Moontanman

If you get a free ride there, how do you get back to the place where you can get a job and get out of the camp? Or is this camp a permanent place? Life imprisonment? Do you only send homeless addicts to this place or all the homeless? I'm betting that the vast majority of the homeless are not drug addicts in the manner you are suggesting or are you counting alcoholics as drug addicts? In Ca., I've ben told by people who live there, the vast majority of the homeless are hard working people who cannot afford housing because the jobs they can get are so low paying. I was out there a couple years ago and the number of homeless was appalling, but a great many of them lived in high end tents, entire families, and even drove cars. My sons who do live there say the homeless are an artifact of the extreme restrictions of building new housing that keeps rent prices artificially high and once you become homeless recovering from it is almost impossible.

So you are sarcasm impaired? On the cheap legal drugs... we control alcohol by making it legally available, makes it harder for under age people to obtain it, drugs on the other hand that are illegal and have an actual war waged on them and anyone of nearly any age that has the money can get them.

All drugs should be legal and sold in designated drug stores along with alcohol and tobacco. Prices should be low enough that people can maintain their habit with the low paying jobs that are available to the general public. Housing should be cheap for those with very low incomes who have to work the low paying jobs. If this was implemented the ultra rich could get even richer and the homeless drug addicts wouldn't be a problem.

Damn, you guys just reminded me I have to make a partial water change on my tank. https://youtu.be/QBYuaEOliY4

We get large amounts of Sargassum weed here in the summer, a heavy onshore wind is the culprit for us.

Are we assuming that all the homeless are drug addicts or are we going separate out the drug addicted from the just homeless and put them in separate but equal concentration camps?

Hand fish are not particularly rare and fish that walk along the bottom aren't particularly rare either. If this one was seen in freshwater as the article suggests that would be rare IMHO.

Lack of data would be my guess. But then again... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11776067/Air-Force-vets-testified-witnessing-UFOs-TURN-nuclear-warheads.html

And nothing about these things preclude alien spacecraft visiting the earth. Relativity in no way precludes aliens visiting the Earth. My belief on this subject is that there are occurrences that despite volumes of data remain unexplained and point to something extraordinary occurring. A bright object hovering over nuclear missile silos and the missiles going off line, 10 at once, doesn't prove aliens but it begs the question, what was it, and no answer has been forthcoming.

I did post a sighting, from the documentary The Phenomena" but no one seemed to be interested in watching a 2 minute clip. None of us are privy to the original data, we all have to depend on what others have reported. To a great extent this is true for everything posted on this forum... UFOs just get an extra kick in the teeth from the get go. I must be stupid, I do present actual data, if I had waved you should point it out specifically instead of handwaving everything I say as illegitimate. People are investigating, sometimes it doesn't adhere to scientific standards and when I doesn't it should be pointed out... specifically. Sadly we do not have access to the original data on most sightings and have to go with what is reported. Until quite recently, and I know you refuse to acknowledge this, scientists have been discouraged from looking into these things officially for fear of having their reputations sullied. This attitude dates from the 1950s when the air force controlled pretty much all the data not to mention the purse strings of many universities and actively discouraged any scientists from universities from looking into these things. There are some notable exceptions but they still encountered considerable friction from the scientific community. To expect aliens to leave behind "concrete" evidence of their existence just so we can know they exist seems to be a bit silly to me. Yeah they might, they might not, but there is no guarantee. Possibly we should drop the current nomenclature that implies aliens and just say that once all the data is in instead of saying UFO or UAP we should just admit they are Objects of Unknown Origin. Then we can concentrate on trying to figure out their origin instead of assuming we already know they are or are not of alien origin. Who knows, one of the craziest notions IMHO is that they represent an unknown civilization we share the earth with. You have yet to back up your assertion that distance and relativity preclude alien visitation.

Evidently proof is required before investigation can begin.

I surrender, I cannot provide concrete evidence that there are aliens currently flying around in our skies. I still think current data suggests something extraordinary is going on but suggests is evidently not enough to justify debate much less investigation.

Again... During the "heyday" of UFOs, probably beginning in the 40s to the late 70s, after which the phenomena was pretty much ignored as anything but "crazy" the main goal of the air force was not to study but to debunk. Their motives were their own and few were privy to them but some scientists like J. Allen Hynek quite working for the air force due to the total lack of rigor concerning the phenomena. Hynek said that the air force was in the business of debunking not studying the sightings and expected him to explain them away no matter how unlikely the "explanation" was. The air force would tout the sightings they could explain while actually hiding info on the ones they could not. They ended up withholding evidence from Hynek and keeping him from having access to witnesses considered to be highly competent like air force pilots and gun camera footage. So, all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men and all the King’s cameras and electronic recording devices could not document anything paranormal occurring at the Skinwalker Ranch, in spite of scientists spending several years onsite trying to do so. NIDS never did document anything much happening anywhere, so Bigelow shut down NIDS in 2004. In 2016 he sold the ranch to Adamantium Real Estate, LLC, whose once-anonymous owner has just revealed himself to be Brandon Fugal, a wealthy real estate investor from Salt Lake City. Fugal had previously been involved in weird science projects, like “an attempt to create a gravitational reduction device that could produce clean energy”. (....) Not only was the yearslong monitoring of “Skinwalker” by NIDS unable to obtain proof of anything unusual happening, but the people who owned the property prior to the Shermans, a family whose members lived there 60 years, deny that any mysterious “phenomena” of any kind occurred there. The parsimonious explanation is that the supernatural claims about the ranch were made up by the Sherman family prior to selling it to the gullible Bigelow. Many of the really bizarre alleged incidents described in Hunt for the Skinwalker were witnessed only by Terry Sherman, who stayed on the ranch as a caretaker after it was sold to Bigelow. It is also disturbing that these people were deeply involved in the pentagons recent "investigation", I'm not sure how much influence they actually had but the skinwalker ranch program does not exactly bolster confidence.

Again... I am not asserting alien origin, I know i used to do that but thanks to you and other people I now know that cannot currently be supported but the unexplained sightings with loads of data still remain. Their origin remains unknown but that doesn't mean they are all conventional objects. All I ask is that people who do instigate these things are not ridiculed or dismissed out of hand. The phenomena is real and deserves to be investigated without ruining the reputations of those who do the investigations. This has improved in recent years to be sure, the subject has started to be taken seriously but the idea that "concrete" evidence has to be obvious before it can be taken seriously seems to be rampant on this forum as it was decades ago. Nothing can be discovered by people who assume there is nothing to be found. Debunking has, until quite recently, been the modes operandi of science and the government, I am glad to see this phenomena being taken seriously in recent years but even now it is being used by unscrupulous persons to make money. The skin walker ranch fiasco comes to mind. Charlatans are attracted like moths to a flame when money is involved. Is anyone else having problems with the spell check? Now that the video the phenomena is available on you tube we can pic it apart bit by bit. This one is interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0Kr1TwKhQk 02:50 to 04:50 It's either a hoax or a real sighting of something extraordinary.

How about we change to a case that is somewhat more robust than the one we have been bashing in the above thread? Are you game? I have three, all of which involved the military and are well documented. No crashed spaceship or alien bodies so they cannot be "concrete" but are not easily debunked either.

https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/124844-aliens-from-space-split-from-time-to-talk-about-ufos-or-now-as-the-military-calls-them-uaps/?do=findComment&comment=1230506

Does scientific rigor mean concluding the data must be wrong because it's not conclusive ? I am quite aware of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony does that mean it should be ignored completely? I am not asking anyone to make a conclusion. all i am asking is that the data not be ignored because just it points to a possibility that is uncomfortable for many. Very true, that same cannot be said for rocks falling from the sky but even lighting was assumed to be from the gods and since at the time we couldn't study it in anyway that conclusion was accepted. When have I asserted that UFO sightings must be aliens? I am only asking that the data be followed to the logical conclusions. If that conclusion is "we don't know" then we have to continue to gather more data not simply dismiss it out of hand because it make us uncomfortable to consider things that lie outside our comfort zones. The real take away for me is that "if" the UFO phenomena represents something extraordinary and that something is best explained by saying it lies outside our current understanding not continuing the study seems somewhat less than scientific. It is true that most UFOs do not have much in the way of data but some do, in fact some have so much data it's downright embarrassing to have to say we don't know. I pointed out the Stockton Ca. sighting in 1896 not because I think it is proof of anything but because it is one of those sightings that is either absolute proof of aliens or an absolute hoax. Nothing in between will explain it, many sightings are like that and while either disturbing or laughable depending on your faith in humanity. It remains as something unusual on many levels not the least of which it supposedly happened at a time when the idea of aliens wasn't exactly part of the zeitgeist. It was at a time when it probably should have been seen in a religious/demonic context not technological or maybe the cusp of those two were meeting and in this case technology won out for whatever reason. One thing I think should be considered is that if we are dealing with an alien intelligence capable of technology far and away above our own then we are unlikely to get the "rigorous evidence" we require unless that intelligence gives it to us or they make a big mistake... everyone makes mistakes, we just need to make sure we are looking hard enough when it happens to know something extraordinary has happened. Ok, I'll give you this one, it's complete bullshit, does that have any bearing on other sightings that cannot be explained away?

You do realize that there are sighting that include multiple independent radars, multiple independent witnesses, photos, videos, physical effects, interactions with both civilian and military aircraft, active influence of nuclear missile silos, lights or hallucination do not even come close to covering them. Suggesting that UFOs are just what some folks claim... like gods and angels, is somewhat less than an accurate appraisal of the situation. Yet... I guess until one crashes into the white house no concrete evidence exists. In other words, until aliens decide to let us know we cannot know. These discussions are very frustrating, some people would not consider any data short of a alien spacecraft crashing into times square sufficient evidence while others seem to think any odd flashing light is an alien spacecraft. The reality is there is a huge volume of data that needs to be looked at in a way that manages to consider what we have and apply some sort of analysis that manages to ride the line somewhere between the extremes.

I do not suggest drawing a conclusion, I suggest not dismissing the data we have out of hand and further study. I honestly wonder what conclusive evidence would be, At one time there was no conclusive evidence that lighting wasn't caused by gods or that rocks fell from the sky. Did dismissing those things give us better understanding? This is true but it doesn't justify saying all sightings are probably those things either. I have seen this "explanation" used to dismiss sightings that were obviously not "Venus" in a temperature inversion as that very thing just because the people involved didn't know better. Neither relativity or the vast distances of space preclude interstellar travel.

As Mudinho did live there, and that was his typical behavior, then for the young women to have seen a space creature there would have to have been two such beings — the known one, Mudinho, and the hypothetical one, an alien — but as they reported only one skinny humanoid crouching in the mud, and not two, we are left with no rational support for there having been any beings present other than Mudinho. Today, the three women do still give interviews about their experience. There is one very important detail that has changed since their original story: Today, they say they knew Mudinho well, and had even given him cigarettes in the past; so of course they would not have mistaken him for an alien. However, in their original reports from 1996, they said they didn't know him, and took him for a devil when they saw him. It's one more example of stories changing and growing to fit a changing and growing narrative that gains mass traction in pop culture. Everyone wants to be in on it, and everyone wants to be seen as credible and correct. I agree with @Moontanman that there is a body of cases that do appear to represent truly anomalous and unexplained aerial events, and these may at some point turn out to be some fascinating atmospheric phenomenon that expands our view of things. They should not be dismissed, and should be studied. But these Stanton Friedman generated narratives are mostly self-promoting flapdoodle and just piss poor science. As Dunning notes: Friedman's whole career, in fact, consisted of compiling bits and pieces of poor-quality evidence, mainly unverified eyewitness testimony usually taken years or decades after an event; and then composing an original alien visitation story that incorporates all those bits and is presented as the factual account of what happened. He's best known as the original author of the Roswell mythology, in which he worked with a retired mortician named Glenn Dennis. In 1989 — more than four decades after the 1947 Roswell crash was alleged to have happened — Friedman carefully wove together a string of snippets of Dennis' assorted memories of having worked in that town, and created the story we know today of a spaceship crash and small alien bodies being recovered. It was published in 1991, the first time that story even existed. Friedman couldn't have cared less that the things Dennis thought he remembered actually took place over a span of twelve years and had nothing to do with each other; his goal was to craft an original UFO narrative. That was Friedman's thing. That was what he did professionally... I all fairness i have to say this sighting appears to be a retelling of an event that happened back in the late 50s or early 60s. I'd have to do some digging to be sure but I am pretty sure of it. I read about it in the late 60s when I was in highschool. This is an example of the inexplicability of some UFO sightings. Occurring in 1896 this report is simply outrageous! An alien craft 20 feet in diameter and 150 feet in length, three 7 foot tall aliens, attempting to abduct a man riding in a horse and buggy. It reads so matter of fact but it's more like a guy detailing his experiences while drinking shroom tea. https://www.recordnet.com/story/news/2015/03/27/fitzgerald-day-space-aliens-visited/34895899007/ The guy should have been writing novels, this is HG Wells type stuff! These "sightings" are not exactly a modern phenomena! https://www.ultius.com/ultius-blog/entry/short-essay-on-the-history-of-ufos-in-the-united-states.html

Probably true but is it better to allow foreign adversaries to fly balloons unimpeded over our territory or to shoot them down so that adersarry knows they cannot get away with it even if they try.

No one is saying a conclusion must be drawn but outright dismissal, which is what "no concrete evidence" really means, is not science or at least not how I was taught. Good point and justifiable as well but what about those reports that cannot be explained by conventional objects despite a huge amount of evidence? The fact that sighting was so easily explained doesn't have any bearing on the ones that are not. Yes, in fact up until recently that is exactly what was being said, for many decades anyone who wanted to investigate was written off as a crazy, careers were destroyed, people in places of trust were told not to report sightings for fear of being labeled as unstable. There is a reason why pilots who were thoughtless enough to say they had seen something extraordinary were often drummed out of the profession or given desk jobs. These things really happened, people were delegated to the crazy pile for just reporting. This was and is wrong, if you can explain them then fine explain them but to discourage people from even looking ito it was simply unconscionable. The US gov's so called investigations became nothing but an attempt to explain away any sighting by any means. This was why Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who started out working for the air force changed sides and became convinced there was something serious to be studied. BTW, I've seen Venus dance around the sky in an early morning temperature inversion, it was an astounding sight. But I was expecting Venus in that area of the sky and i was familiar with the local tendency for temperature inversions so I knew what it was immediately. Yes it looked very strange but that is no reason to explain away everything as a balloon or Venus in a temperature inversion. Quite often no such explanation exists for even something as mundane as a light in the sky. Very frustrating but no reason to dismiss it out of hand. And sometimes the sighting is so extraordinary that nothing can explain it and yet that is quite often dismissed just as confidently as something that can be explained. Just because something can be explained does not mean everything can. You do make good points and the film maker is in the business of making money off views but you cannot simply place all sightings in the same bag. Sometimes you have to do some independent study to see how accurate the film maker was being. Sometimes it turns out to be bs, sometimes is turns out to be lack of enough evidence to really say but more often than some want to think it turns out ot be inexplicable despite an embarrassing wealth of evidence. Those are called unexplained and the number of the unexplained only grows larger.

There is also the real possibility of a significant attack coming from a Drone or a balloon, I know it's considered a crazy idea but a 1 megaton nuke detonated from a balloon at 100,000 feet would do some real damage to our nation and be difficult to defend against and maybe even figure out where it came from. The cost of a few missiles seems a small price to pay to prevent this and maybe even be enough to make cheaper missiles to take down these objects.

No to be disrespectful... but no concrete evidence? What would constitute "concrete evidence"? I often wonder about this, it's like people refuse to consider a report unless they have a crashed object or a body. Does anyone really expect "concrete" evidence from an advanced alien spacecraft? There are pictures, radar conformations, physical traces on the ground of something unusual at the very least. Can we really expect "concrete" evidence to be left behind by anything so advanced? I know I know, what someone said happened isn't enough, but at what point do we stand back and realize that the shear number of sightings by relatively competent observers suggest something... if not extraordinary then at least highly unusual? Maybe it's like the bigfoot phenomena where prolonged study has at least pointed us in the direction that suggests black bears might be what is prompting a great many sightings. Did that real possibility come from simply dismissing the idea of bigfoot? No it came from investigating the sightings, not by dismissing them because we didn't have a bigfoot corpse.