followed a lot of the “Phenomenon” in the past (more than 50 years ago).
Only to be disappointed by the evidence back then and becoming a skeptic. Looking at what is going on today (Yep, giving them another chance much later if you did not notice), the evidence is really worse. There is in reality less evidence that supports the “Phenomenon”.
And still… I can get a look at any new evidence to then see if there is anything good to consider. So far in this thread, the answer is no.
Whether Whitman is making that assertion or not, many people do – that science is limiting, boring, and directly opposed to the aspiration of “I want to believe” and blinds us to the wonders around us. I vehemently reject this view because it’s actually the opposite.
Scientific rigour and its ability to model our world through math has revealed truths about the universe that are literally stranger and more wondrous than anything we could have been capable of imagining: the intuitively incomprehensible strangeness of the quantum world, superposition and quantum entanglement, and the strange family of particles in the Standard Model, the mind-boggling paradox of black holes, the idea that time and space may change places inside them, the processes that birth new stars, and indeed the origin of the cosmos itself.
Those of us with deep respect for what science has accomplished through rigourous methodology are all the more annoyed by pseudoscience and its close cousins, fakery and fraud. The OP is very much mistaken in asserting that failure to investigate the baseless beliefs he describes as being a failure of science; it is not. It’s a testament to the success of the scientific method that it doesn’t get drawn into the claptrap of pseudoscience and maintains an objective assessment of evidence, or the lack of it.
The military has a lot of aircraft and cameras (and thus accumulates a lot of aerial footage) and they have a tendency not to be completely open with their information; this is bound to attract conspiracy theories. It’s not even slightly weird.
Nobody’s stopping you, but you still haven’t established any cases where the data doesn’t cohere.
Which can be demonstrated to be mundane phenomena magnified by hi-tech sensors acting at the edge of their sensitivity. I put it to you; it is literally impossible for an ‘extradimensional entity’ to be able to detect whether passive sensors are being used.
When David Fravor saw his ‘tic tac’ UAP he didn’t have any recording equipment available, and the phenomenon ‘manifested itself’ at the edge of his visible range, so he struggled to identify it. An hour or two later, Chad Underwood filmed an (almost certainly different) object with his FLIR camera, once again at the edge of detection range (20-30 km away). Since Fravor’s eyeballs and Underwood’s camera both use passive detection, it would be physically impossible for these imaginary ‘extradimensional entities’ to detect whether Fravor had his camera working, so they could not possibly be certain to appear at the edge of both observer’s Low Information Zones.
We are talking magic here. Vallee imagines that these ‘extradimensional entities’ are capable of magically hovering at the edge of visibility, no matter what system of detection is being used. This is an absurd requirement, and the only ‘consistent’ pattern is that these phenomena are too far away to be seen clearly and identified as mundane.
B: The pictures that are sometimes reported as being possible unicorns are all low-quality images
A: Thus we conclude unicorns can sense our camera quality and avoid being captured in high quality images.
Exactly. Some here might remember the classic puppet TV show Thunderbirds; in order to preserve their secrets, International Rescue had ‘camera detection sensors’ that could detect when they were being filmed.
This is the sort of tech the Extradimensional Entities need in order to remain in the Low Information Zone, and it is a complete fantasy.
Why do I suspect that you will not be providing specific examples of this.
This is a prefect example of what I mean by a group that is repeating folklore as if it really happened. I don’t mean AARO, I mean the supposed first- hand accounts that aren’t and the circulation of the same unverified stories.
No one here is throwing out curiosity or wonder. What we are throwing out is bad data, misinterpretation of data, misrepresentation of the evidence in any specific case, and bad thinking that assigns a pattern without verifying that there really is a pattern.
You have repeatedly claimed that some incidents have simultaneous multiple sensor captures, but you haven’t even provided one example.
This is how your argument sounds.
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I think elves are creeping around my house at night.
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Why do you think that?
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I keep finding things chewed on or eaten or moved.
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Ok, but why do you think it’s elves?
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I have this video of something moving around.
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That video shows mice.
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Ok, but that just proves that elves could be there. Besides, I’ve seen cockroaches.
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Cockroaches aren’t elves.
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No, but they are small and creep around in the dark, so maybe elves are there, too.
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Have you got any other evidence for elves?
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My sister’s daughter and her friend said they saw some elves.
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How old are they?
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They’re six, but that doesn’t matter because there are two of them. That’s independent corroboration.
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So your evidence for elves is mice, cockroaches, and stories from six year olds.
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You just want to shut down wonder. There could be elves. When do many lines of data point to the possibility of elves, you can’t just ignore the possibility.
I’m not saying don’t look, don’t ask questions, don’t consider evidence. I’m saying that you are overstating the evidence and undervaluing the efforts to evaluate the evidence that has been presented.
Owls can be spooky looking as fuck-all, even when we know we’re looking at owls:
And one infamous sighting, the Flatwoods Monster, is convincingly said to be what you’d get if you were looking at an owl in a tree in poor light:
The infamous “face on Mars” was based on low-res images that have long since been improved upon:
Moral of the story? Don’t trust low-resolution data uncritically.
ETA: It would be fascinating, although much of it is probably still classified to this day, to look at World War Two intelligence gathering compared with post-war analysis once there was access to the enemy archives to see how well and how poorly observers’ best attempts to obtain knowledge of what was going on faired.
I agree with your post except for the phrase I underlined. Some human did in fact imagine each thing in science and then taught others to imagine those things as well. And that is the magic of science: that human intelligence can tease apart facts to comprehend basic truths about the universe.
I think this is the key fallacy in all of this - the notion that this common of appearing very small and indistinct is some intrinsic property of a coherent set of entities, when really it’s just the criterion for selecting them from a much larger set of data.
Or in other words, isn’t it so weird that all of the blurry videos are blurry?
Or in old sdmb memes, why does my cat’s breath smell of cat food?
I think we’re talking past each other and you didn’t quite grasp my meaning. I’m not talking about the power of human intelligence to construct hypotheses and mathematical models based on evidence, I’m talking about the limitations of human imagination in the absence of scientific discovery. The ancient Greeks were a pretty clever lot, philosophizing about all sorts of things, but do you think they could ever have imagined the paradoxical weirdnesses of quantum mechanics? Of black holes? Of the origin and evolution of the cosmos?
Richard Feynman once famously said that “nobody understands quantum mechanics” by which I think he meant that it’s impossible to reconcile with our intuitive understanding of how the world works. It’s an Alice-in-Wonderland world where impossible things are real, and it’s scientific evidence that has led us to this incredible glimpse into a different reality, even if we can’t intuitively explain it.
Simply put, truth is stranger than fiction, and it’s rigorous scientific inquiry and solid evidence that has led us to these truths.
Are there non-UFO examples of the The Phenomenon? I was waiting all thread for some. I think someone explicitly asked for examples. Just curious.
I think it would be things like: People experiencing time oddly (another dimension or whatnot); sleep paralysis/alien at your bed…stuff like this?
Anyways, after reading the thread, and threads like these, it’s the lack of evidence that keeps hope alive for people who have an “open-mind” about The Phenomenon. It makes these cases feel like unsolved puzzles, secrets waiting to be uncovered. They’re compelling because they touch on what we don’t know yet — and as a species, we’re deeply drawn to the unknown. And there will always exist unknowable and unexplained events and phenomena at any given point in time.
I basically asked the same question, but so far, the OP hasn’t ever responded to me at all.