i sure want to believe in paranormal stuff, but i sure don’t. at all.
it has always been the first problem i find with UFO sightings: the blinking, colorful lights. even as a kid, i would think “gee, aren’t those lights safety measures for earth-only DOT compliance? are aliens really rigging up their crafts to be DOT safe?”
i hadn’t thought much about it lately until i saw last weekend’s 60 minutes with the Bin Laden Seal Team Six blabbermouth talking about the covert op. when he mentioned the part about the choppers flying in under the radar with all lights off, i thought “why aren’t aliens this smart?”
so. is there a reasonable theory why aliens would need flashing, extra-attention grabbing lights…or does the presence of blinking lights pretty much guarantee that these UFOs are 100% man-made?
(for the record, i believe aliens probably *statistically *exist but i think every UFO sighting is just some man created vehicle. there’s a reason most UFO sightings cluster around military bases…)
The photons are a harmless byproduct of the inertia damping field they use for extreme G maneuvers.
The actual reason is that the things that people are mistaking as flying saucers at night are visible, so they by necessity are things that are lit up.
confirming my suspicion: the first identifiable feature of a UFO is also a keypoint for debunking it being extra-terrestrial.
i guess there has to be a clarification of terminology: when i say UFO i mean the ones people are convinced are alien spacecraft. i know technically a thing i am pretty sure is a balloon but might be a bird is actually a UFO, but that’s not what i mean by UFO.
i watched a documentary about some of the more well documented UFO sightings, and in one a guy was talking about the “alien writing” on the bottom of the crashed UFO wings (spoiler: it was russian).
“There’s one! Turn on the lights! Hah, he sees us! Uh oh he’s getting out a camera, turn 'em off! Wait for it…he’s put away the camera! Turn the lights back on!”
Perhaps the lights serve some purpose unknown to us, and the aliens, having evolved under a different sun (or suns) having different properties, don’t realize they are visible to humans under a yellow star.
Weeell bright illumination would be a pretty non-dumb safety measure for superfast spacecrafts, for the exact same reason bright lights are a good idea on (relatively, on the speed of light scale) your slow as balls Earthling aeroplanes and supertankers, wouldn’t they ? Light moves fast, and if the other ship can see you coming it can move, bitch, get out the way.
Especially if you posit that said spacecrafts would operate on relatively narrow “shipping lanes” for one reason or another (e.g. avoiding or precision-slingshotting through gravity wells, or using some sort of hypergates/wormholes network…).
But even if they didn’t, avoiding 1 in a million collisions at half the speed of light still sounds like it would be worth duct taping a couple maglites on your flying saucer. After all, two military submarines (one British, one French) narrowly avoided running into each other in the vast, empty 3D space that is the Atlantic Ocean recently, just because they couldn’t hear or see each other and were running at the exact same depth by sheer “luck”. If space is an ocean, and space operas have thoroughly established that it is :), we must conclude that the same thing could happen in space, no ?
Finally, the OP’s implicit assumption is that aliens visiting us would try and stay hidden. Why ? If *we *were out there in the black, scouring the void in search of intelligent lifeforms to meet, greet and possibly eat ; wouldn’t we broadcast on every possible wavelength to try and get their attention ?
so they have unfathomable engine and propulsion technology, but still hang on to flashing lights to be the best method of collision avoidance? the general rule of thumb is that humans are far less advanced than aliens would be, yet we aren’t even relying on a “blinky lights means move” collision avoidance when pertaining to hypersonic flight (see here).
a few other key points: we don’t put blinking lights on the ISS or satellites, and i am sure there are better methods for avoiding debris than a flashing light, esp. in space, such as GPS tracking and trajectory calculation. even the flight path pattern nasa was purported to be working on for the oncoming influx of flying cars relies more on computerized flight pattern mapping and automation than “if you see a light, move.” it’s not reliable enough (line of sight obfuscation is a big cause for a lot of midair collisions, which is why thisexists).
maybe we would, but you have to make the assumption they do not want to be contacted or seen, as they “zip away at impossible speeds” as soon as they are caught on camera and have yet to make contact. they never land and never come out and just address us. they come here and flitter away the second anyone notices them. this isn’t my concept, it’s just a mainstay of ufo lore. i would posit the mechanics of just about every UFO sighting in history alludes to ships who really don’t want to be noticed.
The key thing to ask about any hypothesis is, “What would disprove this? What evidence would cause me to dump this hypothesis and go looking for a new one?”
If the answer is “Nothing could possibly disprove this”, you have a dogma, not a hypothesis. (Or, in math-land, you have an axiom, except in math-land being able to derive a real (falsidical) paradox from a given axiom system kinda-sorta ‘disproves’ that axiom system.)
at first they didn’t have lights, they used radar and low light and IR to navigate. the only people who talked about them had stories of being probed. the shape shifter infiltrating aliens among us phoned home and said this was putting them in a bad light (ha punny); that people were only babbling about probing. they turned on the lights so that people would have other stories to tell about them.
First of all: GPS tracking & positioning relies on a whole bunch of satellites. I think we can rule that out in the context of interplanetary travel across uncharted space
Second: I’m positing spaceships flying ridiculously fast over ridiculous distances. Radar equivalents wouldn’t necessarily work in that context, because by the time the echo came back you’d already be there ; and while you *can *predict the course of inert debris and asteroids in advance you can’t really plan on running into another spaceship moving just as ridiculously fast in the other direction. I’ll readily admit I don’t know elementary physics near well enough to know whether that’s utterly retarded a concept or not.
Lastly: while we do rely on more and redundant means of avoiding collisions… we still stick lights on planes and ships as a last ditch/backup. We also rely on advanced satellite burst communications to transmit messages between/to ships at sea, but they also bring bog standard radios along, and signal lamps, and distress flares, *and *coded flags. Just in case, or just because each set of equipment occupies a slightly different communication niche. Just because you’re hip with the new, doesn’t mean you have to discard the old, especially if it’s as effortless and costless as turning your brights on.
But if the collision avoidance thing doesn’t work for you, and since I was just talking about it : simple communication over unimaginably vast distances would also be a reason to mount a laser-like lantern, reflector dish or disco ball on the hood of your shiny new Jeep Orionranger. As far as I understand it - which is as far as the liquor store - all waves move at the same speed in a vacuum (not that space is a true vacuum, but bear with me), and we use radio wavelengths for communication purposes because they’re invisible to our eyes on top of having different propagation patterns within our atmosphere and less pollution caused by human activity.
If the aliens’ sensory apparatus works differently than ours then maybe the light spectrum could be their go-to 'invisible" communication band, I dunno.
I don’t know that it is - for example, the foo fighters described (and sometimes photographed) by WW2 pilots wouldn’t zip away, some have been described as joining airplane formations, dancing around them like playful light bugs and so forth. Plenty of tripped out dudes will swear up and down that UFOs have beamed signals directly at them. Another mainstay of UFO lore is also that the UFOs have made contact and the Men In Black are keeping it hush-hush, working with them or what have you. And that’s not even getting into the whole, *really *whackadoodle Ancient Aliens helping build the pyramids crap.
But regardless of all that, and since we can both agree that UFO lore is by and large a bunch of hooey, I was thinking more in terms of “If UFOs came, would they have lights ?” rather than exploring the finer internal contradictions and mutually exclusive premises of a bunch of hooey ;).
Not to hijack the OP, but why would they even enter our airspace anyway? “Hey, lets venture 100 light years over in that direction, and if we detect modulated RF coming from the planet we’ll immediately zoom down over Buttcrack, Iowa to see what’s going on!”
i see your point. we might be coming at this from two different starting points. my thinking is it makes far greater sense to presume the very human-like, terrestrial running lights are attributed to human construction/function rather than coming up with some reason how it makes MORE sense that aliens would just employ the same relatively weak technology…
when i pose the question: “why would aliens have running lights–doesn’t it make more sense that we are just misidentifying human crafts since those lights are a human construct?” --the easier default is “yes, human lightworks would seem to indicate human origin.”
to build a case it is “more likely” alien would have these lights would require attributing a lot of human technologies and mentalities to beings we automatically presume are so far beyond our technological abilities we can’t even predict it.
we also have to assume vision works the same way with them, and light is visible on the same wavelengths, and lights retain benign signal meanings (after all, the released dove in mars attacks was a sign of aggression).
i can think of this: if i went to an alien planet, i would be pretty afraid to blink various colored lights at them for fear it might signal something unthinkable to me.
so i see your point: if you want to posit the question “if aliens were real and DID come, why would their crafts have lights,” then ok, i get it. that assumes the ufos ARE real and they DO have lights, so let’s try to guess why.
i would guess the lights are part of some stability or propulsion system/energy source and we don’t understand it.
i still think traveling at hyperspeed makes light moot. i dont think you could see it quickly enough to move. all i’m saying is i can’t get on board with “lights for safety protocol in space.” signaling, maybe. landing safety, maybe. but as i said before, if aliens are coming here to make contact they sure are being elusive about it.
good point, and one i forgot to address in my last post to Kobalt2.
if all of those ufos are alien, we clearly are not “out in uncharted space.” it would be obviously charted, PRECISELY, as they would be making thousands and thousands of return trips here.
Apparently not going by Wiki, but then again their mission is to watch passively, not try and make contact. And the majority of them are limited to missions within the Solar system, which we’re already pretty darn sure is barren.
All of them do have radio emitter-receivers however, if only to send post cards back home.
