What's up with UFOs these days?

[Judge]

Mostly I suspect that government(s) are finally coming to grips with the reality that the public can handle the reality. With considerable time lapsing when it comes to highly classified materials.

Kind of parallels landmark court decisions, where in time there is a belief that society has evolved, and so must some government policies.

 

[Au Naturel]

Back in the 60s, UFOs were real.

Then, for 50 years, they weren't real.

Now, they seem to be real again.

What's up with that?

Press coverage. People are encouraged to claim their minutes of fame with UFO sightings. There's a huge market for UFOlogy these days.

Also, rationality is less valued than it once was. We are awash with bizarre conspiracy theories.

There have always been UFOs. Anything that looks like it is flying that you can't identify is a UFO. Very often, it isn't worth trying to identify it.

Sometimes politics gets in the way. The Chinese ballon would have remained a UFO if the government had its druthers.

 

[Neonatal RRT]

"Non-human biologicals" doesn't really mean a lot in itself... that would also include DNA or biologicals from animals, plants, insects. Unidentifiable biologicals would be really interesting.


It's not necessarily the case that Earth wouldn't be special. If we were to somehow discover evidence of life on another planet, wouldn't that be special? If Earth were the first planet they discovered, it might be special to them. If they had already discovered thousands of other similar planets, then Earth would be just one of many and not particularly special.

I agree that the distances are so vast as to make it very difficult for interstellar travel to happen. It's a huge technological challenge to overcome. Not entirely impossible, just highly unlikely.

Click onto YouTube and watch these hearings. The "non-human biologicals" apparently were alive and well enough to actually physically harm personnel. When he said that, everyone in the room got a bit wide-eyed. No, I don't think he was implying DNA, animals, plants, and insects. He was implying actual intelligent beings.

 

[Neonatal RRT]

What I found interesting was that these expert witnesses were representing military and commercial airline pilots, who actually see these craft common enough to actually have safety concerns, both from a domestic flight perspective and a national security perspective. What they were actually asking Congress to do was to provide an agency to report these sightings and to provide professional protections under law, as many pilots when they do report them are often punished in some way, as if they are "unfit" to fly. However, behind the scenes, pilots are extremely reluctant to make official reports. They just want a legal and transparent mechanism of reporting without risking their professional careers. The military are definitely concerned because these craft are seen around the world and are occasionally shot down. The concern is the reverse engineering aspect where some country could suddenly have a huge leap forward in air superiority and shift the balance of military power in the world.

This idea that extraterrestrial worlds are too far away to travel to/from Earth is simply from the perspective that WE have not discovered ways to navigate the universe in very short time periods. We are still thinking about propulsion and the limitations of traveling at the speed of light. Whereas, extraterrestrials may have found ways to bend space, use wormholes, or some other completely different way to navigate from point A to point B. They may have figured out how to travel thousands of lightyears in distance in the matter of seconds. Who knows? However, the first government, government contractor, or private entity on Earth to figure this out by reverse engineering, I can't imagine the consequences or what that may mean.

 

[Tom]

I am interested but haven't really looked into the recent UFO news, other then read that they say there are flying objects they can't identify and do not seem to have known flying characteristics.

But I tend to think if true, that these are just craft of a foreign nation with a tech we don't have, which is actually scarier to me then aliens in a way. I don't know what aliens will be like, but I know there are nations hostile to us. Having worked out on the Nevada ranges myself around Area 51, I saw no evidence of anything exterrestrial nor ever met anyone who said they had, and ammong ourselfves there always was talk/rumor/leaks about unusual events. I remember one of the organizations like NSA saying if we ever did find aliens that even with the most top secret protocols in existance they esimated the secret would only last 45 minutes. A story like that just couldn't be kept quiet, the lure to be that whistleblower, sell it, tell Mom, etc.

But if anyone could post link to most accurate current reports, I would appreciate it. My info is pretty dated now.

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

If they exist, they understand physics if ways we can only guess. I suspect we are getting close I see hints traveling faster than light not required and if they exist, they figured it out. Not worm hole, fourth spatial dimension which actually works better with theory of relativity. Fourth dimension one Planck length in thickness travel through this travel anywhere in universe need amazing Gps.

 

[lovely_darlingprettybaby]

Back in the 60s, UFOs were real.

Then, for 50 years, they weren't real.

Now, they seem to be real again.

What's up with that?

I do not believe in UFOs that I know of but also I believe anything is possible.
I do not discount life on other planets in terms of small organisims but I wonder too because if that was true then you would think they would have a whole biodiverse system like us.

I had a dream once that there were planets like us out there and humans or people like us living very similarly on other earthlike planets and that freaked me out like idk why that would be true I think a higher power has his hands full with this planet. That freaked me out too because I know there are earthlike planets in the universe and would we ever meet these people and really this does nothing hut scare me to death.
Because why would there be people like us on other planets? For what reason?
So I like to not believe this crazy thought.

 

[SusanLR]

Thinking of space/time distances being too far is keeping with not knowing anything outside of our clanky metal rockets and how it IS too far for them.
If physical UFOs or UAPs are visiting, they would require a better form of travel than we have. I think science will, in time, discover that.
It is being experimented with and studied like never before.

If some parts of the government are privy to UFO phenomena beyond what most of the planet knows, it is because of the fear of panic it would cause.
Information has gradually been more declassified since the late 40's and 50's when the UFO craze hit.
Maybe they do not know for certain there are aliens that we would call physical, but rather, there may be many more proofs of UAPs than they want the people to know.
The government may have felt concern for their own safety. Not knowing if they are from another country, top secret craft, or if indeed extraterrestrial, are they a threat?

Personal view is I believe there are other life forms. The universe is too old and too vast to think the only speck of dust that contains sentient life is planet Earth.
Having seen two up close "crafts" in my lifetime makes for more belief.
It was interesting, but scary because I don't know what they are or what is behind them. What is their purpose or intentions?

I do know they had a surreal sense about them and fit what pilots and others report.
They glide smoothly, effortlessly, without sound.
The lights do not have a light beam like a light would have on a known craft.
One sighting was at night over water very close overhead.
It passed over me and my boyfriend several times before streaking off at an incredible speed to disappear. It would fit the typical flying saucer shape as it was round. About 30 feet wide. A large round bluish light in the center of the bottom.

The other was at dusk in Missouri while my parents and I were driving down a dirt road with trees on one side and a field on the other. It was a delta shape with a light on the front and one large round one on the bottom. And it was huge.
We all saw a light flying very low and slow over the field heading our way.
We stopped the car and watched as it approached and went over the car at the height of the trees. Again, floated without sound and very steady.

They looked solid and real yet had a feeling of not real because they didn't fit what a physical craft that we know of would be like.
To see something like this up close is a once in a lifetime experience, let alone a twice in a lifetime experience.

 

[Outdated]

If they exist, they understand physics if ways we can only guess.

Scientists have recently noticed and are experimenting with erratically behaving muons and they think there's a possibility of there being a 5th force in play at the atomic level.

This could lead to entirely new branches of technology so who knows what the possibilities will be in the future.

"Don't tell me the sky's the limit when I know that there's footprints on the moon."

Scientists at Fermilab close in on fifth force of nature

Physicists believe that an unknown force could be acting on sub-atomic particles known as muons.

www.bbc.com

 

[Neonatal RRT]

 

[Storm Hess]

The Drake equation...

Are we alone in the universe? Revisiting the Drake equation

A speculative study finds a new answer to the question: will we find intelligent alien life?

exoplanets.nasa.gov

 

[Outdated]

The Drake equation...

I agree. With the truly massive numbers of star systems we're talking about it's statistically very Unlikely that we are the only planet that has evolved in this manner.

There will be billions of planets that are capable of supporting life but just never had the right trigger to start that process, but even taking that in to account there must be tens of thousands that have evolved complex ecosystems.

But as I said in my first post in this thread - the geological time scale of evolution - it's very likely that somewhere there are people that have evolved in a similar fashion to us but it's highly improbable that they would exist at the same time as us.

Maybe somewhere in the future we'll discover archeological dream worlds, and maybe we'll discover places that are still very primitive in the types of creatures that exist and have yet to evolve beyond small plants, but even discovering places that close to us on a geological time scale is unlikely.

 

[Shevek]

Re: frequency of habitable planets, until recently, we thought that it was just natural for small, rocky planets to be nearer to a star, and big gassy ones farther away. It turns out that even that is the result of a rare resonance between Jupiter and Saturn.
We have had five major mass extinctions, but are discovering life deep in rocks, and around undersea volcanoes, so it seems that life itself is extremely adaptable and tough, but higher life forms are precarious. Humans were down to a barely viable gene pool at one point. Our current ability to fly is due to a very unusual period of stable weather that let wealth from agriculture build up and allow other pursuits. I'll bet that any species with interstellar travel has learned to keep their weather friendly, their volcanoes small, and the space rocks away.

 

[Outdated]

and the space rocks away.

For this we are so blessed by our moon. When you look at the two bodies together the centre of gravity is off centre, depending on approach angle and current position of the moon. Because of our moon a direct meteor strike is much less likely than it could be.

And to answer an age old question - If you discovered a meteor that was on the correct trajectory and capable of destroying all life on earth would you tell anyone?

That came close to happening in 1998, and no, they didn't tell anyone until it was apparent that it would miss. The rock passed in between the Earth and the Moon.

 

[Shevek]

I don't think the offset cg of the Earth-Moon system is why that rock missed. When bodies approach in space, the usual result is a course deviation, occasionally an orbit, but rarely a collision. It isn't a matter of things being drawn directly to each other with no other momentum to consider, like magnets getting close.

 

[Neonatal RRT]

Given all the disinformation out there, the potential risks to our cultures if visiting extraterrestrials were revealed, what would happen if extraterrestrial technologies were reverse engineered, what that may mean from a religious perspective, so on and so forth, it is a real-life "Pandora's Box" of unknowns.

My guess is that we are finally making some attempt at opening up that box very slowly. Introduce the conversation into the mainstream, spoon feed us some information a bit at a time, and slowly gain some acceptance that we are not alone in this great universe, that we may actually be a part of a much larger community. It's not a matter of IF extraterrestrials will reveal themselves, it's a matter of WHEN, and we had better be prepared, as a world, to accept them instead of having this knee-jerk response of fear and violence.

Furthermore, I think we need to get away from these limiting ideas of "propulsion" as a means of traveling. In order to travel great distances in short periods of time, given the vastness of the universe, you can't do this even at the speed of light. It has to be orders of magnitude quicker. So, it's not traveling via propulsion. Space travelers, in order to visit many worlds, considering radiation exposure, and physiologic effects, must be able to transport themselves from point A to point B something in the realm of seconds. It's a level and understanding of physics that is well beyond us at this stage.

 

[The_Walrus]

I tend to take the rational approach - there's no good evidence of extraterrestrial UFOs, and good logical reasons (outlined expertly by a few other commentators already) to think it is highly unlikely that there are any advanced spacefaring civilisations within travelling distance from us, so the sensible thing to do is to conclude that the people claiming to have seen UFOs are either mistaken or lying.

Some people are placing hugely undue weight upon these congressional hearings. Wouldn't be the first time that Congress has had nutjobs testify before it.

 

[Outdated]

so the sensible thing to do is to conclude that the people claiming to have seen UFOs are either mistaken or lying.

Or got better drugs than I do.

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

Ya all these pilots are lying are you sure you want to continue flying. watched a few videos some alien after attacking a village in Peru. sounds like the Spanish first invading America.

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

what has always bothered me is relativity working better in four spatial dimensions which was investigated and then was abandoned due to it leading the string theory which now has its own issues. have the alien figured this out? non locality Bells theorem is a big clue that their is more to to the universe then meets the eye.