Do the Moyuls throw them up in the air?
Because faster than speed of light travel is physically impossible. It would take hundreds or thousands of years to travel to even the closest stars – and that’s assuming you would have some way of identifying which other stars in the universe had any life on them. The idea that some other species would expend centuries or millenia of searching and travel just to buzz a few yokels in the countryside is so astronomically implausible that it can be dismissed out of hand. There’s a reason that real scientists do not take this stuff seriously.
In January 2000, there was a sighting by multiple individuals near Highland, Illinois (a part of metropolitan St. Louis). This included several on-duty police officers. I’ve heard recordings of some of their communications with dispatchers. In the recordings I’ve heard, the officers really sound reluctant about reporting what’s going on. There’s a brief description on this Wikipedia page. Find the string ‘Illinois Police Sighting Incident’ when you get to the page.
One interesting utterance that a puzzled Halt gives on the tape recording is, “The red, white and blue lights of the UFO are still hovering over Woodbridge.”
But former USAF Security Policemen, Kevin Conde, has exclusively revealed that these lights were the result of a practical joke he played on the gullible airman.
Conde says, “I drove my patrol car out of sight from the gatehouse, turned on the red and blue emergency lights and pointed white flashlights through the mist into the air.”
“The bottom line is that, that was not a UFO it was a 1979 Plymouth Volare!” explains a bemused Conde.
In 2002, Channel 4 television gave a team of special effect engineers 12 weeks to design and build an UFO that will trick witnesses and get media coverage
You’re oversimplifying. First, while light-speed travel may be impossible, are you forgetting the principles of relativity? Little green men traveling at high speeds wouldn’t age as quickly. I’ll agree with you that drunk rednecks spotting flying saucers is almost positively made-up, but statistically speaking, there probably are other intelligent lifeforms throughout the universe and we have no clue what they’re capable of. Realistically speaking though, classified government projects probably make up a vast amount of UFO sightings.
I’m kind of on the fence on the subject- the one thing that tips me in the favor of ‘none of the sightings are alien’ is that 99% of them are near military bases- of course, that could be the aliens attempting to study the military bases…
While I agree that according to our current understanding of the physical laws that FTL travel is physically impossible, who is to say that it is inconceivable to circumvent the limitations via wormholes (either natural or artificial) or gravitational warping? While we might not have the technology now, why couldn’t someone/thing else have the knowledge to do this? Heavier than air travel was once considered an impossibility as was space travel. Who knows what the future will bring?
As to the idea of traveling great distances, merely to take a few photos and maybe pick up a souvenir? Hmm. I just can’t see why anyone would do that?
Back to the OP: the O’Hare sightings had multiple professional witnesses, including several pilots who reported what they saw to United Airlines and to the FAA. The CIA has declassified many reports, including a lot that have police and military eyewitnesses.
I think civilian aircraft, planets, reflections and hoaxes make up the vast majority of sightings.
I would put it a little differently. Interstellar travel (of any sort, slower or faster than light) is at the very least very difficult, and any entity or entities capable of it must necessarily be much more highly advanced than we are, in technology, resources available, or both. If there are aliens visiting us, then they either want us to know of their existence, or they don’t. In either case, they should be assumed to be doing a good job of it, because of the degree of technology they must have. If they wanted us to know of their existence, then they would get our attention with something a lot more obvious than a few scattered sightings out in the sticks. If they didn’t want us to know of their existence, then it would be trivially easy for them to avoid giving us even that much.
While I agree with** Chronos** that for many reasons, the visitor from outer space thing is unlikely enough to dismiss it, I’d just say that we’re on shaky ground when we make ANY assumptions about outer space aliens. This includes imagining what they would or would not do, or want - on the basis of some perceived status of their technological prowess. They may not even perceive us. And, in fact, the ability to move around the universe at will may not require much “prowess” at all. That’s just our view of it as human beings. But if we base our imagining on our knowledge - of physics, of life on earth, etc., it would be pretty strange to think of beings that travelled gazillions of miles to, of all places, this particular rock, just to stop, sniff around, and then take off.
Who’s to say they’re traveling at the speed of light? As others have pointed out, there could quite possibly be other civilizations a million years more advanced than us. How fast do you think we’ll be able to fly in a million years? I mean, look how far we’ve come in just a hundred years of flight.
To answer the question, go to this site for all your UFO needs, wants an questions. There are stories, with videos, pics and witness accounts of multiple witness sightings.
In genuine scientific disciplines peer review is used to try and disprove new theories etc.
"Ufologists"seem to use the completely opposite approach by not even trying to give a simple solution to any observation made by people who are maybe disoriented by familiar objects seen in unusual lighting,from an unusual angle or without a frame of reference.
I recall a while ago there were reports of mysterious lights in the sky above Pensacola.
Speaking to a mate who lived there he said it was almost certainly the local skydivers(of which he was one)jumping with smoke flares.
I watched a programme called "Canadas Roswell"which was almost farcical in content.
The description of the U.F.Os and their behaviour sounded almost identical to that of some meteorites entering our atmosphere.
I dont think that possibility was even mentioned.
Also on T.V. saw what were described as inexplicable lights filmed in the night sky of,I believe Brazil.
The only inexplicable thing I found watching was that they looked inexplicably like hot air balloons flying at night.
Within our atmosphere there are an incredible number of visual phenonema,natural and manmade,not to mention astronomical optical effects from without that it would be quite miraculous if a real extraterrestial craft (If there are such things)could be seen amongst everything else.
"Ufologists"seem to be motivated by either wishfull thinking or the desire for money and celebrity.
Playing the devils advocate though,we cant say that the laws of physics make intersteller travel impossible .
There is one hell of a lot that we dont know about the laws of physics at the moment and much of our theory is purely speculative,inventing forces to match our observations and then discarding them.
Thats why amongst other things we still haven’t got a theory of everything.
I’d like to suggest that folks interested in the subject pick up Unconventional Flying Objects by Paul Hill. Hill was an engineer who worked for NASA and upon hearing accounts of regular UFO sightings by multiple people at a nearby beach went to investigate. He saw (or at least claims to have seen) several craft which were of an unknown type (i.e. they resembled no known aircraft). As Hill describes it, the conditions were clear and in broad daylight.
Hill then began spending his off hours working on the physics of such craft. He even got permission to use NASA equipment during his off hours. It’s been a while since I read the book, and I don’t remember his views, but he was scientific in his approach to the matter. For example, he describes the manuvers of a UFO and then proceeds to calculate the g-forces on the occupants during those manuvers. He looks at the power demands required to make the manuvers and shows his calculations.
What struck me when I read the book is that many of the things he said made sense and didn’t always reflect the popular views in either the UFO community or the scientific community. AFAIK, it is the most unique examination of UFOs ever published.
For my own part, after reading his book, I realized that the UFOs that I saw back in 1986 were either a type of unmanned aircraft still classified or not of Earthly origin. The amount of g-forces which would have been imposed on the occupants during one of the manuvers would have turned a human being to jelly.
When I was younger I was seriously interested in “Flying Saucers” and was a rapacious reader of all books on the subject.
I cant remember the actual book but there was a photograph of an aircraft that couldn’t possibly fly,a few years later it turned out to be the stealth fighter.
My personal opinion is that it was a little bit of subterfuge to mislead the War Pact by the C.I.A.
But all the above hinges on accurate observations of how far away an object in the sky is.
Also, despite decades of reports, (of which the vast majority have been explained), we still have no physical evidence.
Do you believe in alien abduction? We have a lot of reports of that.
Yet no Government is doing anything to investigate those claims, nor give citizens any protection.
The US Air Force has stopped investigating UFOs, which rather outweighs the single enthusiast above…
To an extent, yes, but if an object is four miles away and not three, it doesn’t necessary make a natural phenomina more likely.
We still have no physical evidence of black holes, dark matter, dark energy, or any of a number of things.
We have lots of reports of big foot and the Loch Ness monster too.
The government closed Project Blue Book because they decided that UFOs “posed no threat to national security” (i.e. it wasn’t anything the Soviets were doing). That doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible they are extraterrestrial in origin. Note that Hill doesn’t speculate on what the origin of such objects might be, only the physics involved if they’re doing what accounts that say that they do. Notice also that I offered a non-alien origin for what I saw, as well as an alien one.
Because a picture of an airplane that looked a LOT like the B-1 Stealth was shot by an amateur photographer, somehwere in Iran, a year before the Air Force acknowledged the plane’s existance.
i have a feeling that a lot of UFO rports concern experimental aircraft.
There is no B-1 Stealth. There’s a B-2 Stealth.
Certainly, a good number of sightings can be explained by experimental aircraft. Some of Burt Rutan’s planes don’t look like “normal” planes, and Popular Mechanics some years ago ran an article which compared UFO sightings to suspected designs for unmanned drones used by the various spook agencies.
There have been sightings for decades. The stealth craft have not been around that long . In the 50s and 60s we saw swamp gas according to "experts’. This and other explanations have been insulting to those who saw them.
Sure, in fact there were four of us in the car when we saw it, near dawn. Bright light, and it was staying at our exact speed in front of us. I finally pulled over. It was Venus, being exceptionally bright. We all were willing to swear it was traveling in front of us, matching our speed and (gentle) turns. Optical Illusion.