The Phenomenon: What is it?

Great Debates
361

BTW, the “tic tac” UFO was more than 20 years ago. And many explanations are out there among the 20 years that that took place. (Bonus, they explain the other two videos from the military that were declared by UFO followers as ‘the real thing’.**)

VFX Artists DEBUNK Pentagon UFO Videos

[13:53] Here’s a challenge: I would like to believe that aliens are real, but I think this video footage does absolutely nothing for the cause.

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** As the guys said of the last one: Of course it is a UFO! It is unidentifiable, but in the end, less likely to be aliens and more likely to be an artifact of the resolution and other technical issues with the sensors back then.

362

I don’t think any explanation given by any human of any phenomenon has ever exhausted every possible explanation, because it’s possible to make up an infinite number of explanations, if you so desire; why did the apple fall? Gravity? An invisible pixie named George? An invisible wizard named Terence? An invisible Wizard named Teresa? The variation of possible explanations is endless. It’s almost like we need some way of choosing one of them. I wonder what it might be.

363

Science moves forward by applying scientific rigor to purported evidence and not wasting time and resources on bullshit. That’s why there are no serious scientists investigating ghosts, psychics, alien abductions, or the “the Phenomenon”. The objective facts and reasons for this have already been given to you multiple times in this thread by remarkably patient Dopers, yet you seem too invested in your fantasies to listen.

364

Which one hasn’t been heavily investigated? Name one.

365

Sure, they’ve all been investigated and mundane explanations have been found for each incident. But the fact that every incident has a mundane explanation is suspicious. It must mean there’s something else happening, probably beyond our capacity to understand.

That’s pretty much the argument, right @Ryan_Liam?

366

Yes. The official AARO ( All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) has accepted this analysis of the GOFAST video, although they haven’t actually identified the nature of the object itself. Is it a balloon, or a large bird? Or a tiny extradimensional drone?

Still some dubiety there, and this is enough to allow a little mystery into the event. Some people are only happy when they find an unsolvable mystey, however small.

367

You’re lumping very different things by saying that certain patterns repeat, while saying they’re not the same thing in that same paragraph. They’re not the same thing, but they are the same thing. And, obviously, calling it all THE Phenomenon is saying they’re the same thing.

And, if they weren’t investigated, you’d never have heard of it, so it’s unfair to say they weren’t investigated.

Anyway, you don’t need to respond to me at this point. This thread has been going around in circles for a couple of hundred posts already. Nothing is going to change your mind that there’s something out there, and you’ll never convince a skeptical science-based board like this one that there’s anything special happening.

368

Well, not without some actual evidence!

369

Haha! Point taken. 350+ posts in, though…

370

There may be something interesting to discuss here.

IMHO science always is open to doubt and never completely settled. It is about adjusting the relative degrees of doubt and certainty, based on evidence that supports or potentially falsifies a particular hypothesis.

A hypothesis that has no evidence to support it, which cannot be falsified, which is inconsistent with other things we have current high confidence about, should be dismissed, until and unless it brings significant evidence for it being true and has stood up to some tests of falsifiability.

When that happens there are major shifts in understanding. Paradigms fall and new ones rise.

100% true that there should be (and is) curiosity when there are observations that are unexpected. There will be a constant stream of them. Most of those times they will have mundane explanations, or be simple errors, limits of the tools, within statistical expectations, but curiosity about the serendipitous is where breakthroughs sometimes come (and sometimes by gradual small steps).

The “phenomenon” that “Sensors at the edge of sensitivity pick up anomalies; trained observers try to make sense of them. Sometimes they match up, sometimes they don’t.” is mundane and expected. By definition sensors at at the edge of sensitivity are picking up more noise relative to signal and sometimes we can impose patterns on that noise and sometimes not. Sometimes we will impose patterns that are not really there when presented with noise. We can get anchored to a false pattern even. We often see what we are primed to see in random noise. Human perception and cognitive processes are interesting phenomena. We have lots of evidence for how these processes happen.

371

Typically stupid Argento flick.

372

Great phrasing! I’d reword slightly

Why are there always weird and blurry things happening at the limits of our recording?

If it’s a pattern, then it’s the same thing. If it’s not the same thing, then it’s not a pattern. Calling it “the Phenomenon” is lumping it as one thing.

“Odd behavior, high emotional intensity, and events that seem to but the line between internal and external” – this sounds exactly like the prescription for a psychological phenomenon.

373

Just another thing I haven’t understood for the 60 years I’ve been reading about UFOs. How to you explain that they want to stay hidden (don’t land on the White House lawn) and yet buzz military planes? It is not to observe - we can do that from orbit already and their capabilities must be much better than ours.
And where to they come from? Where is the mother ship? When this started, most people didn’t understand how far the stars were, or they thought they came from Mars or Venus (Adamski.) Now we know they don’t come from the solar system.
Let’s face it. They are either nonexistent or incompetent. I’ve read stories from the '50s about teenagers from outer space joy riding in our atmosphere. Perhaps the best explanation so far.

374

Richard Sharpe Shaver answered this question decades ago. The UFO’s do not come from space. They come from within our hollow earth. I’m confused as to how you don’t know this.

375

Piloted by the Dero, the subterranean race of Deranged Robots who also use their telepathic radios to transmit terrifying and haunting thoughts into select victims.

A theory that is disturbingly plausible if you’ve ever suffered night terrors.

376

My question: how come the best the aliens can do at any time is indistinguishable from hoaxes? How come the best evidence from lower technology periods now look blindingly obvious fakes? How come the best evidence from an improvement in detection and recording is later found to be silly when the technology improves again?

Wasn’t there a few years ago some wild claims about some light vortex opening in the skies of Tennessee, only to find out later it was all publicity for one of the Spiderman movies? I vaguely recall a similar incident from a dozen or more years ago about weird hovering aircraft with strange writing that preceded IIRC another aliens visit Earth movie?

Ok, that one might be hard to validate given I’m not giving specifics. Partially because my time sense is fuzzy, so it could be 10 yrs or 20 yrs. Probably not 30.

But the point still stands. When the best recording we had was eyewitness testimony, we got objects skipping around the sky like skipping saucers across a pond. When still cameras took off, we got fuzzy or poorly composed images or else photos of lantern tops and hubcaps.

When moving cameras became accessible, we got moving blurry images.

Now we have high Def, infrared, and radar signals that supposedly are simultaneously capturing the same items, except we aren’t given any actual examples.

Weird floating infrared images from a dozen years ago now have all the characteristics of paper lanterns that amazingly started to proliferate during the same time frame.

While the same type of flawed arguments are used to justify that this time there must be something to it.

Like it’s significant that the best current evidence comes from the military when:

  1. the military has the best tech of the time;
  2. the military has reason to be gathering all the surveillance that gives us these events;
  3. the military is concerned about security, so are highly motivated to stretch the data to it’s limits and try to interpret from that stretch;
  4. the military is primed to look for threats, and bound to interpret any anomalies from that perspective;
  5. the military has motive to lie about witnessed events and leaked images to cover up their own covert activities.

We KNOW the US government has used UFO rumors to hide classified projects before.

And we know human psychology is flawed exactly in ways the would create these type of events - either the claim of the event or the interpretation of what happened.

But yeah, maybe this time fairies are real.

377

I have a few issues of magazines with Shaver mystery stories - actually written by Ray Palmer, I believe. The scary thing is they sold like crazy, showing people in the late '40s and early '50s were almost as stupid as people today.

378

How can the earth be hollow If it is also flat?

379

Eventually the flat hollow earth will be blown up like a balloon. The Globe is our Future!

380

It’s shaped like an old canteen and the Milky Way is the strap.