Are UAPs/UFOs finally being taken seriously?

[exchemist]

13 hours ago, Moontanman said:

I think we are in the situation of a large island of primitives, we are isolated from the rest of the world and only see glimpses of the outside world. We occasionally see objects over head flying trailing clouds smoke. The tribal elders say these are just illusions, or some might say they are angels, gods or even dragons but there is no way to really know. 

We occasionally see boats way offshore on the horizon, we can see them as boats because we have boats that float and can conceive of such things but they are so far away we cannot see them clearly and there is a lot of debate about who or what they represent but no clear cut way to really know. These "boats" are too fast and too far away for us to catch them. 

Very rarely we see things flying in the dark that light up the sky and the ground and even land. The people shoot arrows at them and throw spears but nothing comes of it. They make a huge amount of noise and some even claim that there are men on board. A few say that they have been abducted and brought back after being examined by these flying things but most people do not have this experience and discount it completely even though many clear pictures have been drawn by the people involved and some of the pictures are similar. 

The tribal leaders say that these things cannot be real because there is no physical evidence of any of them, only people seeing things in the sky or in the distance. Sometimes people who insist they are real are ostracised from the tribe. 

But life goes on and the things people claim to have seen seldom if ever make any real difference in the lives of the island people so no one thinks the sightings should be investigated because they cannot be important to the lives of the people. 

Except that we are not a bunch of primitives and these things have been investigated, on numerous occasions, with nothing to show for it.

What has instead been revealed by many such investigations is the under-appreciated capacity of people to make mistakes in identification, to delude themselves and to fabricate. You, for example, have shown yourself willing to accept, uncritically, a number of stories, at random, with no linking feature, apparently because they support a pre-existing belief in alien visitations. When one of them is shown to be nonsense, it does not give you a moment's pause: you just move smoothly onto the next one, as if the first one had never existed. You never stop to ask yourself why you were fooled, or how to avoid being fooled again. Hence the scepticism of people like me about this stuff, when put forward by people with your sort of mindset.  

[StringJunky]

3 hours ago, Intoscience said:

Such scientists often get ridiculed by their peers for such, so its easy to see why a bunch of science enthusiasts do the same.

Like I said previously, there is a stigma around this subject, so people will scoff and ridicule even those of us who are not necessarily believers in alien visitation, but are open minded to the possibility of it. 

I think some are just open minded but not yet convinced (like myself) others are just closed off and will possibly remain that way until they have an alien knocking at their door. Others feel that the seemingly unsurmountable task of interstellar space travel, combined with the vastness of space, combined with the low odds of simultaneous existence and a whole other bunch of lesser factors, stacks the odds of visitation to be extremely unlikely. 

I think the few that think the idea is silly are somewhat naive, or maybe they feel they believe it is impossible beyond doubt. Either way, that is really a shame, especially so if its intelligent generally objective people. 

It doesn't help matters when you have thousands upon thousands of reports that are hoaxes, fake, or just misunderstood. That then are sensationalised to ridiculousness.  To then accept the small minority of reports that may have potential as being credible becomes difficult.     

Some people want things yesterday and won't wait, so they wish too hard and start seeing things how they want something to be.

Edited March 29, 2023 by StringJunky

[Intoscience]

1 hour ago, StringJunky said:

Some people want things yesterday and won't wait, so they wish too hard and start seeing things how they want something to be.

I totally agree, this is why I remain patient but open minded. 

It's very easy to get over excited and fall into the trap of - it must be extra terrestrial. Which then just adds to the stigma. 

[StringJunky]

26 minutes ago, Intoscience said:

I totally agree, this is why I remain patient but open minded. 

It's very easy to get over excited and fall into the trap of - it must be extra terrestrial. Which then just adds to the stigma. 

 The likelihood is pretty high imo, just not in our neighbourhood.

[Moontanman]

4 hours ago, exchemist said:

Except that we are not a bunch of primitives and these things have been investigated, on numerous occasions, with nothing to show for it.

What has instead been revealed by many such investigations is the under-appreciated capacity of people to make mistakes in identification, to delude themselves and to fabricate. You, for example, have shown yourself willing to accept, uncritically, a number of stories, at random, with no linking feature, apparently because they support a pre-existing belief in alien visitations. When one of them is shown to be nonsense, it does not give you a moment's pause: you just move smoothly onto the next one, as if the first one had never existed. You never stop to ask yourself why you were fooled, or how to avoid being fooled again. Hence the scepticism of people like me about this stuff, when put forward by people with your sort of mindset.  

You are assuming the "islanders" have the capability to investigate their anomalies in some reasonable manner. Remember the outside "world" is far ahead of the islanders nad in total control of what the islanders can investegate, barring some sort of accident the islanders never get to see anything the world doesn't want them to see. 

I do not accept these stories uncritically, I try to approach them without prejudgment, that means not assuming they are false from the beginning and the only thing left is to show they are false. Each one has no connection to the veracity of the next. Each one by definition stands alone, at least at first blush this is the only honest way to investigate honestly. After investigation the stories can be linked together if there is sufficient reason to do so but not before. You cannot do a fair assessment if you assume they are false to begin with. 

My mindset is to approach was sighting/report as though it is the only one I ever saw or heard of, of course I cannot do this completely but if I do not try then bias slips into the investigation from the last report. If you were collecting data from a crime you wouldn't let data from other crimes influence your current data set. To do so would contaminate the crime scene. Once you have that data you can begin to compare aspects of the crime to see if there are connections but there not being connections cannot be used to show there was no crime. 

BTW, compared to aliens who can weld technologies allowing them to travel in some manner between the stars we are primitives. We might have wooden canoes but the others have boats made of fiberglass composites using technologies we cannot even fathom like internal combustion engines and GPS navigation... we have to look at this from the standpoint of being primitives.

Expecting an advanced technology to simply fall into our laps from the sky is unreasonable even if it is being paraded just beyond our reach. 

We will never passively obtain evidence of such technology we must do our best to obtain it by the most advanced means we have available... at the very least we must be able to study what little is revealed to us even if it is nothing but scraps being presented by accident. 

3 hours ago, Intoscience said:

I totally agree, this is why I remain patient but open minded. 

It's very easy to get over excited and fall into the trap of - it must be extra terrestrial. Which then just adds to the stigma. 

We must do our best to avoid this trap but we must also avoid the trap of it can't be extraterrestrial as well. 

3 hours ago, StringJunky said:

 The likelihood is pretty high imo, just not in our neighbourhood.

I don't know if we really can say that with any real confidence, even assuming no "Clark Tech" it would only take a few million years or so for an alien civilization to pretty much explore the entire galaxy

Edited March 29, 2023 by Moontanman

[exchemist]

48 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

You are assuming the "islanders" have the capability to investigate their anomalies in some reasonable manner. Remember the outside "world" is far ahead of the islanders nad in total control of what the islanders can investegate, barring some sort of accident the islanders never get to see anything the world doesn't want them to see. 

I do not accept these stories uncritically, I try to approach them without prejudgment, that means not assuming they are false from the beginning and the only thing left is to show they are false. Each one has no connection to the veracity of the next. Each one by definition stands alone, at least at first blush this is the only honest way to investigate honestly. After investigation the stories can be linked together if there is sufficient reason to do so but not before. You cannot do a fair assessment if you assume they are false to begin with. 

My mindset is to approach was sighting/report as though it is the only one I ever saw or heard of, of course I cannot do this completely but if I do not try then bias slips into the investigation from the last report. If you were collecting data from a crime you wouldn't let data from other crimes influence your current data set. To do so would contaminate the crime scene. Once you have that data you can begin to compare aspects of the crime to see if there are connections but there not being connections cannot be used to show there was no crime. 

BTW, compared to aliens who can weld technologies allowing them to travel in some manner between the stars we are primitives. We might have wooden canoes but the others have boats made of fiberglass composites using technologies we cannot even fathom like internal combustion engines and GPS navigation... we have to look at this from the standpoint of being primitives.

Expecting an advanced technology to simply fall into our laps from the sky is unreasonable even if it is being paraded just beyond our reach. 

We will never passively obtain evidence of such technology we must do our best to obtain it by the most advanced means we have available... at the very least we must be able to study what little is revealed to us even if it is nothing but scraps being presented by accident. 

 

Indeed I am assuming that, since we know it to be the case.

And I'm afraid you do accept these stories uncritically. We've established the Arawn story is rot. You could have questioned it. After all, its rotation period is less than 6 times that of the Earth, a far bigger body. And nowhere on the internet is there any support for the idea it could not be naturally stable. If you had checked that, it should have rung some alarm bells. But no, you just pushed it out as evidence of aliens (suitable hedged with caveats, but that is what you meant).

Have you learnt from the Arawn story that the source you used for that cannot be trusted?  

[TheVat]

1 hour ago, Moontanman said:

Each one has no connection to the veracity of the next. Each one by definition stands alone, at least at first blush this is the only honest way to investigate honestly.

While I remain in the open-to-fresh-data camp, I am not sure that each sighting can be necessarily independent of other sightings, when you have the cases of dozens of sightings on one night in a particular area.  For example, if you have 19 witnesses report seeing something that looks like a balloon, and at least half were able to distinguish the letters "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" across the side, and you have one who reports seeing a spacecraft with eerie lights and emitting a weird whine, you may have to give particular attention to that witness's visual identification skills and overall mindset, in comparison to the other 19.  

That's what I feel canvassing is so important, where an impartial investigative team interviews not just the person reporting something bizarre, but others who were outdoors at that time.  Unfortunately, the smartphone era has introduced a confounding factor:  fewer people are looking up these days.  And electronic media has for several decades caused more humans to spend their evenings inside of houses.  

 

[Genady]

Just for fun, I've decided to run a little exercise in Bayesian inference.

Let's say I am open-minded and believe that there is 1% chance of a UFO siting to be alien related. This is my "prior", P(A).

Let's say about 90% of all UFO sitings have natural explanations. This is P(E).

Let's say that even an alien related siting has 50% chance to be explained naturally. This is P(E/A).

Now somebody reports a new siting, and somebody else points out a natural explanation to it. My new, updated believe in a chance of a UFO siting to be alien related is,

P(A/E) = P(E/A)*P(A)/P(E) = 0.5*0.01/0.9 = 0.0056

So, I'm still open-minded but my confidence in alien related UFOs went down from 1% to 0.56%.

[TheVat]

Pretty cool - sounds like the Bayesian Belief Network that is used in diagnostic medicine.  (except the prior P(A) is much better known in medicine, where e.g. accurate rates of pancreatic cancer are statistically available)  

[Moontanman]

7 hours ago, exchemist said:

Indeed I am assuming that, since we know it to be the case.

How do we know this to be the case? 

7 hours ago, exchemist said:

And I'm afraid you do accept these stories uncritically. We've established the Arawn story is rot. You could have questioned it. After all, its rotation period is less than 6 times that of the Earth, a far bigger body.

I will not continue to defend that which i wasn't defending to begin with, the earth is held together mainly by gravity, a small body like arawn is not held together by it's gravity alone any more than a glacier is held together by its own gravity. 

7 hours ago, exchemist said:

 

And nowhere on the internet is there any support for the idea it could not be naturally stable. If you had checked that, it should have rung some alarm bells. But no, you just pushed it out as evidence of aliens (suitable hedged with caveats, but that is what you meant).

I really wish you would actually read what I am posting instead of reading what you want to see into my posts. 

7 hours ago, exchemist said:

Have you learnt from the Arawn story that the source you used for that cannot be trusted?  

Have you realized i never suggest the Arawan story was true but that it resembled what we might expect to find if aliens were currently present in our solar system? The reason so many tried to suggest it was alien is the assumed oddness of it but it wasn't enough to make that assertion. Only hype by people who had an agenda made those claims. I said this, several times now, please adjust your jets to the reality of the situation. 

3 hours ago, Genady said:

Just for fun, I've decided to run a little exercise in Bayesian inference.

Let's say I am open-minded and believe that there is 1% chance of a UFO siting to be alien related. This is my "prior", P(A).

Let's say about 90% of all UFO sitings have natural explanations. This is P(E).

Let's say that even an alien related siting has 50% chance to be explained naturally. This is P(E/A).

Now somebody reports a new siting, and somebody else points out a natural explanation to it. My new, updated believe in a chance of a UFO siting to be alien related is,

P(A/E) = P(E/A)*P(A)/P(E) = 0.5*0.01/0.9 = 0.0056

So, I'm still open-minded but my confidence in alien related UFOs went down from 1% to 0.56%.

And yet we have many tens of thousands of sightings/reports, many hundreds if not thousands at least are completely inexplicable. If you go by standards released by the US Air force this number should be in the 10% range, you would have to extrapolate from the numbers of sightings investigated just by the US gov and apply those percentages to the world wide reports. The raw numbers are impressive, I doubt the true number of unknown unknowns is that high but it still has to be significant. Even one real alien sighting is world changing. 

I stand by my assertion that just passively collecting data will never result in sufficient evidence to conclude anything. The concept is much further outside our experience/ability for us to ever obtain the indisputable evidence required to accept the idea unless the evidence is granted to us by the "aliens" themselves if we manage to step up our own collection game and obtain evidence outside the current possible parameters of data collection being employed. 

ie Just waiting for the evidence to come to us will not work.    

[swansont]

31 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

I will not continue to defend that which i wasn't defending to begin with,

You posted the video. You posted “it is what an alien colony space station would look like” and “The object was rotating too fast to be made out of rock and ice”

You can’t abdicate this responsibility. If you aren’t prepared to defend the claims you post, don’t post them. Otherwise it’s like “ring and run”

 

31 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

the earth is held together mainly by gravity, a small body like arawn is not held together by it's gravity alone any more than a glacier is held together by its own gravity.

This is moot, since there’s nothing of sufficient strength trying to break it apart.

[Moontanman]

3 hours ago, swansont said:

You posted the video. You posted “it is what an alien colony space station would look like” and “The object was rotating too fast to be made out of rock and ice”

You can’t abdicate this responsibility. If you aren’t prepared to defend the claims you post, don’t post them. Otherwise it’s like “ring and run”

 

This is moot, since there’s nothing of sufficient strength trying to break it apart.

 

I have to admit I didn't know what the video showed, I had seen the full episode about a year ago and I swear I thought it showed the idea of the object being sensationalized and then debunked. This is a common theme for these videos NASA's Unexplained Videos.

Either I am simply misremembering or they intentionally edited this to advertise their channel and try and get people to buy the entire episode. I am sorry, I do not know what to say, I distinctly remember the build up and then the admission of how it was all hype and they explained in some detail why it was hype but this short video only shows the build up.

I am genuinely at a loss, I watched parts of this video and even remember the way they slowly debunked the entire thing going into great detail about the rotation rates not being as fast as claimed and how the communications disruption was due to a software glitch and how this had resulted in the entire alien claims.

I hope I am just remembering the entire video and mistakenly inserted bit of the whole video into this one accidentally from memory... either that or I have slipped a cog. 

I am embarrassed, I do not blame you guys for doubting my credibility, hell I doubt my credibility, I see no way forward on this at this time. 

[Intoscience]

11 hours ago, Genady said:

Just for fun, I've decided to run a little exercise in Bayesian inference.

Let's say I am open-minded and believe that there is 1% chance of a UFO siting to be alien related. This is my "prior", P(A).

Let's say about 90% of all UFO sitings have natural explanations. This is P(E).

Let's say that even an alien related siting has 50% chance to be explained naturally. This is P(E/A).

Now somebody reports a new siting, and somebody else points out a natural explanation to it. My new, updated believe in a chance of a UFO siting to be alien related is,

P(A/E) = P(E/A)*P(A)/P(E) = 0.5*0.01/0.9 = 0.0056

So, I'm still open-minded but my confidence in alien related UFOs went down from 1% to 0.56%.

This is fine, but it's all just conjecture, so no different than those who claim they believe that 90% of UFO's are alien.

It's a bit like the Drake equation, you can input what ever you believe is likely for the factors where there is no evidence to support or repute them. 

I'm not a fan off applying statistics using unknown's, leaves it open to ambiguity. 

So as it stands I have no "belief" system in place when it comes to UAP's / UFO's. E.G. if there is some UAP that is still yet unexplained, especially so if it has been scrutinised by the experts, then I wouldn't state I believe it to be alien or a natural phenomenon.  I'd just sit on the fence and remain open minded to any possibility.    

[Genady]

3 hours ago, Intoscience said:

This is fine, but it's all just conjecture, so no different than those who claim they believe that 90% of UFO's are alien.

It's a bit like the Drake equation, you can input what ever you believe is likely for the factors where there is no evidence to support or repute them. 

I'm not a fan off applying statistics using unknown's, leaves it open to ambiguity. 

So as it stands I have no "belief" system in place when it comes to UAP's / UFO's. E.G. if there is some UAP that is still yet unexplained, especially so if it has been scrutinised by the experts, then I wouldn't state I believe it to be alien or a natural phenomenon.  I'd just sit on the fence and remain open minded to any possibility.    

Yes, this is just conjecture. OTOH, the quote above is just words. Instead, those who claim they believe that 90% of UFO's are alien just need to replace my prior of 1% with their prior of 90% and calculate again:

P(A/E) = P(E/A)*P(A)/P(E) = 0.5*0.9/0.9 = 0.5

The result is that their prior of 90%, after getting a report of a new siting which then gets explained naturally, should reasonably go down to 50%. 

Edited March 30, 2023 by Genady
typo

[dimreepr]

21 hours ago, Moontanman said:

You are assuming the "islanders" have the capability to investigate their anomalies in some reasonable manner. Remember the outside "world" is far ahead of the islanders nad in total control of what the islanders can investegate, barring some sort of accident the islanders never get to see anything the world doesn't want them to see.

And you are assuming that the world is greater than an island, in a world full of islands... 

4 hours ago, Intoscience said:

It's a bit like the Drake equation, you can input what ever you believe is likely for the factors where there is no evidence to support or repute them. 

Bolded mine: No you can't, you can only input what is known for it to make sense, hence the paradox of "where are they", when you find the evidence there is no paradox...

[Intoscience]

2 hours ago, Genady said:

Yes, this is just conjecture. OTOH, the quote above is just words. Instead, those who claim they believe that 90% of UFO's are alien just need to replace my prior of 1% with their prior of 90% and calculate again:

P(A/E) = P(E/A)*P(A)/P(E) = 0.5*0.9/0.9 = 0.5

The result is that their prior of 90%, after getting a report of a new siting which then gets explained naturally, should reasonably go down to 50%. 

I'm not disagreeing with you, I was just pointing out that when dealing with "what if's" / "lets say" things start to get a bit muddy. 

38 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

you can only input what is known

That just isn't true though for the Drake equation. Many the of the factors are unknown or at best rough approximations based on the data we do have. 

You can easily input approximations that are based on the current data, that are quite reasonable, and the equation will spew out a quite reasonable result that makes sense based on the best observations we have.   

Edited March 30, 2023 by Intoscience
spelling

[Moontanman]

I spent most of the night trying to find out where I got the debunking and how or why i inserted it into the Science Channel video. I couldn't find it, I am truly sorry, but I stand behind the rest of what I posted in this thread including the Minot Base papers about the UFO seen from a 52 bomber and tracked on radar. 

I also stand behind my contention that we will not credible evidence by passively waiting.  

3 hours ago, dimreepr said:

And you are assuming that the world is greater than an island, in a world full of islands... 

I am assuming that a civilization capable of star travel will be beyond us technologically a similar amount as we are beyond a stone age culture isolated on a island. We are a couple thousand years beyond the island culture and just as isolated from the greater galaxy as the islanders are from us. A galaxy spanning culture would be by necessity as much as a million years beyond us and have motivations and capabilities we can not conceive of any more than the islanders can conceive of our motivations and or capabilities.   

Their knowledge of us is dictated almost completely by us as our knowledge of an advanced civilization would be dictated by them.  

[Genady]

1 hour ago, Moontanman said:

I also stand behind my contention that we will not credible evidence by passively waiting.  

I still don't understand what your suggestion is. To look for infra-red sources in the Kuiper Belt?

Edited March 30, 2023 by Genady

[swansont]

1 hour ago, Genady said:

I still don't understand what your suggestion is. To look for infra-red sources in the Kuiper Belt?

As if we aren’t already scanning everywhere in all available frequency bands where we might expect a signal.

[StringJunky]

1 hour ago, swansont said:

As if we aren’t already scanning everywhere in all available frequency bands where we might expect a signal.

Yes, I would say we have the sky scoped out pretty well. Plus 15 billion phones being used and 96% of the global population owning one according to Statista.

[Moontanman]

5 hours ago, Genady said:

I still don't understand what your suggestion is. To look for infra-red sources in the Kuiper Belt?

Yeah, it would be more difficult that you might think, most of our infrared telescopes are looking for planetary sized bodies not tiny low level sources. I'm sure there are other ways, this one is just my own dog and pony show. 

4 hours ago, swansont said:

As if we aren’t already scanning everywhere in all available frequency bands where we might expect a signal.

Yes but the ability to actually pinpoint a source varies greatly. A planet is much easier to see than a tiny object in terms of raw power output. Just like seeing Jupiter is easier than seeing one of Jupiter's tiny moons in visible light. 

Edited March 30, 2023 by Moontanman

[Genady]

3 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

Yeah, it would be more difficult that you might think, most of our infrared telescopes are looking for planetary sized bodies not tiny low level sources. I'm sure there are other ways, this one is just my own dog and pony show. 

It appears that your suggestion is to look for a needle in a haystack without knowing anything about the needle or the haystack.

[Moontanman]

Again I would suggest checking out these papers/reports from 1968 very suggestive of something highly unusual happening at Minot Air Force Base in 1968. 

1 minute ago, Genady said:

It appears that your suggestion is to look for a needle in a haystack without knowing anything about the needle or the haystack.

It has to start someplace if it's going to start at all. All we can know is that under the laws of physics we know an object that uses energy has to give off waste heat. A spacecraft powered by nuclear energy would be difficult to really hide due to it giving off waste heat as part of it's operation of homeostasis if not direct propulsion. 

I am sure it might give off other sources of energy such as neutrinos but I don't think we have the capability to detect those from a distance and at such low levels as even controlled fusion might release them. I see no reason why infrared should be impossible, difficult possibly but not impossible. 

 

[swansont]

46 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

Yes but the ability to actually pinpoint a source varies greatly. A planet is much easier to see than a tiny object in terms of raw power output. Just like seeing Jupiter is easier than seeing one of Jupiter's tiny moons in visible light. 

That doesn’t change the fact that we are actively looking at the skies. At the very least we look for objects that might collide with the earth, and if the objects are too small/faint to see, you can’t write it off as being passive - it’s a technical limitation.

47 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

All we can know is that under the laws of physics we know an object that uses energy has to give off waste heat. A spacecraft powered by nuclear energy would be difficult to really hide due to it giving off waste heat as part of it's operation of homeostasis if not direct propulsion. 

Which should show up in IR viewing, and it doesn’t depend on reflection of sunlight. What does it say that we don’t see anything? Multiple IR telescopes have been in operation since the late 70s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_telescope#Infrared_telescopes

 

(and this is the sort of technical discussion that has a basis in science, so kudos to you for engaging in that direction)

 

[TheVat]

I have wondered, re the AFB sightings, what sane ET would approach a planet full of aggressive and xenophobic beings that's bristling with nuclear weapons and say, hey, I know, let's go buzz an Air Force Base!