Another example of a possible explanation that wouldn’t have occurred even to intelligent, imaginative thinkers until recent decades. Look at the science fiction of the 1950s: they could imagine FTL interstellar travel but still thought of workers manually building spaceships with welding torches and rivet guns; a few might have thought of having robots do the welding and riveting (with human compatible hand tools).
What I’m thinking of is exemplified by a couple of lines from Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, where the human protagonist is inquiring of a member of the (as it turns out, ONLY non-ascended race besides Humanity):
“There have been many legends suggesting that Earth has been visited in the past by other races.”
“I know: I’ve read the Historical Research Section’s report. It makes Earth look like the crossroads of the Universe.”
If the Air Force seriously believed there were alien craft freely roaming our skies, it’s much more likely their “agenda” would have been to lobby Congress for a ton more money for investigation and defense against the little green men.
It’s a common thread among proponents of various crank ideas, including antivax mythology, assassination conspiracies etc. that only a few Brave Mavericks have come out in support of them because they’re afraid of ridicule/censure/losing their jobs or even being killed (see the Holistic Doctor Murder Conspiracy). The major reason scientists don’t get involved in UFOlogy is that they see it as a nonsensical waste of time.
Speaking of J. Allen Hynek, his career seems have followed a descending arc if this statement is any indication:
OoooOoooOOO.
*Hynek did get a cameo in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which may or may not indicate a reputational boost.
However, these sightings are almost exclusively witness statements with no physical corroboration. We can’t rely on such accounts - they may all be honest mistakes, and almost certainly are. (I’m discounting the obvious fakes here).
In recent years a number of film clips have become available, many of which are impeccably sourced from US Navy sources. Surely these clips demonstrate beyond question that existence of an unknown phenomenon, whether it be aliens or @Lumpy’s mysterious’ something’ 'outside our current experience;.
However, detailed analysis of each of these clips indicate that they can all be explained by phenomena which are mundane and terrestrial, or sometimes celestial objects such as out-of-focus stars. See Mick West’s Metabunk forum for more details. Sure, these objects might be aliens or extradimensional ghosts piercing the very fabric of reality; but they almost certainly aren’t, but instead they are distant objects in the Low Information Zone, where we can’t quite see what they are one way or another.
Hynek was almost certainly premature in abandoning his scepticism. There has been no convincing evidence of an exotic origin for these phenomena since his conversion in the 1960s from unbeliever to believer - not one good photograph or film clip, no physical, testable remains, no alien DNA, nothing.
One thing that I always find interesting is that aliens-as-UFO proponents think that aircraft pilots who are witnesses add credibility to the aliens explanation for some reason. IMHO the only time that a pilot as a witness would offer unbeatable credibility would be if he/she also was an astrophysicist and metallurgist who somehow managed to get incontrovertible evidence. Otherwise he/she is just another vehicle driver who happens to be at a higher altitude.
Those who jump to conclusions or assumptions that something of unidentified origin in the sky is extraterrestrial in nature always seen to fall into the trap of getting into their own heads and immediately assigning imagined characteristics and motivations of the object(s).
I usually dismiss someone’s credibility when they use phrases like “it appeared to be signaling the others”, “it was trying to avoid being pursued”, “it was as large a school bus”, “it flashed it’s lights in a pattern” etc.
These are characteristics assigned by someone’s imagination. Not scientific observations.
The same person could spend 30 minutes watching a paper bag in a windy alleyway and come up with an entire story for what it was trying to accomplish.
What makes you think that? They wanted people to think the explanation was aliens, because that distracts people away from the real secrets, like actual experimental airplanes or balloons or whatever. Project Blue Book was a genuine government conspiracy, and to a large degree, it succeeded.
The only controversy was essentially a bunch of conspiracy theories that probably comprised a giant administrative hassle for the government.
Neither of which possess any special expertise. I was a naval officer and if I saw any mysterious things o’the sea I would likely be less qualified to discuss them than a marine biologist.
Yeah, by the time you’re reduced to saying “but what if reality itself isn’t what we presume?” you’re pretty much grasping at straws. P.S. gonna add “quotidian” to my vocabulary.
See OP: “a number of accounts that seem dubious and contradictory.”
First of all, my sincere apologies to you Lumpy for the “brain spasm” comment. Totally inappropriate.
Surely even Great Debates is here for our entertainment, even if that means chewing over well trod ground. I’ll remember to stay out of discussions that look to me like they’re circling the drain. Again, sorry.
Wasn’t it Voltaire who said, “If UFOs did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them”?
Going back to the earliest days, one of mankind’s grand traditions has been telling tales about the things that exist just beyond the light of the campfire. How boring would life be without UFOs, Bigfoot or the occasional Chupacabra or Mothman?
Let’s take the “Wayback Machine” to the year 1938.
On Halloween morning, 1938, Orson Welles awoke to find himself the most talked about man in America. The night before, Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air had performed a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, converting the 40-year-old novel into fake news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. Some listeners mistook those bulletins for the real thing.
Even a Halloween radio broadcast that should have easily been recognized as entertainment triggered panic among many people followed by controversy, criticism, law suits, and even a criminal investigation. So, imagine that the government, instead of trying to debunk the idea of an alien presence, suddenly decided to just come clean and announce to the public that:
“What appear to be alien spacecraft are roaming our atmosphere at will, and the purpose is at this time unknown. They appear to be technologically advanced to the point where we cannot control their actions but, fortunately, there has not yet been any hostile actions by any of the craft observed.”
Yeah, that would go over real well with the public. LOL
Look, I think the whole thing has been blown way out of proportion by people who want to sensationalize the idea through exaggeration and embellishment and even with downright fake reports. The lunatic fringe are being kidnapped by aliens in droves to the point where the aliens would have to have a medical center the size of a city to deal with them all. I get that and don’t buy into it.
I do, however, think that explorers from another world or worlds have visited us just like we want to go out and explore all the planets in our solar system and then things beyond. I also believe that the chances are small that you would find little green men inside most of them because they are probably AI operated. The galaxy is a big place containing billions of stars. Unmanned and highly sophisticated craft make a lot of sense, and the direction in which we ourselves are moving lends credence to the idea.
There’s that pesky speed of light restriction, and that the Voyagers will take roughly 70,000 years to reach their destinations, which are the closest star systems to ours. Entire species will have come and gone by then, possibly including our own. How are extraterrestrials coping with that?
I’m going to assume that you are old enough (experienced) and educated enough (worldly) to know that, even in a span of just 500 years, what was once considered impossible has become common place. To say that an alien culture that is, say, 10,000 years more advanced than us, cannot do things that we cannot do just doesn’t hold water.
God, we are so arrogant as a species. There are people who say that one of the reasons why aliens should make direct contact is so we can exchange technology. Hah! Yeah, I’m sure that would be the equivalent of trading cell phones for stone hatchets. LOL
So your answer to the means to exceed the speed of light is that we’re too arrogant to think otherwise? The nerve of Einstein, suggesting mass approaches infinity at that point. The Hadron Collider is still working on that, and have only managed to work their way up to 0.999999990 c under tightly controlled conditions, with only one proton at that. Maybe if they were less arrogant, they’d use more than one proton, disprove physics, and we could build Star Trek.
