Why do some people put up Xmas lights? To celebrate the birtH of their lord, right? Probably the same reason for ETs.
Space-Jesus was probed up to his eyeballs for someone’s sins, but not mine.
That’s a pretty darn big assumption you’re making there ! Even down here on Earth we know of animals that don’t perceive the same light spectrum we do - some like dogs have a narrower range of vision, snakes see into IR and many creepy crawlies see well into UV for example. Plenty of animals are altogether blind as well. It’s really not a flight of fancy to conceptualize beings that would naturally perceive say gamma wavelengths or microwaves but no light whatsoever without tech tools. Come to think of it, considering the sheer breadth of the EM spectrum it would be pretty amazing in and of itself that beings evolved under completely different conditions, possibly based on completely different chemical processes and along completely different biological routes or even (let’s go wild) occupying different physical dimensions would have evolved to perceive the exact same narrow bits of it as us !
that’s my whole point; aliens using lights as humans would presumes they visualize things as we do. which is a bold assumption–but one you simply have to concede if you want to make the argument they would use lights on their ships for similar reasons as us.
it’s another reason the simplest explanation is lighted crafts=human crafts.
Maybe the aliens can’t perceive sound, and communicate by flashing sequences of light at each other. Those “running lights” are them trying to say “hello.”
Maybe the lights are a religious ritual required by their culture.
Maybe thats not a ship with aliens on it - maybe the ship IS an alien creature, and it has those lights because it evolved with them.
Thats the thing about aliens. They’re alien. We have no idea how life on other planets would evolve, let alone how societies on other worlds might evolve. Trying to guess at either by making human analogies isn’t going to get you very far.
again, you’re assuming that aliens are real, are coming to earth, and that sightings are aliens.
you might as well have said “they do because JUST BECAUSE.”
it’s easy to say “here’s why: we don’t know.” that’s not exactly a debate. it’s reverse engineering something you’ve already decided the answer to. what i asked was “doesn’t the presence of lights point more towards a human origin, or is there a really good theory why aliens would need lights?”
here’s the thing about paranormalists: rather than deferring to the most explicable logic, they come up with something fantastic THEN wag as to why. a great example was a time when i was on a paranormalist board and they posted pics of “black orbs” in front of the sun.
NASA has a photo segment on their site (or did at the time) where they would hastily post rather raw images temporarily before editing and/or refining the content and hosting it in proper places on the website. conspiracy/alien nuts frequented this portion, looking for anything they could speculate wildly about.
they found pics of a ‘green’ sun with black balls–which would “have to be thousands of times our planet’s size” that do not appear in the same place in consecutive photos (ie "moving,)* (hint: GIANT. ALIEN. SHIP. OH YOUR GOD!) and just about the time it was posted and shuffled around the boards, NASA pulled the pics off that portion of the site.
THEY ARE HIDING IT! THIS IS HUGE!
it took exactly 11 seconds of googling for me to find that 1. nasa was taking thermal images of the sun, and the black orbs were cooler spots of plasma (not physical bodies), that 2. you can find them in *any *thermal images of the sun, and that 3. NASA clearly states all images on that section of the site are only hosted temporarily as a kind of place holder. they were reposted in another section of the site.
when i pointed it out to the nuts, they all just kind of groaned “bah” and skulked back to their respective mother’s basements.
i pushed the issue, tho. i asked why they didn’t do the thing it took me 11 seconds to do. i asked why they didn’t research it beyond their wild fantasy based guesses.
no one but one person answered. and he said “because this is more fun.”
so. i get it–but that’s not really what i was asking here. i was asking why it makes more sense aliens would use lights than defaulting to it must be a human craft, what with the same running lights we require and all.
Is it claimed, though, that most UFOs have lights? Most videos I’ve seen have just been silver shapes.
Of course, I’ve heard of sightings too that have just been bright, rapidly moving lights, but that would be something totally different, too.
I’m not sure the concept of running lights is all that absurd. For example, the craft of various races could have software that picks up all visible light and processes it to avoid collisions, etc. Thus, running lights could be a universal design feature that helps prevent collisions without the need for an agreement between civilizations on special signaling. Just a thought.
a great deal of sighted UFOs have blinking/flashing lights. it’s a fairly common trope.
about your theory–would lasers work better? i think about the reflector we have on the moon that we can shoot with a laser and measure the reflective light. wouldn’t lasers work better for a system like that, and across greater distances with more precision?
…would lasers still look like blinking, flashing landing lights to us? hrm.
Yep, I just wonder what percent of recent sightings are reported as having lights.
Lasers would send light only in one direction and in outer space would not be visible from the sides, etc. Running lights would be visible in all directions. Also, if the craft had lasers, in the atmosphere the beam would be visible from the side because of light scattering, but it would still look like a beam and not fit the descriptions you mentioned, I believe.
Not necessarily - as I said, lights could be them expecting us to see and react to them, or it could be them broadcasting EM they “know” are invisible between themselves/back home, or the byproduct of instruments/equipment (like your mention of engine glow), and possibly they might not even be aware of their emitting light at all, or a million other things. The lights can’t even be assumed to have a purpose in the first place, much less that the purpose is one that we could dream of.
And maybe the reason they would be making so many return trips is that they’re running through an impossibly large range of ideas, options and fancy equipment to try and get us to react to *something *(or trying to get our *cars *to react…it’s weird that we’re made out of meat, y’know ? :p), and listening for reactions on totally different channels. Or it’s never the same aliens. Or it’s always the same ship but with a funky relation to time. Or we’re a rest area smack dab in the middle of an intergalactic expressway. Or we’re the galaxy’s hot P.T. Barnum attraction - “come point and laugh at the amazing retards who can’t even get off their silly rock !”. And maybe, just maybe, they haven’t even noticed us (or considered the possibility that life could exist elsewhere than wherever they’re from !).
What I’m saying is, just as we can’t even begin to comprehend how aliens would communicate with us or why they’d do things or why they’d put lights on their UFOs ; grokking us would be just as nigh-impossible for them, no matter how technologically advanced or the kind of mega brainiacs they could be. Going “well, they’re hyper advanced aliens on spaceships, they must know what they’re doing” doesn’t really change the fact that contact between alien species is preeeetty tough stuff.
Ask the dolphins, they’ve been yakking at us and wondering what’s with all the beer cans for *ages *!
doublepost
Sorry, I suppose I should have included a “By the way, I’m not an idiot,” disclaimer in my last post. I do not believe that aliens have visited, are visiting, or ever will visit Earth. I just don’t think your argument here is especially strong. We really can’t look at the behavior of these purported alien sitings and make conclusions about them based on an idea of what an alien species would or would not do, because we have absolutely no idea what an alien species would or would not do.
At any rate, even making this argument is pointless, because the best argument against alien visitation is the hard limit of the speed of light. Interstellar travel, on anything short of massive, slow-moving “generation” ships, is almost certainly impossible. We don’t need to speculate about what aliens would or would not do, because the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that it’s physically impossible for them to even get here. Anyone who’s willing to handwave away the cold, hard facts of the laws of physics isn’t going to be swayed by the idea that starships shouldn’t have running lights.
we cant make conclusions on what aliens would or would not do, but we can apply occam’s razor to the problem to start with: aircrafts have lights for human safety protocol. many “ufos” have lights. simplest conclusion would be UFOs are human spacecraft. unless there’s a more compelling debate as to why we should presume the blinky things that follow human rules are alien.
you seem to have missed the spirit of debate both ways; someone asks why, if there’s a God, does he not reveal himself. you reply “because who knows the mind of God.” when asked for debate, you reply “this is bullshit–there is no God.”
i was kind of, you know…looking for some kind of really good reason they might have lights that maybe i hadn’t thought of…like maybe some known light arrays are consistent with theoretical propulsion systems, or energy sources, or decoded messages, or something along those lines. something compelling. maybe a theoretical quantum combustion for something we don’t understand, or some kind of friscalating glimmering remnant from teleportation.
this is true. i watched a documentary about visiting aliens that had spaceships that were essentially giant tv screens. even their leader looked like someone off the cover of a magazine.
Yes, our current level of understanding is insufficient to explain how aliens could achieve interstellar travel. However, remember that at one time the state of the art means of communication was snail mail; now we have email. Who wooda thought?
Besides, everybody knows that UFO’s have lights because they are screwing with us.
Since all the descriptions of NDEs-- er, I meant UFO sightings, seem to be similar in many ways, I don’t see how anyone with half a brain would believe them.
You get trailer park individuals hopped up on cold medications, modern hippies at a campsite hopped up on trail mix and herbal tea, and the average wannabe know-it-all who knows nothing of Project Bluebook or anything about clouds or atmosphere or even astronomy.
The bright light from overhead? The flashing colored lights? Laying half-conscious on a cold slab? Someone (or something) feeling the inside of your asshole? Congratulations. You passed out on the ground, the initial bright light was the cops’ sight lamp, the colored lights were their flashers, the cold slab was the jail cell and the probing was done because you probably told them something prolific, like, “I have a bomb up my ass!”
Oh, and you left jail in a paper suit they gave you because, well, you were naked when you were arrested.
This is almost every UFO sighting. The rest are people with a Brownie camera who know nothing about lenses, wind, aircraft, etc.
When there’s a landing, or a crashing, in a major city, maybe then I’ll bite. I would actually enjoy that happening. Lots of holy buybulls would be discarded for some telescope classes.
That’s a faulty syllogism. Cats have paws. Many dogs have paws. Simplest conclusion would be that dogs are cats.
Especially considering there are many variations in UFO sightings, and a plethora of tentative explanations for them that do not involve human planes, weather balloons OR little green men - ball lightning ; corona discharges ; lenticular clouds ; St. Elmo’s fire ; aurora borealis ; swarms of tiny bugs zapped by naturally occurring electro-magnetic fields, psychosis & hallucinations ; autokinesis* ; UFO lore itself which, due to its penetration of mainstream media and the human brain’s tendency to auto-suggestion and “filling in the blanks”, certainly leads many people to see one thing but remember another entirely even if they’re not UFO kooks themselves… and last but not least : old reliable self-aggrandizing bullshit & scams :).
Did you even know that there were representations and accounts of “UFOs” long predating powered human flight ? No fooling. Whatever people see going bump in the night sky, it’s not always or necessarily an army prototype or a Russian missile test (although I’m sure some were).
Of course, it’s never aliens either.
PS: when you say “human spacecraft”, do you mean… like… actual **spacecraft **? As in, the flying cigars and the hovering teleporting triangles are really ours, not misidentified ? 'Cause in that case, I hate to have to be the one to tell you but… 
- my personal fave - it looks exactly like the “blinkenlights pulling sharp turns and zippy, trail-y motions” often described & portrayed in media. It’d also explain why “UFOs” of this type are more often than not sighted over Bumfuq, Kansas - where there are fewer spatial reference points & illumination sources at night for the brain to correct for its own fuckery
Addendum: autokinesis would also explain why these mysterious vessels vanish the instant someone points a camera at them (and their eyes focuses on the near point) and/or don’t appear on pictures or film. They’re inside your mind, brah !
One thing I have always wondered about is: what are the chances that another planet would have the same evolution as we have, to go from an amoeba,then having the comet hit the earth,destroying most of the early life and the evolution of humans coming after that,taking many millions of years. What would be the chances of this to have happened in some other of the billions of possible planets?
Activate the focus disruptor!