NASA picks its UFO-hunting – sorry – unidentified aerial phenomena-hunting team NASA has announced the names of 16 individuals who will be a part of its unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) research group that begins work today. The study into UAP, which NASA defines as sky-based events that cannot be attributed to aircraft or natural phenomena, will take around nine months to complete. While most people …
Except that there's little evidence the majority of reports involve anything aerial. Some well known UFO reports involve things like fishing boats, oil platforms, a variety of stars, planets and the bloody Moon. Plenty of others are just blurs on a picture or a scratched lens, or just outright faked or invented from nothing. If you're going to come up with a new name for UFOs because they don't necessarily involve flying objects, making the new name just as wrong doesn't really help matters.
We're 150,000 years down the line and we still fight over areas of dirt, dirty black goop we suck out of the ground and most people think the height of tech is being able to see tits on their mobile phone!
I'm pretty sure that if there's intelligent life out there, then there's probably an invisible sign post around our solar system saying, "Care in the Community Programme in progress. Enter at your own risk! Lowering of intelligence likely to occur if you encounter humankind.".
I have always found it an interesting phenomenon, that since the advent of pretty much everyone now carrying mobile phone cameras with high resolution, the number of reports of alien visitations, has dropped off a cliff.
Either the Aliens are camera shy or the fact that people can demand proof with a high expectation that said person would have had their phone with them, means that braggards move on to other easier claims to fake ("You should have seen the fish I caught it was this big!!!").
Still it's also a shame that we're past the point that experimental aircraft can look so weird and awesome, and actually need to be built in order to test. All the testing is now done with computers these days... *grumble, grumble, grumble*...
Did you ever watch a person preparing to take a picture? Pick up the phone, unlock it, chase camera app, touch at least 3 or 5 options to get that perfect picture, center the phone on the subject, wait for the image to stabilize, take the picture. Say 1 to 2 minutes. Do you think the UFO will hold for that long?
> everyone now carrying mobile phone cameras with high resolution, the number of reports of alien visitations, has dropped off a cliff.
Aha! That's because the aliens can easily avoid anyone with a mobile phone - the phone's signal can be used to triangulate our location. There are just as many aliens on earth now as in the 1970s, but now we're walking around lit up like EMF lighthouses!
/ I'm not actually a UFO believer, but I enjoyed this logic!
"I have always found it an interesting phenomenon, that since the advent of pretty much everyone now carrying mobile phone cameras with high resolution, the number of reports of alien visitations, has dropped off a cliff."
If anything, there are many more "sightings". The problem is that the people holding the cameras have no fucking idea how to take photos or video! Back in the days of film cameras, I'd suggest that they were more expensive to buy and very much more expensive to use, so people tended to at least learn the basics of how to use them. Wasted shots cost money! Modern people with modern "point and click" phones expect the phone to do all the work for them. Hell, most of them have no idea you can rotate the phone 90o to take in a wider shot! And most of them swing the phone around wildly like they're dancing the Pogo on steroids. Billions more cameras out there and far fewer useful images.
There seems to be a decent amount of evidence for something that moves very rapidly through the air and changes direction very quickly and I would not be at all surprised if we get some really interesting and weird science out of this. Not aliens, sure, but _something_ interesting and novel or some weird long-theorised phenomenon that nobody thought would behave in this way.
I still think UFOs are a load of hoohey but having seen some interesting docs on NetFlix like the Unsolved Mysteries series, where credible people see something interesting, shrug their shoulders and say "No idea what it was but it was something different!", I'm little more intrigued in the less easily explainable sightings.
Agreed. If you watch those shows through the eyes of a sceptic, there are some interesting photos and videos from otherwise credible witnesses. Some seem fairly obvious, but the talking heads and narrator will big up the UFO angle as much as possible. Some are less obvious, and while still not agreeing with the show that it's aliens, there is something strange or odd. In the case of video evidence, I find many of those shows only show the bit of the film that supports their claim. They will probably tell you, if challenged, that they only have so long per episode so can't show everything in it's entirety. But they do have the time to show the shortened clip multiple time while cutting to and from talking heads. I remember one in particular where they claimed "alien orbs" and I thought "insects really close to the camera". They cut the video short right at the point where we would be able to see if the "alien orb" passed in front of or behind the bush that was about 2-3 metres away.
Its not mentioned in the article at all, but I thought it's interesting. Frank Drake was the founder of modern SETI experiments, developed the Drake equation for estimating the number of intelligent lifeforms we can discover, and designer of the Pioneer plaque and the Discovery record.
Frank Drake was part of the team on the Pioneer Plaque and the Voyager Golden Disc, but the credit really goes to Carl Sagan, as the originator of the plaque and project director on the disc.
Jim Moray tells the tale: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RPxCN8pNxWM
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