I’ve never heard anyone suggest that the rings of Saturn could by any stretch of the imagination be unique. On the other hand, like planetary life, our statistical sample is pretty small so we are free to speculate.
That was poorly phrased on my part. To be clear, the rings of Saturn are surely not unique, but they may be well be unusual in the fact that they are big, massive, very bright rings, which is unusual even in our own solar system: all of the other gas giants in our solar system have rings too but they are small and faint.
Other planetary rings were discovered more recently. Saturn’s were observed in 1610 but only known to be rings in 1655. Uranus’s in were discovered in 1977, Jupiter’s in 1979, and Neptune’s in 1989.
Unique, no; but they are likely quite unusual. Rings as spectacular as Saturn’s are temporary affairs, we’re just lucky enough to be around and able to see them at their height.
I agree with Tyson’s assessment, including his thoughts on light-speed travel. At best (or worst), some of these sighted objects could be some sort of supersonic craft created by our political enemies, and that we have no information about.
Quasi-off-topic, but so far nobody has bothered to start a new thread here, which surprises me.
Anyway, Perseverance found a weird rock on Mars which appears to contain similar features to Terran rocks which once were part of a floodplain:
I don’t think this has been mentioned yet, so I’ll include it here. Better if it had been a couple posts above the @John_DiFool’s legit post.
That’s… not coherent. We suppose UFO’s are vessels for extraterrestrial beings because we are beings that shape our experiences and observe that we make things happen, and events happen for because of intensions, so if we observe something strange, we project that it must have a thinking cause that has intent.
People have weird dream experiences, and interpret those experiences through the zeitgeist of the time. Whether it’s angels and demons, elves and fairies, incubi and succubi, or ghosts, it’s people projecting explanations.
Aliens were the revolutionary idea that came when science began to show other planets were celestial objects like Earth. “They must be inhabited.” Boom, strange sightings, hallucinations, and dreams are now aliens. In spacecraft, because humans need spacecraft.
People then attribute any strange observation to the common expected story.
Dubious and contradictory is the hallmark they are not the same things. Looking for one common explanation is dubious.
Common experiences that the observer has never experienced.
I’ve seen three or four UFOs in my life.
The first - driving at night, large flash in the sky, with a sparkle trail like a big firework. “What was that?” Then I learned about bolide meteors.
Driving home from work just before dusk, saw a bright flash of light in the empty blue sky. Looked around, discovered a small plane from the small airport behind my apartment and the angle in the sky from the setting sun. Light momentarily flashed off the plane because of the geometry of motion.
One day midday I was driving around the lake and spotted an odd, flashing ball moving around in the sky. Later, I noticed my apartment complex had some mylar balloons tied out.
Each time I didn’t know what it was at first, but then identified the “flying object” afterwards. But imagine if I were less observant, and more credulous. They might still be unexplained observations. “Aliens did it!”
There’s a lot if ignorance and credulity involved in the “unexplainable” sightings. I came across a UFO sighting post a number of years ago, where the poster had taken video of two glowing balls flying in formation and rapidly receding into the distance, and breathlessly reported it an an obvious UFO sighting.
I, however, could clearly see the faintly illuminated shape of the distinctive vertical fin and downturned tailplanes between the two glowing twin jet exhausts of the F-4 Phantom jet climbing to altitude. “Unidentified” only because the observer hadn’t a clue what they were looking at. “A plane? In the sky? Nonsense - it must be a UFO!”