If the aliens were smart, they’d disguise their saucers as pink flying cows. No report would ever be taken seriously. Clearly, we only get visited by the dumber kinds of extraterrestrial.
Most UFOs don’t have running lights. That’s why we don’t notice them hovering over New York, London, Paris, your bedroom window . . .
How would we expect extraterrestrial spacecraft to appear?
I would say, given the advanced tech, that if they’d chosen visible craft, I’d expect a few WTF features from our perspective.
And I’d also like to try to reclaim the term UFO.
I once saw a UFO. I don’t think it was of extraterrestrial origin.
The Apollo Lunar Module had a light beacon to make it more easily visible to the Command Module during docking. The Agena vehicle that Gemini practiced docking maneuvers with also had running lights. Don’t believe the Shuttle, ISS, Russian Soyuz/Progress crafts had/have any need for docking lights anymore.
I cant tell if you are playing devil’s advocate or what, but this analogy is bullshit. It would be apt if you said “bigfoots are furry…I saw something furry. I saw Bigfoot.” Dogs and cats are tangible and substantiated, so speculating a furry, pawed creature being one of these things we know do exist would be reasonable, if still incorrect. Manifesting a fictional new creature=alien theorists.
That mentality is how bumps in the night become ghosts and so on.
And of course not every misidentified object in the sky has to be something manmade, which is why no one has said that. Things with blinking lights, esp ones that make shape formations really tend to indicate terrestrial aircraft. But if you have a single reasonable explanation where the most logical, simplest and reasonable conclusion of the sky-thing being aliens, argue for It. That is what the op was asking…for a reasonable excuse as to why defaulting to aliens would be the most logical answer.
So…? Why’s is aliens a better answer, logically?
The shuttle nor the ISS have lights. The shuttles have no running, anti collision nor docking lights, not even on approach when landing on earth.
If our spacecrafts do not need safety lights, it is hard to imagine aliens do.
I am indeed playing devil’s advocate to some extent, but it’s not an analogy at all - it’s an equivalent syllogism, in formal logic terms. Faulty syllogisms are bad and you should feel bad ! 
Occam’s Razor and syllogisms have their place, and they are valid logic tools when used properly - but you’re employing them badly in this case, that’s all.
Doesn’t matter that the conclusions you draw from them are correct (for a given value of correct - as I said, there are plenty of equally and more often than not more adequate explanations for given UFO sightings than “aircraft”), the path you take to reach that conclusion is still wrong ; and my high school math teachers would award you no points for a correct result reached by incorrect means.
The utter*, *utter bastards. No you betweeded fucks, I haven’t forgotten, and I haven’t forgiven. Soon.
That’s really the thing - they don’t necessarily, not by a long shot. Do read up on autokinesis. Fast moving blinking lights in the sky, zipping around at extreme speeds, making improbable turns or positioning themselves in “geometric patterns” and “formations” are exactly the sort of things one can perceive watching lone, immobile stars or distant ground light sources at night in the “desert”, especially when under stress, intoxication or sleep deprivation.
It’s really quite fascinating and dare I say wondrous a phenomenon.
Atmospheric & cloud patterns also “work” just as well - I’m just more personally partial to biological wonky as a concept and source of wonder. But I’ll readily admit, I’m easily impressed and get a perverse kick out of human imperfection 
I don’t - for one thing I don’t believe in alien visitations, for another I don’t believe there is a single explanation for all UFOs, or even each discrete subset of UFO sightings. Reality is messy and complex as shit even before you introduce human factors.
Nor do I suggest defaulting to aliens as the most logical answer - I’ve just given you a laundry list of phenomenons any given sighting could be (and should be ruled out) before one goes to little green men… or to military planes. And in my profound ignorance, I’m probably forgetting/ignoring about a hundred others.
I’m just saying that you’re just as utterly wrong as crack UFOlogists are when you handwave the problem away as or reduce it to “it’s human made, duh” based on nothing but facile and faulty logic.
Even when and if it really is human made.
when i say it’s an airplane and it IS an airplane, i’m still wrong.
k, got it.
of course, it’s not faulty logic–you’ve reduced the claim to one i haven’t made, then attacked it (i think they call this a strawman, and i have no idea why you’d reduce to that level–playing devil’s advocate to that low level is tantamount to another common internet game. one i don’t see the point of playing, since we already agreed on the premise of this debate.
do you just NEED to debate? is it masturdebation for you?
the point is i never handwaved away *all *UFO claims as airplanes based on “faulty logic.” i never discussed *all *UFOs ever, in any part of this thread, not even once. and if you consider it faulty logic to consider aircraft with wings and lights near military bases “airplanes,” the i guess it’s faulty. i, on the other hand, consider things like extremely airplane-y “formation” lights that blink red and such to be fairly in-line with descriptions of nightflying airplanes. esp. when the “formation” is triangular (wings/nose/tail lights, batwing plane designs, stealth planes and drones).
do you know how many UFO sighting descriptions match the exact description of both the sr-71 and the stealth bomber (the “ufo” sightings came before the planes were declassified. dubious, that. i guess it’s faulty logic to presume those UFO sightings were most likely those jets–better consider them being giant birds, meteors, glowing clouds or any other possible thing, huh?)
what about the Falcon HTV-2, which is a wedge-shaped hypersonic drone that goes up to like 15-20thousand miles per hour?
it sure has a UFO-like appearance. and i utterly positive anyone who isn’t up on current military tech would see it and scream UFO, even if they aren’t nutjobs.
or for that matter, the truck-loaded x64b what was reported as a UFO under a tarp by tons of people as it made its way across the US? (anecdote: i saw it on the side of the road on the truck coming out of st louis and said “people are going to say that’s a ufo, just you wait…”)
drawing a conclusion based on a variety of convincing evidence isn’t “faulty” logic. it is if you build a strawman and pretend i have some dogmatic belief that every UFO is an airplane–but i can’t help you making that up. i never said it. and dismissing a decision based on logical evidence as “faulty” is exactly the mentality paranormalists cling to. they say “hey, now–HOW CAN YOU BE SUUUURE?! you have to consider every possible thing, even the most ludicrous and insane.” that is what they need to make their belief structure work–but it’s bullshit, they don’t live their day to day life that way–and neither do you. you (and them, which i am calling “you guys” from now on) don’t agonize over bent light and flaws in perceptions when you go through green lights. you have faith built on evidence and just trust that there’s not some dimensional curvature in time-space that makes oncoming cars invisible. you don’t wait to consider every possible scenario before pressing the gas (hey man, you could have had an aneurism that makes you think the light was green when it was red. you could have just had a stroke, etc etc.)
the point is it is impossible to live life that way, and none of you do it.
call it a faulty syllogism, but the rest of mankind (and you, when you’re not being contrary) make well informed decisions based on evidence. that’s not faulty. it’s just how life works.
so…
go back and re-read the OP. i asked something about blinking lighted aircraft that people call UFOs. i asked about THAT, SPECIFICALLY, and now you want to argue about swamp gas and unlighted shiny things and balloons and birds and i don’t even know what-all, as if i was referring to every known ufo sighting ever in history of all time.
i wasn’t. and i clearly stated what i was talking about.
this is a big problem with this forum–rather than people paying attention to what people say in GD, they just make up their own debate then argue that.
so congrats! you win the argument you made up–not *all *UFO sightings are planes. but i was talking about the ones with running/blinking lights. many have light patterns that match the layouts of known terrestrial aircraft. many other have been fully debunked as classified or experimental aircraft. there’s still not a reasonable theory as to why one should default to aliens.
and that was pretty much the gist of the whole point.
They’re obviously low beams. The high beams are the ones faster than light.
I thought you would be linking to the short story, itself. Instead you linked to someone who actually dramatized it. Cool Points for You! That was hilarious.
Getting back to the OP’s point. No life form will evolve that uses a wavelength of EM radiation that isn’t well into it’s sun’s peak emission. No life form we’ve ever found can see a wavelength that isn’t pretty damn copious in its environment. And easily distinguishable. We can pretty well say that there will never be a life-form that sees in the VHF range. Why? Because anything that could is dealing with temperatures too cold for there to be any significant selection pressure for differentiating the signals they receive, and they would have to have ‘eyes’ that actually work (i.e. are one or two meters across), in that environment. Sure. I can imagine that. I can’t see how it would be useful for it to come here (shit-loads of light-years) and ‘anal probe’ random rednecks.
If they are here at all, they see in pretty damn near the same wavelengths. Or they wouldn’t be here.
I’m not straw manning or playing games - I’m going by what you’re saying and replying to that. Not what you think you say, or what you meant, or what is obvious to you. All I have is your words, I’m not a mind reader.
I didn’t say you did.
You didn’t mention anything about wings, military bases or anything else than “lights” in that faulty syllogism I pointed out to you. Maybe you had them in mind, but how the hell am I supposed to know ?
And again, you’re moving the goalposts and adding information afterwards. All you were talking about in the posts I responded to was flickering lights.
And now you’re adding shapes, too ? What’s next, “Of course something that had USAF markings I never mentioned is not extra terrestrial, what a maroon !” ?
Again, read what **you **wrote. Read it again. Read it once more.
All I was saying is that if the only element of a given UFO story is “it had lights”, or even “it had lights extremely reminiscent of the lights airplanes have”, then **that **is not enough to immediately assess it as an aeroplane, military or otherwise. You need more contextual data than that. Got it this time ?
Now, with that in mind, and with the clarifications you’ve now added, I’m… not quite sure what it is you wish to debate. “Are specific UFOs that have been conclusively identified as planes, exhibit plane-like behaviour, are witnessed in the vicinity of an airport and are in the shape of planes, in fact, planes ?”.
Well yes, yes they might just be at that. Congratulations on your keen deductive mind.
“Do we have reasons to assume a priori that the subset of UFOs that are planes are not in fact planes ?”, no, no we don’t, not as such, no. Once again, congratulations on passing Things We Already Know 101 with a minor in Tautology summa cum laude.
Seriously, what *is *the debate you want to have here ?
No, you talked about blinking lights in the context of UFO sightings, of which there is a very large variety. The word “aircraft” is not present once in the OP. You go back and re-read it, I’ll wait.
I would imagine the life span of some alien from outer space would have to be many thousands of years of age, or like the monarch butterflies ,several generations would have to start out, then propagate while coming and going, to get here even at the speed of light! Perhaps one day in the distant future human’s may know…if they haven’t blown themselves to pieces before then!
they are conventional human aircraft.
nitpick: Due to time dilation, any journey would take zero time in the local reference frame at c. Or at least, that’s the limit as velocity tends to c.
Or atmospheric/astronomical phenomena, or hallucinations, or hoaxes; a category as broad as “stuff in the air we don’t recognize” is generally going to have more than one cause.
as apposed to the regular flying cows?
or cows flying aircraft?
Given the distances between solar systems it wouldn’t make sense to travel by conventional ship. It would be a function of traveling in a way we can only theorize. And any exploratory expedition would involve micro robotic probes that would move undetected.
Disclaimer- I don’t believe in the ET explanation for UFOS but-
…some people in this thread have given some fairly sensible reasons why these things might have lights on them. Lets see if there are any more.
One almost sensible idea suggested to me once was that the lights are camouflage. You can’t see the exact shape of the craft because the lights are shining in your eyes. Something like WW1 dazzle camouflage, but with lights.
Another is that the lights are part of the drive phenomenon. If they turn them off they fall out of the sky. Perhaps they are waste heat radiators or something.
My own ‘theory’ is that the ufonauts have forgotten where the off switch is. They’ve been flying around in these fully automated, voice-activated spacecraft for so long they’ve forgotten what most, or all, of the controls do. they don’t even know the external lights are on.
I don’t see this as unrealistic. Assuming that aliens would have eyes or some alien equivalent, they would need running lights for the same reasons we need them. There are a lot of reasons why UFO’s as flying saucers from another planet are implausible, but this isn’t one of them, IMHO anyway.
Either way you have to make some assumptions. You are assuming that aliens wouldn’t use lights and that they would want to hide. I’d say that’s as valid as the assumption that aliens would use running or other lights and do not want to hide. Either is equally plausible…or, equally implausible.
Oh, I’m about 99% sure that most if not all alien sightings were either swamp gas reflecting Venus, some other natural phenomena or military (or even civilian) air craft of one type or another. The only reason I don’t say 100% is, well, I never think anything is 100% sure. 
And I DO believe that there is alien life out there…I’m, well, 99% sure of that. I’m fairly sure that there is alien life (outside of the Earth) in our own solar system (say, 60% sure), in fact. In the Galaxy? 99%. In the Universe? 99.999999999999999…% sure. I’m less sure there is intelligent life out there, but even there I’m thinking…well, 99.998% in the universe, so…