NASA experts looked through 800 UFO sightings and found essentially nothing

Experts leading NASA's study on unidentified anomalous phenomena – what we now call UFOs – have studied 800 unclassified events recorded over 27 years, and found that only two to five percent of cases are truly unexplainable. The panel, formed last year, is made up of 16 people ranging from scientists and biz execs to federal …

[jake]

"The panel only analyzed unclassified events"

More fodder for the conspiracy loons, then? Perhaps trying to get some of the more vocal nutjobs off the politics thing?

"if you see something odd, you're not a loon for letting Uncle Sam know."

But PLEASE, for gawd/ess's sake learn how to make a reliable report! And try not to look/act/sound like a fucking nutjob while you are doing it.

"The current existing data and eyewitness reports alone are insufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of every UAP event,"

And yet virtually every man.woman and child in the Western Hemisphere has had access to a digital camera 24/7 this last decade and a half ... and yet the numbers haven't climbed appreciably since the 1980s[0]. Gut feeling? There is nothing odd to be seen.

[0] The numbers cycle quite obviously with the government babbling about it. This has been true since the late '40s, at least.

[DS999]

If you're on the ground you can't see much, camera or not, unless the 'UFO' is flying pretty low or is the size of an aircraft carrier. The problem then is if it is moving with any speed it will be going by so quickly you won't have time to get your camera out. You basically have to hope it flies low and slow or hovers if you want a random citizen armed with a smartphone to record it.

Pilots are up in the sky and moving quickly so they are better positioned, but a commercial pilot can't change course, speed and altitude to chase one down so it is the same problem where it has to be flying "low and slow" relative to the plane as well as in the same direction, plus the pilot is (hopefully) busy flying the plane not getting out his camera to take a video.

Military pilots are by far the best equipped since they are more free to fly whatever direction, altitude and speed necessary - especially if they were tasked to chase down something unknown showing up on radar rather than just encountering something while on a different mission.

I do have to wonder what sort of camera technology they have though. Is it comparable to a modern smartphone or a decade or two behind the state of the art? i.e. due to slow qualification of stuff for military use and the need for military contractors to find an excuse to mark up a $10 part to $100,000 before they are willing to install it. At least I'm not too impressed with the quality of the video we get to see, though maybe they are digitally zoomed a whole bunch so they just look like crappy noisy low res video from a 2010 era smartphone the same way digitally zooming an iPhone video 50x would look pretty grainy and pixillated.

[John Robson]

I suspect you're underestimating the number of people who already have their phones out or start recording.

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect you're underestimating the number of people who, should they already have their phones out, would be staring vacantly down at their device, rather than in any direction conducive to seeing things happen in the sky.

[Anonymous Coward]

most stuff in military hardware is 10+ years old. as in they want it stable, not cutting edge.

the newer stuff they have limited amounts, see russia presently using 70+year old tanks (some retro fitted with 1990's optics)

[DJO]

OK, forget smart phones.

What about the legions of amateur astronomers with equipment better than most observatories had 50 years ago?

What about surface monitoring satellites, they look down 24/7 and there are a lot of them, there's nowhere that isn't seen from above and the resolution is down to a few metres and far better for the military birds. They will see anything of significant size in the air that shouldn't be there

If aliens were to visit either nobody would know or everybody would know - no middle positions.

[John Brown (no body)]

"You basically have to hope it flies low and slow or hovers if you want a random citizen armed with a smartphone to record it."

Not to mention that 99/9% of smartphone users have no idea how to use a camera properly. Like trying it out in landscape mode, not rapidly waving it all over the place and most importantly, at least *trying* to find some way of steadying it.

[plrndl]

Having a camera doesn't make you a photographer.

To take a decent quality photo or video of a distant moving object, you need near-professional quality equipment and skills, and you need to be prepared before the object comes into view. If you don't believe me, try whipping out your phone and photographing a passing bird.

Judging by what I've seen on the internet, most people with smart phones can't take a decent picture of a cat sitting in front of them.

[jake]

Since when was a picture of a UFO (bigfoot, Yeti, a ghost or whatever) ever a "decent" photograph?

The point is that the now astronomical number of cameras in the hands of the general public SHOULD have resulted in an astronomical number of grainy, out of focus, shaky, badly composed, off-center, obscured-with-thumb photos of UFOs, bigfoots, Yetis, ghosts (or whatever) ... and yet we haven't seen this huge bump in such pictures.

William of Ockham might have been overheard to mutter something about lex parsimoniae ...

[jvf]

guilty

that would be me,

[Anonymous Coward]

re. every man.woman and child in the Western Hemisphere has had access to a digital camera 24/7

if you look at UFO photo 'proofs' as human-make-believe phonomenon, the massive increase of phot-capture devices SHOULD lead to a significant increase in those photos, and I really find it peculiar it hasn't. On the other hand, the overall pool of UFO-photo-wannabes has only grown by 2-3 billion. But still, given how many people have a camera now (everybody), there should be more of those proofs. Perhaps UFOs are out of fashion? I'm SO disappointed!

OR, look, here's why: the Aliens got BETTER at hiding, as they realised humans got better at capturing their existance. I bet them alien boffins ave been working real hard over the last 20 years to make them invisible to our tech! What better proof do you need?! :)

[Tom 7]

Re: re. every man.woman and child in the Western Hemisphere has had access to a digital camera 24/7

So you're saying the aliens we can see are the shit ones and not the ones we really want to see but cant.

[Fr. Ted Crilly]

Re: re. every man.woman and child in the Western Hemisphere has had access to a digital camera 24/7

Nope, it's simpler than that, trolling...

“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.” “Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: re. every man.woman and child in the Western Hemisphere has had access to a digital camera 24/7

aliens we can see are fake, aliens we can't see are real. Simples.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: re. every man.woman and child in the Western Hemisphere has had access to a digital camera 24/7

1945: Atomic bomb

1946: Aliens set up committee, have lots of budget meetings etc to gauge if humans actually a threat to galactic federation

1952 H- Bomb

1953: Committee decides its worth checking out, alien scout ship departs to see what's going on (first 'modern' UFO sighting)

1955 - 1970: Major campaign to study earth's ecology and gauge human intelligence (lots of UFO sightings)

1970 - 2000: Follow up campaign (some sightings, 'catch and release' investigations on human biology)

2000 - 2005: Facebook, twitter launched, aliens realise that mankind has sown seeds of its own destruction, so investigation formally closed

2005 - 2023:; Only occasional alien visits, mainly by bored aliens who got hooked on Lost, The Wire, Succession etc during fieldwork, and want to catch up on the episodes they missed.

[Dr Dan Holdsworth]

Re: re. every man.woman and child in the Western Hemisphere has had access to a digital camera 24/7

There is a hypothesis that there is a wild or feral population of large cats that are not domestic cats in the UK. The exponential increase and improvement in mobile phone camera technology over the last couple of decades should also have led to an increase in the numbers of photos of anomalous cats, and an improvement in the quality of these photos.

This has not happened.

Similarly, the rapid decrease in price and improvement in quality of cheap trail cameras should also have yielded some decent photos of big cats; trail cameras are after all what wildlife cameramen use to locate rare and elusive species for filming purposes. Once again, there have been no reasonable photos of big cats taken by trail cams.

Now there are at least four different makers of thermal night vision devices competing in a race to the bottom in price and quality; these devices are becoming ubiquitous in hunting circles for the purpose of locating target species. Once again there has been no footage of large non-domestic cats seen at all.

Conclusion: there aren't any big cats in Britain.

[DJO]

Re: re. every man.woman and child in the Western Hemisphere has had access to a digital camera 24/7

True story:

Many years ago in the depths of winter I visited some friends who had a small farm on the edge of Dartmoor. They had just lost some sheep so we went to the field that was covered in now pink snow with bits of sheep scattered around and footprints, one set of big feline footprints - about 5 inches across (casts were taken). We followed the tracks to a stream and lost them.

One big(ish) cat 40 odd years ago - Yes, multiple big cats now or then, unlikely.

It was on the news but I can't find it on YT.

[jake]

Re: re. every man.woman and child in the Western Hemisphere has had access to a digital camera 24/7

Probably one of the three Puma[0] (or their sprog) that Mary Chipperfield released from her circus/zoo in Plymouth onto Dartmoor back in '78.

Side note: Puma don't shred sheep. They take them apart with almost surgical precision. I lose a few every year to the critters ... no grudge on my part, it's a cost of doing business in this neck of the woods. If bits of sheep were scattered about, it was probably dogs and/or birds that did the scattering. Likewise, I have never seen one of the big cats kill more than one sheep at a time, on an as-needed basis. The only times I have seen multiple sheep kills it has been caused by feral dogs[1], HOWEVER, the cats might be attracted by the fresh kill, especially in the cold of Winter, and thus get blamed for it. Dog tracks are supposed to be seen on a farm, right?

[0] Mountain Lion, Cougar, Catamount, Florida Panther, etc. depending on where you live.

[1] Three or four house-pet dogs (from a couple-three houses) running together without human supervision are nearly a pack of feral dogs. Five running together are a feral pack, and will no longer listen to humans while they are together. The size of the dawgs doesn't matter. It's the lack of direction of a human pack leader that causes this, they revert. Palo Alto had a big problem with feral dogs out at the dump (tip to you brits). It turned out that a dozen or so were using a local creek as a highway to join up and go terrorize the workers ... but they were all home in time for dinner, with their owners none the wiser. Until we started trapping and checking tags.

_{Feral poodles! I've seen it with my own eyes! The horror!}

[DJO]

Re: re. every man.woman and child in the Western Hemisphere has had access to a digital camera 24/7

It was about 40 years ago, the exact details are hazy to say the least. Pink snow for sure, bits of sheep but I could not say if it was from one or more sheep, I have no idea how many sheep they had or if there were any unscathed ones left or if they were moved to another field. I am 100% certain on the prints and tracking them.

The consensus at the time was it was probably a puma or lynx but that was not an expert opinion so make of it what you will. Whatever it was it was not a dog or fox, the difference between canine and feline pawprints is distinctive. Although it's certainly possible some other wildlife had a go, carrion birds could have spread the mess a bit. I'd not actually considered that before - thanks. There no prints in the field except sheep, alleged cat and people, bird prints I would have ignored if they even showed up in the snow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Conclusion: there aren't any big cats in Britain.

Conclusion: big cats in Britain have developed invisibility cloak, QED (see: Monty Python, how not to be seen).

[tiggity]

Re: re. every man.woman and child in the Western Hemisphere has had access to a digital camera 24/7

Although

https://www.discoverwildlife.com/news/new-dna-evidence-confirms-presence-of-big-cats-in-the-uk/

[Rol]

It's like Flat Earther's. Of the multitude of nut jobs out there peddling such nonsense only about five of them truly believe the Earth is flat. The rest are playing a devilish debating game of who can get the most people to believe in total bullshit.

There's clearly an unfortunate downside to that game, as the citizen's of both the UK and USA can testify. How else did Trump/Boris/Brexit become a plausible concept that just might get past all sanity checks.

[deadlockvictim]

2 obligatory xkcd cartoons

1. UFO videos: https://xkcd.com/2156/

2. Settled: https://xkcd.com/1235/

[Pascal Monett]

2. Settled: https://xkcd.com/1235/

Yeah, I'm gonna keep that link.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 2 obligatory xkcd cartoons

2. Settled: https://xkcd.com/1235/

and the trouble with this is that most of the people with "phone cameras" seem to prefer pointing the lens at themselves, so they can post some boring/irrelevant/crap stuff on TikTok, rather than pointing the lens at something more useful such as Bigfoot/UFOs/Trump getting his leg over/Ghosts/BoJo getting HIS leg over.

The crazy thing is that come the end of the human race (for whatever reason) I can guarantee that there will be billions of mobile phones with images stored on their internal memory that will NEVER be published anywhere, but that one day some alien visitor will collect all this footage and wonder how we survived on Earth for so long !!!

[yetanotheraoc]

Flying Saucers, Lake Monsters, Ghosts, and Bigfoot

RE: Settled

The graph of camera-carriers hugs 0% until about 2000, but I thought these questions were settled decades before then.

[xyz]

I know how crazy this is going to sound, but...

Sorry, just had to type that... X files, Jose Chung's, From Outer Space.

Anyhoo, as previously stated, I've seen jack in 8 years of looking, go with the can't go faster than C thing etc, but 2% to 5% is a lot given the "scientific" approach of the study. So I'm moving over to the "welcome to Earth" side of the fence.

Ack, ack, ack.

[Grunchy]

Re: I know how crazy this is going to sound, but...

Time travel really works but the problem with going very far into the future is this tiny problem of the Earth hurtling through space at about 50,000 mph.

(You’ll get there ok but you may find yourself either in outer space or else soaking in lava in the Earth’s interior. Maybe be more careful about what you wish for? We may never recover any time-traveller’s body, if you think about it.)

[Spazturtle]

Re: I know how crazy this is going to sound, but...

To make things worse the solar system is also orbiting the centre of the milky way at around 450,000 mph, and the milky way is itself also moving.

[Rafael #872397]

Re: I know how crazy this is going to sound, but...

Great, now "The Galaxy Song" is playing in my head. At least it is drowning the strange clicking voices that were there before....

[TheProf]

Re: I know how crazy this is going to sound, but...

As a seasoned time-traveller I can assure you that the movement of the target planet is factored in to the computations.

[jake]

Re: I know how crazy this is going to sound, but...

At the near exact rate of one second per second.

[ArrZarr]

Re: I know how crazy this is going to sound, but...

If you can bend the 4th dimension through the 5th dimension, bending it to a specific point in the third dimension is just part of the maths.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I know how crazy this is going to sound, but...

and this bending has been scientifically explained in one of the great scientific volumes called... I don't remember... Light of better days? Something like that.

...

Light of other days, ok.

[Grunchy]

Ogopogo != Nessy

You could invent a “game” camera and stick em all over the woods and lake shore and such, but you know why the right pictures never get captured? It’s because of the Fermi paradox, i.e. how do you take photos of faster-than-light phenomena. Answer: well, first of all your Polaroid probably isn’t up to the task.

[lglethal]

Re: Ogopogo != Nessy

Nessy moves faster than light? I would have thought that would cause some pretty massive problems in Lake Ness, some unexplained Fusion explosions for one...

[GruntyMcPugh]

Re: Ogopogo != Nessy

Hell, should be easy to spot from the Cerenkov radiation!

[TVU]

Re: Ogopogo != Nessy

A lot of the Nessie sightings date from after 1822 and that date is significant. That was the date that the Caledonian Canal was opened and that inadvertently allowed seals, porpoises, dolphins and large sea sturgeons (of the fish variety, excluding the political ones) into Loch Ness by way of the canal loch gates and that's what has probably given rise to most of the Nessie sightings.

[Citizen of Nowhere]

Re: Ogopogo != Nessy

Good grief, there is no lake at Loch Ness!

;-)

[jake]

Re: Ogopogo != Nessy

I once dated a girl named Lake that came from Fort Augustus ...

[Doctor Syntax]

Right now there's a very limited number of high quality observations.

Data quality probably explains why they're unexplained.

to study and understand UAP

That seems to come under the heading of "nice work if you can get it".

[GruntyMcPugh]

I'm not saying it's Aliens,...

... because it's almost certainly not aliens. Like, it's not aliens.

When I worked in a University Space Physics Dept, we got data from Earth bound observatories, in optical, radio, from satellites, in IR, optical, EUVE, X-Ray, and Gamma, looking outwards. Down the hall, the Earth Observation lot had ground facing satellites in IR, Optical, and RADAR, and the only thing we ever found was a leaky Russian reactor. No highly energetic telltale signs spacecraft dropping out of warp drive, no pictures of odd craft in in our all sky surveys,... so sadly, the Truth might be out there, but it doesn't seem to be visiting.

[Arthur the cat]

Re: I'm not saying it's Aliens,...

the Truth might be out there, but it doesn't seem to be visiting.

Regarding that as a metaphor is incredibly depressing.

[Version 1.0]

Re: I'm not saying it's Aliens,...

I think that it's clear that aliens are visiting our planet. They are probably looking to see if there is any intelligent life, but ...

Does the icon apply to only one of my sentence's thoughts?

[imanidiot]

Re: I'm not saying it's Aliens,...

If they are visiting, they're probably visiting the dolphins and laughing with them about the stupid monkeys.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'm not saying it's Aliens,...

>>When I worked in a University Space Physics Dept, we got data from Earth bound observatories, in optical, radio, from satellites, in IR, optical, EUVE, X-Ray, and Gamma, looking outwards. Down the hall, the Earth Observation lot had ground facing satellites in IR, Optical, and RADAR, and the only thing we ever found was a leaky Russian reactor.

Such a shame that the scientists involved in these observations simply did not accept full responsibility for their failure to point said "data collection devices" in the right direction.

But I guess that they did this to conserve their jobs, as finding nothing would just allow them to keep on searching for another few months/years until the next budget meeting !

Whereas if they "did" find something their jobs would end straight away (as their mission would then be over).

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: I'm not saying it's Aliens,...

That's because they are emerging from the huge hole at the South Pole which is disguised by a reality distortion field so puny human instruments can't detect it :-)

[Pascal Monett]

UFOs

From my point of view, the UFO craze started after the second World War. At that time, very, very few people carried cameras around with them, and the "sightings" were few and far between, but they were sensational (as in, caused a sensation in the public). There were news reports, investigations, and everyone was interested.

Today ? Almost everyone has a rather high-quality camera. Curiously, if you want UFO news, you now have to go to specialized sites on the Internet because it would appear that hardly anyone snaps a pic of a UFO anymore.

And, funnily enough, the pics are always blurry . . .

[David Hicklin]

Re: UFOs

> the UFO craze started after the second World War.

And around that time the came the belief that scientifically anything was possible

[bo111]

Ball lightning photos and videos

The high-quality camera argument is not convincing, because I personally know 2 non-bullshit persons who saw the ball lightning. Unfortunately there are no quality videos or photos in the Internet about the phenomena. Could it be that most photos taken are selfies?

I am not a believer in extraterrestrials, but I once saw a spectacular UFO, decades later well proved to be of human origin.

[yetanotheraoc]

Re: Ball lightning photos and videos

"Could it be that most photos taken are selfies?"

If you could get followers by taking a selfie with an alien, we would be flooded with UFO pics. But UFOs and aliens are no longer cool. For notoriety people used to make up stories about UFOs and try to get them published in the newspapers. Now they make up stories about their own lifestyle for posting on social media.

[DS999]

Re: Ball lightning photos and videos

My mom said when she was about 12 living on a farm in northern Kansas they had ball lightning come out of their phone (one of those old style ones with the ear thing on a cord and microphone on the main unit) in the kitchen accompanied by a loud buzzing noise, floated silently across the room then dove into a bucket of water sitting in the sink causing a lot of steam. Her mom was there and confirmed the story.

I don't know exactly how long this took but let's say 10 or 15 seconds. Unless you had your phone in your hand at the moment you probably wouldn't have enough time to get it and begin recording. You might be so shocked you wouldn't think about recording until it is too late.

I think people with cameras inside their home would be the most likely way to capture phenomena like this, assuming they see it happen so they can save the footage.

[bo111]

Re: Ball lightning photos and videos

Now it all adds up. My witnesses also saw it long ago, when many rural houses did not have lightning rods. As well as electric and telephone cables were not properly grounded. I guess the ball lightning is a type of discharge with extremely high voltage between walls. This would produce visual plasma effects and "wind" feelings caused by static electricity.

So nowadays it is not about the short life of the phenomena, but rather mush smaller likelihood to observe it close.

[DS999]

Re: Ball lightning photos and videos

I've seen reports where people say they saw it traveling along (not clear if "on" or "near") telephone or power lines from pole to pole to pole at around driving speed so it makes sense that if not grounded as well as they are today it wouldn't dissipate/discharge.

Still doesn't solve the mystery of how it was created, or why it could float through open air as a self contained sphere rather than forming 'leaders' and discharging in a bolt like electric charge otherwise always does. I mean maybe it was attracted to that bucket of water in my grandmother's kitchen because it would have been metal, and the sink would have been metal, and the pipes in the sink I imagine would have been metal and run outside to the well that would effectively ground the sink. But why wouldn't it discharge with a bolt instead of going into the bucket like a slow moving basketball?

But yeah, if grounded/buried lines reduce the chances for ball lightning to be created / reduce the chances for it to travel any appreciable distance then it may be rarer today than it would have been 50-100 years ago.

[Intractable Potsherd]

Re: Ball lightning photos and videos

I came home from work one day to find all the electronics on the side of my house closest to the driveway fried. 2-3 metres away from the furthest fried piece of kit, in the same rooms, everything worked. My neighbours on the other side of the shared driveway (approx 3.5 metres wide) had the same. One of them had been at home and saww a growing ball float between the houses during a thunderstorm, and then dissipate once past the passageway. Fortunately, a) the insurance company paid for the TV, video, and telephone/answering machine, and b) my Atari ST was on the safe side of the house.

[Cyberian]

Open source approach to UFO observations

There's this new project called Sky360 intended to unite UFO enthusiasts from all over the world to provide the said hi-res pictures of UFOs using custom-built hardware. AI is supposed to help with distinguishing the U[nidentified] from the I[dentified] FOs.

On another note - when the UFO subject gets picked up by the mainstream media, historically some political or economical mess is taking place in the background...

[yetanotheraoc]

Re: Open source approach to UFO observations

"AI is supposed to help with distinguishing the U[nidentified] from the I[dentified] FOs."

For the training dataset of what is not a UFO, they use every picture ever taken?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Open source approach to UFO observations

"On another note - when the UFO subject gets picked up by the mainstream media, historically some political or economical mess is taking place in the background..."

So a week that has a Tuesday somewhere in the middle, got it.

;-)

[tiggity]

Re: Open source approach to UFO observations

Wonder if the algorithms used in the cameras at UK meteor network would pick up a "UFO flyby"?

https://ukmeteornetwork.co.uk/

Its a gradually expanding network (though generally using cheap & cheerful optics such as CCTV cameras so not exactly high res imagery) but multiple cameras do have the advantage of letting you "track" movements, so they have done nice things such as calculate approx meteor trajectory that led to meteorite fragments being collected just hours after impact in the UK

[Plest]

Just 'cos you can't see it, don't mean it ain't there!

Seriously, tin foil hat off for a second there's only two ways to look at this...

1) NASA is lying 'cos the US gov is in league with the Illuminati and the lizrad people from Rigell 7

or

2) We live in a godless, empty universe where the only vaguely intelligent species thinks staring at a 3" screen to see 30 second videos of 16 year old females shaking their arses and tits on camera is the empitome of technological achievement. ( Or for the older peeps, "Only concerned with the movements of little green pieces of paper.". )

[LionelB]

Re: Just 'cos you can't see it, don't mean it ain't there!

I'm going to go with:

3) We live in a universe that is so vast and empty, the chances of intelligence life-forms evolving so minuscule, and the survival times of their civilisations so insignificant in terms of cosmic time scales, that given a hardwired speed-of-light communication limit there's a snowball's chance in hell that said life-forms will ever manage to make their presence known to each other, let alone encounter one another physically.

[yetanotheraoc]

Re: Just 'cos you can't see it, don't mean it ain't there!

"30 second videos"

Psychology is complex, there's a lot of weird behavior packed in each one of us. The godless ones are those who figured out how to monetize the lever-pushing pellet-dispensing part of our brains. It's not new, though. The clever ones have been exploiting our baser instincts since the dawn of civilisation.

[LionelB]

Re: Just 'cos you can't see it, don't mean it ain't there!

"The godless ones are those who figured out how to monetize the lever-pushing pellet-dispensing part of our brains. It's not new, though."

Not new indeed - I'd suggest the godful ones were early adopters.

[jake]

Re: Just 'cos you can't see it, don't mean it ain't there!

The effect itself goes back to the first proto-shaman separating the ignorant from their meager scavenged food because his cave or hollow tree looked scary. Cushiest job in Africa a couple million years ago, I'm sure.

[aregross]

Bill Nye (The Science Guy) said something years ago that convinced me there are no ETs visiting us... He said that if they're really visitors from another planet/galaxie/et al they surely they would've come down and said "Hi! Take me to your Leader" by now.

I thought about this for a long time and came up with the only logical conclusion, "IF" there really are UFOs flying around. They are time travelers from our future, like a Disney E-Ticket ride to "Go back in Time and see your ancestors". The reason they can't 'land' and do a 'visit' is they would then alter the future, *their* present.

[AndrueC]

I think it's more likely that any civilisation capable of solving the myriad problems involved in interstellar travel will be so far ahead of us that we just won't be of any interest to them. Stuck down here at the bottom of a gravity well, squabbling with each other for a piece of dirt to stand on when they can experience and exploit the other 99.99% of the universe.

I think it's akin to us walking along a forest path. Maybe we notice an ant nest but probably not. If we do notice it we might briefly wonder what's going on in there but probably not. More likely we'll just continue our walk without conscious awareness of the nest.

We just have to hope that there aren't any aliens out there who take pleasure in kicking ants nests.

[LionelB]

Also, given the hard speed-of-light limit (not to mention the energies/acceleration required to get anywhere near it in terms of physical propulsion*) those aliens are going to need an awful lot of time on their hands**.

_{* without turning yourself into plasma}

_{** tentacles/antennae/other prehensile appendages}

[Anonymous Coward]

> I think it's akin to us walking along a forest path. Maybe we notice an ant nest but probably not. If we do notice it we might briefly wonder what's going on in there but probably not. More likely we'll just continue our walk without conscious awareness of the nest.

On the other hand, if an entomologist happened by, say in the 1950s, and realised it was a previously undiscovered type of ant, the nest may be visited, and studied, and have samples taken, by many, many entomologists for the next few years. Eventually the studies would conclude, interest would wane, and the nest perhaps wouldn't sight any entomologists any more.

[Brian 3]

But there are so many undiscovered species of ants, still today, and it doesn't work that way at all? Even for really 'interesting' species.

[doublelayer]

That's possible, but there are only so many entomologists. Most of the people walking by would not be one, so the chances that that particular nest would be found by an entomologist are rather low given how many nests there are. There's also the chance that the entomologist, having completed a long day's work studying some other ants, wouldn't look closely enough to determine that these were an undiscovered species and just walked past thinking that they already understood what was going on.

If we posit an alien species that has the travel technology to end up here, there are basically two situations:

1. There are a lot of planets with life on them, in which case why are we of particular interest to the aliens who have likely already seen plenty of them.

2. There are few, possibly only two, living civilizations in the universe, in which case how would the aliens discover our existence so quickly?

My only solution to either hypothetical is to admit that, if aliens show up, we were probably quite close to them or it happened by accident.

[localgeek]

Warp Drive

They won't take any notice of us until we invent the warp drive. I saw a documentary about this one time.

[jake]

"We just have to hope that there aren't any aliens out there who take pleasure in kicking ants nests."

Or eating ants.

[pdh]

Experts?

How exactly does one become an expert on UFOs / UAPs? I have to wonder whenever I see someone described as a bigfoot expert, or an expert on the Loch Ness monster, etc.

[LionelB]

Re: Experts?

The same way you become an expert in astrology, homeopathy and other woo.

[doublelayer]

Re: Experts?

You just have to get a certification from a [person with access to a printer] I mean certified expert who tests your knowledge by [making sure you will back up any lies they say], sorry again, are knowledgeable about the subject matter including all the stuff the government doesn't want you to know, unless your subject is one of those which holds that the government is powerless when compared to some other shadowy conspiracy. Your certified examiner will be able to provide you with important study materials about the subject as well to provide you with more information you need to know. If you don't agree with those materials, you are free to do your own research for which all you'll need is a blank sheet of paper and some way to put writing on it.

Fortunately for you, I am a completely certified expert and examiner on all those topics and many others as well [at least I will be when I turn this PDF into a piece of paper]. Just send your topic of interest and registration fee and you too can be an expert.

[Anonymous Coward]

The UFOs/Aliens I’d like to exist

Sadly don’t. Not in the classic sense.

As for other life forms in the Universe, absolutely.

It’s just that we probably will never know for sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The UFOs/Aliens I’d like to exist

I think that's over pessimistic. I think the chances of observation of a extra-solar planet with atmospheric chemistry that can only be explained by biological processes is reasonably high. Maybe not with the sensors/satellites we have today, although the James Webb might get lucky. Admittedly that will just tell us 'here be bugs' and not much else. But if there are bugs eventually they will invent digital watches....

[OldCrow 1975]

Were NASA's eyes open?

NASA has had a contemptuous relationship with UFO/UAP. I can not expect a through examination of any suspected UFO/UAP evidence to ge a fair evaluation from NASA.

I can only imagine that the budget for such a NASA venture was severely under budget and time constrained, I do not believe we in the US have any internist in separating the wheat from the chaff of accumulated evidence.

So why not create an Agency that is devoted to UFO/UAP. Staff it with people who are competent capable people who report to the President on Validate verified findings.

NASA has already been at logger heads with Private Space companies. SpaceX being a prime example. So why not relieve NASA of a detestable pursuit.