It sounds similar to the dilemma of how much to believe people who are known delusional schizophrenics. Just because they’re extremely unreliable doesn’t mean that some incident couldn’t have happened to them.
That definitely happens people doubling down on weak data or rejecting reasonable explanations. It’s part of the landscape.
What I’m raising is a different concern: early stage anomalies often get dismissed on tone before they’re examined on substance. Mockery doesn’t always wait for junk science, it sometimes greets the question itself.
So yes, ridicule has its place. But when it shows up before proper investigation, or becomes the cultural default for anything that resists easy classification, it stops being skepticism and starts being a defense of the status quo.
Don’t agree, if there are examples that don’t fit so neatly into fraud or error, then it begins to be investigated more seriously… Proponents can demand to not be mocked, but they already lost that point. (This is the era of the internet, anything can be mocked, specially when there is support for that mockery)
Remember Erich von Däniken? If you grew up in the 1970s, you couldn’t escape him. His book, Chariots Of The Gods? was a huge hit, alleging alien visitors not only walked the Earth over the millennia, but also left a fossil and artistic record of their presence.
What I have somehow managed to miss over the last few years was the construction of an entire amusement park, based on von Däniken’s ideas. According to its website, Mystery Park, located in Interlaken, Switzerland “present(ed) the unexplained, yet real phenomena found in various historical and archeological sites around the globe.”
After its opening, Mystery Park was called a “cultural Chernobyl” by Antoine Wasserfallen, a member of the Swiss Academy of Science and Technology. Apparently the public agreed. Its original incarnation was a financial catastrophe.
Apparently the property was purchased this year by a new promoter, and it reopened in May 2009. The season ends in November.
Bear in mind, von Däniken once said, “I am not a scientific man, and if I had written a scientific book, it would have been calm and sober and nobody would talk about it.”
What is clear to me is that there is mockery that comes hard from the ones demanding recognition of woo woo, in that case the demand that mockery should never come their way sounds suspiciously like many conservatives do when they claim to be cancelled and mocked.
Things do not happen in a vacuum, a lot of conspiracies are pushed to support woo with the intention to justify the dismantling of science efforts and removing many educational institutions as we are seeing now.
QAnon, the “Deep State,” Donald Trump’s Big Lie and now a report by the U.S. government on UFOs. How do you explain this confluence of events?
First, it’s important to understand that all these conspiracy theories are interrelated. It’s not like QAnon is completely separate from UFOs and that is completely separate from a conspiracy about Jewish bankers taking over the world — as Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested, by using “Jewish space lasers.” These conspiracies are all connected by this idea of rejected knowledge — that there is a secret body of knowledge that can tell a person how the world really works, and is being hidden away from the public by elites.
People who believe in conspiracy theories are searching for a means to understand a complex and changing world in a simple way, one that flatters their own particular prejudices, particular beliefs and feelings that they should be the ones at the center of the historical narrative.
One of the foundational issues involved in all of these conspiracy theories is white supremacy. It doesn’t always seem obvious. In many cases, some of the people who believe in one particular variety of conspiracy or another are not themselves motivated primarily by white supremacy, and may not even be aware of the connections to white supremacy. But at their core, many of these conspiracy theories revolve around ideas about the way things were in a semi-idealized past
But I digress.
The point still stands, mockery does not mean that investigation is not happening too.
Says all believers in woo for more than the past hundred years.
I’m out of here.
One would expect based on a bell curve distribution that some apparently mysterious events are readily explained upon examination, some may reasonably be presumed mundane, and a small percentage will lack sufficient evidence to resolve. An example would be famous unsolved murders: no one rationally believes that the deceased may have been killed by vampires, werewolves, space aliens, time travelers or the Illuminati; but their deaths are still genuinely baffling.
I watched that video up to the point where Graham Hancock appeared, whereupon I promptly noped out of there. Giving Graham Hancock a platform is a red flag that this is heading in the wrong direction.
I think the “investigation” isn’t considered to be complete until the desired result is acquired.
No straw men, just pointing out a pattern that gets overlooked when discussion gets siloed into belief vs. non-belief.
Yes, I said most incidents have conventional explanations. That’s not a dodge, it’s a filter. The interest isn’t in those cases, it’s in the small remainder that remain unresolved after multi-sensor corroboration and expert review.
Examples? Sure:
2004 Nimitz incident (USS Princeton radar, FLIR, pilot visual confirmation)
2015 Gimbal and GoFast (forward-looking infrared, multiple pilot observers)
1976 Tehran incident (multiple systems failures during a UAP intercept, corroborated by Iranian and U.S. reports)
These aren’t proof of “The Phenomenon” as a unified intelligence. But they are examples of cases that weren’t resolved with weather balloons, Venus, or sensor error.
You can call continued investigation “faith,” but I’d call it following a pattern that hasn’t fully resolved.
There will be cases where phenomena are observed by witnesses who think they are seeing a physical object do a thing, but it’s some kind of optical illusion or they are just mistaken about what they are seeing, even collectively.
There will be cases where phenomena appear on radar but they are the result of some sort of equipment malfunction or just artefacts of reflection or interference or whatever.
It therefore stands to reason that there will be rarer cases where these two, possibly completely unrelated phenomena, coincide and there are witnesses seeing a weird thing, and radar also reporting a weird thing. Of course correlation of multiple different strands of evidence does, in general, tend to support the notion that there is a real phenomenon being observed, but it’s a big, busy world and silly coincidences happen.
It’s also notable that one of your items of evidence here is a marked lack of evidence - ‘no heat signature’ is not a thing that necessarily denotes some weird alien tech is at play; it also, and more commonly, denotes there is nothing there.
At least a couple of those cases, where there appears to be a large, fast-moving object, it’s been pretty clearly shown that it could quite easily be a much smaller and closer and slow-moving object that merely appears to be moving fast across a distant background, because it was being viewed from a fast-moving viewpoint (parallax motion). Without distance cues, it’s very easy for this to happen.
This is a step in the right direction. But this is the Straight Dope and Great Debates. I could Google the little information you have given. I would find a website giving more detail. Whether that website was biased one way or the other, to what extent it was biased, whether the infofrmation given is accurate and whether all the information is given would require a lot more Googling. You need to provide links.
No, I am NOT calling continued investigation faith. I am calling your repeated claim of a pattern that you have not provided any evidence for until this last post (and still have not provided links for) faith. Saying ‘These things have not been explained yet. We should do more investigating.’ is just good science. Saying ‘These things have not been explained yet. Therefore, The Phenomenon is real.’ is a statement based entirely on faith.
Mick West and the members at Metabunk have analysed this report in great detail; there are two separate incidents involved, which occured at different times on the same day. The first one was probably some kind of misperception of an unknown (but probably mundane) object, caused by a parallax error, and involved no FLIR at all. The second one, with a different pilot, probably involved a distant plane many tens of kilometres away, and shared no characteristics with the first event.
All records of the radar returns involved (if any) were destroyed as part of routine procedures shortly afterwards, so the ‘USS Priceton radar confirmation’ is tenuous.
None of the pilots have come forward, and these FLIR clips (which are very different) seem to have very different explanations. GOFAST, in particular, has been accepted as another parallax error by AARO (the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office). Metabunk’s analysis of the GIMBAL clip seems to indicate that it was just another mundane Earthly aircraft about 30km distant from the camera.
In this case they seem to have been following Jupiter on the horizon for at least part of the time, and the multiple systems failures were due to poor maintenance. The pilots detected a ‘beacon’ emitting strange transmissions on the ground at one point, but this was later recovered and identified as mundane.
None of this is proof of alien or ‘extradimensional’ visitation, although some of the coincidences involved are reasonably unusual - but million-to-one coincidences happen (on our planet of eight billion people) thousands of times a day, so we have no need to invoke aliens from another universe.
I am particularly unsympathetic to Jacques Vallée’s ‘extradimensional hypothesis’. I have read his paper “Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects”, and he makes a good argument against the idea that these incidents are caused by actual aliens from our own universe.
The ‘aliens’, whenever they (apparently) reveal themselves, are all too humanoid in appearance, and conform to our science-fictional ideas of aliens rather than a realistic astrobiological extrapolation of non-Terran evolution. And as Vallée points out, their (apparent) behaviours make no sense from if they really are an extraterrestrial race either attempting to make contact or avoiding such contact. Vallée is correct to reject the extraterrestrial hypothesis; it is garbage.
But Vallée replaces it with a hypothesis that says these (apparent) visitors are instead from another, presumably nearby, dimension, a vantage point from which they can come and go at will and merely do so to cause mischief. He says that their bizarre and seemingly motiveless interactions with the human race are the result of their ‘trickster’ mentality, which has caused them to interact with human society since the dawn of time to bemuse and mislead us.
To me, this explanation (it barely qualifies as a hypothesis) explains nothing; it is basically just ‘a wizard did it’, and has exactly the same shortcomings as the extraterrestrial explanation. Why would any faction of entities behave in this way, without ever making any successful contact with humanity, and do so for thousands of years? Cui bono?
There is much better hypothesis, the psychosocial hypothesis, that explains all the apparently bizarre behaviour of our visitors as a collection of widely disparate human misperceptions, misrememberings, peer pressure, misinterpretations of physical evidence and simple hoaxes and embellishments of the truth. I have no respect for Vallée’s hypotheses in this matter since he seems to disregard this option consistently and repeatedly.
Vallée’s hypothesis requires a greater suspension of disbelief (if that’s the correct term) than simply believing that aliens from elsewhere in our universe come to Earth for any number of reasons and interact with people in any number of ways for any number of reasons. I wouldn’t be surprised if aliens from other universes visited our own but I think the vast majority of encounters originate from our universe. His five arguments all can be easily refuted or challenged and the likes of Stanton Friedman have done exactly that. I find it weird and intellectually obtuse to take a fantastical and esoteric issue like UFOs and aliens and make it even more fantastical and esoteric in a way that has even less evidence than the original explanation. It would be like one person saying ghosts are the spirits of people that have died and the other person saying they’re actually psychic projections of a giant squid dictator from a planet called Blixelthorp V. You’re just going against basic intuition and making it needlessly complex under the guise of intellectual rigor.
FWIW, as to the basic premise of this thread: yes there will be weird shit that happens that make no sense based on what we know. Sometimes they have mundane explanations. And sometimes the answer will be that there is no current explanation that fits. The premise though that anything that does not a good explanation must be … extraterrestrial, extradimensional, whatever, is the old God of the Gaps argument. I can rationally accept “no current good explanation” over accepting God or aliens therefore did it. I am hugely confident that there are natural phenomena that we do not yet understand and rarely even observe.
Beyond that is something that puzzles me: why would any greatly advanced other civilization especially care about a two bit hick planet?
Thank you for that link. Not because I was worried that there wasn’t an explanation, but because I’ve seen those touted a fair amount and was curious what answers could be.
I like the fuzzy triangle that is likely the out of focus aperture. I really like that bright items washing out the sensors and going black with a glowing halo.
Parallax is fun.
Actually, it can explain apparent coregistering of multiple sensors and pilot observation. It’s called “mistaken memory, misrepresented evidence, and confabulated information”. Take a story here and a story there and think they are the same incident, now you have more data. Except combining unrelated incidents is not giving you more data.
I don’t know what this means.
If the Phenomenon is able to manipulate perception, cognition, and spacetime, how do we have any chance of studying it? How do we even notice it? Are they able to manipulate perception, but bad at it? They can affect cognition, but not stop us from getting glimpses of them?
It’s like those light flasher sticks from Men In Black - one flash and you don’t remember, but they have malfunctioning sticks so we sometimes remember just a little?
Just like a dream, it isn’t real, but it can sometimes feel real. The trick is to recognize it was a dream when you wake up, and not keep believing it really happened.
I once had a very real-feeling dream as I was approaching waking that my brother had died. It felt intensely real, so much so I woke up crying. I had to shake it off and get ready for work. And no, it wasn’t a psychic experience. My brother is still just fine a decade later.
If this phenomenon were real, we would never know of its existence. How could we?
The Neurolyzers work perfectly. OTTOMH Orville Redenbocker was killed rather spectacularly on live television fighting an army of plant monsters created by Monsanto. You remember that, don’t you?
Exactly my point.
[Ahem]
“You’ll like it better, or my name isn’t Orville Redenbacher” 
Fun bit, he also said once that:
“Every once in a while, someone will mail me a single popcorn kernel that didn’t pop. I’ll get out a fresh kernel, tape it to a piece of paper and mail it back to them.”
This is a big part of the issue - there seems to be a sort of dissonance about it all that goes something like:
“What about THIS? You can’t explain THIS, can you, skeptics? Gotcha!”
…
“Oh wait, you’re going to try to explain it? Stop doing that. Stop always looking for rational, mundane explanations!”
It is just more bullshit by the UFO proponents; it means a ‘craft’ that passes from the atmosphere into the water without apparently slowing down. Many of the current troop of UFO enthusiasts talk about transmedium craft; one example is the Aguadilla UAP, which Mick West and Metabunk have shown pretty conclusively to be a floating fire lantern filmed from a circling helicopter. Parallax again.
The object seems to pass into the distant ocean at some points, and fades away; this is just a result of the faint nature of the image, rather than a physics-defying dive into the ocean with no apparent deceleration.