What are these and who is behind them? Area 51 is news again?

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What are these?

The UFO question is one that I think will never die.
It started back in the Fifty’s, it had a spike of reports and of media commentary on these reports of huge proportions in the mid-Sixties, and then it subsided to a murmur for several decades, with the faithful year after year still making their way to the sanctum sanctorum of lookouts on Area 51, in the Nevada desert. And contributing considerably to the local economy:

https://www.vox.com/2019/9/19/20857221/storm-area-51-aliens-ufos-meme-myth-lore-history-bob-lazar-explained

“The CIA also encouraged the myth that UFOs were flying around Area 51 because it helped obfuscate what was really going on: the testing of odd-looking, high-flying, lightning-fast, never-before-seen aircraft.”

Now, once again, it has come to the attention, for better or worse, of some in government and the media, at least in the USA, after someone dusting off old reports from witnesses to things that have remained unexplained until now, and maybe shall never get explained to everyone’s satisfaction:

https://apnews.com/article/science-government-and-politics-808f797b27f8a0ac8d81ecd0343d1f36

” Worried about national security threats from adversaries, lawmakers ordered an investigation and public accounting of phenomena that the government has been loath to talk about for generations.

“There is stuff flying in our airspace,” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, one of the senators who pressed for the probe, recently told Fox News. “We don’t know what it is. We need to find out.”

Congress late last year instructed the director of national intelligence to provide “a detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data” from multiple agencies and report in 180 days. That time is about up. The intelligence office wouldn’t say this past week when the full document will be out.”  ”

So what do you think?

Is this more wishful thinking, although of a much older vintage than the one commonly spread around today through “social media”, a medium that did not exist back then?

An updated version of an old urban legend that was also a countryside one?

I have met and spoken with people who swear they saw UFO’s performing their unearthly aerobatics in the air, high above them.

This is a “Fun Stuff” thread, so I hope for a light-handed and good-humored discussion. Fanatics not welcome.

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Myst

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OscarCP wrote:

What are these?

If they do exist, they’re clearly not alien. Any extraterrestrial civilisation that possessed the technology to traverse the vast distances needed in order to visit this planet, would also possess the technology to ensure that they were not detected when they got here

It’s just a slow news day story. Also, Fox News…

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Seff, Myst

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NaNoNyMouse writes: “It’s just a slow news day story. Also, Fox News… ”

Yes. And Yes.

But: Fox News is totally incidental here, it’s just where Senator Rubio made a comment (as he would) that the author of the  AP article has chosen to pick up.

But: the story is interesting enough, because it is about the re-opening by the US Government of a Pandora Box, years after its first opening (with  the USAF “Project Blue Book”) that might still have some interesting stuff coming out of it the second time around. With or without aliens, legal or not, in it. And this Pandora-Box reopening, when it happens, is guaranteed to produce days and days of commentary on the TV news channels. You can bet on it.

Besides, a sufficiently advanced civilization capable to send their spaceships all the way here from wherever, might not feel the need to hide their operations from lowly creatures that the worst they can do is pelt them with annoying and poorly made, amusingly low-yield, thermonuclear explosives. So there is that to consider as well.

Finally: slow-day commentaries are often the best. Don’t knock them. And one does not have to be a UFOlogist to be interested in Area 51, as the article I linked from Vox can show to those who actually read it.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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Yes. There are aliens up there. They’re looking to abduct people who dumped Norton AV and will put them in a room for 7 days and 7 nights to watch files being scanned for malware.

Best I can do this late, and yes I realize my comment is “out there”. Good night and sleep with one eye open.

MacOS iPadOS and sometimes SOS

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SueW, wavy

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I can see where the aliens would be interested in abducting someone who can get rid of Norton AV totally.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Well, Myst showed up just when I was going to add something to my previous comment, now that we are no longer given fifty two and a half seconds to edit one’s comments (something that I consider real progress, thanks Susan!)

So I am adding it here and never mind Myst (and sweet dreams to you!): To me what is interesting, and it has been so for decades now, is not the aliens, but the humans. I think that the passionate interest in UFOs demonstrated at some level, with ups and downs, but always there, for over seventy years by now, speaks at something deep in the human mind, shared by millions, something that works somewhat like Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious. What is it, I don’t know. But I believe it is real and it is important.

And if there are aliens too, after all, and if the aliens kidnap people and use them in experiments involving some serious probing and if they also mutilate cattle? Well, that would be unfortunate. And interesting.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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THE TRUTH IS IN HERE JUNE 3, 2021

What Can We Expect From the Pentagon’s UFO Report?

One of the many curiosities packed into the $2.3 billion omnibus spending and coronavirus-relief package passed by Congress in December was a stipulation requiring the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to deliver an unclassified report on unidentified flying objects to Congress within six months, compiling what the government knows about about UFOs rocketing around over American airspace…

What does an early look at the report reveal?
On June 3, the New York Times reported that senior administration officials who were briefed on the UAP report had found no evidence that the objects seen by Navy pilots over the past decade are not of this Earth. Nevertheless, the Times states intelligence officials “still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military.”..

Former Israeli space security chief says extraterrestrials exist, and Trump knows about it
A “galactic federation” has been waiting for humans to “reach a stage where we will understand… what space and spaceships are,” Haim Eshed said.

A former Israeli space security chief has sent eyebrows shooting heavenward by saying that earthlings have been in contact with extraterrestrials from a “galactic federation.”

“The Unidentified Flying Objects have asked not to publish that they are here, humanity is not ready yet,” Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s Defense Ministry’s space directorate, told Israel’s Yediot Aharonot newspaper. The interview in Hebrew ran on Friday, and gained traction after parts were published in English by the Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.

A respected professor and retired general, Eshed said the aliens were equally curious about humanity and were seeking to understand “the fabric of the universe.”..

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OscarCP wrote:

Well, that would be unfortunate. And interesting.

Of course maybe just youngun space brats out for a lark. Likely in JV now. The Elders hoping we don’t eventually send an envoy to the Galactic Court to sue for damages. 🚀🛸

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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BTW its “Fifties” 😉

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Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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OscarCP wrote:

something that works somewhat like Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious. What is it, I don’t know.

I would call that ones culture, our perspectives run deep in our psyches due to the culture we have grown up/into.

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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Wavy: “.. I would call it ones culture …”  Hey, Wavy, is it not “one’s” culture? (You corrected me and I correct you …)

https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/ones-ones/

” ones, one’s

The possessive pronoun “one’s” requires an apostrophe before the S, unlike “its,” “hers,” and other personal pronouns. Examples: “pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps,” “a jury of one’s peers,” “minding one’s own business.”

A simple test: try inserting “anyone’s” in place of “one’s.” If it works grammatically, you need the apostrophe in “one’s” too. When “one’s” is a contraction of “one is” it also requires an apostrophe: “no one’s listening,” “this one’s for you.”

The only times “ones” has no apostrophe are when it is being used to mean “examples” or “people” as in “ripe ones” or “loved ones,” or in the informal arithmetical expression “the ones column.”  ”

Now, how about crop circles? Anyone is wiling to comment on crop circles?

See, the situation with crop circles is a confused one, because in addition of what extraterrestrials might have been doing to cause theirs, there are pranksters of the “homo sapiens sapiens” species (improperly called that, I often feel) going into the fields of some poor farmer and ruining a good deal of his future harvest by carving out their own fake crop circles in the farmer’s ripening corn. And that is a fact, a sad and awful fact. And maybe they also mutilate the farmer’s milch cow, while they are at it.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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The UFO phenomena will dog the human race until an extraterrestrial spacecraft, along with it’s occupants, make a big splash somewhere in a populated area and makes it on television before some government (the USA isn’t the only place on earth where ET’s could show up) has time to find a way to suppress and hide it.   It’s been happening since 1947. Hence, Roswell.

It is understandable that any government who came into possession of alien technology would want to do everything in their power to hide it and stash it away somewhere and keep it for themselves.  Why?  To weaponize it!  It’s that simple.  If a government admits that they are in possession of alien spacecraft, the scientific community would —— rightfully —– howl for full disclosure, presentation, and independent examination of the evidence. And the public as well.  Myself included.  After all, it would be the greatest revelation in the history of the human race, and finally answer the age-old question “are we alone?”  But until the time ET decides to pay a visit to Central Park in New York in the middle of a lazy Sunday afternoon —– before the Air Force can get to it with their spin doctors, it’s just not going to happen.

We must digress for a moment. Remember a few years ago, when the president (at the time) pushed for full-disclosure and an unsealing of all records related to the JFK assassination?  Everyone was excited.  I sure was. Man, this was going to be a bombshell story of the century!!!

Pffft.  What a dud. The CIA clamped down on the president and basically told him to “back off and shut up.” The release of the redacted documents amounted to nothing more than fluff —— government pandering to Americans’ insatiable appetite for the truth. Yea, they released some 3000+ documents. But, naturally, there were (many) portions of them that had been redacted —– meaning that the —- no pun intended —  smoking gun would remain sealed in a vault deep below the National Archives. What the government ended up releasing was nothing more than evidence that credible JFK assassination researchers like Christopher Fulton, James DiEugenio, Mark Shaw, Lamar Waldron, and others have already been telling us for years.

The same could be said for UFO’s, UAP’s, or whatever you want to call them.  Whatever physical evidence the government has is going to remain out of sight, and out of the public eye because the CIA doesn’t want the public and, especially our adversaries, to know we have that evidence because our enemies know that the technology could be used against them with the development of ultra-sophisticated weaponry.

Which brings us to this recent Pentagon report that they were going to make public all of the evidence they had on UFO’s.  And like the Kennedy ‘document dump’ (it was a dump alright … complete with an empty toilet paper tube), that UFO report turned out to be a dud as well.  Sure, we’ve all seen the videos of UFO’s shadowing naval vessels, military aircraft and even the International Space Station. But seeing something on video is one thing.  Seeing an extraterrestrial spacecraft land and it’s occupants coming forth for all to see is another. And that hasn’t happened.  Yet.

I alluded earlier that the USA isn’t the only place on Earth that ET could decide to pay a social call. Who is to say that alien spacecraft, and their occupants, didn’t crash or be captured by much larger nations like Russia or China?   It’s possible. And it may have already happened.  Especially in a closed society like China where such secrets really could be kept. In this last report, the Pentagon (read; CIA) said they had “no evidence” that any of it was of extraterrestrial origins. Or at least, no proof of it anyway.  Perhaps that is their way of skirting the responsibility (and embarrassment) of admitting that, just perhaps, those UAP’s were indeed advanced alien technology that our enemies have harnessed for their own nefarious uses. To come out and admit that would frighten us more than anything because there is obviously no defense against those ‘objects,’ and that whoever had possession and control over that technology could squash us, and any other nation, like a bug.

So, until the day we turn on the evening news and see ET walk out of their spacecraft and give a thumbs up, we’ll just have to keep asking ourselves “is it just us?” and then reply with a quote from the character Ted Arroway; “If it’s just us, seems like it’s an awful waste of space.”

"War is the remedy our enemies have chosen. And I say let us give them all they want" ----- William T. Sherman

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Thank you Clear Thunder. I can’t say I agree entirely with you (I don’t believe we humans are that good at conspiring, and doubt even more that we can keep it up for several decades, before misunderstandings, plain mistakes and serious squabbling among the various participating chefs ruin the pie) but you are the first here who takes a considered view at the UFO business, something that I was hoping for.

And thanks for referring to the Roswell Incident!

Here is one take on the facts of the case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident

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In my work, I went to Area 51 officially. There are no UFOs there. There are no alien bodies there.

It is a base for testing advanced aircraft, pure and simple.

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Well, now I have two statements that go directly to the point: Clear Thunder’s and KStephens’!

Thank you both.

Although, why is KStephens so sure the Area 51 keepers did not keep her from seeing the Greys? Did she ask: “OK, now show me the Greys?” Did she also ask: “Show me their Unidentified Flying Objects that you know perfectly well what they are, as they have been identified decades ago, since Roswell, BY YOU”???

Did she? And if she did, were there any interesting answers?

Oh, how exciting, to have been so close to the final answer to this great mystery!

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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Kenneth Stephens wrote:

In my work, I went to Area 51 officially. There are no UFOs there. There are no alien bodies there.

Working at the Groom Lake Facility or Area 51 means top security measures and everything you do is strictly on a “need to know basis”.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Don’t misunderstand my soapbox rant on UFO’s, Oscar. 🙂  If your interest is in UFO’s, you and I are kindred spirits. I’ve been studying them for over 30 years. My rant was a manifestation of the angst around the government lies that have been a part of the vernacular since Roswell.  I have written to former Senator Harry Reid, pushing for FULL government disclosure.  I own all of Stanton Friedman’s books, and attended MUFON where Stanton spoke a few years before his death. Stanton set the example for a good researcher because he himself was a skeptic. He admitted it.  You cannot be a serious UFO researcher unless you have a healthy skepticism of the phenomena. Just as a police detective or forensic specialist relies on physical evidence, so did Stanton.  But on the other hand, Stanton believed, in his heart and soul, that we have been visited. Not just since 1947, but for thousands of years.

And I feel the same way.

Like Stanton, I think the Roswell ‘incident’ was the worst government cover-up since the deaths of JFK, Dorothy Kilgallen and even Marilyn Monroe, who hinted to her friends that RFK told her of the existence of UFO’s and bodies of aliens shortly before her death, which I believe was a murder.  Oddly enough, one of those people she told was Dorothy Kilgallen, who was a close friend.

As for crop circles, I have an issue with that.  Thanks to people like Linda Moulton-Howell and Steven Quayle (both, excellent paranormal researchers), crop circles have been tied in with the UFO phenomena for decades.  Linda’s rationale is that aliens are trying to communicate with us. But I have my doubts.  Alien technology, along with the level of AI that they would undoubtedly possess, would allow them the capability of communicating with the human race in every language on Earth, both verbal and written. I do not believe aliens would try to send us a message by creating intricate designs in cornfields.  A few years back, an English farmer (most crop circles have been found in the UK. Coincidence?) caught a handful of people on his farm tramping down corn in the middle of the night. When police arrived, they confiscated a set of written plans and diagrams the pranksters were using. After that, I lost interest in it.

Now, if you want to talk cattle mutilations, I’m game.  The intricate removal of eyes, brains, and sexual organs from cattle around the world (key word; around the world) makes perfect sense if aliens wanted to clone cattle for their own purposes.  In every single case, after a thorough necropsy, veterinarians have concluded over and over that there is absolutely no way that that such precise, laser clean removal of those organs could have been done without sophisticated equipment that only a handful of veterinarians are trained and equipped to do in the confines of a laboratory, but certainly not in the middle of a pasture somewhere in BFE, and in the middle of the night.

Abductions? What better way to study the human race than to snatch a few and get a close up looksee.  And maybe even leave an implant with them. It’s plausible and, like cattle mutilations, makes sense.  I don’t know any UFO researcher who hasn’t studied the transcripts of interviews with Betty and Barney Hill.

Perhaps the most credible UFO sighting comes from one of the original Mercury astronauts, Gordon Cooper.   During a radio interview with Art Bell a few decades ago, Cooper admitted that he was at Edwards AFB (he was a test pilot there) when he saw a “saucer shaped craft” quietly lift from the ground and hover for a few moments before setting back down.  When Bell asked him what he thought it was, he bluntly said “it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft.”  He didn’t say “it may have been….”  He said “it was.…”   Cooper was known as a jokester in his astronaut days, but that night, he was serious. And I believed him.

The kicker was that a few weeks after that admission, Cooper was dead.  Yet he had said earlier that he had recently had a physical and his doctor had pronounced him to be in “remarkable health.”

Cooper’s book “Leap of Faith” (a must read!) sits right next to my collection of manuscripts by Stanton Friedman, Steven Greer, Erich Von Daniken, Mike Bara, Will Hart, and at least a dozen others, including Bob Lazar who, along with Las Vegas radio host, George Knapp, broke the Area 51 story wide open and sent government spin doctors into a panic.

"War is the remedy our enemies have chosen. And I say let us give them all they want" ----- William T. Sherman

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Charlie, OscarCP

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Clear Thunder, thank you. I believe that are great mysteries out there, in the darkness between and beneath the stars, because it is generally agreed that the extent of our knowledge of the Cosmos is negligible compared to our ignorance. As is limited our knowledge of the immensely complex workings of our minds.

At the same time, I have my doubts that the current ideas about UFOs are actually relevant to what might be the true origin of humanity’s enduring preoccupation with them. To me the answers are a bit too pat and a bit too old Cold War-like. Maybe they are the right ones, but I am hoping for something even more strange and interesting than aliens flying around our skies in otherworldly machines of amazing maneuverability and speed. Or maybe that is how it is.

Of one thing I am sure, and that is what you wrote at the beginning of your first comment.

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ROMA DEFENDER SMALLING ‘SAW UFO’

Roma defender Chris Smalling and his wife Sam claim they saw a UFO last night. ‘Chris could see it rotating with lights flashing all around.’

The incident seemingly occurred when the family were on their summer vacation and Sam Smalling shared it via her Instagram Stories.

“OK so I promise we weren’t on magic mushrooms or anything, but me and @Smalling saw the craziest UFO last night! Now like a quick few seconds sighting high in the sky that could have enough a plane!

“It flew down low past us and then turned and shot back high up in the sky where it stayed for an hour (maybe longer but we had to leave)….

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OscarCP wrote:

Hey, Wavy, is it not “one’s” culture? (You corrected me and I correct you …)

Ah I sit corrected!

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Unidentified Flying Objects have been observed by humans for a very long time… the evidence indicates at least a few centuries if not more.

My own theory is they’re us visiting ourselves from the far future to check out what happened in the distant past because…

• some great calamity destroyed most of their records …like the great fire of Alexandria destroyed a huge part of civilization’s early history… and they want to fill-in-the-blanks.
• it’s simply been so long ago from their perspective no one’s sure their historical records are actually accurate.
• simply curiosity as to exact how we managed to survived the early threats to our survival as a species… nuclear war, climate change, lethal pandemic, some unknown calamity that hasn’t actually happened yet.
• harvesting historical animal/human DNA to “fix” genomes that have been totaled screwed up via centuries of genetic tampering.
• travel-to-the-past tours for those with way too much time and money on their hands.

Anyway, to me in makes a lot more sense it’d be us humans coming back to review out own past and being “very sloppy” about hiding our presence (a common human weakness) than it being some super advanced aliens who traveled thousands of light-years to get here and then couldn’t hide themselves until they were ready to reveal they’re here.

Also, time traveling to the past on the same planet you’re already located on would completely eliminate the need to travel thousands of light-years back & forth to get to your destination. 😉

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Hmm … Anonymous? “Also, time traveling to the past on the same planet you’re already located on would completely eliminate the need to travel thousands of light-years back & forth to get to your destination”

Well, I believe the Earth is moving at 490,000 miles per hour relative to the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and even faster relative to the very distant active galaxies known as “quasars” that are our best proxy  these days for the “fixed stars”, according to the article below, so coming back from the future to visit today’s Earth is not going to be exactly to the same place from where the time-faring visitors will come …

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-fast-is-the-earth-mov/

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wavy

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You have to make the assumption that there’s a future to come back from.  From the way things are looking in the present, it’s not likely.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Charlie: Cheer up! There may not be a future where we, humans, shall be coming from, but there will be a future, you bet. (With or without us? That is the question.)

And time travel is pretty iffy, in the light of present understanding, as explained in this really good video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGnMiGrYmPE

Also I should note here that, according to the quantum physicist Carlo Rovelly, time does not exist, it is merely a convenient mathematical trick to get useful physics equations. So even time itself is open to question. And Rovelli also says that, in one way or another, this idea of his has actually been around for well over two thousand years:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04558-7

So, for all we know at this time (that unword, again! — but we just can’t do without it), UFOs might just as well be what has been understood by most people, whether believers or not, since the late 1940’s.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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Charlie

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Who knows but there might well be other experiments like the one going on here on Earth on other planets in our galaxy and the universe.  Maybe some of those are or will be more successful.

Sorry if I haven’t been my cheerful self lately.  Heavy rain (2″ in 1 hour) one day,  then 60 mph wind gusts the next day caused a tree to get blown down on our house.  This happened on March 26, and we are just now getting our home back to somewhat normal.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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From a physics standpoint, it is highly likely that there will always be a future of some sort, although it might be very different from what we have today.

As long as there is time, there will always be a future.

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Charlie

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Charlie, I hope the tree did not do a lot of damage to the roof of the house. You and I live in the same state, I believe, and the weather has been, and might continue to be showery around here.

You might take some consolation in that it was a tree, not an UFO: one of those coming down probably would have  obliterated the neighborhood. According to the whispers and rumors about them.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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Thanks for that consolation which cheered me up.  We were lucky that the tree hit where it did on the corner of the house.  It wasn’t so much damage that we couldn’t stay living in the house. The worse thing was getting the reconstruction people moving.  Most of the repairs have just been done in the past two weeks!  Because of the way things are right now we had to wait for almost everything.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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I can understand the pain you had when the tree fell on your house.  A couple of years ago, a very large tree fell very close to our house.  It shook the house so firmly that I thought there had been an earthquake.

More recently, we had a hidden (slow) water leak from a toilet.  It was discovered only after the water had moved horizontally several feet.  We found it only when there was some discoloration on the ceiling of the room below.  When we reported it to our homeowners’ insurance company, they refused to pay, because they said we should have found the leak before the major damage.

We canceled that insurance company and discovered that we could get better coverage with another company for 2/3 of what we had been paying the bad company for 12 years.  The bad company advertises widely on TV, and for all those years we thought they were a good company.

 

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wavy, Charlie

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Hello everyone, please continue commenting to this interesting topic!  I certainly hope my dreary mood did not put a halt to things if, in fact that’s what happened.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Lars220

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Charlie: “Hello everyone, please continue commenting to this interesting topic!”

Your wish might not be every ones’ command, but I just came in with some news that have moved me to add a new comment on this both interesting and fraught topic of extraterrestrial visitations.

In the “Washington Post” online edition of today there is an article on the dangers of trying to communicate with aliens in other star systems, something that some groups are trying to organize and do, having the basic means for at least sending signals to other stars, and something those against it have been arguing that our own history here on Earth, when one technologically more advanced and militarily better equipped people has met other less so is something that should give anyone pause, ‘genocide’ and ‘enslavement’ being two words that come up too often when discussing said history. This is not new, as such warnings have been voiced in the past, most notably by the late astrophysicist and popular celebrity Stephen Hawking from his famous wheel chair.

The article then includes a link to YouTube videos said to be recorded by military pilots out on patrols or maneuvers and showing their unexplained sightings of flying objects made using onboard infrared cameras of these objects following their planes, or being followed by the pilots in their planes for closer inspection, something foiled after a while by an unexpected and unearthly fast maneuver of the mysterious object or objects that suddenly disappear from the camera’s field of vision.

The writer also goes on to discuss the recent release of that and other information by the US military and the openly expressed interest in getting to the bottom of this by people currently or recently in government in the USA, from Senator Rubio to Barack Obama by way of President Biden’s White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, who is shown saying much the same thing as these two gentlemen, but with fewer words, the video showing the more relevant parts of their interviews and also the Press Secretary making her statement.

At the end of the video there is an unidentified man that makes a rather long commentary on the whole unidentified flying objects thing: he covers the Roswell history, area 51, etc. Although, if I heard him right, he said “Area 51 in New Mexico”, when Area 51 is in Nevada. Also the videos are not awfully clear and, to some extent, at least one who has an untrained eye, has to take the word of the video makers that these actually are showing mysterious flying objects being found and followed by, in this case, US military pilots.

Which is always the thing with UFOs: the evidence is not immediately obvious and compelling and demands some willingness to take it seriously on the part of the ordinary reader, watcher, or listener. But the ability to decide what the evidence may be really worth depends on the specialized knowledge of such things that one may have: if I were a Navy jet pilot I might be expressing here a much more definitive opinion on the relevance of those flight videos, for example.

As the Washington Post is paywalled, and some articles one can read without being a subscriber able to login to it, but sometimes one can’t, I am putting here the link to the article in question that you might or might not be able to read. Good luck with that and keep your comments coming. The UFOs might or might not be here for real, but they are not going anywhere any time soon, either. If proof of the latter is needed, then the WaPo article is proof enough.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ufo-report-aliens-seti/2021/06/09/1402f6a8-c899-11eb-81b1-34796c7393af_story.html

Excerpt:

“In April 2020, the Defense Department released videos recorded by infrared cameras on U.S. Navy aircraft that documented the planes’ encounters with a variety of “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Pilots reported seeing objects flying across the sky at hypersonic speeds and changing direction almost instantaneously, capabilities far beyond that of any known aircraft.”

Also recommended reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_51

Specially:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/24/area-51-raid-event-what-happened-nevada

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Charlie

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I couldn’t read much of the Washington Post article because I’m not a subscriber.

I heard about the “Storm Area 51” in the news and was glad it didn’t turn out to be a big deal.  They would have to “storm” the Gloom Lake area first and then try to find Area 51 which would be a very tough job.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Charlie: “They would have to “storm” the Gloom Lake area first and then try to find Area 51 which would be a very tough job.”

But those two intrepid Dutch who had got close enough to the Groom Lake Facility some days before the would-be invasion, they did get stopped by regular Security earthlings. So they did find something — themselves arrested and cooling their heels in a locked cell and wondering if the government of The Netherland was going to send rescuers to their very remote location — even if an alien component was lacking.

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Charlie wrote:

Hello everyone, please continue commenting to this interesting topic!

Hello everyone, please stop commenting in this uninteresting topic. I was bored by this subject 30 years ago.  🙂

cheers, Paul

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Ouch.  You’re entitled to your opinion of course, but personally I find this topic much more interesting than the current news – which I refer to as the horrors of the day.  By the way, I have actually seen a saucer shaped UFO not too far from where I live.   🙂

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Lars220

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These are not the UFOs you seek

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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Please explain.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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OscarCP

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UFO’s: fascinating or boring? Or better than the daily news? Good questions, very good questions indeed!

I have lived well beyond the life span of several consecutive generations of dogs, in fact I am from before UFOs, that started to be spoken of around 1947, and even from before the “Trinity” test of the first A- Bomb (*), when Robert Oppenheimer, considering the events of the day, commented on them by quoting Hindu scripture. (By the way, the Bhagavad Gita is a pretty good read.)

So that is quite a bit of elapsed time and, for most of this time, the UFO chatter, once it started, it never went away. I do find this strange fact more interesting than the latest Windows 10 patches and also than the unfailing consequent lamentations. Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that I now use a Mac. But deep down, I believe it’s just me.

(*) But not from before electricity.

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I not only find the whole space alien UFO topic interesting, I consider it to be a source of fun.  These days, and at my age, finding ways of having fun is always one of the things at the top of my to do list.  I like to read the new threads in the Outside The Box section, and this is the Fun Stuff subsection which to me is appropriate for this thread.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers (2018)

“Former government physicist Bob Lazar made headlines world-wide in 1989 when he came forward with his account of reverse-engineering an alien spacecraft for the US military. The reason the public even knows the name Area 51 is because Lazar came forward about the work he did at the formerly secret military base. His testimony remains the most controversial and important UFO story of all time. This film intimately chronicles the challenges and travails of a cosmic whistleblower. Burdened with a revolutionary secret, he had to choose between his oath to his country or his conscience. Corbell’s film explores Lazar’s groundbreaking claims and the devastating impact it has had on his life over the course of the last 30 years, including rare and never before revealed footage guaranteed to alter the landscape of the debate. He blew the whistle, shocked the world, then went silent – until now.”

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There is this Wikipedia article on Mr. Lazar here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar

To give you just an idea of what the article is like, here is a sample:

” …. Lazar additionally claimed that during his joining the program, he read briefing documents describing the historical involvement of Earth for the past 10,000 years with extraterrestrial beings described as grey aliens from a planet orbiting the twin binary star system Zeta Reticuli. As of September 2019, no extrasolar planets have been found in the Zeta Reticuli system. In 1989, Lazar said the seats of the saucer he saw were approximately child-sized and that he had seen alien cadavers of a corresponding size. He also said that while walking down a hallway at S-4, he briefly glanced through a door window and saw what he interpreted as two men in lab coats facing down and talking to “something small with long arms”. Three decades later, he said he did not think he saw an alien, but speculated that he saw a doll used as reference for the size of the alleged aliens, and that a nickname used for them was “the kids”.

Lazar claims to have earned a master’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a master’s degree in electronic technology from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech); however, there are no records of Lazar attending either MIT or Caltech. His supposed employment at a Nellis Air Force Base subsidiary has also been discredited by skeptics, as well as by the United States Air Force. ”

Interesting Lazar’s claim of having consulting documents on UFOs of “the past 10,000 years”, considering the oldest writing on anything, including “documents”, is in the cuneiform syllabic script from Sumer, one of the World’s first ever civilizations (that is to say, with permanent settlements and cities) that developed in the Golden Crescent’s Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, in what is today’s Irak and part of Anatolia in Turkey. Recorded writings in this script that have survived since antiquity, are not older than 5,500 – 6,000 years. So here is a discovery as interesting as the UFOs themselves: people could write well before anyone of the many who have been studying this subject for a good part of 200 years has suspected.

I still find the belief in UFOs to be most interesting, not on account of people like Mr. Lazar, but on account of its remarkable persistence, consistency, as well as to its origins happening in different places at a rather precise point in time. Extraterrestrial visitors or not, I believe something is going on and am curious as to what it may be.

And concerning old documents, I read earlier this month the oldest story ever written of which there is knowledge: “The Epic of Gilgamesh” (from around 3,400 BC), named after a fabled king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk, and it is a rip-roaring “buddy” adventure story that also dwells, through its nominal hero’s ultimately unfruitful quest for immortality, on deep issues of life and death that still preoccupy the human mind. But no UFOs. It has a version of the story of the Flood, though.

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[Charlie]

Going back further than 6000 years could put us into antediluvian times.  I could go further into what happened then but it would probably be considered religious and I don’t want to break lounge rules.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Charlie.

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Lars220

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The “Epic of Gilgamesh” is some 5,000 years old and its story happens after the Flood, as Gilgamesh goes to see a man that survived it, called Utpanishtim, a sort of Sumerian Noah, to learn from him the secret of immortality.

There have been different ideas around, besides the strictly religious, as to what may have been the origin of the stories of the Flood that, clearly from the above, are older than the one written in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, generally considered to be around 3,400 years old. Although, according to this book, the story happened in what was, even then, a distant past.

A favorite of mine is that the stories of the Flood are a recollection of the flooding of what is now the basin of the Black Sea, some 7,000 – 7,600 years ago, a region that was before in part dry land and in part a huge fresh water lake. The flooding with salt water, turning it into today’s larger salty sea, happened because of the overtopping by the rising waters of the Mediterranean, after the end of the last Ice Age, as the Eurasian ice sheets melted, of a natural barrier that had kept until then the Mediterranean from coming in, a barrier that is thought to have existed across what is now the straits of the Bosphorus, the narrow passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. There are also other ideas about where the water came from and how fast it came:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

“As proposed, the Early Holocene Black Sea flood scenario describes events that would have profoundly affected prehistoric settlement in eastern Europe and adjacent parts of Asia and possibly was the basis of oral history concerning Noah’s flood.”

On the plus side, that would explain the widespread existence of Flood stories. But such a flooding would have been gradual and not caused by a long, but still much shorter, very intense period of heavy rains. So … who knows?

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Charlie

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Project 1794 Air Force’s Supersonic Flying Saucer Schematics

..The newly declassified materials show the U.S. Air Force had a contract with a now-defunct Canadian company to build an aircraft unlike anything seen before. Project 1794 got as far as the initial rounds of product development and into prototype design. In a memo dating from 1956 the results from pre-prototype testing are summarized and reveal exactly what the developers had hoped to create.

The saucer was supposed to reach a top speed of “between Mach 3 and Mach 4, a ceiling of over 100,000 ft. and a maximum range with allowances of about 1,000 nautical miles,” according to the document…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFoSYntvFVk

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Then someone invented the Frisbee. It performed adequately, although it did not resonate within the military, so it was never funded as a weapon’s project, but it eventually found a different market:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisbee

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Lars220

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Forgive me Alex but this was not much more than a hovercraft.  I can’t see something like this (doughnut shaped) going very fast let alone Mach 3 or 4.

To do those speeds this is what you need – Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird (2,500 mph)

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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UFO = Unadulterated Fun Obsession
Obsession; noun: an unhealthy and compulsive preoccupation with something that probably has to do with ‘Flying Saucers’. But wait, Breaking News, Sky News UK has not only a photograph, but also a 1:54 minute “Must See” UFO video. (Everyone loves these short, informative, interesting, and educational videos) Now come on, don’t try to deny that you really want to read, see, and hear what Sky News UK has to say on this subject. Not that it is the last word,  just some more recent articles to spend time glancing over, hey – fun:
Anticipation is high for impending release of US government information on ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ – Monday 21 June 2021 – Sky News UK
And another Sky News UK UFO follow up article the very next day:
Researchers welcome release of government information about ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ – Tuesday 22 June 2021 – Sky News UK
“The phenomenon has just been validated by the papers coming out that, yes, there’s something out there. No, we don’t know what it is, but it’s worth looking into. And that’s what we’ve been doing for decades,” said Chris Jones of the Mutual UFO Network.”            Additional Top Secret information for true believers and reluctant wannabes:
UAP Unidentified Aerial Phenomena is just the US Govt, and other colluders, trying to obfuscate the ‘Truth’ that we all know is out there about UFO’s. Down with UAP, bring back our favorite terminology, the well known UFO.
Having too much fun, I’m leaving, – ouch, hey did the barn door hit me on way out?

Amazing Truths Revealed: Link to Simply Magnificent AskWoody Knowledge Bases

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Well, what do you know? “The phenomenon has just been validated by the papers coming out that, yes, there’s something out there. No, we don’t know what it is, but it’s worth looking into. ”

Hey! That is my line!

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Some further comment on the AVROCAR flying-saucer project:

In my rather long career I have, individually and as a member of a number of teams, worked on designing electronic circuits and, later on, I have had to write some fairly complex software to do the things I needed, and still need, to do computer work of the kind known as “there is NOT an app for that.”

And never I have found myself at all in, or even heard of, such an overall miserably and, in detail, badly designed and executed project as it seems to have been the one of the flying-saucer-like fighter aircraft that Alex has brought here to our attention. Particularly one that, based on the previous experience of its leader and, presumably, other team members designing actual military aircraft, makes this one’s failure even more puzzling. Or were they the kind of big company/organization employees that rise and rise inevitably above their own capacity?

Their super-flying wonder turned out to be no more than an unstable and very noisy as well as slow hovercraft that could lift its own weight and little else and would have incapacitated anyone with motion sickness after a short while hovering around on it, while alerting any enemies around that were not completely deaf, of its coming. So it could not have been relied upon to fast and silently move troops and equipment to where most needed, or for the debarkation of marines when launching an invasion from ships offshore. And the same can be said for the civilian uses I can think of.

I wonder if the reason might have been that, back in the late 1950s, without the help of computers (there were already some around, but were not available to any but a few in certain universities and government laboratories) the transition from back-of the-envelope ideas, all the way to their (very expensive) proof of concept implementation, there was nothing much else that could be done to verify that the idea was a sound one before starting to bend metal? If so, that would have been a real wild time (a true “Wild West” time) in big, expensive and innovative design prototyping.

One more saucer-shaped mystery, this one, indeed.

 

 

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Breaking news! Stop everything you are doing, and pay attention:

They are coming! Soon! To you!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/25/power-up-ufo-report-come-pentagon-soon-today/

This site being paywalled (and I not being OK with people using newspaper paywall busters) I am excerpting more than usual here, with the guts of this most important story of the day:

“FREAKY FRIDAY: A government report on unexplained aerial phenomena is expected to be provided to Congress by the director of national intelligence as soon as today, according to a spokesperson for the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The report, mandated as part of the coronavirus pandemic relief package signed by then-president Trump at the end of last year, comes after the Pentagon established an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force last year, and has since urged military pilots to report unusual sightings.

Senior administration officials who were briefed on the findings of the report told the New York Times’s Julian Barnes and Helene Cooper earlier this month that American intelligence officials “have found no evidence that aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy

 

pilots in recent years are alien spacecraft, but they still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military.”

The news was dismissed as a nothing-burger by some readers but viewed as a major development by others who have tracked the issue closely:

“This report has definitively stated once and for all that it’s not our technology,” Lue Elizondo, former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, told Power Up during an interview. “And that’s hugely important. For 30 years there has always been this undercurrent, if you will, these conspiracies that there was… some sort of a super special technology that has been implemented and we’ve been – just been very careless about it. And I think that argument was finally put to bed this week.”

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have started taking the issue more seriously and have come to view UAPs as a potential national security threat. They’re eager for answers: “There’s stuff flying in our airspace and we don’t know who it is and it’s not ours. So we should know who it is, especially if it’s an adversary that’s made a technological leap,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Politico’s Andrew Desiderio.

“We don’t know,” Rubio added. “But how can we have stuff flying over restricted military airspace and not even be curious — not to mention concerned — about who it is and why they’re here?”
“The report is also expected to disprove some of the more wacky theories about certain sightings, which have fueled conspiracy theories about extraterrestrial life. The fact that the U.S. government is even producing a report on the matter — sought by Congress in last year’s defense policy bill — shows that top officials are trying to move past the sci-fi reputation of UAPs.” ”

 

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Depending on their intentions, I’d rather go for a little trip with these whoever they ares rather than a short and dangerous trip with Jeff Bezos.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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OscarCP

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Charlie, two points commenting on what you have written about not going up with Bezos, but in case that you were also thinking about going with Elon Musk:

(1) You cannot afford it.

(2) If you got in one of those one-way trips they have been having at SpaceX when testing their “Starship”, you might be OK on the way up, but would need a parachute to make it back.  The reason why? You can see it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5Vw2ZDe-G0

(With explosions.)

As to going with the aliens instead, well, what is your opinion about “being probed”?

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No trips with Bezos, Musk, or even NASA for me even if I could afford it.  Still way too dangerous and uncomfortable.  As far as being probed, it would depend.  Throughout my life I’ve been stuck with needles, scanned, blasted with X-rays, and undergone colonoscopies (a probe).  So it would pretty much depend on what they wanted to do beyond that, and I wouldn’t want them messing with my brain unless . . it was to improve it.

I would think by now they already know what they want to know about life on Earth.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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I watched Sir Richard Branson’s flight into space and have to admit I was impressed by it.  His sparing use of rocket power makes for a more comfortable ride, and lots of big windows lets one see the Earth and how wonderful it looks from space.  I wish them all the best of luck.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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He’s been around quite a bit, in his seventy Aprils, starting his first company in 1970, when he was 20 years old. But he is also an adventurous soul:

In 1987 he crossed the Atlantic in a balloon (named: “Virgin Atlantic”, “Virgin” being the first word in the names of many of his companies, including “Virgin Galactic”, that develops, builds and operates rockets like the one that took him into space :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Branson

https://www.wickersworld.co.uk/the-ballooning-exploits-of-richard-branson/

Excerpts:

“In 1987, at the age of 36, Branson crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a hot air balloon. He made the trip in the company of a Swede, Per Lindstrand, who was the balloon’s designer. The ‘Virgin Atlantic Flyer’ was the first ever hot air balloon to successfully complete the Atlantic crossing, during which it achieved speeds of more than 130mph. The balloon was also the biggest that had ever flown, with a total volume of 2.3m cubic feet.”

…..

” In 1991, Branson and Lindstrand successfully crossed the Pacific Ocean in a hot air balloon, setting a distance record of 6,700 miles. … In the mid-to-late 1990s, Branson made several unsuccessful attempts to fly all the way round the world by balloon.”

Here, some video clips of today’s flight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6Cspcb6hCQ

But it would seem that, if there are aliens flying in those UFOs, either they were not interested, or did not know about the event, as none seems to have showed up to see it.

At least that any earthlings have noticed, or told others, if the did see the aliens hanging about. Or maybe those who noticed were all abducted?

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And the report is now out:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-report.html

(This NYT article is not paywalled.)

Excerpts:

“Officials do not have any indications that the unexplained incidents show objects that are part of a foreign intelligence collection program or a major technological advancement by a potential adversary, a senior government official said. They are also unable to confirm that any of those incidents are part of a U.S. government or defense industry program, a senior official said.”

“The report avoids any real discussion of the possibility that the unexplained phenomena are extraterrestrial in nature. It was not the purpose of the government’s task force to search for extraterrestrial life, a responsibility that falls to NASA, said a senior governmental official.”

OK, I’ll get right to it.

“The effort may require some outside expertise, but scientists, who have long avoided studying U.F.O.s, are likely going to need cajoling.”

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Looks like this Grey has been working out.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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OscarCP wrote:

“The effort may require some outside expertise, but scientists, who have long avoided studying U.F.O.s, are likely going to need cajoling.”

Yes, with the mistrust of scientists in the past five years or so, it stands to reason that men of science are hesitant to delve into anything that might bring more criticism on them than they’re already getting.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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There is also the fact that scientists are human (and none that I know uses a lab coat, by the way, so they blend in with the crowds and you got to know their faces to recognize them for what they are). And being human means they are also competitive and it is not unheard of them being less than scrupulously fair players. Another fact is that being involved in what is widely regarded as offbeat stuff is to give a good excuse to one’s competitors to go after one’s grants, for example by having one’s proposals buried six feet under a pile of unfavorable reviews, to the advantage of the proposals of the reviewers’ allies.

So “he is studying flying saucers” is not really a good thing to be rumored of anyone who wishes to have, or continue to have, a reasonably successful career.

This does not mean that studying flying saucers is a a bad thing to do, but that there is such a thing as a third rail in every kind of human endeavor, and wisdom dictates that it is better not to touch it. Unless, for example here in this country, you have a couple of influential US Senators on your side, at the very least.

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Roswell: The Final Verdict tv series.

“In 1947, a rancher near Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have discovered mysterious debris on his property, triggering decades of official government denials, and countless conspiracy theories, about aliens. Now, tapes of haunting first-person accounts from the past are being analyzed in a totally modern way, using artificial intelligence (AI) lie detection software to test if the eyewitnesses are telling the truth. Although most of the witnesses are now deceased, AI permits truth to be separated from fiction and the most important UFO event in world history can be weighed in the balance with all the evidence at hand. Truth seekers will now decide … the final verdict.”

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Alex quoted: “Now, tapes of haunting first-person accounts from the past are being analyzed in a totally modern way, using artificial intelligence (AI) lie detection software to test if the eyewitnesses are telling the truth. ”

Hmm … AI lie detection software: Whose software? Advanced extraterrestrial alien’s AI software, perhaps, who knows, kept under wraps in Area 51? Because present day human’s AI software is not exactly the most dependable thing in the universe:

https://syncedreview.com/2021/01/01/2020-in-review-10-ai-failures/

“ The global artificial intelligence market is expected to top US$40 billion in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 43.39 percent, according to Market Insight Reports. AI’s remarkable achievements and continuing rapid expansion into new domains are undeniable. However, as with most nascent technologies, there are still bugs to work out. “

….

” In June, a controversial study by Harrisburg University in Pennsylvania, A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing, proposed an automated facial recognition system the authors claimed could predict whether an individual is a criminal from a single photograph of their face.

In response, a letter addressed to the publisher of Nature and signed by more than 2,000 AI researchers, scholars and students urged the scientific journal not to publish the study, arguing “recent instances of algorithmic bias across race, class, and gender have revealed a structural propensity of machine learning systems to amplify historic forms of discrimination, and have spawned renewed interest in the ethics of technology and its role in society.” ”

And also mentioned there: an AI-driven technique for taking in people’s photos and putting out realistic-looking photos of the same people, sans their clothes, that then can be posted in Facebook, etc. Whether that is an AI success or not depends on whose point of view.

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OscarCP wrote:

authors claimed could predict whether an individual is a criminal from a single photograph of their face.

Remember Phrenology anyone??

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I think this went out with high-buttoned shoes and Alchemy.  It could, however, if you took away all of the good qualities, be used as a way of depicting the brains of many politicians and the people who follow them blindly.

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Wavy, you are being remarkably cryptic here, even compared to your previous triumphs displaying this awesome gift you have for terseness.

Yes, Phrenology was a pseudo-science discredited ages ago.

Phrenology joined a select group of things people, even many scientist of the day believed were correct and real, such as:

The “Flat Earth” theory.

The “Ptolemaic Universe”, where Earth was a sphere, OK, but sitting at the center of the Universe and fixed there, with the Sun and also everything one could see in clear nights going around it.

The “Phogiston”, or “heat fluid” theory that was supposed to explain what heat was and what it did.

The medieval “Four Humors” theory  of medicine, whose unbalance caused illness.

The “Canals of Mars.”

The “Z Rays”, the was supposed to be another novel form of invisible radiation “discovered” after Roentgen discovered X rays. They could be “seen” with special instruments and only by those specially trained and after gaining much needed experience.

The theory of the “Luminiferous Ether” that was the medium through which light waves were supposed to propagate. Plank (with other people) and Einstein took care of that.

The idea that “Atoms” were not real, but a convenient way of explaining things. Einstein also took care of that.

And so on and so forth.

So is that your point about UFOlogy? For shame, Wavy! For shame!

 

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Oh, my apologies to Wavy! He posted a phrenological map of a human head as a follow-on to a previous comment of his!

Some more corrections are in order:

It is “Phlogiston”, but that was just a typo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory

The”Four Humors” theory (a.k.a. “Four Temperaments”) it was, or it was not exactly medieval, depending of what one takes into consideration to assign antiquity to it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_temperaments

And the rays were N rays, no Z rays (so at 90 degrees to the letter I remembered):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-ray

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I seem to remember reading in a magazine (Analog) in the 10 to 20 years that not all aether theories were debunked. As I do not really understand most of the Einstein refutations I will stay on dry land here and not get in over my head in aether.
I do recall the The Michelson-Morley experiment disproved one aether theory.

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Wavy, Maybe you saw something like this?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankoberlein/2018/04/06/the-tale-of-a-1986-experiment-that-proved-einstein-wrong/?sh=93052de3ed3e

The idea that the failure to detect a different speed of light when the lab where the measurements were made, on the rotating Earth, was moving towards the Sun or away from it in the course of a day and also when measuring light coming from two perpendicular directions, was because of the use of an inappropriate method by Michelson and Morley, was proposed in 1986 by a man whose last name was Silvertooth, who published a paper showing results of his own experiments that, using a different instrument from Michelson and Morley’s, seem to show clear evidence of different speeds that agreed with the notion that light travels the same as classical objects, towards an observer at the speed of light plus or minus that of the observer away or towards the source.

The questions about the experiment method’s quality, the competence of Sivertooth, who had been involved on work requiring a reasonably solid foundation on physics, and whether there might be something real in his results even so, remained open until another experiment was conducted in a rigorous way and using the same method that showed that the results of Silvertooth were too noisy to infer a daily effect, as would be the case if he were right, and the effect observed in the second experiment was, in fact, due to minor changes in temperature that stretched and contracted the apparatus. As the author of the article I have linked here concludes:

“This doesn’t mean the aether doesn’t exist, but for now it is clear we don’t need an aether to explain Silvertooth’s experiment. In a broader sense, this story is an excellent example of the striking difference between science and pseudoscience. In pseduoscience folks are content to cite an article without any consideration of the actual results. If it seems to agree with your expectations, then that’s good enough. As a scientist, Marett took the time to look at an old experiment with a questioning eye. In doing so he solved a 30-year old mystery of the experiment that seemed to prove Einstein wrong.”

In my own mind I am inclined to think that not only is not true that the ether exists and relativity is fundamentally wrong, but also that quantum theory makes the ether unnecessary, since according to it light does not need an ether to propagate, because photons are not like water waves that need water to exist. Photons can propagate in a real vacuum just fine, same as bullets do, without an ether or anything else to be there for them to do that. Unless one considers the quantum electromagnetic field to be “the ether.” That is not what the proponents of the ether theory mean.

But concerning UFOs, while there is much charlatanism and “learned studies” that qualify as pseudoscience, something is going on nevertheless that, in my own view, nobody has found a completely convincing explanation for. If it is an advanced intelligent species of aliens behind it, well, that would be extraordinarily important knowledge to have: the knowledge that life, intelligent life to boot, exists elsewhere in the universe and is advanced enough to be able to zip by Earth, perhaps from light years away. If it is all some kind of enduring, world-wide mass delusion, that would also be very interesting from the point of view of understanding human nature, the workings of the human mind. Or if it is neither aliens, nor mass illusion, nor secret military projects that create the impression of alien technology flitting by across the skies, then discovering what it actually is could be most interesting.

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I am not sure if that study was mentioned, it was maybe more than a dozen years age.
Kooistra maybe Cramer writing the The Alternate View column in Analog.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?10404

OscarCP wrote:

Or if it is neither aliens, nor mass illusion, nor secret military projects that create the impression of alien technology flitting by across the skies, then discovering what it actually is could be most interesting.

A visit from Mt Olympus ?

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From Olympus Mons?

In my list of debunked scientific ideas, that does not include the one that something is really going on that is usually attributed to UFOs, but might be something else entirely, the theory of the ether is listed but maybe I should have marked it with a (tiny) question mark.

Now about the existence of the Ether (or Aether), that I think is implicitly rebuked by quantum field theory:

Some physicists won’t give the ether a rest, because if it existed there would be a universal reference frame for space and time, and that is precisely what “relativity” denies, because in it all reference frames are “relative” to particular observers.
But assuming such a universal space and time frame would result in observable phenomena, at least in principle, so the idea is, also in principle, subject to verification (falsification) by experiment and sort of deserves being taken seriously. Except that the necessary measurements, precise enough for this, may not yet exist. Or if they exist, it would seem that nobody has yet realized that they could be used to prove, or disprove the existence of the ether.

In the following article, what is known as “Einstein’s aether theory” is not Einstein’s, that is just the name it has been given, as it leads to a modified theory that preserves much of Einstein’s General Relativity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_aether_theory

As to the “Analog Science Fiction & Fact” 2008 “Alternate View” article on the aether, it was by Jeffrey Kooistra, who was prone to defending discredited theories, for example that global warming is not real, but an artifact of comparing inaccurate older temperature measurements to more accurate present ones. (One “View” that got a strong rebuke from Prof. John G. Cramer, the current holder of the “Alternate View” column, by the way.)

What follows is a description of Kooistra’s article by someone else (typos and all), not the article itself, because I don’t have time to dig deeper for it right now:

“Aether Theory and Einstein … What textbooks don’t say”

http://theminiaturespage.com/plus/msg.mv?id=132325

Excerpt:

” In the [2008] January/February ANALOG magazine, Jeffrey Kooistra presents some interesting support for the theory of a fluid model of space/time, as a few physicists are currently raising. Starngely enough, it comes for the one person who supposedly enitrely removed the concept of the Aether (The non-luminous ‘fluid medium’ in which light waves propagate )- Albert Einstein.

The neeed for this medium to exist was based upon Einstein’s interpretation of “Handbook Of Optics” by P Drude, who badly distorted the theory of Lorentz’s view of the concept; Drude claimed that Lorentz saw the aether as being an actual mass at absolute rest, which would not have allowed light to be a constant as Einstein based Rleativity upon, but Lorentz actually claimed that ” ( Aether has ) some parts . . . remaining at rest with respect to one another, and that the aether at rest constituted a priviledged reference system.”

However, in 1916, Einstein and Lorentz entered into correspondence, during the course of which the former began to realise that there was a way that an aether could fit with Relativity; To quote ‘Einstein And The Ether’ by Ludwick Kostro, “For the first time, however, there emerged a concept of a new, non-stationary aether which would not violate the relativity principle.” In fact Kostro quotes Einstein from a deleted section of an article for ‘Nature’ in 1920 “Therefore, in 1905, I was of the opinion that it was no longer allowed to speak about the ether in physics. This opinion, however, was too radical, as we will see later when we discuss the general theory of relativity. It is still permissible, as before, to introduce a medium filling space and to assume that the electromagnetic fields (and matter as well) are its states.” “

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I take back that “tiny question mark” in my previous comment on the debunking of the theory of the luminiferous ether: that was debunked by Einstein. If he later came up with something that resembled some aspect of the debunked theory, that was not the debunked theory, but something fundamentally different and that did not violate Relativity’s tenets, unlike the old theory.

The debunked theory assumed that light consisted in waves that propagated through some static medium, same as water waves through still waters with no currents to carry them faster than they would move otherwise, so if one moved towards its source, the relative speed would be the simple difference of the velocities relative to this static ether, same as when a car coming towards where one is will pass one sooner if one goes towards it and later if one goes in the same direction. But the Michelson and Morley experiment showed light did not work this way: it definitely kept coming towards one at the same speed regardless of which way one moved. This strange result led Einstein primarily, to work out a different theory with really surprising ideas as how space and time work, so two synchronized clocks that work perfectly, for example, would give different readings if one clock was taken for a ride and the other stayed put, when compared at the return of the traveling one; events might be both simultaneous and happen one after the other, depending on who is looking. And much more.

And this is already, I imagine, enough frivolous diversion from the serious topic of UFO sightings and what they might really be and what they are doing here.

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wavy

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A good read:

AREA 51   An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base

By Annie Jacobsen

And if you cannot sleep at night, turn on your internet radio and stream The Ultimate Art Bell.  Art was a master at hosting guests who enjoyed spinning tales of government conspiracies and the supernatural.

Art carried on the legacy of Long John Nebel, a late-night radio host in the mid-1950s until his death in 1978. Long John was on radio station WOR in New York.

It is interesting to compare the regional distribution of telephone calls to Art’s show with the regional density of conspiracy talk in modern day America.

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Another good read is:  UFO Headquarters  Investigations On Current Extraterrestrial Activity

By Susan Wright

“State of the art information and testimony on the UFO ‘hot spot’ Area 51”.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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In comparison to Annie Jacobsen the author of AREA 51  An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the New York Times bestselling author, Susan Wright is a true scholar.

According to her page at Amazon, “Susan Wright is the author of over thirty novels and nonfiction books published by Penguin Group, Pocket Books and St. Martin’s Press, among others.”  Her publications include:

• Turning Your Man into Putty in Your Hands: A Learning Annex Book,
• Driving Your Woman Wild In Bed: A Man’s Guide to Satisfying Women,
• Slaves Unchained (Slave Trade Book 3),
• Confessions of a Demon (An Allay Novel),
• The Badlands: Book Two (Star Trek: The Next Generation 2) Jan 26, 2000,
• The Badlands: Book One (Star Trek: The Next Generation 1),
• Gateways Book Seven: What Lay Beyond (Star Trek 7),
• The Tempest (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Book 19),
• Gateways #1: One Small Step (Star Trek: The Original Series),
• Dark Passions Book One (Star Trek: The Next Generation),
• Slave Masters (Slave Trade Book 2),
• Dark Passions Book Two (Star Trek: The Next Generation),
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: Sins of Commission, and
• A Pound of Flesh (A Marja Duology).

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Kathy Stevens: Interesting author; first time I learn about her or the wide-ranging topics of her work. Some of it may be helpful to couples having problems as well as to newlyweds, and also of particular interest to people who read Sci-Fi TV-show tie-ins, so it should not surprise anyone if she is capable of writing good books on such things as UFOs, for example.

I think.

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Kathy, what comes to mind is that authors often have to write what will sell and/or what their publisher wants in order to sell books.  There is most likely a high demand for the topics you listed, and even the Star Trek universe has gotten darker and sexier of late.

I think Susan Wright did a very good job on the book I mentioned and read.  My intent was to add more info. to this topic and not to compete with your info.

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I haven’t heard of Annie Jacobsen either, which shows the extent of my tremendous ignorance.

But, as to Susan Wright, I think that to have a better idea of what her writing is like, first I will get from Amazon in Kindle format and then read, the second one in Kate Steven’s list; because one can never know enough about its so important, but bewildering topic.

And, for some reason, as I write this comment, the following thought occurs to me: one should always keep in mind that this thread is in “Fun Stuff.”

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Charlie

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Kathy Stevens wrote:

Susan Wright is a true scholar

Ok I will bite, what did she do to deserve the accolade Scholar?

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Wavy: As usual, this information you have asked for is to be obtained at the forever surging fountain of all knowledge, both the truly enlightening and the otherwise:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Jacobsen

Excerpts:

“Jacobsen writes about war, weapons, security, and secrets. Jacobsen is best known as the author of the 2011 non-fiction book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, which The New York Times called “cauldron-stirring.”

“She is an internationally acclaimed and sometimes controversial author who, according to one critic, writes sensational books by addressing popular conspiracies.”

Sure, there is always “one critic” that would say that. Sheesh!

What matters here is that she has written a book on Area 51 and on the Roswell Incident that should be of possible interest to all of those curious-minded enough to want to know more about this whole UFO thing.

The Wikipedia’s article on her book (see the “Area 51” link included in the first of the excepts above), has this to say:

“The book, based on interviews with scientists and engineers who worked in Area 51, addresses the Roswell UFO incident and dismisses the alien story. Instead, it suggests that Josef Mengele was recruited by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to produce “grotesque, child-size aviators” to be remotely piloted and landed in America to cause hysteria in the likeness of Orson Welles’ 1938 radio drama War of the Worlds, but that the aircraft crashed and the incident was hushed up by the Americans. Jacobsen writes that the bodies found at the crash site were children. Grotesquely but similarly deformed, aged around 12, each under five feet tall, with large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes. “They were neither aliens nor consenting airmen, but human guinea pigs”, she claims. Jacobson also interviews Richard Mingus who outlines an incident whereby Area 6 was attacked at gunpoint during the preparation of a nuclear test detonation. ”

That Dr, Mengele (a.k.a “Dr. Death” by his “patients” at the Nazi concentration camps) surely got around!

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wavy, Charlie

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Actually I was inquiring about Susan Wright.
Beem me up Scotty ….🥏🛸

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Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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I now see I missed a sentence in Kathy’s post. I consider the question answered.

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On Fareed Zakaria’s CNN program GPS, Sunday July 11 , astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (head of Hayden Planetarium in New York City) ( https://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/about/profile.php   ) opined that the UFO in the image released by the Air Force may be nothing more that a computer glitch.

https://www.askwoody.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-25-at-12.32.53-PM.gif

See the Wikipedia discussion of Occam’s razor.

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Kathy Stevens: I saw another deGrasse Tyson’s interview. He said something to the effect that the recordings from  the Navy fighter jets’ infrared cameras showing something unusual “could be a glitch”. He did not have the camera in his possession, available to inspect it himself, or to have it inspected by people who know how to do it and have the necessary tools to do it; so, yes, he was just guessing, not having the necessary data to back up his assertion. A reasonable guess, but a guess even so. On the other hand I was not all that impressed by the Navy fighter’s infrared camera recordings either. I have posted a still from one, somewhere in this thread, taken from a New York Times’ article, so people can see what I mean. It has that unclear, fuzzy look characteristic of all the UFO “evidence ” I have seen over the years: maybe there is something to it, but “it” does not exactly nail it down.

It could well be just a glitch, but I am an engineer and know the difference between a reasonable guess as to how something might, or might not work, and a statement made knowing the facts of the matter.

Being the Director of a planetarium, however great the planetarium might be, makes no difference in this case.

On the question of logic, of the use of Occam’s razor, as well about the resort to authority in an argument over facts, the “argumentum ad verecundiam”, being a faulty form of reasoning, much has been written and shall continue to be written.

I’ll be inclined to believe deGrasse Tyson when he lectures on the planet Neptune and his weird icy moon Triton, but not when he discusses the potential problems of Navy jets’ infrared camera recordings. In fact, I would not trust even my own definite assertions on this topic — were I ever to make such assertions, which is not very likely.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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I saw a good cartoon on The Week magazine’s website where a man and his wife are watching the news and seeing the “fuzzy” picture of the reported UFO.  The man says “If I’m going to believe in aliens, I need to see something more than just fuzzy videos”.  Outside their house a fuzzy UFO has landed a little way off, and two fuzzy aliens are ringing their doorbell.

I would have liked to have inserted it but these cartoons are copyrighted.  Here is a link that should take you to that webpage:   https://theweek.com/cartoons?page=3

You may have to do “Load more” to get to it.

 

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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OscarCP

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And here you have some fuzzy jet camera video with some pilots “subdued” chatter in the last clip:

https://in.mashable.com/culture/13570/pentagon-confirms-ufo-sightings-and-the-internet-reacts-with-alien-jokes

There is a long read here, but depending on browser, one might run against a paywall:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/what-the-pentagon-report-says-about-ufos

The big question now opened by the US military: is it UFO or UAP?

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Charlie

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And here is, finally, definitive proof that UFOs, or UAPs, or whatever you prefer to call them, ARE REAL!!!

These two recorded Argentinian TV shows, clearly (well, a bit fuzzily, to be precise) have images of these alien devices flying in the then clear skies (well, a bit polluted, to tell the truth, but that’s neither here nor there) during the shows.

In the first one, a talking-heads panel discusses the news being presented by the anchor, a woman, while, on a supposedly live cityscape background, an UFO appears flying from left to right, passing behind a tall building nearby that briefly occults it, then reappears and finally exits stage right. The panelists continue babbling among themselves, totally oblivious:

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/weird-news/watch-ufo-appear-behind-news-5463784

In the second recorded video, during a morning weather TV show, while two people, another female anchor and a man who is, presumably, a meteorologist, discuss the color of the unclouded but rather smoggy Buenos Aires sky at that time of day, in front of a giant screen, another UFO shows up and is spotted by the woman, and the man has a look and says it is an UFO, but  probably worried about having to put up with UFO jokes for the rest of his life, quickly adds that, technically speaking, it should be called that until its true nature can be determined and, in this case, it is possibly a weather balloon or some such perfectly terrestrial and human-made object, not an alien’s flying saucer (there is a longer clip of this recording, where he can be heard saying that; I am not able to find it just now and, in any case, it is also in Spanish, so it may not be understood by some of those who read this):

https://www.ibtimes.co.in/tv-news-anchor-spots-ufo-live-argentine-channel-conspiracy-theorists-claim-it-alien-existence-783477

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Charlie

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My wife and I watched the TV show “60 Minutes” this past Sunday and they had a report on the new interest in UFO’s by the government.  The guy they were interviewing referred to them as UAP’s (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).  They can’t dismiss all the reports from reliable sources like fighter jet pilots who see these “Tick Tac” craft doing very unusual things.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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OscarCP

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Now, about crop circles: the source of “aliens among us” stories, with purported sightings of mysterious lights hovering over the fields where they were then found and that, allegedly, have been seen for centuries in certain parts of Britain; later debunked as hoaxes, when some hoaxers demonstrated how they made theirs. But then it was realized that the method the hoaxers used could not explain some very elaborate and very large patterns carved out over hilly terrain by flattening the plants along selected paths in corn fields. Presumably made, whether by aliens or by hoaxers, with the understandable aggravation of the farmers so affected and afflicted.

Here there is a series of articles on different interesting things; for the one on the circles, please scroll down the page:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210825-in-the-steps-of-historys-forgotten-female-explorers

 

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wavy

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Nice design!

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In today’s news (24 November 2021):

Pentagon to study UFO sightings in restricted US airspace
(Again)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59405585

From this article:

“US defense officials have announced the launch of a task force to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects in restricted airspace.

The group will assess objects of interest and “mitigate any associated threats”, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

A highly anticipated military report in June failed to explain dozens of reported UFO sightings and warned of possible national security risks.

The new group will be overseen by top military and intelligence leaders.

The Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group will “detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in [special use airspace]”, Deputy Defence Secretary Kathleen Hicks said in a memo to senior Pentagon leadership on Tuesday.

Their directives include reducing gaps in intelligence detection capabilities, analysing intelligence and counterintelligence data, and recommending policy in the area.

The defence department has said it takes any reports of aerial incursions – identified or unidentified – “very seriously, and investigates each one”.

Tuesday’s statement acknowledges challenges highlighted by a Pentagon report to Congress in June.”

“Lawmakers had demanded the report after the US military reported numerous instances of unidentified objects seen moving erratically in the sky.“

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Now NASA is studying … Oh, No!

https://www.zdnet.com/article/nasa-is-starting-a-new-study-into-uaps-aka-ufos-it-says-its-not-selling-out/

““NASA is uniquely positioned to address UAPs [a.k.a UFOs],” Daniel Evans, the assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said to reporters Thursday. Evans will serve as the NASA official responsible for orchestrating the study.“

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